The research team set out to examine how a person’s sense of security shapes their willingness to help others online, and, crucially, what psychological mechanisms lie beneath that connection. Their work combined two complementary approaches. The first was a traditional questionnaire study designed to test whether sense of security indeed facilitates internet altruistic behavior. The second, and more ambitious, was a ten-day diary study using an intensive longitudinal design, in which participants reported on their psychological states repeatedly over nearly two weeks. This allowed the researchers to track how hope rises and falls within individuals from day to day, rather than capturing only a single snapshot in time.

Sense of security, as the authors frame it, is a stable psychological experience of feeling safe, protected and free from threat. It is rooted in integrative theories of human security and closely related to attachment research, which has long shown that people who feel securely attached tend to trust others more, burn out less and perform better in cooperative settings. When people feel secure, the argument goes, they are less consumed by self-protection and more able to direct psychological resources outward, toward the needs of others. In the online world, where anonymity and physical distance can either unleash generosity or breed suspicion, this internal foundation may matter even more than it does offline.

The mechanism the researchers focused on was hope. In the influential hope theory developed by psychologist C. R. Snyder, hope is not mere optimism but a goal-directed motivational state built from two components: agency, the perceived capacity to move toward goals, and pathways, the perceived ability to generate routes to reach them. Hope has repeatedly been linked to prosocial outcomes; a systematic review of hope theory and prosocial behavior concluded that hopeful individuals are more likely to act in ways that benefit others. Prior work by the same research group had already connected adolescents’ internet altruistic behavior with hope through self-efficacy and self-esteem, making hope a natural candidate for explaining how security translates into online kindness.

What makes the new study methodologically distinctive is its treatment of hope as a dynamic phenomenon with both trait and state components. Drawing on latent growth curve modeling, a statistical framework for analyzing change over time, the researchers separated hope into its initial level, which functions like a stable dispositional trait, and its change trajectory across the ten days, which reflects moment-to-moment fluctuations in state hope. This distinction matters because trait and state components of psychological variables can behave very differently in longitudinal data, a point emphasized in classic work on trait-state-occasion models. Collapsing them into a single measure can obscure which part of a construct actually carries the explanatory weight.

The diary data revealed something unexpected: hope did not change in a simple linear fashion over the ten days. Instead, it followed a non-linear trajectory, and there were significant individual differences in how each person’s hope developed across the study period. Some participants’ hope may have risen, others fallen, and others fluctuated in more complex patterns. This finding underscores why intensive longitudinal designs are increasingly valued in psychology: they capture the rhythm of everyday psychological life that one-time surveys inevitably miss, and they reveal that seemingly stable traits are underlaid by considerable within-person variability.

The central result, however, concerned mediation. The trait component of hope, operationalized as the initial level of hope at the start of the diary period, fully mediated the relationship between sense of security and internet altruistic behavior. In other words, people who felt more secure tended to begin the study with higher dispositional hope, and it was this elevated baseline hope that accounted for their greater tendency to help others online. The state component of hope, the day-to-day change trajectory, did not serve as a mediator. Feeling safe appears to build a durable reservoir of hopeful motivation, and it is that stable reservoir, rather than transient daily surges of hope, that fuels online generosity.

The theoretical implications are substantial. The findings align with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which holds that positive states expand people’s thought-action repertoires and build lasting personal resources. Security, in this account, is not merely the absence of threat but an active ingredient that cultivates hope, which in turn broadens the motivation to act prosocially. The results also echo attachment research showing that boosting attachment security promotes prosociality, and studies linking online interpersonal trust to altruistic behavior through moral identity and social support. By pinpointing the trait component of hope as the critical conduit, the study offers a new perspective on how the formation of internet altruistic behavior actually works, moving beyond simple correlational claims toward a mechanistic, temporally sensitive account.

There are practical consequences as well. If security fosters hope and hope fosters online kindness, then interventions that strengthen people’s sense of security, whether through supportive parenting, stable social environments, trustworthy platform design or reduced exposure to online hostility, could indirectly cultivate a more generous digital society. Educators and platform designers interested in promoting prosocial online communities might focus less on prompting individual acts of kindness and more on building the underlying psychological conditions, particularly secure feelings and dispositional hope, from which such acts naturally flow. The study was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, and its data are available from the corresponding author on request due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

Like all research, the study has boundaries that invite future work. The diary window of ten days, while far more informative than a single survey, remains a brief slice of life, and the participants’ characteristics may limit generalizability to other populations and cultures. Hope’s non-linear change patterns suggest that longer or more frequent measurement could reveal additional dynamics. Still, the core message is clear and quietly optimistic: the seeds of online altruism are planted in the soil of psychological security, watered by stable hope, and harvested in the countless small acts of digital generosity that make the internet, at its best, a genuinely humane place.

Subject of Research: How sense of security promotes internet altruistic behavior through the trait component of hope in a diary study

Article Title: How does sense of security promote internet altruistic behavior? a diary study

Article References: Zheng, X., Yuan, Y., Liu, G., & Li, T. (2026). How does sense of security promote internet altruistic behavior? a diary study. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10042-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10042-7

Keywords: internet altruistic behavior, sense of security, hope, diary study, latent growth curve modeling, prosocial behavior, cyberpsychology, trait hope, state hope, online helping, does, sense

The study, conducted by a team led by Yasuo Murayama of Kanazawa University and published in Child Psychiatry & Human Development, tracked 634 students in grades 3 through 9 across all public elementary and junior high schools in Wajima City, a community that suffered extensive damage in the January 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake. Data were collected at three time points between July 2024 and February 2025, roughly three months apart, as part of a broader mental health support program run jointly by the Ishikawa Kokoro no Care Center and Kanazawa University’s Research Center for Child Mental Development. Participation was voluntary, anonymous, and approved by the Chukyo University Research Ethics Committee.

What makes the research technically distinctive is its modeling strategy. The investigators employed a three-wave cross-lagged panel model, a structural equation technique that estimates whether each variable predicts change in the others over time while statistically controlling for each variable’s own prior level. The researchers deliberately chose the traditional cross-lagged panel model over the newer random-intercept variant, arguing that in a period when situational stress was widely shared across the community, a random intercept would risk conflating stable trait-like differences with persistent contextual effects of the disaster. The final model fit the data exceptionally well, with a comparative fit index of 1.00 and a root mean square error of approximation of just 0.011.

The study’s central and most striking finding concerns an asymmetry in the relationship between loneliness and depressive symptoms. While the two constructs showed bidirectional longitudinal associations, the pathway running from depressive symptoms to later loneliness was substantially stronger and more consistent than the reverse. Depressive symptoms at one wave predicted loneliness at the next with standardized coefficients ranging from 0.15 to 0.23, both statistically significant at p less than 0.001 and qualifying as large effect sizes under recent guidelines for cross-lagged effects. In contrast, loneliness predicted subsequent depressive symptoms with coefficients of only 0.06 to 0.08, one of which was merely marginally significant.

This directional pattern partially diverges from earlier meta-analytic work, which reported relatively comparable reciprocal effects between loneliness and depression in the general population. The authors propose that the post-disaster context may explain the difference. Cognitive models of depression hold that depressive symptoms are associated with negative biases in how people interpret their social environments, and in a community where nearly everyone is struggling, awareness that others face similar hardships may blunt the usual impact of loneliness on mood. Meanwhile, elevated depressive symptoms may still distort individuals’ perceptions of their relationships, gradually deepening feelings of isolation. Consistent with this interpretation, research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic similarly found stronger longitudinal effects from depression to loneliness than the reverse in collectively affected populations.

The behavioral findings were equally revealing. Aggressive behavior consistently predicted higher subsequent loneliness, with standardized coefficients of roughly 0.08 to 0.09 at both intervals, and it also forecast declines in prosocial behavior with coefficients between negative 0.11 and negative 0.12. Notably, the reverse pathway from loneliness to later aggression was not supported, a result that contrasts with laboratory and animal research suggesting social isolation heightens aggression. Instead, the data suggest that in the complex social ecology of real classrooms, it is aggressive conduct that erodes future social standing and connection, echoing a five-year longitudinal study of first-grade children that found aggression predicted reductions in prosocial behavior while the reverse was not significant.

One unexpected result concerns prosocial behavior. In the first interval, higher prosocial behavior actually predicted a small increase in subsequent loneliness, a finding that ran counter to the common assumption that helping others buffers against isolation. The researchers offer a tentative hypothesis: in a post-disaster community under collective stress, children who frequently engage in helping behavior, or who perceive themselves as doing so, may focus excessively on others’ needs at the expense of their own, potentially receiving less support in return. They note prior evidence that self-sacrificing altruism is sometimes linked with interpersonal difficulties, but they emphasize this interpretation should be regarded as a preliminary hypothesis, since individual disaster exposure was not directly assessed.

The temporal stability of the constructs added further nuance. Between the first and second waves, depressive symptoms and aggressive behavior showed notably high stability, with autoregressive coefficients of 0.680 and 0.697 respectively, while loneliness was considerably less stable at 0.345. Loneliness, the authors suggest, is a socially constructed and cognitively mediated experience that is more state-dependent and therefore more malleable over time, whereas emotional and behavioral problems may have been particularly entrenched during the recovery period. Analyses comparing students with complete data to those with missing waves found no significant baseline differences on any measure, suggesting attrition did not bias the results, and exploratory multi-group analyses indicated the longitudinal associations were largely invariant across sex and grade level.

The findings carry concrete implications for practitioners supporting young people after disasters. Because the study’s evidence aligns with the developmental cascade framework, which views development as a system of mutually reinforcing interactions across emotional, behavioral, and social-cognitive domains, interventions targeting a single domain may produce cascading benefits elsewhere. The authors argue that early identification and treatment of depressive symptoms should be a priority, given their central and stable role, while the lower temporal stability of loneliness suggests that efforts to foster a shared sense of social connectedness within affected communities may be especially valuable. Even modest, coordinated multi-domain support, they contend, may contribute meaningfully to psychosocial recovery in resource-limited settings.

The researchers also acknowledge important limitations. The observational design precludes causal conclusions, the traditional cross-lagged panel model cannot cleanly separate within-person change from stable between-person differences, and the exclusive reliance on self-report measures may have inflated associations through shared method variance. Socioeconomic status was not assessed, a deliberate ethical choice given the sensitivity of income questions for families whose livelihoods were disrupted by the earthquake, leaving open the possibility of residual confounding. Because the sample was drawn exclusively from a disaster-affected, ethnically homogeneous Japanese community and lacked a comparison group, the authors caution that the observed asymmetry between depression and loneliness may reflect post-disaster circumstances or broader developmental processes, and they frame several of their interpretations as hypothesis-generating rather than definitive. Future research incorporating perceived social support, multi-informant measures, and earlier post-disaster time points could help clarify how young people’s emotional lives and social worlds reshape one another in the long aftermath of catastrophe.

The Wajima findings gain additional weight when placed against the broader epidemiological picture of youth loneliness. A meta-analysis drawing on data from 113 countries has estimated that roughly one in ten adolescents aged 12 to 17 experiences loneliness, while earlier surveys in Japan suggested that nearly one-third of children and adolescents reported the feeling. Loneliness, in this literature, is understood not as objective isolation but as a subjective aversive state arising from a perceived gap between desired and actual relationships, which helps explain why it can persist even in densely connected communities like Wajima.

Adolescence is considered a period of particular vulnerability because peer relationships, social evaluation, and identity formation all reach heightened salience, making the grade 3 through 9 span covered by the study developmentally informative. The pandemic-era research cited by the authors offers a useful parallel: adolescents worldwide reported elevated loneliness during COVID-19, and studies of collectively affected populations likewise found stronger longitudinal effects running from depression to loneliness than the reverse, mirroring the asymmetry observed after the earthquake.

The developmental cascade framework that anchors the study emerged from empirical demonstrations that internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and interpersonal quality influence one another reciprocally over time, meaning no single domain should be examined in isolation. Prior prospective work has shown depressive symptoms predicting later aggression, prosocial behavior buffering later depressive symptoms, and externalizing problems eroding later prosociality. By simultaneously modeling all four constructs, the Wajima study addresses a gap left open by research that considered these variables only in pairs, and it suggests that the cascade processes documented in general populations remain operative even under the unusual strain of a large-scale natural disaster.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal associations among loneliness, depressive symptoms, and social behaviors in youth after a major earthquake

Article Title: Longitudinal Interrelations Among Loneliness, Depressive Symptoms, and Social Behaviors in Youth: A Cross-Lagged Panel Study in a Post-Disaster Context

Article References: Murayama, Y., Nishiura, M., Soma, D., Kameya, M., Tanaka, S., Tsujii, M., & Kikuchi, M. (2026). Longitudinal Interrelations Among Loneliness, Depressive Symptoms, and Social Behaviors in Youth: A Cross-Lagged Panel Study in a Post-Disaster Context. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02096-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02096-2

Keywords: loneliness, depressive symptoms, aggressive behavior, prosocial behavior, children and adolescents, cross-lagged panel model, developmental cascade, post-disaster mental health, psychosocial adjustment, Noto Peninsula Earthquake, Japan, longitudinal study

The intellectual lineage of the study reaches back to the 1960s, when Bibb Latané and John Darley conducted their now-legendary experiments on bystander intervention in the United States. Sparked in part by public outrage over the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York — a case later revealed to have been badly misreported — their work identified diffusion of responsibility as a central mechanism of inaction: the more witnesses present, the less any single individual feels personally obligated to help. Their Adult Decision Tree to Determine Helping became a foundational framework in social psychology, describing a sequence of judgments about noticing an event, interpreting it as an emergency, assuming responsibility, knowing how to help, and deciding to act. What remained strikingly underexplored, however, was whether this model transfers to adolescents navigating the morally and socially treacherous terrain of school bullying.

The timing of the two research traditions is itself telling. Bullying first emerged as an internationally recognized research topic in the 1970s, propelled by Dan Olweus’s pioneering work in Scandinavia on what he originally termed ‘mobbing’ among schoolchildren. Olweus went on to develop the Bullying Circle, a model that maps the distinct roles students occupy in bullying episodes — from the bully and the victim to defenders, supporters of the bully, passive onlookers and outsiders. Meanwhile, American experimental psychology was independently building its science of adult emergency helping. For decades these two literatures ran largely in parallel. The new study deliberately brings them together, asking whether the decision architecture mapped for adults in emergencies also describes how teenagers reason about bullying — a chronic, socially embedded form of victimization rather than a sudden, unambiguous crisis.

To answer that question, the researchers conducted a qualitative, phenomenological, in-depth case study at a large public high school in the Midwest — a Class A institution serving more than 885 students. Fifty-five adolescents aged 14 to 19 participated. Rather than relying on a single instrument, the team triangulated their data across participant essays, individual interviews and focus groups, all centered on students’ lived experiences of bullying and bystander behavior. Participants were introduced to the Olweus Bullying Circle and asked to discuss the roles students play in bullying situations, and their responses were then systematically compared against Latané and Darley’s adult decision model. The phenomenological approach, grounded in established traditions of qualitative inquiry, sought to capture not just what students did but how they experienced and made sense of those moments from the inside.

The results show that adolescents do indeed traverse territory familiar from the adult literature, but with important additions. Like adults, students in the study reported considering whether intervening would expose them to negative judgment, what methods of intervention were available to them, whether their actions would actually be effective, and whether they could act without endangering themselves. These four considerations — judgment, methods, efficacy and safety — parallel the classic decision tree’s stages of assessing the situation, assuming responsibility and choosing a course of action. In this sense, the core logic of helping behavior identified in adults appears to be recognizably present in teenage cognition when bullying unfolds before their eyes.

Yet the adolescents’ decision calculus was demonstrably richer and, in certain respects, more constraining than the adult model predicts. Three additional dimensions surfaced repeatedly in student accounts: social apprehension, social safety, and a concentration of responsibility. Social apprehension captures the acute fear of reputational damage, ridicule or social backlash that teenagers face when they break ranks with the peer group — a pressure that operates far more intensely in adolescent social ecologies, where status and belonging feel existential, than in the anonymous adult emergency scenarios of the 1960s experiments. Social safety extends this concern into the anticipated consequences of helping: students worried not merely about physical harm but about being targeted themselves, becoming the next victim, or losing friendships. And the concentration of responsibility describes how adolescents assess whether helping is truly their job, particularly when adults — teachers, counselors, administrators — are perceived as the appropriate authority figures to handle such matters.

These findings carry significant weight because bullying is not a marginal problem. Decades of research following Olweus have established that bullying is fundamentally a group process, in which peer bystanders are not neutral scenery but active participants whose reactions can either sustain or dismantle the bullying dynamic. Naturalistic observational studies have shown that when peers do intervene, bullying often stops quickly — yet intervention remains comparatively rare. Previous work has linked bystander defending to factors such as empathy, school connectedness, parental warmth and friendship quality, and newer studies are extending the question into cyberbullying environments, where the ‘good bystander’ concept is being re-examined for digital contexts. The present study adds a crucial piece: a granular, first-person account of the adolescent decision process itself, grounded in the voices of the students who actually face these choices daily.

Methodologically, the study also demonstrates the value of qualitative rigor in a field often dominated by surveys and experiments. The triangulation of essays, interviews and focus groups, combined with member checking to verify the accuracy of interpretations with participants, allowed the researchers to build trustworthiness into their design. The work was approved by the Oakland University Institutional Review Board, with informed consent obtained from parents and guardians and assent from the minor participants themselves, who were told they could withdraw at any point. The authors report no funding for the research and no conflicts of interest, and de-identified data are available upon request to protect participant confidentiality.

The implications reach beyond academic theory. The study explicitly connects its findings to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good Health and Well-Being, and Goal 4, Quality Education, situating bystander behavior within a global agenda for adolescent mental health and safe schooling. Whole-school intervention programs, including the widely disseminated Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, have long emphasized mobilizing the peer majority; this research suggests such efforts should explicitly address the distinctive adolescent barriers of social apprehension, social safety concerns and diluted personal responsibility. If educators want students to move from passive onlookers to defenders, they must reduce the reputational cost of helping, teach concrete and effective intervention methods, and clarify that responsibility for stopping cruelty belongs to everyone in the room — not only to the adults at the front of it. Half a century after Latané and Darley asked why adults fail to help, American teenagers are telling researchers, with striking candor, exactly what it would take for them to step in.

The intellectual backdrop of the bystander tradition extends beyond the famous emergency experiments themselves. Related work from the same era explored how the presence of others shapes effort and accountability, including research on social loafing showing that individuals contribute less when working in groups, and studies demonstrating that a bystander’s perceived ability to help alters whether intervention occurs at all. Even the presence of children at an emergency scene was found to increase adults’ sense of responsibility, underscoring how situational cues continuously recalibrate the helping calculus that Latané and Darley first formalized.

The study’s qualitative design also reflects careful attention to established standards of trustworthiness in phenomenological and grounded-theory traditions. Techniques such as member checking, in which interpretations are returned to participants for verification, draw on longstanding methodological debates about whether such procedures genuinely enhance rigor or serve mainly as symbolic validation. By anchoring the analysis in multiple data sources and established qualitative frameworks, the researchers positioned student voice — a concept with its own scholarly history in educational improvement research — at the center of the inquiry rather than treating adolescents as passive subjects of adult theorizing.

The findings also resonate with a broader international evidence base. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have linked empathy to bystander defending roles in children and adolescents, while whole-school interventions promoting mental health and preventing risk behaviors have shown measurable benefits across adolescence. Recent qualitative work on cyberbullying is extending the good bystander question into digital spaces, where motivations and victim perceptions take new forms, and studies of juvenile populations suggest bystander characteristics can even influence displaced aggression in provocative situations.

By framing the work within the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the authors align a seemingly small-scale school study with global policy commitments, positioning peer intervention as a lever for both well-being and educational quality worldwide.

Subject of Research: Adolescent bystander behavior and intervention decision-making in school bullying situations in the United States

Article Title: To help or not to help?: adolescent bystander behavior in bullying situations in the US

Article References: Vannest, R. J., & Anderson, K. (2026). To help or not to help?: adolescent bystander behavior in bullying situations in the US. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01691-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01691-3

Keywords: bullying, bystander behavior, bystander intervention, adolescence, Olweus Bullying Circle, Latané and Darley, diffusion of responsibility, qualitative research, school safety, peer intervention, prosocial behavior, social psychology

Prosocial behavior refers to intentional actions that benefit someone else, whether or not the person helping receives an external reward. In school settings, it can include cooperating with classmates, offering support, sharing resources, defending someone who is being mistreated, or performing small favors for friends and family. Empathy is not a single ability. It includes cognitive processes, such as taking another person’s perspective and understanding what they may be feeling, as well as affective processes involving emotional responsiveness to another person’s condition. The distinction matters because recognizing distress does not automatically lead to assistance. In some circumstances, another person’s suffering can generate self-focused personal distress and avoidance instead of constructive action. Gratitude may help redirect attention outward by highlighting the benefits people receive from others and the value of their relationships. In that sense, the emotion could provide a motivational bridge between noticing another person’s needs and choosing to respond.

To investigate this proposed pathway, the researchers used a quantitative, cross-sectional, correlational design. The sample included 159 students from public schools and 159 from private schools, all between 12 and 16 years old. The average age was 13.2 years, with a standard deviation of 1.5 years. The public-school participants were classified within a low socioeconomic group, while the private-school participants were classified within a middle socioeconomic group using information that included residential stratum, family income, parental education, and occupational stability. Students completed questionnaires in their classrooms during four consecutive weeks of the 2024 academic calendar. Trained research assistants administered the instruments to groups of approximately 20 to 30 students, using standardized instructions and emphasizing voluntary participation, anonymity, and honest responses. The complete session lasted about 25 to 30 minutes. Participation required student assent and written consent from parents or legal guardians, and the fieldwork was reviewed as a no-risk project by Corporación Universitaria Rafael Núñez in Colombia.

The measures were designed to capture different parts of the proposed model. Prosocial behavior was assessed with a 27-item scale covering actions directed toward strangers, friends, and family members. Each category contained nine items rated from one, meaning “not at all like me,” to five, meaning “very much like me.” Empathy was measured with a 15-item Spanish questionnaire for children and early adolescents. Its dimensions included empathic action, perspective taking, emotional contagion, awareness of others, and emotional regulation, with responses recorded on a four-point scale from never to always. Gratitude was assessed with a six-item scale measuring a general tendency to recognize and feel thankful for benefits received from others, using responses from strongly disagree to strongly agree on a seven-point scale. Earlier validation work cited in the study reported acceptable reliability for these instruments in Latin American and Colombian youth, including McDonald’s omega values of .70 to .78 for the empathy dimensions and .75 to .91 for the prosocial behavior dimensions.

The central analysis used structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to estimate relationships among latent constructs that cannot be observed directly. Instead of treating empathy, gratitude, or prosociality as single raw scores, the approach uses patterns across questionnaire items to estimate the underlying variables and then tests pathways between them. The researchers examined whether empathy predicted gratitude, whether both were associated with prosocial behavior, and whether gratitude mediated the relationship between empathy and helping actions. They also conducted multigroup analyses to determine whether the measurement instruments and proposed relationships operated similarly in public and private schools. Measurement invariance is important in this context: before comparing groups, researchers must establish that students in each setting interpret the scales in sufficiently comparable ways. The study reported configural, metric, and scalar invariance for the instruments, indicating that the basic factor structure, factor loadings, and item intercepts were comparable across the two school groups.

The results supported the broad proposed relationship, but its strength varied according to whom students were helping. The model for prosocial behavior toward family members explained 12 percent of the variance, while the model for behavior toward friends explained 42 percent and the model for behavior toward strangers explained 23 percent. These values indicate that empathy and gratitude accounted for a meaningful, but incomplete, share of differences in students’ reported behavior. The model involving friends showed acceptable fit for both groups, with a comparative fit index of .93 in private schools and .84 in public schools, although the root mean square error of approximation was higher for public-school students. The family model showed weaker fit in the public-school group, including a comparative fit index of .73 and an RMSEA of .11. The stranger model also showed weaker fit for public-school students, with a comparative fit index of .77 and an RMSEA of .13. Such values caution against treating the proposed model as a complete explanation of adolescent prosociality.

One of the clearest group differences concerned behavior toward unfamiliar people. Students in public schools scored lower than private-school students on perspective taking, with a small effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.32, and on prosocial behavior toward friends, with a moderate effect size of d = 0.55. The study reported that the empathy–gratitude relationship did not predict helping strangers in the same way in the two groups, and that the public-school model produced a negative predictive value for this outcome. The researchers interpret this pattern in light of the social environments represented in the sample, including socioeconomic vulnerability, insecurity, distrust, and stronger orientation toward close relational networks. In circumstances where social risk is perceived as high, helping a stranger may carry different meanings or costs than helping a family member or friend. Empathy and gratitude may still encourage solidarity, but that solidarity could be directed primarily toward people regarded as trusted or familiar. The finding therefore does not show that public-school students lack empathy or gratitude, nor that they are generally less prosocial.

The study’s cross-sectional design also limits what can be concluded. Because all measures were collected at one point in time, the results demonstrate associations rather than causation. They cannot establish that empathy produces gratitude, that gratitude produces helping, or that a school program designed around either quality would necessarily increase prosocial behavior. It is also possible that students who regularly help others develop greater empathy and gratitude through those experiences, creating a reciprocal developmental process. The authors note that some structural models had fit indices below conventional recommendations and call for more flexible models and additional contextual variables. Future studies could examine school climate, perceived safety, parenting practices, social support, sense of belonging, emotion regulation, and community conditions. Longitudinal research would be particularly valuable because it could track how emotional skills and prosocial actions change across adolescence and whether improvements in one precede changes in the other.

Despite these qualifications, the findings offer a practical direction for education systems seeking to promote supportive school climates. Programs could combine perspective-taking exercises with opportunities for students to recognize assistance, express appreciation, and connect gratitude with concrete cooperative actions. The results suggest that such efforts may be relevant in both public and private schools, while also indicating that the social context must shape how activities are designed. In schools serving communities affected by insecurity or economic strain, building trust and safety may be necessary before encouraging students to extend helping behavior beyond immediate relationships. The researchers conclude that empathy and gratitude are consistent predictors of prosociality across the school contexts studied, especially toward family and friends. Their work does not reduce kindness to two psychological traits, but it identifies a potentially important mechanism through which emotional understanding can become social action—and shows why that mechanism must be examined within the real environments where young people live and learn.

The study’s comparison across school types is scientifically important because socioeconomic context can affect not only behavior itself but also how students interpret questionnaire items. Configural invariance indicates that the same broad pattern of dimensions was present in both groups; metric invariance supports comparing associations among those dimensions; and scalar invariance permits comparisons of average latent scores. Together, these tests strengthen the basis for group comparisons, although they do not eliminate differences in lived experience or guarantee that every item carries precisely the same practical meaning for every student.

The mediation result is best understood as a proposed statistical pathway rather than a confirmed sequence of psychological events. In a cross-sectional model, students who report greater empathy may also report greater gratitude and prosociality, but the data cannot determine whether gratitude develops afterward, whether helping experiences cultivate both qualities, or whether another factor influences all three. This distinction matters for intervention design. School programs can reasonably use the findings to test activities that connect perspective-taking and appreciation with cooperative behavior, while evaluating outcomes prospectively and monitoring whether effects differ by target of assistance, classroom climate, and perceived safety. Such testing could clarify whether gratitude is a modifiable mechanism or primarily a marker of broader supportive relationships.

Subject of Research: Empathy, gratitude, and prosocial behavior among Colombian school students

Article Title: Study on the prediction of prosociality through empathy and gratitude in the school context of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

Article References: Tezón, M. I. (2026). Study on the prediction of prosociality through empathy and gratitude in the school context of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00054-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00054-3

Keywords: empathy, gratitude, prosocial behavior, adolescent development, school psychology, Colombia, structural equation modeling, social-emotional learning, prediction, prosociality, school, context

The research, spearheaded by social psychologist Katarzyna Cantarero at SWPS University and psychologist Michał Białek at the University of Wrocław, targeted nearly 900 participants across the United States. Employing experimental methodology through the Prolific online platform, the study presented scenarios involving individuals offering critiques to two cooks whose culinary efforts failed. The responses of these feedback providers were manipulated to vary in truthfulness and sensitivity—ranging from blunt honesty to tailored, sometimes deceptive, kindness.

Critically, the participants evaluated the morality, predictability, and trustworthiness of these feedback providers. It emerged that those who engaged in prosocial dishonesty—delivering overly positive or softened critiques to shield recipients from distress—were perceived as more moral than their strictly honest counterparts. This finding underscores a prevailing social value placed on empathy and interpersonal sensitivity, especially when communication might otherwise cause harm.

Moreover, the data illuminated how flexible feedback strategies, often blending honest critique with considerate softening, were not penalized morally. Feedback providers who adjusted their truth-telling depending on the recipient’s emotional resilience were considered strategically sensitive rather than inconsistent or untrustworthy. This suggests that society tolerates, and perhaps even endorses, a nuanced calibration of honesty based on social context and individual vulnerability.

Interestingly, the study exposes a divergence in preferences for receiving feedback versus providing it to others. While prosocial liars garnered higher moral esteem, individuals overwhelmingly preferred to receive unvarnished truth when evaluating themselves. Approximately 70% favored honest feedback providers for their personal growth, revealing a self-concept grounded in valuing directness for self-improvement despite the discomfort it may cause.

When it came to choosing feedback sources for others, particularly those known to have difficulty handling criticism, participants leaned toward socially sensitive feedback providers who could modulate their honesty with kindness. This protective stance underscores a societal recognition of emotional variability and a desire to preserve motivation and wellbeing in vulnerable populations, confirming that context-dependent honesty is a socially adaptive mechanism.

The findings also imply an absence of a universal “best practice” for interpersonal feedback. Instead, they point to a complex interplay where individuals weigh the moral qualities of honesty against compassion, tailoring their communication approach accordingly. This strategic adaptability likely serves to maintain relational harmony and optimize emotional outcomes, supporting theories of communication as a dynamic, socially embedded process rather than fixed normative behavior.

This study bridges gaps in moral psychology and communications research by empirically demonstrating that the binary classification of honesty versus lying is too simplistic to capture the social realities of moral judgment. It highlights how the fine line between truth and deception blurs in everyday interactions when intentions align with preserving social bonds and emotional health.

Furthermore, the investigation extends the conceptualization of morality beyond rigid adherence to factual truth, incorporating notions of empathy, social responsibility, and contextual reasoning. Such integrative perspectives bear significant implications for domains like education, management, counseling, and social policy, where feedback functions as a critical tool for growth, motivation, and social cohesion.

As feedback mechanisms continue to evolve in digital and real-world environments, understanding the moral calculus behind truth-telling strategies becomes ever more pertinent. This research offers valuable insights for designing communication frameworks that respect individual sensitivities while fostering transparency, enabling more effective and humane interactions across diverse social settings.

Ultimately, the publication titled “Selective (dis)honesty: Choosing overly positive feedback only when the truth hurts” in the British Journal of Social Psychology foregrounds a sophisticated psychological reality: honesty is not merely about adherence to facts but intimately tied to the social contexts and emotional landscapes we navigate. By recognizing this complexity, we can better appreciate the moral dimensions embedded in everyday communication.

This study invites a reevaluation of how society balances the desire for truthful feedback with the equally compelling need to shield others from unnecessary emotional harm. It expands our understanding of moral judgment to include strategic kindness and adaptive communication, revealing that selective honesty is a nuanced social skill that maintains both ethical integrity and relational empathy.

With these revelations, the dialogue about honesty in social and professional environments gains a deeper, more compassionate dimension—acknowledging that sometimes, the truth alone is not the ultimate moral good, but rather the care with which it is conveyed.

Subject of Research: People
Article Title: Selective (dis)honesty: Choosing overly positive feedback only when the truth hurts
News Publication Date: 23-Nov-2025
Web References: 10.1111/bjso.70020
References: British Journal of Social Psychology
Keywords: Honesty, Prosocial dishonesty, Moral judgment, Feedback, Social sensitivity, Emotional resilience, Communication, Psychology, Empathy, Social context