The research team, led by Melissa Padron of Florida International University together with Lin Liu of Temple University and Jeremy W. Pettit of Florida International University, set out to confirm results from an earlier, smaller investigation. In that prior study of 427 detained youth, 40 percent of those who reported a lifetime suicide attempt denied ever having serious thoughts of suicide or making a suicide plan. The new analysis, using an independent and substantially larger sample drawn from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice residential programs between 2008 and 2018, found an even higher figure: 45 percent of the 1,250 youth with a lifetime suicide attempt—557 individuals—denied any history of suicide ideation.

The scale of the replication matters. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 19, and youth detained in the legal system die by suicide at two to three times the rate of their non-detained peers. If nearly half of detained youth who attempt suicide report no prior ideation, then screening tools built around asking young people whether they have had suicidal thoughts may be missing a large share of those at greatest risk. In detention settings, where every intake is an opportunity for prevention, that gap could be deadly.

The study relied on the Residential Positive Achievement Change Tool, or R-PACT, a semi-structured risk and needs assessment administered by trained case managers within 30 days of a youth’s admission to a residential facility. The instrument assesses criminal history, demographics, mental health history, and suicide ideation and attempt, and validation studies by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and independent researchers support its reliability. From the R-PACT data, the researchers constructed a binary measure of lifetime ideation and examined a battery of potential distinguishing factors, including adverse childhood experiences, depression, somatic complaints, hallucinations, anger and irritability, and offense severity.

The statistical picture that emerged was strikingly consistent with the earlier study. Youth who reported ideation alongside their attempt showed higher rates of depression, somatic complaints, hallucinations, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, and exposure to violence. Youth who denied ideation, by contrast, were significantly more likely to endorse anger and irritability—40 percent versus 30 percent in the ideation group. When the researchers ran a logistic regression controlling for demographics and all other risk factors, anger and irritability remained a significant predictor of attempting suicide without ideation, with an odds ratio of 1.43. Depression, somatic complaints, hallucinations, and exposure to violence all predicted the opposite pattern: attempting suicide with ideation.

These results lend empirical weight to the idea that there are multiple, distinct pathways to a suicide attempt. The dominant ideation-to-action theories in the field—including the interpersonal theory of suicide and the three-step theory—propose a sequential progression from thinking about suicide to planning and finally acting. That framework appears to capture the trajectory of the majority of detained youth in the study, whose profiles were marked by well-established risk factors such as adverse childhood experiences and mood disturbance. But it struggles to explain the hundreds of youth who leapt from apparent absence of suicidal thought to a suicide attempt.

The researchers propose that the second pathway involves rapid emotional escalation. Among youth prone to anger and emotion dysregulation, a distressing event may trigger an intense affective crisis, and the attempt may function as a desperate, near-instantaneous escape from unbearable internal states rather than the endpoint of a premeditated process. This conceptualization aligns with the Suicide Crisis Syndrome, a framework that emphasizes frantic hopelessness, entrapment, and hyperarousal—including anger and irritability—as proximal features of acute suicide risk that do not require the presence of ideation. The authors caution that their study did not measure the syndrome’s defining features or the temporal sequence of experiences before the attempt, so the findings are consistent with, but do not confirm, that model.

Anger and impulsivity are related but distinct constructs, and the study’s authors argue that anger deserves attention in its own right. Impulsivity reflects a dispositional tendency toward rapid, poorly controlled action, whereas anger is an emotional state that can intensify psychological distress and precipitate behavior. A growing literature links irritability and anger to suicidal behavior in both clinical and community samples of adolescents, and the new findings suggest anger may be a key affective ingredient in the rapid route to an attempt. Future work examining anger and impulsivity simultaneously could clarify whether they contribute independently or interact.

One of the most consequential findings concerns race. Black youth in the sample were significantly more likely than White or Hispanic youth to report a suicide attempt without ideation, with an odds ratio of 1.32 in the multivariate model. This aligns with a broader and deeply concerning pattern: Black youth have experienced disproportionate increases in suicide rates over the past decade, and recent research has found that Black adolescents are disproportionately likely to give missing or non-responses to suicide attempt items on population surveys. The authors raise the possibility that internalizing distress among Black youth may be more likely to be expressed or recognized as externalizing symptoms such as irritability, or that cultural stigma and barriers to disclosure reduce the likelihood that suicidal thoughts are reported before an attempt.

Importantly, the researchers do not claim that ideation was truly absent in these cases—only that it was not reported or identified. Retrospective reports are vulnerable to recall bias, reluctance to disclose, and difficulty labeling internal experiences, and the R-PACT relied on single-item measures that may miss contextual factors such as stigma or fear of being labeled high-risk within a detention facility. Whether the findings reflect genuinely distinct pathways, limitations of current assessment methods, or both, the practical implication is the same: risk screening that leans primarily on asking about suicidal thoughts will fail to flag a substantial fraction of youth who go on to attempt suicide.

The study also points toward concrete prevention strategies. Programs that teach anger management, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation could interrupt the chain from acute negative affect to attempt. Dialectical Behavior Therapy and interventions such as Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy, which has been implemented in juvenile detention facilities, show promise on exactly these fronts. For Black detained youth specifically, the authors suggest that prevention efforts may also need to address social stressors that are more prevalent in this population, including community and police violence, racial discrimination, and low-income environments.

The research carries the usual caveats of a cross-sectional, retrospective design: it cannot establish causality or directionality, and it cannot confirm whether the same patterns hold among non-detained youth. Longitudinal studies using frequent, real-time assessments such as ecological momentary assessment would help clarify the temporal relationship between anger, ideation, and attempt. Still, the replication in a sample nearly three times the size of the original is a powerful signal. A significant proportion of the most vulnerable young people in the justice system may be invisible to the screening questions designed to protect them—and their risk may be written not in thoughts of death, but in the heat of anger.

Subject of Research: Suicide attempts without prior suicidal ideation among youth detained in the juvenile legal system

Article Title: Anger (again) Differentiates Suicide Attempt with Versus without Suicide Ideation Among Youth Detained in the Legal System: A Replication Study

Article References: Padron, M., Liu, L., & Pettit, J. W. (2026). Anger (again) Differentiates Suicide Attempt with Versus without Suicide Ideation Among Youth Detained in the Legal System: A Replication Study. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02100-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02100-9

Keywords: suicide attempt, suicide ideation, juvenile justice, anger, irritability, emotion dysregulation, risk assessment, adolescent mental health, adverse childhood experiences, Suicide Crisis Syndrome, Black youth suicide, replication study

The study arrives against the backdrop of psychology’s much-discussed replication crisis, which erupted in the early 2010s when large-scale efforts to reproduce classic findings returned weaker or null results. Since then, researchers including Fradera, Maxwell and colleagues, Fletcher, Plucker and Makel, Pennington and Bogdan have argued that careful, systematic replication is the only dependable foundation on which theory, and ultimately practical intervention, can be built. The new work was designed precisely for that purpose: to replicate an earlier 2021 study by Francis, Crea and Laycock that had validated the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised among 287 Italian Catholic priests, this time with a different sample of participants and a rigorous statistical re-test of the model’s central claims.

To understand what was tested, it helps to see how the two leading burnout instruments for clergy differ. The Maslach Burnout Inventory, long the dominant tool in occupational psychology, operationalises burnout through three scales measuring emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment, with a theory rooted in developmental progression: exhaustion is assumed to lead to depersonalisation, which in turn erodes a sense of accomplishment. The Francis Burnout Inventory takes a different route, built on the balanced affect model originally proposed by Bradburn in 1969. That model contests the assumption that positive and negative affect sit at opposite poles of one continuum, proposing instead that they function as partially independent systems. A person can, in principle, hold high levels of both at the same time, and the balance between them determines psychological outcomes.

Translated into practice, the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised comprises two 10-item scales: the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry, known as the SEEM, and the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale, known as the SIMS. Each item is rated on a five-point scale from agree strongly to disagree strongly. The theoretical pay-off of this design is that it points toward actionable interventions. If positive affect can buffer the damage done by negative affect, then programmes that help clergy identify and amplify sources of satisfaction in their work may be more realistic than attempts to strip away the embedded triggers of exhaustion, which are often structural features of pastoral life rather than removable irritants.

Before the present replication, a substantial body of evidence had already begun to accumulate around the balanced affect model. Studies showing that the two affect measures respond to different predictors have included findings that satisfaction in ministry is unrelated to age while emotional exhaustion declines with age among Catholic priests in Italy, Methodist ministers in Britain and Catholic priests in Portugal. Religious coping strategies have been found to enhance positive affect without touching negative affect, and intriguing work on the Dark Triad of subclinical personality traits, operationalised through the Short Dark Triad measure, has shown that narcissism correlates positively with both exhaustion and satisfaction, a pattern that is difficult to reconcile with a single-continuum view of burnout. Meanwhile, eight previous studies testing the buffering hypothesis, spanning Presbyterian clergy in the United States, Anglican clergy in England and Wales, Methodist ministers in Great Britain, and Catholic priests and religious sisters in Italy and Portugal, had all supported the model using dependent variables ranging from thoughts of leaving ministry and psychosomatic ailments to recognised wellbeing scales.

The new study recruited its 264 participants through a snowball sampling technique administered by a team of trainee psychologists at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome. Participation was voluntary, confidential and anonymous. The resulting sample ranged in age from 25 to 84 years: 130 priests were under 40, 73 were in their 40s, 36 in their 50s, 13 in their 60s and 11 aged 70 or over, with one participant not recording his age. In all, 150 served as diocesan priests and 114 as religious priests, and while 117 were Italian, 147 came from other nationalities, underscoring the international character of the priesthood in Italy. Alongside the burnout measure, the researchers administered the 12-item Purpose in Life Scale developed by Robbins and Francis, a unidimensional instrument rooted in the logotherapy tradition of Viktor Frankl, which assesses the sense of meaning and purpose in life.

The statistical analysis proceeded in three stages using the SPSS package. The first examined internal consistency reliability, and the results were satisfactory across the board. The SEEM achieved a Cronbach alpha of .82, the SIMS an alpha of .84, and the Purpose in Life Scale also performed well, consistent with the alpha of .90 reported for its Italian translation in earlier validation work. Item–rest-of-scale correlations fell between .39 and .62 for the SEEM and .41 and .62 for the SIMS, indicating homogeneity within each scale. Purpose in life scores correlated positively with satisfaction in ministry and negatively with emotional exhaustion, supporting the appropriateness of purpose in life as the dependent variable for testing the balanced affect model.

The second stage of analysis probed the individual items and revealed a strikingly textured portrait of priestly life in the sample. On the negative side, 16.3 percent of the priests reported that fatigue and irritation had become part of their daily experience, 14.8 percent reported feeling drained by fulfilling their ministry role, and 14.4 percent said they were less patient with those among whom they minister than they used to be, suggesting that up to one in seven priests recognised signs of burnout. On the positive side, the picture was overwhelmingly encouraging: 88.7 percent said they were really glad they had entered the ministry, 85.8 percent gained a great deal of personal satisfaction from their ministry roles, and 81.8 percent felt very positive about their current ministry. Most priests, in other words, are simultaneously carrying meaningful levels of exhaustion and high levels of satisfaction, precisely the co-occurrence the balanced affect model predicts and the single-continuum view struggles to accommodate.

The third and most consequential stage tested the buffering hypothesis directly through a series of multiple regression models, with purpose in life as the dependent variable and age, exhaustion, satisfaction and their interaction entered in sequence. Age proved statistically non-significant and was dropped, and once the interaction term was included the independent effect of satisfaction no longer held, leaving a parsimonious model in which the effect of exhaustion on purpose in life depends on the level of satisfaction. The interaction was highly significant: the mitigating effect of satisfaction in ministry on purpose in life scores grew stronger as emotional exhaustion increased. In the fitted model, the negative effects of exhaustion could, on average, be completely eliminated at the highest levels of satisfaction. Among the ten priests in the sample with the maximum observed satisfaction score of 50, the individual with the highest exhaustion score of 23 also recorded the highest possible purpose in life score of 60, a vivid illustration of satisfaction acting as a psychological shield.

The authors are careful to acknowledge three limitations that should shape future replications. First, the snowball sampling technique, while adequate for testing associations within the sample, does not permit generalisation to the wider population of Catholic priests in Italy, a caveat reinforced by the sample’s relatively young age profile; caution is needed before extending the pastoral implications to older priests. Second, the study relied on a single dependent measure, and multiple indicators would strengthen the security of the findings. Third, the choice of the Purpose in Life Scale carries a conceptual wrinkle, since the satisfaction measure itself contains references to work-related purpose, potentially overlapping with the outcome. Even so, the replication is a notable victory for methodological rigour and for the balanced affect framework. Its practical message is concrete: rather than trying to eliminate the intractable stressors of ministry, programmes of continuing personal and professional development may achieve more by helping clergy recognise and maximise the sources of satisfaction in their calling, turning positive affect into a deliberate safeguard against burnout.

Subject of Research: Construct validity and reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised and the balanced affect model of burnout among Catholic priests in Italy.

Article Title: A Replication Study Testing the Construct Validity and Internal Consistency Reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised Among Catholic Priests in Italy

Article References: Francis, L. J., Crea, G., McKenna, U., & Laycock, P. (2026). A Replication Study Testing the Construct Validity and Internal Consistency Reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised Among Catholic Priests in Italy. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01376-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01376-x

Keywords: balanced affect, Catholic priests, burnout, emotional exhaustion, satisfaction in ministry, Francis Burnout Inventory Revised, purpose in life, replication study, psychometrics, clergy wellbeing, pastoral psychology, Italy

The idea behind the experiment rests on embodied cognition, a framework in cognitive science holding that thinking is not confined to the brain but is grounded in bodily states and sensorimotor experiences. According to this view, abstract concepts borrow their structure from concrete physical experience. Temperature is one of the most studied grounding dimensions: physical warmth has been linked to social trust and interpersonal closeness, while cold has been associated with alertness, psychological distance, and threat sensitivity. Because climate change is an abstract, temporally distant risk, researchers have long suspected that bodily cues—especially cold sensations, which mirror the literal subject matter of global cooling fears and physical threat—might make the risk feel more immediate and concerning.

In the original 2012 experiments, Lewandowski, Ciarocco, and Gately asked participants to chew temperature-inducing gum as part of what they believed was a taste test. Cinnamon-flavored gum produced sensations of warmth, mint-flavored gum produced sensations of cold, and control participants chewed flavorless gum. Those who felt cold reported greater concern about climate change, greater willingness to volunteer for an environmental organization, and a larger intended time commitment than controls. The findings were arresting, but they arrived from a discipline now wrestling with a well-documented replication crisis, and embodied cognition research has been singled out as an area particularly vulnerable to failures of reproduction. Machery’s recent assessment of the field catalogues how many classic embodiment effects have failed to hold up under stricter experimental controls, making an independent test of the gum effect scientifically important rather than merely curious.

The replication team introduced three methodological improvements designed to address the most obvious weaknesses of the original work. First, rather than relying solely on undergraduates—the famously unrepresentative ‘WEIRD’ population of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies—they recruited a community sample alongside a student sample, allowing them to test whether the effect generalizes beyond young, highly educated participants. Second, they added a bubble-gum condition, a flavor that carries temperature associations for some people but is far weaker than mint or cinnamon, to separate the effect of chewing itself from the effect of temperature-inducing flavors. Third, and critically, experimenters were blinded to which gum each participant had received, since evidence shows that unblinded experimenters can inflate effect sizes by unconsciously influencing participants or their own data recording.

The procedure mirrored the original study closely. All gums were white, identical in shape, and stored in sealed containers, and participants were told they were taking part in a taste test. A total of 116 people took part: 58 undergraduates with a mean age of about 21, and 58 community members with a mean age of about 37, roughly 41 percent of whom held a university degree. Participants were equally divided across the three flavor conditions and, while chewing, completed a ten-item survey measuring climate change risk perception, concern for social issues in general, willingness to volunteer for a climate organization, and the perceived temperature of the gum. Only after the session ended did the experimenter identify the flavor using a hidden marker inside the container.

The manipulation worked. Sixty-one percent of participants who chewed cinnamon gum reported feeling heat, compared with just 5 percent in the mint condition and 21 percent in the bubble-gum condition, while 57 percent of the mint group reported sensations of cold against 5 percent of the cinnamon group and 15 percent of the bubble-gum group. Importantly, perceived and actual room temperatures did not differ across conditions, ruling out ambient temperature as an alternative explanation. The stage was thus set for a clean test of whether the induced temperature sensations moved climate attitudes.

The headline result partially replicated the original study. Participants who chewed mint gum reported significantly greater concern about climate change than those who chewed bubble gum, with a small overall effect size. The effect was driven entirely by the undergraduate sample, where it was moderately strong, whereas the community sample showed no reliable difference across conditions. In a further echo of the original findings, gum flavor had no effect on concern about unrelated social issues, supporting the specificity of the manipulation—it was climate concern, not general negativity, that shifted. On pro-environmental behavior, participants in the mint condition were more willing to volunteer for a climate organization, with 48 percent expressing willingness compared with 26 percent in the cinnamon condition and 24 percent in the bubble-gum condition, a pattern that held across both samples.

Yet the replication also revealed sharp limits. Unlike the original study, the sensation of cold did not increase the number of hours participants said they would volunteer, a result that remained non-significant even after sensitivity analyses excluding extreme outliers. The authors interpret this gap between intention and commitment through the lens of the well-known attitude–behavior gap in environmental psychology: concern about climate change is only weakly correlated with actual pro-environmental behavior, a relationship complicated by factors such as learned helplessness, perceived inefficacy of mitigation responses, education, and entrenched habits. Theoretical models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and Value-Belief-Norm theory emphasize motivational and normative pathways from belief to action, and the findings suggest that a fleeting bodily sensation may nudge attitudes without activating the deeper mechanisms required for sustained behavioral commitment.

Why did the effect appear only in undergraduates? The authors point to research showing that younger people are more responsive to contextual climate cues, reflecting their developmental stage, active identity exploration, and heavy exposure to climate discourse in education and media. For students, climate change is a salient identity issue, so a cold sensation may more readily connect bodily threat cues with an already-primed mental representation of climate risk. Older community members, whose beliefs are more crystallized and shaped by diverse life experiences, appear far less susceptible. The result carries an important warning for the field: embodied interventions may work only for narrow populations, and generalizing effects from student samples to the public at large—as much of psychology has traditionally done—is a hazardous enterprise. The relatively small subgroup sizes in the new study also temper confidence, underscoring the need for larger and more diverse samples in future work.

The study did not control for confounds such as prior climate concern, political ideology, or environmental literacy, all of which are known to shape climate beliefs, and the authors flag this as a priority for follow-up research. Still, the broader lessons are clear. Embodied temperature effects on climate concern are real but fragile, cold-specific, and demographically bounded. The work reinforces growing skepticism about the robustness of classic embodiment findings while demonstrating exactly the kind of methodological rigor—community samples, neutral control conditions, and blinded experimenters—that can distinguish durable effects from artifacts. For anyone hoping that a stick of mint gum could substitute for climate communication, the message is sobering: bodily sensations may open a small window of concern, but converting that feeling into lasting engagement requires motivational and efficacy-building strategies that no flavor can deliver.

Subject of Research: The influence of embodied temperature sensations, induced by chewing gum flavor, on climate change beliefs and behavioral intentions.

Article Title: Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012)

Article References: Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012). (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Keywords: embodied cognition, climate change beliefs, chewing gum, replication study, embodied temperature, environmental psychology, attitude-behavior gap, risk perception, Current Psychology, experimenter blinding, undergraduate sample, climate concern