The study drew on openly released survey data collected at Gulf Medical University in Ajman, a health-professions institution whose student body reportedly spans 77 nationalities. Students in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and health-sciences programs completed an anonymous online questionnaire between late October and mid-November 2023. The released dataset contained 683 records, of which 661 complete cases entered the statistical models. The researchers transformed both predictors to proportion-of-maximum-possible scores, placing supportive campus environment and relationship quality on a comparable zero-to-one metric before centering them at 0.50.

Four constructs anchored the analysis. Supportive campus environment was measured with eight items covering academic support, learning services, cross-background contact, social involvement, wellbeing, nonacademic responsibilities, campus participation, and engagement with social or political issues. Relationship quality was assessed with four items about peers, faculty, academic advisors, and administrative staff. University belonging, the primary outcome, captured fit, welcome, pride, positive attachment, and the university as a favored place. Sociocultural engagement, the secondary outcome, combined eight cross-cultural interaction items with five sociocultural adaptation items. Internal consistency was high across all composites, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.922 to 0.956.

The methodological centerpiece was response surface analysis, a polynomial regression technique that retains both predictors, their squared terms, and their interaction. This approach allows the fitted surface to be interpreted along theoretically meaningful lines rather than collapsing two resources into a single difference score, which can be statistically ambiguous. Four surface parameters were estimated: the joint-resource slope, joint curvature along the congruence line, directional difference along the incongruence line, and mismatch curvature. Inference combined 2,000 bootstrap resamples, HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, duplicate-record checks, and Cook’s D influence sensitivity.

The results were striking. The primary belonging model explained 47.3 percent of the variance, while the secondary sociocultural engagement model explained 25.6 percent. For belonging, the joint-resource slope was positive at 3.159 with a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 2.596 to 3.602. For sociocultural engagement, the joint slope was 1.721 with a confidence interval of 1.233 to 2.133. In both cases, the outcome rose as both resources increased together. Curvature, directional difference, and mismatch curvature were not consistently supported by the bootstrap intervals.

This pattern carries a specific theoretical meaning. A matching interpretation would imply that equal levels of institutional support and relationship quality are valuable even when both are low, or that imbalance between the two is harmful beyond their absolute levels. The observed surface does not justify either claim. Instead, institutional and interpersonal resources appear to contribute in parallel, accumulating rather than requiring alignment. The most defensible description is a cumulative resource gradient, not a special benefit of equality between the two layers.

Robustness checks reinforced the central finding. Removing two exact duplicate records produced nearly identical results, with the belonging joint slope at 3.163 and the sociocultural engagement slope at 1.716. Removing 41 observations flagged by Cook’s D above the 4/n threshold retained a strong positive joint slope of 2.915 for belonging and 1.390 for sociocultural engagement. Curvature estimates proved influence-sensitive and should not be emphasized, but the core joint-resource pattern was stable across all sensitivity analyses.

The culturally diverse UAE context strengthens the relevance of these findings without supporting overgeneralization. The sociocultural engagement items directly capture interaction across cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic difference, perspective taking, communication adaptation, and learning about oneself through others. That makes the secondary outcome more proximal to multicultural participation than belonging alone. However, the cross-sectional measures do not directly observe identity co-construction, so the contribution is a bounded quantitative account of conditions associated with culturally situated participation rather than a claim about dynamic identity transformation.

For university administrators, the results support a concrete two-layer diagnostic rather than a generic call to increase belonging. A program can administer a brief, repeated pulse survey of perceived campus support and relationship quality, inspect the two scores separately, and target the weaker layer first. A cohort with easy access to tutoring and wellbeing services but low relationship quality would call for stable faculty-adviser assignments, scheduled small-group check-ins, peer mentoring, and faculty development on respectful feedback. Conversely, strong peer ties but low perceived support would call for clearer service navigation and removal of administrative access barriers. Because no mismatch penalty was detected, either layer can be improved first, though progress should ultimately be tracked across both.

The study also illustrates what transparent open-data secondary research can contribute. The authors reported a discrepancy between the released file’s 683 records and the linked article’s reported 638, choosing to preserve rather than silently reconcile the difference. This practice makes the inferential chain auditable and underscores that dataset reuse does not eliminate the need for provenance checks. Longitudinal and multi-institutional work remains necessary to test how students and institutional cultures shape one another over time, but the present evidence narrows the claims the data can sustain while supporting a clear practical message: belonging and multicultural participation rise together when both institutional support and relationship quality are strong.

Subject of Research: Response surface analysis of university belonging and sociocultural engagement among health-professions students in the UAE

Article Title: Institutional support, relationships, and multicultural participation: response surfaces of university belonging and sociocultural engagement

Article References: Luo, S., & Qu, H. (2026). Institutional support, relationships, and multicultural participation: response surfaces of university belonging and sociocultural engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1950905. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1950905

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1950905

Keywords: university belonging, response surface analysis, campus environment, relationship quality, sociocultural engagement, multicultural participation, health-professions education, open data, cultural psychology, United Arab Emirates, polynomial regression, student engagement

The study, led by Philipp Yorck Herzberg of Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg together with colleagues at the European Distance University Hamburg and the University of Bern, set out to answer a question posed nearly thirty years earlier by Dean and Malamuth. Those researchers had found in 1997 that the interaction between hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality robustly predicted sexual aggression only among men high in dominance and low in nurturance, a pattern they interpreted as possibly driven by empathy. Nurturant individuals, after all, tend to be warm, gentle and sensitive to others’ needs, traits closely linked to empathic capacity. But the question remained whether empathy itself was the critical protective ingredient, or merely one facet of the broader dominance-nurturance dimension.

To disentangle the two, the researchers recruited 300 heterosexual men aged 18 to 65 through online advertisements on social networks and internet forums, without disclosing that the survey concerned sexual aggression. Participants completed the German version of the Sexual Experience Survey, a ten-item count of sexually coercive behaviors ranging from verbal manipulation to physical force or incapacitation through alcohol or drugs. Hostile masculinity was measured with the Hostile Sexism Scale of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, impersonal sexuality with the revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, and dominance and nurturance with the revised Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Crucially, empathy was assessed with the German adaptation of Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which captures perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern and personal distress.

Statistically, the team faced a technical challenge. Sexual aggression scores are count variables, skewed toward zero, with roughly sixty percent of participants reporting no aggressive acts at all. Ordinary linear regression would violate the distributional assumptions of such data. The researchers therefore employed latent negative binomial regression models within a structural equation modeling framework, comparing three nested models: one in which empathy’s effect was constrained to zero, one in which dominance/nurturance’s effect was constrained to zero, and one in which both were freely estimated. Latent modeling also sidestepped the notorious unreliability of difference scores, which the dominance-nurturance variable required.

The results were unambiguous. Across all three models, hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality emerged as significant positive predictors of sexual aggression, confirming their status as the model’s core risk factors. Empathy, by contrast, acted as a significant negative predictor: men higher in empathy reported lower rates of sexually aggressive behavior. In the model combining all predictors, each unit increase in empathy reduced the expected rate of sexual aggression by roughly a third, while each unit increase in hostile masculinity multiplied the expected rate by about 1.46 and impersonal sexuality by 1.25. The dominance/nurturance difference score, however, contributed nothing, neither directly nor in interaction with the two risk factors.

Model fit statistics told the same story. The model containing empathy but excluding dominance/nurturance achieved the best fit according to the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion and sample-size-adjusted variants. Because dominance/nurturance showed no effect to begin with, there was no effect for empathy to replace or explain away, despite a substantial negative correlation of minus 0.52 between empathy and the dominance/nurturance score. The authors conclude that whatever predictive value the dominance-nurturance dimension once appeared to hold was likely attributable to its overlap with empathy, and that future confluence model research should replace it with direct empathy measures.

One finding added an unexpected layer of nuance. Although the hostile masculinity by impersonal sexuality interaction failed to reach significance in the count regression models, complementary response surface analysis confirmed a synergistic effect. Using a shifted and rotated squared difference model, the analysis revealed that risk climbs steeply and nonlinearly when hostile masculinity is high, even when impersonal sexuality is only moderate. The interaction, in other words, is asymmetric and driven primarily by hostile masculinity. The authors caution that previous studies reporting interaction effects with ordinary linear regression may have overestimated them, and that appropriate count regression techniques may simply make interactions harder to detect, making the response surface approach a valuable complement.

Why does empathy matter so much? The authors suggest that when a man can take the perspective of a potential victim and imagine how coercive behavior would feel from her side, the behavior becomes less likely to be carried out, independently of his hostility toward women or his preference for uncommitted sex. The prevalence figures underline how rare protective combinations are. The high-risk profile of high hostile masculinity, high impersonal sexuality and low empathy appeared in only 5.7 percent of the sample, whereas the opposite profile combining all three risk traits with high empathy occurred in fewer than one percent of participants, a scarcity that may also explain why the three-way interaction just failed to reach statistical significance.

The practical implications reach into prevention. Interventions that merely attack hostile attitudes have often proven ineffective over time because the underlying traits are stable, and some programs may even provoke reactance and boomerang effects in high-risk men. Earlier work by Schewe and O’Donohue showed that programs targeting victim empathy can partially succeed in increasing empathic concern and reducing risk factors such as acceptance of interpersonal violence. The present findings strengthen the case for empathy-enhancing components in prevention programs aimed at high-risk men. At the same time, the open question of whether empathy operates as a moderator or as an independent protective factor has direct practical weight: if both pathways exist, different groups of aggressive men may require different interventions.

The study carries limitations that its authors freely acknowledge. The cross-sectional design rules out causal claims, and longitudinal work is needed to establish temporal ordering among the constructs. The sample, though spanning a broad adult age range, was restricted to heterosexual men and relatively small, and hostile masculinity was operationalized solely as hostility toward women rather than the full heterogeneous construct including sexual dominance. Replication in more diverse populations and with broader measures is essential. Nevertheless, the message is clear and consequential. Within the confluence model, hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality remain the drivers of risk, dominance/nurturance should step aside, and empathy emerges as a measurable, modifiable protective factor that may be the most promising lever for reducing sexual aggression.

Subject of Research: The roles of empathy and dominance/nurturance in predicting male sexual aggression within the confluence model

Article Title: The Critical Role of Empathy Over Dominance/Nurturance in Predicting Sexual Aggression in the Confluence Model

Article References: Herzberg, P. Y., Brunner, H., Wildfang, S., & Troche, S. J. (2026). The Critical Role of Empathy Over Dominance/Nurturance in Predicting Sexual Aggression in the Confluence Model. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 55(6), 2627-2641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03510-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03510-5

Keywords: confluence model, sexual aggression, empathy, hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, dominance/nurturance, Bem Sex-Role Inventory, negative binomial regression, response surface analysis, prevention programs, Critical, Role