The research team used a phenomenological design, a qualitative approach rooted in the philosophical tradition of exploring the essence of human experiences as they are perceived by those who live them. Participants were recruited through criterion sampling, a form of purposive sampling in which candidates must meet a specific defining condition—in this case, documented exposure to peer bullying. The interviews continued until data saturation was reached, the point at which new conversations stop yielding new themes. Every session was audio-recorded, transcribed, and then subjected to thematic analysis, a systematic method for identifying patterns of meaning across qualitative data. To ensure transparency and rigor, the authors conducted and reported the study in line with the COREQ checklist, a 32-item international standard for qualitative research reporting, and the work received ethical approval from the Giresun University Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee, with written parental consent and adolescent assent obtained for every participant.

From the transcripts, the researchers distilled five overarching themes: types of bullying, causes of bullying, effects of bullying, ways of coping, and recommended measures. Within these themes emerged fifteen subthemes, and together they form a taxonomy of adolescent victimization that is strikingly granular. The adolescents described four distinct forms of aggression: physical bullying, involving direct bodily harm; verbal bullying, through insults, mockery, and threats; social bullying, the quieter machinery of exclusion, rumor-spreading, and relational manipulation; and psychological bullying, a sustained assault on a victim’s sense of self-worth and safety. This fourfold classification echoes decades of bullying research initiated by Dan Olweus, but hearing the categories articulated by teenagers themselves gives each one a texture that questionnaires rarely capture.

Equally revealing is what the participants said about why bullying happens. The analysis grouped perceived causes into individual, family and social, and psychological origins. Some adolescents attributed aggression to personal traits of the perpetrators, including impulsivity and a desire for dominance or status. Others pointed to the environment: broken family dynamics, exposure to violence at home, and social norms that reward aggression among peers. The psychological dimension included low self-esteem, emotional dysregulation, and the perpetrators’ own unmet psychological needs. This layered causal picture aligns with ecological models of bullying, such as the framework advanced by Hong and Espelage, which situates victimization within nested systems running from the individual to the family, the peer group, the school, and the wider community. In other words, the adolescents themselves intuitively described what formal theory confirms: bullying is rarely the product of a single defective child, but of an interacting web of personal history and social context.

The consequences of that web, according to the study, are both physical and psychosocial. Participants reported somatic complaints—headaches, sleep disturbance, appetite changes—alongside deeper emotional wounds: fear, shame, anger, loss of confidence, and a corrosive withdrawal from school life and friendships. These accounts are consistent with a large body of quantitative evidence linking peer victimization to internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression. Recent longitudinal work, including studies published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence and Psychological Medicine, has shown that the association between victimization and mental health deterioration is robust over time, and that friendship quality and perceived social support can buffer some of the damage. The Turkish adolescents’ narratives add a human dimension to those statistical curves, describing how the psychological effects of bullying ripple outward into academic performance, physical health, and the capacity to trust others.

When it came to coping, the study identified two broad pathways: personal methods and external support. On the personal side, adolescents described strategies such as ignoring the aggressor, avoiding known danger zones, attempting to respond in kind, and using private rituals to regulate their emotions. Research on adolescent coping suggests that these strategies fall along a spectrum from engagement to disengagement, and that their effectiveness depends heavily on context; avoidance may provide short-term relief while leaving the underlying victimization intact. The external pathway proved more consequential. Participants emphasized the value of social support from friends and trusted adults, and of professional help from school counselors and health providers. This mirrors the findings of intervention science: meta-analyses by Gaffney, Ttofi, and Farrington have demonstrated that well-structured school-based programs significantly reduce both perpetration and victimization, and cost-effectiveness analyses of programs such as KiVa in Finland show that prevention pays for itself in reduced harm.

Perhaps the most actionable part of the study is its fifth theme: the measures the adolescents themselves recommended. Participants called for school-based interventions, including clearer anti-bullying rules, better supervision, and teachers who take reports seriously rather than dismissing them as ordinary childhood conflict. They urged family-based measures, asking parents to communicate openly, watch for warning signs, and avoid blame directed at the victim. And they advocated individual and community education—awareness campaigns, classroom discussions, and public messaging that reframes bullying from a rite of passage into the public health problem that organizations such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization have declared it to be. The World Health Organization’s 2019 practical handbook on school-based violence prevention makes a similar case, arguing that no single actor can address bullying alone.

The study’s methodological choices deserve attention as well, because they shape how much weight its findings can bear. Phenomenological research does not aim for statistical generalizability; a sample of 16 adolescents in one Turkish province cannot tell us how common any given experience is. What it can do—and what this study does—is generate hypotheses and depth. By following the COREQ checklist, achieving data saturation, and grounding the analysis in established qualitative methods, the authors have produced findings that are credible as a window into lived experience, one that can inform the design of quantitative instruments, screening tools, and intervention protocols. The researchers also note that the datasets are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, and the work received no external funding, with the authors declaring no conflicts of interest.

The broader significance of the study lies in its insistence that victims are not passive subjects of research but experts on the phenomenon that defines their daily lives. The adolescents interviewed here described a problem that is multidimensional in form, multifactorial in origin, and far-reaching in consequence—and, crucially, they described a solution architecture that is equally multidimensional: personal coping strengthened by social support, professional help embedded in responsive schools, and families engaged rather than sidelined. As global attention to bullying intensifies, with UNICEF estimating that a substantial share of the world’s adolescents experience peer violence, studies like this one remind policymakers that effective prevention cannot be imposed from above. It must be built in conversation with the young people it is meant to protect, listening to what they say hurts them, what they say helps them, and what they believe could stop the harm before it starts.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial difficulties and coping experiences of adolescents exposed to peer bullying

Article Title: Psychosocial difficulties and coping experiences of adolescents exposed to peer bullying: a phenomenological study

Article References: Ustuner Top, F., & Uzun, S. (2026). Psychosocial difficulties and coping experiences of adolescents exposed to peer bullying: a phenomenological study. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1520. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10074-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10074-z

Keywords: adolescence, peer bullying, victimization, phenomenology, qualitative research, thematic analysis, coping strategies, school psychology, mental health, social support, bullying prevention, Turkey

The research team, led by Yihang Du of Capital University of Physical Education and Sports together with colleagues at Wuhan Sports University and WLSA Shanghai School, measured each construct with validated instruments. Physical exercise was assessed with the Physical Activity Rating Scale-3, regulatory emotional self-efficacy with the Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale, social avoidance with the corresponding dimension of the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale, and social anxiety with the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents. All participants were junior high students, and the study received ethics approval from the Academic Committee of Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, with informed consent obtained from both the students and their guardians.

The correlational results were striking in their consistency. Social anxiety was negatively correlated with physical exercise, with a correlation coefficient of r = -0.320, and with regulatory emotional self-efficacy, at r = -0.330, both statistically significant at p < 0.001. In other words, students who exercised more and who felt more capable of regulating their emotions tended to report lower social anxiety. The strongest single correlate, however, was social avoidance: the correlation between social avoidance and social anxiety was r = 0.434, also highly significant. Students who actively steered away from social contact were markedly more likely to report the fear of scrutiny, embarrassment and negative judgment that defines social anxiety.

Correlations alone can be misleading, so the researchers went further. Using a two-step hierarchical multiple linear regression with HC3 robust standard errors, a technique that guards against distortion from outliers and heteroscedasticity in survey data, they adjusted for sex, grade and household registration. Even after these adjustments, physical exercise retained a negative association with social anxiety (β = -0.174, p < 0.001), as did regulatory emotional self-efficacy (β = -0.182, p < 0.001), while social avoidance remained positively associated (β = 0.322, p < 0.001). Together, the final model explained 26.6 percent of the variance in social anxiety scores, a substantial share for a single model in psychological survey research and a sign that these three factors capture a meaningful portion of what differentiates anxious from less anxious students.

One of the study’s most technically interesting contributions is its decomposition of regulatory emotional self-efficacy into subcomponents. The construct, rooted in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, refers not to emotional regulation itself but to a person’s belief in their own capacity to regulate emotions. The researchers found that perceived efficacy in managing despondency or distress and perceived efficacy in managing anger or irritation were both negatively associated with social anxiety. Perceived efficacy in expressing positive affect, by contrast, was not independently significant once the other factors were accounted for. This asymmetry suggests that what matters for socially anxious adolescents is not general emotional confidence but specifically the belief that one can contain and manage negative emotional states in the moment they arise.

The team also subjected its findings to robustness checks designed to test whether the results were artifacts of particular statistical choices. When the researchers log-transformed the physical exercise variable to reduce skew, and when they excluded potentially influential observations from the analysis, the directions of the main associations were unchanged. In a supplementary analysis using an alternative outcome measure, social avoidance remained associated with fear of negative evaluation, one of the core cognitive components of social anxiety. These checks do not prove causation, which no cross-sectional design can, but they strengthen confidence that the reported associations are not fragile statistical accidents.

The causal question deserves emphasis. Because the data were collected at a single point in time, the study cannot determine whether low exercise and low emotional self-efficacy contribute to social anxiety, whether socially anxious students withdraw from exercise and lose confidence in their emotional coping, or whether some third factor drives all three. Each direction is plausible. Exercise is known to reduce physiological arousal and improve mood, which could buffer against social fear. Conversely, a student terrified of being watched may quit team sports, gym class and playground activity, eroding both fitness and opportunities for positive social feedback. Similarly, repeated failures to manage distress in social situations could erode regulatory self-efficacy, while strong self-efficacy could make social challenges feel manageable rather than threatening.

What the design does establish is that these factors are independently associated with social anxiety even after controlling for demographic characteristics, and that they are not simply proxies for one another. The fact that physical exercise, emotional self-efficacy and social avoidance each contributed uniquely to the regression model indicates that social anxiety in this population sits at the intersection of behavior, self-belief and social strategy. A student could be physically active yet still avoidant, or emotionally confident yet sedentary, and the model treats each configuration as informative rather than collapsing them into a single risk score.

For schools, the authors argue, the practical message is about differentiated assessment and support. Screening that focuses only on anxiety symptoms may miss students whose primary signal is withdrawal from social settings, or whose anxiety is intertwined with low confidence in handling anger and distress. Conversely, interventions that boost exercise participation or build emotional regulation skills, such as structured physical education programs and self-efficacy-focused counseling, may offer complementary routes to reducing social anxiety, even though the present study cannot confirm that such interventions would work. The findings also suggest that social avoidance itself, not merely the anxiety behind it, is a legitimate target for attention, given that it was the strongest correlate in the dataset.

The study’s setting matters for interpretation. All participants came from junior high schools in a single prefecture in Henan Province, and the measures were self-reported, which introduces the usual possibility of response bias. Cultural context may also shape how social anxiety, exercise and emotional expression manifest in Chinese junior high students compared with adolescents elsewhere. Still, the scale of the sample, the use of validated scales, the robust regression approach and the consistency of the results across sensitivity analyses make this a useful data point in a growing literature linking adolescent mental health to everyday behavior. As the authors conclude, social anxiety among junior high students appears to be associated with multiple behavioral and psychological domains rather than a single factor, and effective support will need to consider exercise participation, confidence in managing difficult emotions and avoidance-related behavior alongside anxiety symptoms themselves.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional associations of physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy and social avoidance with social anxiety among junior high school students

Article Title: Social anxiety, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and social avoidance among junior high school students: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Du, Y., Zhang, K., Wu, W., & Liu, M. (2026). Social anxiety, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, and social avoidance among junior high school students: a cross-sectional study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05742-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05742-5

Keywords: social anxiety, adolescents, physical exercise, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, social avoidance, junior high school students, cross-sectional study, BMC Psychology, mental health, China, fear of negative evaluation, school psychology

A new randomized controlled trial published in Current Psychology suggests that a smartphone game may close that gap. Researchers at the Universitat de València, working with colleagues at Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe and the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, tested an app called esTOCma, a serious mobile health game designed to improve OCD-related mental health literacy, reduce stigmatizing attitudes, and boost school staff’s confidence in supporting students with obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The trial, registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT06334887, enrolled 175 school staff members, roughly 70 percent of them women, with an average age of about 42 years.

The design was straightforward and rigorous. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that completed the esTOCma intervention or a waitlist control group that received nothing during the trial period. The app delivers its content through ten game-like missions that together require only about 40 to 45 minutes of use, spread across roughly five days. That brevity is deliberate. Traditional mental health training for teachers often demands workshops, substitutes, and scheduling gymnastics that schools cannot easily afford. A self-paced game that fits into coffee breaks removes most of the practical barriers that have limited previous training efforts.

Underneath the playful surface, esTOCma packs in three well-established psychological techniques. The first is psychoeducation: clear, evidence-based information about what OCD is, how its symptoms present in young people, and what effective treatments look like. The second is indirect contact, a stigma-reduction strategy in which users engage with realistic narratives and characters rather than meeting people with the condition directly, which research has shown can soften prejudicial attitudes at scale. The third is cognitive restructuring, a core cognitive-behavioral method that guides users to identify and challenge mistaken beliefs about OCD, including the persistent misconception that the disorder is a quirk or a personality trait rather than a serious but treatable condition.

The researchers assessed participants at three points beyond baseline: immediately after the intervention, and again at one-month and six-month follow-ups. Their primary outcomes were OCD literacy, stigmatizing attitudes, and perceived confidence in addressing students with OCD symptoms. To analyze the repeated measurements, they used Mixed Models for Repeated Measures, a statistical framework well suited to longitudinal trials because it handles missing data gracefully and models how each participant changes over time relative to the other group. This approach is increasingly the standard for randomized trials in mental health research, where dropout and uneven follow-up completion are common.

The results were striking. At post-intervention, the esTOCma group showed significant between-group differences on all three primary outcomes, with medium-to-large effect sizes. In practical terms, teachers who played the game knew substantially more about OCD, held measurably fewer stigmatizing attitudes, and reported notably greater confidence in responding to students showing obsessive-compulsive symptoms than their waitlisted colleagues. Crucially, the gains did not evaporate once the novelty wore off. Improvements were maintained at both the one-month and six-month follow-ups, suggesting that a single short course of game-based learning produced durable changes in knowledge and attitude rather than a fleeting quiz-score bump.

The trial also examined a secondary question with an interesting twist: whether the intervention changed participants’ own OCD-related distress, since intrusive thoughts and compulsive-like behaviors exist on a continuum in the general population. Here the app showed no significant between-group effect. That null result is arguably reassuring in context. The intervention was designed as a literacy and stigma tool for professionals, not as a treatment for the players themselves, and it appears to have done its intended job without unintended effects on users’ personal symptom levels.

Why does teacher literacy matter so much for OCD specifically? The disorder is frequently misunderstood by the public, who often reduce it to hand-washing or tidiness and miss the wide range of presentations, including aggressive or taboo intrusive thoughts, symmetry obsessions, and checking rituals. Adolescents themselves show poor recognition of these symptoms and high stigma toward them, and adults with OCD commonly describe decades of secrecy before seeking help. Because OCD typically first appears during the school years, a teacher who recognizes that a student’s rituals are symptoms rather than stubbornness can initiate a conversation, involve the family, and support referral to mental health services, potentially shaving years off the duration of untreated illness that so strongly predicts poorer long-term outcomes.

The Spanish team’s work builds on a line of earlier studies from the same group, including a brief educational intervention for teachers, a pilot smartphone app study, and a crossover randomized trial in the general population, all pointing toward the same conclusion: short, digital, evidence-based formats can shift knowledge and attitudes about OCD. The new trial extends this to a fully powered randomized design with school staff and long-term follow-up, addressing a frequent weakness of stigma interventions, whose effects often fade quickly. The datasets from the study have been deposited in the Zenodo repository for public access, and the work was funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund.

Limitations remain, as with any single trial. The sample was drawn from Spanish schools, the comparison group was a waitlist rather than an active control, and confidence was measured through self-report rather than observed behavior in real classrooms. Whether improved literacy and confidence translate into more actual referrals of students to mental health services is the critical next question, and one that future studies with behavioral outcomes should tackle. Still, the implications are compelling. A 45-minute mobile game, requiring no specialized trainer and no time away from the classroom, produced meaningful and lasting improvements in the very capacities that determine whether a struggling child gets noticed and helped. If such tools were scaled across school systems, they could turn one of the largest workforces in daily contact with young people into an early-warning network for one of the most misunderstood disorders in child and adolescent mental health.

Subject of Research: A mobile health game intervention for improving school staff's OCD literacy, stigma, and confidence

Article Title: Addressing OCD literacy, stigmatizing attitudes, and confidence in teachers through the esTOCma app: a randomized controlled trial

Article References: Saman, Y., Arnáez, S., Carratalá-Ricart, L., Carrasco, Á., Merchán, O., Corberán, M., Pascual-Vera, B., Roncero, M., & García-Soriano, G. (2026). Addressing OCD literacy, stigmatizing attitudes, and confidence in teachers through the esTOCma app: a randomized controlled trial. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1574. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10083-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10083-y

Keywords: obsessive-compulsive disorder, mental health literacy, stigma, teachers, mobile health, serious games, randomized controlled trial, school psychology, early intervention, cognitive restructuring, psychoeducation, adolescent mental health

The research, led by Seifemichael Tsegaye Kassa of Wollo University and Mengistu Awlachew of Dessie College of Teachers Education, examined every student with visual impairment enrolled in Grades 7 and 8 across the five governmental middle schools in Dessie that operate inclusive education programs. That came to exactly 50 students, and rather than sampling from them, the researchers used a census approach, including the entire accessible population. The participants completed standardized questionnaires measuring perceived social support and self-esteem, while their academic performance was drawn from official school examination records across eight subjects, from Amharic and English to General Science and Information Technology.

The numbers are compelling. Perceived social support correlated with academic performance at r = .49, and self-esteem at r = .54, both statistically significant at the p < .01 level. When the two variables were entered together in a multiple regression model, they accounted for 39.7 percent of the variance in examination scores—a substantial share for any two predictors in educational research. The overall model was highly significant, F(2, 47) = 15.48, p < .001. Notably, self-esteem carried the stronger standardized weight (β = 0.42) compared with perceived social support (β = 0.34), suggesting that a student’s internal sense of worth may be the more immediate psychological engine of achievement, even though both factors contributed independently.

The theoretical backbone of the study is Sociometer Theory, the influential idea proposed by psychologist Mark Leary that self-esteem functions as an internal gauge of social acceptance. According to this view, when students with visual impairment perceive meaningful emotional, informational, and practical assistance from parents, teachers, and peers, that support signals relational value, which is then reflected in stronger self-esteem. Conversely, stigma, isolation, or thin support networks register as signs of low acceptance and gradually erode self-worth. In the Dessie data, perceived social support and self-esteem were themselves moderately correlated at r = .46, consistent with the idea that external relational inclusion shapes internal self-evaluation.

The researchers layered three additional frameworks onto this foundation. Socioecological Theory situates the student within nested systems of family, peers, and school, each shaping development. Self-Determination Theory emphasizes that relatedness and competence feed intrinsic motivation, the fuel of persistence in difficult academic tasks. Social Capital Theory explains how interpersonal networks supply tangible resources—help navigating barriers, information, encouragement—that facilitate educational success. Together, these perspectives converge on a single proposition: academic performance among students with visual impairment is not merely a product of cognitive capacity or instructional quality, but is deeply embedded in the psychosocial and structural contexts in which learning occurs.

Context matters enormously here, and the Ethiopian setting is distinctive. In collectivist cultures such as Ethiopia’s, self-worth is tied more strongly to group membership, family approval, and social inclusion than in individualist Western contexts. Strong family interconnectedness and community-based support systems may therefore amplify the association between social support and achievement. At the same time, resource constraints, lingering stigma around disability, and the early stages of inclusive education policy implementation mean that psychosocial resources may carry extra weight: where structural supports are thin, students lean more heavily on relationships and self-belief to navigate academic challenges. The authors argue that this may explain why the observed associations were relatively strong in their sample.

The methodological care behind the study deserves attention. Because all participants had visual impairments, the standard written questionnaires could not simply be handed out. Trained research assistants read every item aloud, individually or in small groups, using neutral delivery without inflection, and recorded verbal responses; enlarged-print versions were available for students with partial vision. The Amharic-adapted Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support showed excellent internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.870), and the adapted Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale performed even better (alpha = 0.884). The instruments were translated forward and backward, reviewed by bilingual experts, and piloted with 12 visually impaired students at a separate school.

The team also took deliberate steps to guard against common method bias and social desirability. Crucially, the outcome variable—academic performance—came from official school examination records rather than self-reports, creating methodological separation between predictors and outcome. Students were assured confidentiality and told their answers would not affect their academic standing or be disclosed to teachers or parents. Regression diagnostics were clean: variance inflation factors of 1.27 indicated no multicollinearity, the Durbin–Watson statistic of 1.65 fell within the acceptable range, and tests of residual normality were satisfied.

Still, the authors are candid about limits. The cross-sectional design captures associations at a single point in time and cannot establish causation—it remains possible that high-performing students feel better supported and more confident, rather than the reverse. The sample of 50, while a complete census of the local population, is small and drawn from one city, limiting generalizability to private schools, rural settings, or other regions. Roughly sixty percent of the variance in performance remains unexplained, likely reflecting instructional quality, access to assistive technology, socioeconomic status, disability severity, and other factors outside the model. Longitudinal studies and larger, more geographically diverse samples are the clear next step.

Even so, the practical implications are immediate. The findings suggest that schools should foster self-esteem development programs, build peer mentoring and teacher-led emotional support systems, and embed counseling alongside instructional accommodations in inclusive education policy. For Ethiopia’s growing inclusive education framework—and for educators across Sub-Saharan Africa facing similar conditions—the message is that braille, screen readers, and accessible curricula are necessary but not sufficient. The relationships surrounding a student, and the self-worth those relationships cultivate, appear to be among the most powerful predictors of whether that student succeeds.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial predictors of academic performance among middle school students with visual impairment in Ethiopia

Article Title: Perceived social support, self-esteem, and academic performance among students with visual impairment in Ethiopian middle schools

Article References: Kassa, S. T., & Awlachew, M. (2026). Perceived social support, self-esteem, and academic performance among students with visual impairment in Ethiopian middle schools. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1082. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02223-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02223-0

Keywords: visual impairment, self-esteem, social support, academic performance, inclusive education, Ethiopia, middle school, Sociometer Theory, school psychology, disability, cross-sectional study, psychosocial factors

The scale of the study alone makes it noteworthy. Among the nearly twenty-five thousand participants, 4,350 adolescents—17.8 percent of the sample—met the operational criterion for problematic internet use, a proportion that underscores how common the phenomenon is in secondary school populations. The researchers measured three psychological domains using validated Chinese-language instruments: the Internet Addiction Test for problematic use, the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children for anxiety symptoms, and the Ruminative Response Scale for rumination, the repetitive, self-focused pattern of thinking in which individuals dwell on their distress and its possible causes and consequences. Adolescents with problematic internet use reported significantly higher levels of both anxiety and rumination than their peers without problematic use, confirming the close association between maladaptive online behavior and dysregulated emotional and cognitive processing that has been described in the cognitive-behavioral model of the condition.

What distinguishes this study is its methodological ambition. Rather than relying on a single analytical technique, the team integrated three complementary approaches: network analysis, latent profile analysis, and a computational algorithm called NodeIdentifyR. Network analysis treats psychological symptoms not as isolated scores on a questionnaire but as nodes in an interconnected system, where each node can activate or reinforce its neighbors. In this framework, the edges between nodes represent statistical associations, and the overall architecture of the network—its global strength and its structure—can be compared across groups. Latent profile analysis, by contrast, is a person-centered statistical method that sorts individuals into unobserved subgroups based on their response patterns, allowing researchers to ask whether the population is genuinely heterogeneous rather than assuming it is. NodeIdentifyR then uses network simulations to nominate specific nodes as candidate intervention targets, essentially asking which symptom, if successfully modified, would most efficiently disrupt the maladaptive dynamics of the whole system.

The person-centered analysis delivered the study’s central insight. Latent profile analysis identified two distinct subgroups among the adolescents with problematic internet use, differentiated by the degree to which anxiety and rumination co-occurred: a low anxiety-rumination co-occurrence subgroup and a high co-occurrence subgroup. In other words, some teens with problematic internet use carry a heavy combined burden of anxious and ruminative symptoms, while others show comparatively little of this emotional-cognitive entanglement. The two subgroups differed significantly not only in their overall symptom levels but also in the global strength of their symptom networks and in the structure of those networks—the pattern of connections linking individual anxiety and rumination dimensions to one another.

This structural difference mattered enormously when the researchers ran their network simulations to identify intervention targets. For adolescents in the low co-occurrence subgroup, the simulations pointed to Harm Avoidance—a dimension of anxiety reflecting the tendency to worry about potential future threats and to avoid situations perceived as dangerous—as the most promising candidate target. For the high co-occurrence subgroup, the simulations instead nominated Symptom Rumination, the component of rumination focused on dwelling on one’s distressing feelings and their implications. The implication is striking: the single most efficient point of therapeutic leverage differs depending on which psychological profile an adolescent occupies, and a one-size-fits-all intervention strategy may therefore miss the mark for a substantial fraction of affected teens.

The technical logic behind these simulations is worth unpacking. In network approaches to psychopathology, symptoms are conceptualized as self-reinforcing systems in which activation spreads along the edges of the network. A node with high centrality—many strong connections to other nodes—can, in principle, sustain the entire dysfunctional system, so temporarily activating or perturbing that node in silico and observing the cascade of effects provides a way to estimate where an intervention would produce the greatest downstream benefit. The NodeIdentifyR algorithm formalizes this perturbation logic, and by applying it separately to each subgroup’s network, the researchers could test whether the same node would emerge as the optimal target in both groups. It did not, which is precisely the finding that gives the study its practical significance.

For clinicians and school mental health programs, the results suggest a practical triage strategy. Before selecting an intervention focus, practitioners might first assess whether an adolescent with problematic internet use falls into the high or low anxiety-rumination co-occurrence profile. A teen whose network is dominated by anticipatory worry and threat avoidance may benefit most from interventions that directly target harm avoidance, such as exposure-based cognitive-behavioral techniques that reduce avoidance behavior and catastrophic forecasting. A teen whose symptoms are organized around repetitive negative thinking may respond better to approaches aimed at disengaging from ruminative loops, such as rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness-based strategies. The study’s framing within the cognitive-behavioral model supports this logic, since that model explicitly links problematic internet use to maladaptive cognitive processing and dysregulated emotional responses that can be addressed at specific points in the system.

The authors are careful to frame their conclusions appropriately. The findings are model-based, generated from cross-sectional data, and the network simulations identify candidate targets rather than proven ones. Whether intervening on Harm Avoidance in low co-occurrence adolescents or on Symptom Rumination in high co-occurrence adolescents actually reduces problematic internet use over time is an empirical question that can only be answered with longitudinal designs and, ultimately, randomized experimental studies. The researchers state explicitly that these model-based findings require validation in longitudinal and experimental work before they can be translated into clinical guidelines. Cross-sectional networks also cannot establish the direction of causality: anxiety and rumination may drive excessive internet use, excessive use may amplify anxiety and rumination, or both may arise from shared underlying vulnerabilities.

Even with those caveats, the study represents a meaningful advance in how researchers think about problematic internet use in adolescents. By demonstrating that the population is psychologically heterogeneous—that two subgroups with measurably different network architectures exist within the same diagnostic label—it challenges the assumption that a single intervention target will serve everyone. The work also showcases the value of integrating multiple analytical methods, since neither the latent profile analysis alone nor the network analysis alone could have revealed both the existence of the subgroups and the divergence of their optimal intervention points. Funded by the Shandong Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program and approved by the Ethics Committee of Shandong University, with written informed consent obtained from all participants and their legal guardians, the study offers a template for large-scale, methodologically rigorous research on adolescent digital behavior. As screen time continues to climb worldwide, the message for the field is clear: effective intervention may depend less on finding the one right target for problematic internet use and more on matching the target to the individual adolescent’s psychological profile.

Subject of Research: Heterogeneous anxiety-rumination profiles and network-based intervention targets in adolescents with problematic internet use

Article Title: Are candidate intervention targets consistent across adolescents with problematic internet use: an empirical study integrating multiple methods

Article References: Are candidate intervention targets consistent across adolescents with problematic internet use: an empirical study integrating multiple methods. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05727-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05727-4

Keywords: problematic internet use, adolescents, anxiety, rumination, network analysis, latent profile analysis, intervention targets, cognitive-behavioral model, mental health, internet addiction, NodeIdentifyR, school psychology

The study was conducted by Ekrem Sedat Şahin of Aksaray University and Makbule Duran Mucuk of Akdeniz University, who surveyed 544 Turkish adolescents, 348 of them female and 196 male. Participants were recruited through convenience sampling and completed their questionnaires in face-to-face sessions. The researchers measured three constructs: relative deprivation using the Relative Deprivation Scale-Adolescent Form, the significance quest using the Significance Quest Scale, and aggression using the short form of the Aggression Questionnaire. They then analyzed the relationships among these variables using structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test whether a network of hypothesized pathways fits the observed data better than competing models.

Relative deprivation is one of the oldest and most influential concepts in social psychology. First articulated in the mid-twentieth century in studies of American soldiers, and later formalized by sociologist Robert Merton, the idea is deceptively simple: people do not evaluate their circumstances in absolute terms. They evaluate them against reference points, usually the people around them. A teenager with a perfectly adequate life may still feel deprived when comparing themselves to a wealthier classmate, a more popular peer, or the curated highlight reels of social media. Decades of research, including a major meta-analytic review by Heather Smith and Thomas Pettigrew, have shown that these subjective comparisons, rather than objective conditions, predict a wide range of outcomes, from reduced well-being to collective action and interpersonal hostility.

Adolescence is a particularly fertile ground for such comparisons. Developmental research has long emphasized that the teenage years are a period of heightened sensitivity to social evaluation, identity formation, and status concerns. Neuroimaging work by Laurel Somerville and colleagues has shown that the adolescent brain responds robustly to social feedback, and studies of school environments indicate that perceived rank among peers shapes behavior in ways that objective resources do not. Against this backdrop, the Turkish researchers asked a specific mechanistic question: if relative deprivation breeds aggression, what psychological process carries that effect?

Their answer draws on significance quest theory, developed by Arie Kruglanski and colleagues as a reformulation of the classic frustration-aggression hypothesis. In its original form, that hypothesis held that frustration, defined as the blocking of goal-directed behavior, produces aggression. Kruglanski’s team proposed a deeper mechanism: frustration matters because it threatens a person’s sense of significance, the feeling of being somebody, of mattering to others and to oneself. When significance is lost or threatened, individuals experience a pressing motivational state, the quest for significance, that drives them to restore it. Crucially, this restoration can be pursued through violent or extreme means, a dynamic studied extensively in the context of radicalization and violent extremism, but the same logic applies to everyday aggression.

The structural equation model in the new study supported this pathway. Relative deprivation was significantly associated both with aggression and with the significance quest, and the significance quest was in turn significantly associated with aggression. Most importantly, the analysis showed that the significance quest significantly mediated the relationship between relative deprivation and aggression, meaning that part of the reason deprived adolescents become aggressive is that deprivation activates a burning need to reassert their worth. The researchers describe the mediation as partial, indicating that significance quest explains a meaningful share of the effect but not all of it, leaving room for other mechanisms such as anger rumination, moral disengagement, or deviant peer affiliation, which other recent studies have also implicated.

The findings fit into a rapidly growing international literature. Experimental work by Tobias Greitemeyer and Christina Sagioglou in Austria found that inducing feelings of personal relative deprivation increased aggression toward others, and that rising wealth inequality may heighten interpersonal hostility. Studies in China have linked relative deprivation to online aggression, school disengagement, and deviant peer affiliation among students. A meta-analysis on significance quest and the so-called 3N model of violent extremism confirmed that significance loss is reliably associated with radicalization-related variables. What the Turkish study adds is developmental specificity: it demonstrates that this motivational chain operates in adolescents, a population whose identity is still under construction and whose sense of mattering is especially fragile.

The practical implications are significant. If the significance quest is the engine that converts perceived disadvantage into aggression, then interventions that target mattering directly may be more effective than those that focus on aggression alone. The authors suggest that strengthening adolescents’ sense of significance could help reduce both relative deprivation and aggressive behavior. This aligns with a broader movement in community psychology, championed by Isaac Prilleltensky, that treats mattering as a foundational psychological need with consequences for health, happiness, and social behavior. School-based programs that give students genuine opportunities to contribute, be recognized, and build competence may inoculate them against the significance vacuum that deprivation creates. Community-based aggression prevention programs have already shown measurable effectiveness in meta-analysis, and significance-focused components could sharpen their impact.

There are, of course, important caveats. The study used a cross-sectional design and convenience sampling, so it cannot establish causal direction with certainty; it is possible, for example, that aggressive adolescents perceive more deprivation or experience a stronger significance quest as a consequence of their behavior. The sample was drawn from a single cultural context, and aggression, status norms, and the meaning of mattering vary across cultures. Self-report measures are also vulnerable to shared-method bias. The authors themselves call for future research to test significance-focused interventions experimentally, which would provide stronger causal evidence and translate the correlational findings into actionable practice.

Even with those limitations, the study reframes a familiar problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Adolescent aggression has often been treated as a symptom of poor impulse control, bad parenting, or toxic peer cultures. This research suggests that at least part of the story is motivational: young people who feel left behind are not merely venting frustration, they are searching for a way to matter. If families, schools, and communities can offer legitimate routes to significance, through recognition, responsibility, and genuine belonging, the pressure that otherwise finds an outlet in hostility may be channeled into effort, achievement, and prosocial contribution. The quest for significance, the same force that can fuel violence, can also power growth. The difference lies in the paths a society makes available to its young people.

Subject of Research: The mediating role of significance quest in the relationship between relative deprivation and aggression among adolescents

Article Title: Why do they become aggressive? Significance quest explains the effect of relative deprivation on adolescent aggression

Article References: Şahin, E. S., & Duran Mucuk, M. (2026). Why do they become aggressive? Significance quest explains the effect of relative deprivation on adolescent aggression. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10073-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10073-0

Keywords: relative deprivation, significance quest, adolescent aggression, structural equation modeling, frustration-aggression hypothesis, social comparison, mattering, Current Psychology, radicalization, school psychology, Turkey, mediation analysis

The study adopted an interpretivist qualitative design, drawing on semi-structured interviews and brief questionnaires with 24 participants: 11 adolescents aged 15 to 17, six caregivers and seven educators, recruited across both public and private schools in Gauteng. This triangulated design matters methodologically. By capturing the perspectives of learners, the adults responsible for them at home and the professionals responsible for them at school, the researchers could trace how breakdowns in one part of the system were experienced elsewhere in it. Thematic analysis of the transcripts identified distrust in educational and support systems as a central theme underpinning sustained disengagement — a disengagement that persisted well beyond the formal end of pandemic restrictions.

Theoretically, the authors frame their analysis through Bronfenbrenner’s Bio-ecological Systems Theory, which situates adolescent development within nested layers of context, from immediate relationships with teachers and caregivers to the broader policies and institutional structures that shape those relationships. The framework helps explain why a pandemic-era policy failure is not simply an administrative problem: when distal systems — education departments, health services, social support structures — behave inconsistently, the instability propagates inward, destabilising the micro-level relationships on which teenagers depend for psychological security. The researchers pair this with the principles of Trauma-Informed Care, an approach that treats behavioural signs of distress as adaptations to adversity rather than defiance, and that emphasises safety, trustworthiness and predictability as prerequisites for recovery.

What participants described, in practice, was a cascade of institutional inconsistencies. Learners reported strained relationships with teachers, in which the rapport that anchors classroom learning had frayed during remote schooling and never fully recovered. Caregivers described weak school–home communication, with schools failing to reach out when adolescents stopped attending or began struggling emotionally, leaving families uncertain where to turn. Educators, for their part, pointed to the near-total absence of school-based psychologists and limited access to psychosocial services, meaning that even when distress was recognised, there was often no professional resource to which a struggling learner could be referred. Layered over all of this were persistent inequalities between school contexts, with under-resourced public schools far less able than wealthier private institutions to rebuild routines, provide counselling or re-establish reliable contact with families after the pandemic.

The psychological consequences of this unreliability were consistent across accounts. Adolescents who experienced schools as unpredictable reported anxiety, emotional withdrawal and a marked reduction in school engagement — not as a momentary reaction to lockdown but as a sustained pattern that outlived the disruption itself. In the language of the study, institutional unreliability functioned as a chronic stressor, one that eroded exactly the sense of safety that adolescents needed in order to re-engage with learning after a collective trauma. The researchers also connect these findings to posttraumatic stress, noting that the pandemic years constituted a period of genuine adversity for young people, and that recovery from adversity depends heavily on whether the surrounding environment restores predictability and support.

The counterfactual embedded in the data is equally instructive. Where schools demonstrated predictability — clear expectations, consistent routines, honest and timely communication — and where relational continuity was maintained between learners and teachers, adolescents reported stronger coping and improved wellbeing. In other words, dependability operated as a protective factor. This is a conceptually significant extension of the South African evidence base, which has documented pandemic-related learning losses and mental health burdens extensively but has less often identified the specific institutional qualities that buffer adolescents against those burdens. The study’s contribution is to name institutional dependability itself — rather than merely resources or curriculum catch-up — as a mechanism worth targeting.

The distinction matters because it changes what a plausible intervention looks like. If the problem were purely material, the answer would be funding alone; the study does not minimise resource gaps, but it shows that trust is built or destroyed through everyday institutional behaviour that costs little to change. Teachers who maintain steady, respectful relationships with learners, schools that communicate proactively with homes when a learner’s engagement slips, administrators who follow through on commitments — these relational practices, the findings imply, carry measurable weight in adolescent mental health, and their absence carries a measurable cost.

From these findings the authors derive a set of practical implications that operate at multiple levels of the system. At classroom level, they recommend embedding trauma-informed practices into daily teaching, so that educators recognise distress and respond with predictability and support rather than punitive escalation. At school level, they call for strengthening school-based psychological services, including the presence of school psychologists, so that referral pathways exist in practice and not only on paper. At the interface between institutions, they urge improved school–home collaboration, formalising communication so that caregivers are partners rather than bystanders. And at policy level, they argue for aligning implementation with sustained monitoring, so that policies designed to support learners are actually delivered consistently — because, in their account, inconsistency itself is the injury.

The South African context sharpens the significance of these conclusions. Gauteng’s schools span an extraordinary range of resource levels, and the pandemic amplified pre-existing inequalities rather than creating new ones. A learner in a well-resourced private school who fell behind or struggled emotionally during lockdown was far more likely to encounter a counsellor, a responsive teacher and a structured re-entry plan than a peer in an under-resourced public school. The study suggests that this differential restoration of institutional support has translated into differential recovery of trust and engagement, meaning that post-pandemic mental health disparities among adolescents partly reflect disparities in institutional dependability. Rebuilding trust, on this view, is not a soft aspiration but a concrete equity intervention.

The research, which received no external funding and was approved by the University of Johannesburg Research Ethics Committee under reference SEM 2-2023-047, was conducted with careful ethical safeguards, including written informed consent from adult participants and parental consent alongside adolescent assent for minors. Its qualitative design and modest sample size mean the findings should be read as an in-depth account of lived experience rather than a statistical generalisation — yet it is precisely this depth that reveals the mechanism quantitative surveys can miss: the slow corrosion of trust when institutions that promised support repeatedly fail to deliver it. As education systems worldwide continue to grapple with post-pandemic absenteeism and adolescent distress, this Gauteng study offers a clear and testable proposition: adolescents re-engage when the systems around them become dependable again, and the work of rebuilding that dependability belongs to classrooms, schools, homes and policymakers alike.

Subject of Research: Institutional dependability and adolescent mental health in South African schools after COVID-19

Article Title: Institutional dependability and adolescent mental health in South African schools after COVID-19

Article References: Institutional dependability and adolescent mental health in South African schools after COVID-19. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00596-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00596-0

Keywords: adolescent mental health, institutional dependability, COVID-19, school disengagement, trauma-informed care, bio-ecological systems theory, South Africa, Gauteng, school psychology, school-home collaboration, educational psychology, trust in institutions

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