The research, conducted by Junsong Qian and Guiping Wang of Hebei Normal University and published in the journal Current Psychology, surveyed 1,203 adolescents from three Chinese provinces: Henan, Hebei, and Fujian. The sample included 49.3 percent boys and spanned both junior high school students, who made up 68.9 percent of participants, and senior high school students, who accounted for 31.1 percent. Data were collected in 2025, with ethical approval from the researchers’ university and informed consent obtained from school administrators and parents before questionnaires were administered anonymously. The breadth of the sample matters, because previous work on parental rejection and test anxiety in China has often relied on smaller or more localized groups.

What distinguishes the new study methodologically is its use of latent profile analysis, a statistical technique that sorts individuals into unobserved subgroups based on their patterns of responses. Traditional variable-centered approaches — correlations and regressions — ask whether parental rejection, averaged across a whole sample, predicts test anxiety on average. Latent profile analysis instead asks whether different configurations of rejection exist within the same population. A teenager might perceive both parents as rejecting, neither, or one but not the other, and those configurations could have different psychological consequences. Rooted theoretically in John Bowlby’s attachment theory and in Rohner’s parental acceptance-rejection theory, the analysis treated maternal and paternal behavior as potentially separable streams of influence rather than a single undifferentiated family climate.

The results revealed four distinct profiles. The largest, containing 66.67 percent of adolescents, was labeled Low Parental Rejection: these teenagers perceived generally accepting behavior from both parents. Three smaller groups followed. The High Paternal-Low Maternal Rejection profile, comprising 13.30 percent of the sample, captured adolescents who experienced their fathers as substantially more rejecting than their mothers. The mirror image, Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection, included 11.97 percent. Finally, 8.06 percent of adolescents fell into the High Parental Rejection group, perceiving rejection from both parents. Each of these profiles differed significantly from the others in both test anxiety and sense of security, confirming that the configuration of rejection — not merely its presence or absence — tracks emotional outcomes.

One demographic pattern stood out. Girls were significantly more likely than boys to be classified into the Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profile, suggesting that in these Chinese families, daughters disproportionately shoulder the experience of a rejecting mother alongside a comparatively warmer father. The researchers note that this aligns with a broader literature on gendered parenting dynamics in Chinese societies, where fathers’ involvement has historically been thinner and mothers often serve as the primary — and sometimes the harshest — daily disciplinarians. Intriguingly, however, the pathways linking profile membership to test anxiety did not differ by gender, indicating that whatever a teenager’s sex, the underlying psychological route from rejection to exam fear appears to operate in much the same way.

That route runs through the sense of security. Using the Low Parental Rejection group as the statistical reference, the researchers tested whether each of the other three profiles influenced test anxiety indirectly by eroding adolescents’ feelings of safety and predictability in the world. The mediation analyses confirmed this pattern for all three elevated-rejection profiles: adolescents in these groups reported lower sense of security, and lower security in turn predicted higher test anxiety. The concept of sense of security, as measured in Chinese psychological research, reflects a stable inner confidence that one’s environment is dependable and that one can cope with its demands. When parents — the earliest and most powerful guarantors of that dependability — communicate coldness, hostility, or indifference, the child’s basic assumption of safety is undermined.

The consequences surface acutely in examination settings. Test anxiety involves worry components, such as intrusive catastrophic thoughts about failure, and emotionality components, such as physiological arousal. A secure adolescent can frame an exam as a challenge to be met; an insecure one may experience it as a threat to an already fragile sense of worth. Attachment theory offers a coherent account of why. Early caregiving experiences are internalized as working models of self and others, and those models shape how ambiguous, high-stakes situations are appraised. A rejection-based model primes threat appraisals, and threat appraisals are precisely the cognitive engine of anxiety before and during tests.

Equally notable were the comparisons the mediation analysis did not find. There were no significant differences between the mediating pathways of the High Paternal-Low Maternal and Low Paternal-High Maternal Rejection profiles. In other words, from the adolescent’s perspective, rejection by a father appears roughly as damaging to security — and thus to exam composure — as rejection by a mother. This finding challenges any assumption that maternal warmth is uniquely decisive and adds weight to the parental acceptance-rejection tradition, which holds that rejection from either attachment figure carries comparable developmental costs. For family systems theorists, it also underscores that children integrate parental behavior configurally: what matters is the overall pattern of acceptance and rejection, not which parent supplies it.

The authors draw a practical conclusion that departs from much conventional advice. Interventions aimed at reducing adolescent test anxiety, they argue, should not target one parent in isolation. Instead, they should promote coordinated parenting patterns in which both mother and father provide acceptance, and they should explicitly work to strengthen the adolescent’s sense of security. In the Chinese context, where high-stakes examinations such as the zhongkao and gaokao exert enormous pressure on families, this reframing is significant. It suggests that counseling services and school-based programs may achieve more by treating the family’s relational climate as a unit — and by building teenagers’ inner confidence in the dependability of their world — than by addressing the mother’s or the father’s behavior separately.

The study’s limitations invite cautious interpretation. Its cross-sectional design, with all measures collected in a single wave in 2025, cannot prove the direction of causality: anxious adolescents may also perceive their parents more negatively, or insecurity may color both perceptions of rejection and exam fear. Self-report questionnaires remain vulnerable to shared-method bias, and the sample, though large, was drawn from three provinces and may not generalize to all Chinese regions or to other cultures. The data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, subject to privacy and ethical restrictions, allowing qualified researchers to scrutinize the analyses. Even with these caveats, the latent profile approach offers a valuable refinement: instead of asking whether parental rejection matters for test anxiety, it maps the specific shapes rejection takes in real families — and shows that whichever shape it takes, the erosion of a child’s sense of security is the channel through which exam-room dread follows.

Subject of Research: Latent profiles of parental rejection and their association with test anxiety mediated by sense of security in Chinese adolescents

Article Title: The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security

Article References: Qian, J., & Wang, G. (2026). The relationship between latent profiles of parental rejection and Chinese adolescents’ test anxiety: the mediating role of sense of security. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09972-z

Keywords: parental rejection, test anxiety, adolescents, sense of security, latent profile analysis, attachment theory, Chinese families, mediation analysis, parenting, mental health, educational psychology, relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10042-7

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