The research, conducted by Michael Christopher, Xander Kahle, and Kaylia Pham, surveyed 207 adults with physical disabilities using validated self-report questionnaires measuring shame, depression, psychological flexibility, and self-compassion. The team then applied a series of multiple regression analyses, statistical techniques that allow researchers to test whether a predictor variable explains variance in an outcome after accounting for other variables in the model. The question was whether psychological flexibility and self-compassion would predict lower depression even once shame was statistically controlled, and whether they would moderate, or buffer, the relationship between shame and depression.

Both predictions held. Psychological flexibility and self-compassion each negatively predicted depression over and beyond shame, and each mitigated the impact of shame on depressive symptoms, with all reported effects reaching statistical significance at p values below .05. In practical terms, among adults who reported similar levels of shame, those who reported greater psychological flexibility or greater self-compassion reported fewer depressive symptoms. Shame remained a meaningful risk factor, but its downstream toll on mood was substantially attenuated in people who possessed these two protective skills.

Understanding why shame is so central to mental health in disability begins with its psychological definition. Unlike guilt, which attaches to a specific behavior, shame is a global, self-directed emotion, the painful sense that the self itself is defective, diminished, or unworthy. For people with physical disabilities, shame can arise not only from internal self-evaluations but from repeated exposure to stigma, inaccessible environments, and social messages that frame disability as tragedy or personal failing. Over time, these experiences can consolidate into a stable shame-prone self-concept, and shame of this kind is one of the strongest emotional predictors of depression across many populations.

Psychological flexibility, a concept at the core of acceptance and commitment therapy, refers to the ability to remain in contact with difficult thoughts and feelings in the present moment while continuing to pursue valued courses of action. It is the opposite of experiential avoidance, the reflexive effort to suppress, escape, or control painful inner experiences. When shame arises, a psychologically flexible person can notice the feeling, recognize it as a thought or emotion rather than a literal verdict on their worth, and still move toward what matters to them. This defusion from harsh self-evaluations interrupts the chain that otherwise runs from shame to withdrawal, rumination, and depression.

Self-compassion, studied extensively by social psychologists over the past two decades, involves three components: self-kindness rather than harsh self-judgment, a sense of common humanity rather than isolation in one’s suffering, and mindfulness, a balanced awareness of painful feelings rather than overidentification with them. In the context of disability, self-compassion directly counters the isolating logic of shame. Where shame whispers that one’s struggles are proof of personal defectiveness, self-compassion reframes suffering as part of the shared human condition and responds to it with warmth instead of attack. The new findings indicate that this reframing is not merely comforting; it measurably changes how strongly shame translates into depressive symptoms.

The statistical design of the study strengthens these conclusions in an important way. By entering shame, psychological flexibility, and self-compassion simultaneously into regression models predicting depression, the researchers tested whether the protective skills mattered independently of how much shame participants carried. They did. This means the benefits are not simply a matter of people with low shame also being flexible and self-compassionate. Even among those carrying heavy shame burdens, the two skills appeared to cushion the emotional impact, a pattern consistent with a buffering rather than a merely additive model of resilience.

The clinical implications are considerable. Psychological flexibility is the primary target of acceptance and commitment therapy, and self-compassion is cultivated directly through compassion-focused therapies and mindfulness-based interventions such as mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindful self-compassion training. Both treatment families have substantial evidence bases in general populations, are typically delivered in structured, skills-based formats, and can be adapted for delivery online or in group settings. The present results suggest that adapting these approaches for adults with physical disabilities, and testing them in intervention trials with this population, is a well-motivated next step. Rather than treating shame as an immovable feature of the disability experience, clinicians may be able to target the skills that change a person’s relationship to it.

The study also carries implications beyond the clinic. Public health frameworks increasingly recognize that the elevated burden of depression among people with disabilities is not an inevitable consequence of impairment itself but is shaped by stigma, exclusion, and the psychological residue of social devaluation. Shame sits precisely at that intersection between social treatment and private experience. Interventions that build individual resilience, such as flexibility and self-compassion training, address the private side of that equation, and the authors of the study frame them as tools for improving mental health and wellbeing in this population. They complement, rather than replace, the equally necessary work of dismantling structural stigma and improving accessibility.

As with any cross-sectional, self-report study, caution is warranted in drawing causal conclusions. The data capture associations at a single point in time, so it remains possible that depression itself reduces psychological flexibility and self-compassion, or that unmeasured variables influence all three constructs. Longitudinal follow-up and randomized intervention studies will be needed to confirm that building these skills actually reduces shame-driven depression over time. Even so, the findings sharpen a question that mental health science has been circling for years: not simply who experiences shame, but who recovers from it. For adults with physical disabilities, the answer increasingly appears to lie in skills that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened, turning shame from a sentence into a signal that can be heard without being obeyed.

Subject of Research: The buffering role of psychological flexibility and self-compassion in the relationship between shame and depression among adults with physical disabilities

Article Title: Psychological flexibility and self-compassion buffer the impact of shame on depression among adults with physical disabilities

Article References: Christopher, M., Kahle, X., & Pham, K. (2026). Psychological flexibility and self-compassion buffer the impact of shame on depression among adults with physical disabilities. PLOS Mental Health, 3(9), e0000707. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000707

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000707

Keywords: psychological flexibility, self-compassion, shame, depression, physical disabilities, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness, mental health, stigma, regression analysis, PLOS Mental Health, resilience

Compulsive sexual behavior disorder, recognized in the eleventh revision of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, is characterized by repetitive sexual activities that become a central focus of a person’s life to the point of neglecting health, responsibilities, and relationships, often accompanied by repeated failed attempts to reduce the behavior. The condition is frequently entangled with shame, depression, and difficulties regulating emotion, and many affected individuals never seek professional treatment because of stigma. That treatment gap motivated the research team to design an intervention that could be delivered discreetly through a channel most people already use every day: a messaging application.

The program, called MISCAB-S, short for a messenger-integrated self-compassion intervention, was tested in a randomized waitlist-controlled feasibility trial. A total of 100 adults, 65 percent of them women with an average age of 28 years, were randomly assigned either to the four-week intervention or to a waitlist control group. The researchers emphasized that the study targeted individuals at risk of the disorder rather than people with a clinical diagnosis, a deliberate choice reflected in the program’s naming, which was revised from an earlier registered label referring to sex addiction to better reflect its focus on nonclinical, at-risk participants.

Technically, the intervention combined several behavior-change components delivered through messenger messages. Participants received motivation-enhancing messages grounded in established models of behavior change, psychoeducational materials explaining the psychology of compulsive sexual behavior and self-compassion, practical exercises to practice, and recovery examples illustrating how others have managed similar struggles. Each week included brief assessments with individualized feedback, allowing the program to adapt to each participant’s reported state. The design also incorporated anonymous group-sharing activities, giving participants a sense of common humanity, a core element of self-compassion theory developed by researcher Kristin Neff, which holds that recognizing that suffering is shared rather than isolating helps reduce shame.

The feasibility results were encouraging. Participants reported moderately high levels of satisfaction with the program and spent an average of about 15.36 minutes per day on program activities, a level of engagement the authors interpreted as evidence that the intervention was acceptable to its target audience. In an era when digital mental health tools often struggle with attrition and disengagement, daily engagement of roughly a quarter of an hour sustained over four weeks is a meaningful signal that messenger-based delivery can hold users’ attention without requiring appointments, commutes, or face-to-face disclosure.

The trial was not without problems, and the authors were candid about them. One technical issue occurred during the study, and two safety-relevant incidents were documented. One participant withdrew from the study after experiencing distress from reading posts on the group-sharing board, and one pre-screened post was suggestive of suicidal ideation. These incidents underscore a crucial lesson for anyone designing digital interventions with peer-sharing components for emotionally vulnerable populations: safety monitoring, moderation protocols, and clear escalation pathways are not optional extras but essential infrastructure. The findings align with a growing literature on meditation-related adverse effects and so-called backdraft phenomena, in which turning attention toward self-directed kindness can initially surface painful emotions.

On the outcome side, exploratory intention-to-treat analyses, which include all randomized participants regardless of adherence, showed a clear intervention-specific increase in self-compassion among those who received the program compared with the waitlist group. The intervention also improved key psychological process variables, most notably emotion dysregulation, with suggestive reductions in perceived stress. These are precisely the mechanisms the program was designed to target, since prior research has linked difficulties in emotion regulation to compulsive sexual behavior, and self-compassion interventions have shown promise across a range of mental health outcomes in meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials.

Interestingly, the primary behavioral outcomes told a more complicated story. Compulsive sexual behavior disorder severity and the amount of time spent daily on sexual behavior declined over time in both the intervention and waitlist groups, without a detectable intervention-specific advantage between them. The researchers suggest that this pattern may reflect natural symptom fluctuation, regression to the mean, or the effects of assessment and attention themselves, all well-known phenomena in waitlist-controlled designs. Within the intervention group, however, exploratory repeated-measures mediation analysis suggested that improvements in emotion dysregulation and depression from before to after the program were associated with reductions in CSBD severity, hinting at a plausible mechanism of change that larger trials could test directly.

The statistical approach reflected the pilot nature of the study. The team used linear mixed models implemented in the jamovi statistical environment, reporting effect sizes appropriate for pretest-posttest control group designs, and the analysis syntax was made available in the supplementary materials. The trial was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Sungkyunkwan University and retrospectively registered with the Clinical Research Information Service of the Republic of Korea. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic and the consent conditions approved by the ethics board, individual-level data are not publicly available, with only anonymized aggregate results reported.

The authors conclude that MISCAB-S appears feasible and acceptable and may have beneficial effects on psychological processes relevant to CSBD risk, while stressing that longer and larger trials are needed to test behavioral effectiveness and durability of any gains. For a field in which stigma keeps many people away from treatment and digital tools are increasingly seen as a first line of reach, the study provides a template: embed compassion training in the messaging apps people already carry, monitor safety vigilantly, and measure the psychological machinery, shame, emotional chaos, and stress, that drives compulsive behavior. If future full-scale trials confirm that shifting those inner processes translates into lasting behavioral change, a few minutes of daily practice on a phone could become a genuinely scalable public health tool.

Subject of Research: A randomized controlled pilot trial of a messenger-delivered self-compassion intervention for adults at risk of compulsive sexual behavior disorder

Article Title: Randomized controlled pilot trial of a messenger-integrated self-compassion intervention (MISCAB-S) for individuals at risk of compulsive sexual behavior disorder

Article References: Park, K., Yoon, S., Her, J., & Chang, H. (2026). Randomized controlled pilot trial of a messenger-integrated self-compassion intervention (MISCAB-S) for individuals at risk of compulsive sexual behavior disorder. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1563. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10129-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10129-1

Keywords: compulsive sexual behavior disorder, self-compassion, messenger-integrated intervention, digital mental health, emotion dysregulation, randomized controlled trial, pilot study, perceived stress, depression, shame, mobile health, Current Psychology

The editorial team behind the issue argues that the field has spent decades focusing heavily on emotion recognition: how accurately observers can identify what someone else is feeling from a face, a voice or a posture. The new collection deliberately shifts the lens inward, toward the person doing the expressing. Emotional expressions, the editors propose, should be understood in terms of their origins and development, their continuity across animal species, and the practical roles they play in behaviour and social life. In this framing, emotions become a visible inner world, a living link between brain, body and environment, rather than a private mental state that occasionally leaks to the surface.

Among the most striking contributions is a study co-conducted by Cristina Colonnesi of the University of Amsterdam, which examines how infants in their first year of life actively construct positive moments with the people around them. The researchers observed that eight-month-old babies, markedly more than four-month-olds, initiate episodes of shared positive emotion themselves. A typical sequence involves a baby smiling and then drawing an adult into mutual laughter, creating a loop of shared enjoyment that the infant, not the caregiver, set in motion. Rather than primarily reacting to another person’s smile, older babies increasingly deploy their own positive expressions as social tools, using them to start and sustain warm, enjoyable interactions.

That developmental shift may look subtle, but its implications are considerable. The ability to initiate, rather than merely respond to, shared positive emotion suggests growing flexibility in how infants use their emotional behaviour in social contexts. It hints that the foundations of humour, joint attention and even the social bonding that characterises later friendship may be laid in the first year of life, not through language or instruction, but through the infant’s own expressive behaviour. Shared laughter between a baby and an adult is, in this view, not a charming by-product of caregiving but a developmental achievement produced by the infant’s emerging expressive control.

A second line of work, presented by Milica Nikolić and colleagues, turns to self-conscious emotions: shame, guilt, shyness and pride. These emotions are distinctive because they arise when children begin to view themselves through the eyes of others, and the research shows that they are already visible in a child’s facial expressions, body posture and gaze during the first few years of life. Crucially, they prove to be far more than internal feelings. The studies reviewed in the issue indicate that these emotions have characteristic outward signatures and, more importantly, predictable behavioural consequences that begin shaping a child’s social world very early.

The consequences differ sharply depending on the emotion. When children feel guilty about something that has gone wrong, they are subsequently more likely to try to make amends, whether by helping others, sharing resources or repairing damage they have caused. Shame produces the opposite pattern: children who feel ashamed are more likely to withdraw, avoid eye contact and steer clear of the situations that triggered the feeling. Nikolić and her colleagues are careful to note that the evidence base is still limited, but they argue that these self-conscious emotions likely play an early role in shaping social behaviour and reputation, functioning as internal regulators that push children toward repair in one case and retreat in the other.

The third major contribution, from Disa Sauter and her team, dismantles one of the most persistent assumptions in popular psychology: that feeling good means smiling. In a study covering twenty-two different positive emotions, grounded in participants’ own personal experiences, the researchers mapped which facial muscles and movements are activated for each emotion. The results reveal that many positive feelings carry their own distinct facial profiles that involve no smile at all. Interest and determination are prime examples; in the case of determination, the defining feature is a raised chin rather than any movement of the mouth. Other positive emotions, such as amusement and elation, do involve distinct smiles, characterised by upturned corners of the mouth and often accompanied by closed eyes and strongly raised cheeks.

The technical significance of this work lies in its demonstration that positive facial behaviour is a heterogeneous family of expressions rather than a single gradient of smile intensity. Feeling good, the researchers show, manifests in a variety of facial configurations, including spontaneous ones, and the classic smile is only one member of that family. For fields ranging from affective computing to clinical screening, which often rely on smile detection as a proxy for positive affect, the findings suggest that such proxies may systematically miss positive states such as interest or determination, and may misread them when they appear without any mouth movement at all.

A fourth study, authored by postdoc Christopher Riddell, Milica Nikolić and colleagues, extends the comparative dimension of the issue by examining mimicry of the play face, an exaggerated, playful expression resembling a smile that typically appears during rough-and-tumble play. The researchers compared infants, adults and orangutans. Both human infants and adults were more likely to produce a play face themselves after observing one in another person than after seeing a neutral expression, and their own expressions mirrored what they saw even without any direct interaction with the person being mirrored. Orangutans, by contrast, rarely showed this behaviour. For them, play faces arise primarily during direct social play, whereas in humans contagious smiling can break free of the play context altogether and spread through observation alone.

Taken together, the nineteen articles of the special issue, published under the title Mechanisms, development, phylogeny and functions of emotional expressions, make a coherent case that emotional expressions are central to development from the very start, shaping both individual behaviour and the formation and regulation of social relationships, from a baby’s first self-initiated smile to the complex body language of shame and pride. In their editorial, Nikolić, Kret, Nummenmaa and Sauter call on the research community to study emotions more within real-life contexts, attending to how expressions emerge, develop and function for both the expresser and the people around them. If the collection is right, the smile that lights up a living room, the guilty glance after a broken vase and the raised chin of a determined child are not merely decorations on an inner life. They are the mechanisms through which that inner life reaches out and builds the social world.

Subject of Research: The development, evolution and social functions of emotional expressions in humans and other animals

Article Title: From a baby's smile to a monkey's grin: how emotions shape our behaviour

Article References: From a baby's smile to a monkey's grin: how emotions shape our behaviour. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: emotional expressions, infant development, smiling, self-conscious emotions, shame, guilt, facial expressions, play face, orangutans, mimicry, social behaviour, developmental psychology

The framework, called the sacred speech–psychological internalisation model (SSPIM), was developed by Bandara Bandaranayake, an independent researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. Presented as a heuristic rather than a tested theory, the model draws together insights from speech act theory, the sociology and psychology of religion, attachment theory, and research on psychological internalisation. Its central claim is that under particular developmental, relational, and cultural conditions, sacred language acquires existential significance, becomes emotionally encoded in memory, is reinforced by religious communities, and is gradually internalised as lasting patterns of conscience, compassion, shame, and moral identity. In other words, the words of spiritual authority do not merely instruct; they can become part of the psychological architecture of the self.

The intellectual scaffolding of the model begins with speech act theory, the philosophical tradition inaugurated by J. L. Austin and elaborated by John Searle, which established that language does not simply describe reality but performs actions within it. A judge’s sentence, a officiant’s declaration of marriage, or a priest’s absolution changes social reality through the act of speaking, provided the speaker holds recognised authority and the hearer accepts the institutional context. Sacred speech, the model argues, represents an especially potent class of performative language because its presumed authority derives not merely from institutional office but from the claimed mediation of ultimate reality. When a religious leader declares something sacred, forbidden, forgiven, or defiled, the utterance carries a weight that ordinary commands cannot replicate, because it appears to connect the listener’s finite life to transcendent order.

Sociological and psychological perspectives on religion supply the second pillar. From Émile Durkheim’s analysis of religion as a collective phenomenon that generates shared emotional energy, to Max Weber’s account of charismatic religious authority, to more recent anthropological work such as Tanya Luhrmann’s studies of how evangelical Christians learn to experience God as communicative, researchers have documented how communities and institutions amplify the force of sacred words. The SSPIM incorporates these insights by emphasising that sacred speech is rarely encountered in isolation. It arrives embedded in ritual, repetition, music, communal assent, and the visible reverence of others, all of which deepen its emotional encoding. Research on emotionally charged memory, including Joseph LeDoux’s work on the amygdala and Elizabeth Phelps’s studies of amygdala-hippocampus interactions, suggests why such linguistically delivered experiences may be stored with unusual durability: words that arrive wrapped in awe, fear, joy, or communal fervour are prioritised by the memory systems that tag experiences as significant.

Attachment theory provides the model’s third foundation. Studies by Pehr Granqvist and Lee Kirkpatrick have shown that religious belief and conversion often follow patterns analogous to attachment relationships, with God or sacred figures functioning as attachment figures who offer security, comfort, and a felt presence. The SSPIM extends this logic to sacred speech itself: words spoken by a spiritually authoritative figure can be experienced the way a child experiences a caregiver’s voice, carrying signals of safety or threat that are absorbed pre-reflectively. This relational encoding helps explain, the model suggests, why a phrase of divine forgiveness spoken by a trusted pastor can dissolve guilt in moments, while a phrase of divine condemnation delivered by the same authority can install a chronic sense of unworthiness that persists long after the person has left the community.

The model’s most distinctive contribution is its account of internalisation, the process by which external voices become internal ones. Drawing on classical and contemporary theories of how children absorb parental prohibitions and values into conscience, the SSPIM proposes a staged pathway. Sacred language first acquires existential significance when the listener perceives it as bearing on ultimate matters such as salvation, moral standing, or life’s meaning. It is then emotionally encoded, tagged with the affect present at the moment of reception. Religious communities subsequently reinforce the encoded message through liturgy, teaching, and social confirmation. Over time, the external voice falls silent, and its content persists as an inner moral presence: a conscience that condemns or absolves, a compassionate orientation toward others, a shame response to perceived transgression, or a stable sense of moral identity. Crucially, this process is not confined to childhood. Adults in periods of crisis, conversion, or heightened receptivity appear capable of the same deep internalisation of sacred speech.

Bandaranayake frames the divergent outcomes of this process using the concepts of spiritual placebo and spiritual nocebo effects. On the adaptive pathway, internalised sacred speech functions as a spiritual placebo: it fosters resilience, meaning-making, compassion, and moral confidence. The literature on religion, spirituality, and health, including Harold Koenig’s reviews and Crystal Park’s work on meaning-making after stressful events, documents associations between benevolent religious framing and improved psychological adjustment. Words of unconditional love, forgiveness, and worthiness, once internalised, can operate as enduring psychological resources, comparable in function to a secure internal working model of a loving caregiver. Research on divine forgiveness by Frank Fincham and colleagues, and on spiritually integrated psychotherapy by Kenneth Pargament, illustrates how such internalised benevolent speech can be therapeutically mobilised.

On the maladaptive pathway, the same mechanism becomes a spiritual nocebo. Sacred speech that emphasises condemnation, impurity, or perpetual danger can be internalised as chronic shame, anxiety, scrupulosity, and diminished personal agency. The psychology of shame and guilt, notably June Tangney and Rhonda Dearing’s distinction between shame as a global condemnation of the self and guilt as a focused assessment of behaviour, helps clarify why religiously framed messages that target the whole person, rather than specific acts, are particularly corrosive. Clinical literature on religious and spiritual struggles, including work by Julie Exline and Pargament, links such struggles to depression, anxiety, and diminished wellbeing, while scholarship on spiritual abuse by Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond and on trauma-attentive spiritual repair by L. Kalvari documents the harm that can follow when authority is exercised coercively. The model thus treats the same psychological process as capable of producing either flourishing or pathology, depending on the content, context, and relational quality of the sacred speech involved.

To ground the framework, the article draws illustrative examples from Christianity and Buddhism, while insisting that its focus is psychological rather than doctrinal. Christian practices of absolution, blessing, and preaching demonstrate how authoritative sacred speech can be internalised as forgiveness or as crippling guilt, and devotional traditions in which believers cultivate a conversational relationship with God show the endpoint of internalisation: the external authoritative voice becomes an experienced inner interlocutor. Buddhist traditions offer a complementary case, in which the spoken teachings of the Buddha and of living teachers, along with recited texts and formal refuges, function as authoritative speech that practitioners internalise as ethical orientation and meditative attitude, with compassion and mindfulness as the intended fruits. The article emphasises that the mechanisms under study concern human psychology, not the truth claims of any tradition.

The SSPIM is offered explicitly as a springboard for empirical research rather than a finished scientific account. The author proposes that future studies could test the model’s stages experimentally and longitudinally, examining how perceived spiritual authority, emotional context, community reinforcement, and attachment history predict the depth and valence of internalisation, and how internalised sacred speech relates to measures of conscience, shame, scrupulosity, resilience, and moral identity. Practical implications are outlined for pastoral care, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, and religious leadership: caregivers and clinicians may benefit from attending to the specific sacred sentences clients carry within them, since reframing or repairing those internalised utterances may be as therapeutically important as addressing early caregiver relationships. Religious leaders, for their part, are reminded that their words are never merely informational; spoken under recognised authority and received within communities of trust, they are quite literally formative, capable of building consciences and compassion or of installing burdens that last a lifetime. As research on the psychology of religion continues to mature, the framework suggests that one of its most important objects of study may be the simplest of all: the sentence spoken in earnest, from a place of sacred authority, into an open human heart.

Subject of Research: The psychological internalisation of sacred speech and the adaptive and maladaptive effects of spiritual authority

Article Title: Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority

Article References: Bandaranayake, B. (2026). Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Keywords: sacred language, spiritual authority, psychology of religion, internalisation, speech act theory, attachment theory, moral identity, shame, scrupulosity, pastoral psychology, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, meaning-making