The pilot clinical service was conducted over 12 months in 2023–2024. Patients undergoing chemotherapy were offered complimentary 15- to 20-minute effleurage massages from a licensed massage therapist. The technique used long, gentle, gliding strokes without deep pressure, and patients could choose massage of the hands, feet or both. The program was designed to assess whether massage could be delivered without interrupting clinical care and to examine changes in patient-reported symptoms during infusion.

Participants completed a modified Edmonton Symptom Assessment System immediately before and directly after each massage. Symptoms were rated from 0 to 10 and included nausea, pain, tiredness, anxiety, depression, shortness of breath, neuropathy and wellbeing concerns. The study also recorded demographic characteristics, cancer type and stage, chemotherapy regimen and the number of massage sessions per patient. These assessments were collected during routine clinical care and analyzed retrospectively as part of a quality-improvement initiative.

Most participants were female (73.5%), the median age was 62, and patients self-identified as White (56.5%), Asian (18.5%) or Hispanic or Latino (10.5%). Hematologic cancers were the most common diagnosis (27.5%), followed by gastrointestinal cancers (19.5%), breast cancer (19.2%) and gynecologic cancers (16.3%). Stage IV disease was documented for 30.7% of the cohort, while 29.7% had unknown stage. Participants received a median of two sessions, with a range of one to 24; 74% chose combined hand and foot massage, while 13% chose hand massage and 13% chose foot massage.

Mixed-effects linear regression models accounted for repeated measurements within individuals and included time, massage type, the interaction between time and massage type, age and gender. Each symptom was modeled separately, with restricted maximum likelihood and the Kenward–Roger method. The time effect was significant for every evaluated symptom, with F-statistics ranging from 25.73 for nausea to 128.84 for neuropathy and all p-values below 0.001. Estimated mean pre–post changes were 1.46 points for neuropathy, 1.21 for tiredness, 1.20 for wellbeing concerns, 1.19 for anxiety, 0.87 for pain, 0.59 for depression, 0.50 for nausea and 0.45 for shortness of breath.

Baseline symptom burden was also substantial across the cohort. Tiredness was reported by 82.8% of patients and had a mean score of 3.78, while neuropathy was reported by 65.2% and had a mean of 3.22. Wellbeing concerns were reported by 77.9%, with a mean score of 3.24, and anxiety was reported by 59.3%, with a mean of 2.34. The immediate pre–post estimates therefore occurred in a population experiencing frequent symptoms during treatment, although the study did not include a no-massage control group for comparison.

There was no statistically significant interaction between time and massage type for any symptom, indicating that the models did not detect different pre–post change patterns among hand, foot and combination massage. Post hoc slice tests nevertheless produced differing estimates by modality. For example, foot massage was associated with estimated changes of 1.65 points for neuropathy, 1.46 for tiredness and 1.15 for pain, compared with 1.17, 1.06 and 0.49 points, respectively, for hand massage. These modality-specific results were presented descriptively and do not establish that one type of massage was superior.

No adverse events or complications attributed to massage were reported during the program. A separate survey of infusion nurses was completed by 22 of 28 nurses who received the questionnaire. Respondents rated the perceived effect on patient stress at 4.9 out of 5 and improvement in overall patient symptom burden at 4.4 out of 5. They also rated the effect on their own stress or burden at 4.4 and unanimously selected 1, meaning no disruption to nursing tasks. These survey findings describe staff perceptions and were not controlled measures of clinical benefit.

The study has several limitations. It was retrospective, prospective in its collection of observational data, and conducted at one cancer center with one massage therapist, limiting generalizability. The absence of a control group prevents clear attribution of pre–post improvements to massage, while the immediate assessments did not establish whether benefits persisted. Post-session surveys were collected by either massage therapists or nurses, which the authors noted could introduce response bias. The findings support the feasibility and acceptability of the service and show associations between massage sessions and lower immediate symptom scores, but randomized studies with longer follow-up are needed to evaluate efficacy, optimal treatment parameters and longer-term effects.

Subject of Research: Retrospective pilot study of massage during chemotherapy infusion and patient-reported symptom burden

Article Title: A pilot study of the impact of massage therapy on symptom burden during infusion in patients with cancer

Article References: DiCristofano, C., Razavi, M., Tran, P. H., Ku, S., Fisher, A., Kim, E., Rose, J., Hedgpeth, N., Fertal, J., & Lee, R. T. (2026). A pilot study of the impact of massage therapy on symptom burden during infusion in patients with cancer. Frontiers in Oncology, 16, Article 1943581. https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2026.1943581

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2026.1943581

Keywords: massage therapy, chemotherapy infusion, cancer care, symptom burden, neuropathy, tiredness, anxiety, wellbeing, retrospective study, pilot, impact, massage

Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with parents whose primary language was not English. The families were recruited by audiologists at tertiary children’s hospitals, and immigrant identity was confirmed during interviews. Each interview was conducted in the language the parent felt comfortable using. Two researchers independently inductively coded four representative interviews to create an initial codebook, iteratively refined it, and then applied the final codebook to the remaining interviews. The analysis focused on the reported influence of social connections, barriers to those connections, their relationship to family wellbeing and self-efficacy, and recommendations for peer mentorship between families with deaf or hard of hearing children.

Thematic analysis identified three main themes: challenges faced by immigrant families, benefits of social connections, and recommendations and considerations for a peer-mentorship program. Participants said that cultural and linguistic barriers made resources supporting their child difficult to find. They also described cultural and linguistic differences and assimilation as complicating connections with other families of deaf or hard of hearing children. By contrast, families reported that social connections supported their children’s wellbeing and their own wellbeing and sense of self-efficacy. These are participants’ reported experiences and associations; the interview design did not establish that social connections caused improvements in measured wellbeing or self-efficacy.

All 14 families viewed the proposed peer-mentorship program positively and provided recommendations for its implementation, according to the abstract. The authors concluded that the reported successes, barriers and opportunities associated with social connections could guide future interventions intended to improve outcomes for immigrant families and their deaf or hard of hearing children. However, the study was a small qualitative exploration rather than a test of program efficacy. The abstract does not provide detailed demographic characteristics, quantitative effect estimates or a full account of recruitment criteria, and it does not report whether the proposed program was implemented or evaluated.

Subject of Research: Qualitative study of social connections, wellbeing and self-efficacy among immigrant parents of deaf or hard of hearing children

Article Title: Understanding the role of social connections in the wellbeing and self-efficacy of immigrant families with deaf or hard of hearing children

Article References: Chau, D., Tummala, T., Rashidi, N., Ho, S., Villegas, E., Fernald, L., & Chan, D. K. (2026). Understanding the role of social connections in the wellbeing and self-efficacy of immigrant families with deaf or hard of hearing children. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15557-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15557-0

Keywords: immigrant families, deaf children, hard of hearing children, social connections, wellbeing, self-efficacy, cultural barriers, linguistic barriers, peer mentorship, qualitative interviews, Understanding, role

Researchers used a qualitative design grounded in constructivist-contextualist epistemology and applied reflexive thematic analysis to semi-structured interviews. The analysis was interpreted through a social-ecological lens. Reported barriers included workload intensification, gendered caregiving burdens, context-specific constraints in remote settings and unsupportive institutional cultures. Accounts from two participants in remote-Upazila schools illustrated local infrastructural constraints, but the authors state that the study does not establish geographical representativeness or systematic location effects.

The participants identified proactive, leadership-supported and system-level support as necessary elements of institutional support. They also described future wellbeing programs in terms of holism, flexibility and genuine teacher involvement. These findings are qualitative accounts from the interviewed sample rather than measurements of program effectiveness, causal effects or outcomes across Bangladeshi schools.

The study offers context-specific evidence about how teachers experience work-life balance, stress and the institutional conditions associated with their wellbeing. Its authors describe the findings as having analytic rather than statistical transferability to comparable settings, meaning that the themes may inform interpretation in similar contexts without demonstrating that they apply universally. The available evidence summarized here comes from the study abstract; it does not provide quantitative estimates, intervention results or a systematic comparison among the three school-setting categories.

Subject of Research: Qualitative analysis of Bangladeshi teachers’ work-life balance, stress and perceived institutional support

Article Title: Work-life balance and wellbeing among teachers in Bangladesh: a reflexive thematic analysis of stress, coping, and institutional support

Article References: Ahmed, M. K. (2026). Work-life balance and wellbeing among teachers in Bangladesh: a reflexive thematic analysis of stress, coping, and institutional support. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05438-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05438-w

Keywords: Bangladesh, teachers, work-life balance, wellbeing, stress, institutional support, reflexive thematic analysis, qualitative interviews, school leadership, Work-life, balance, reflexive

The intervention involved 84 women aged 18 to 26, with a mean age of 21.93, who were born between 1997 and 2006 and described themselves as feeling stressed or anxious. They were not diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, so the study did not evaluate a treatment for diagnosed anxiety disorder. Each morning for 28 days, participants took three capsules containing either 1.8 g of powdered Lion’s mane, 1.8 g of a blend containing 60% Lion’s mane and 40% Reishi, or placebo made from microcrystalline cellulose. The blend was standardized to 20% beta-glucans. Participants and the research team were kept unaware of treatment assignments during the study, while a separate research-centre director labelled the treatments and held the emergency code-break envelopes. A treatment-guess analysis found that participants were not significantly better at correctly identifying their assigned group than chance, including when active groups were combined and compared with placebo. Average compliance, calculated from returned capsules, was 96.7%.

The trial was preceded by a separate sort-and-rank study involving 38 women from the same target population. Participants ranked 54 statements derived from diagnostic criteria for acute stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depressive disorders and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Excessive anxiety and worry ranked highest, with 59.5% assigning the statement a score above +2 on the study’s 13-point scale, which represented placing an item among the 16 statements considered most important. Mental exhaustion, physical exhaustion, panic, overwhelming stress, worthlessness and low self-esteem also featured prominently. This formative phase was used to select outcome measures considered most relevant to participants, rather than leaving the trial’s targets entirely to investigators. It was a separate cohort, and its results informed measurement rather than contributing participants to the intervention comparison.

Anxiety measured by the GAD-7 was the prespecified primary outcome. Secondary measures included the anxiety subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, a visual analogue scale for stress, the Chalder Fatigue Scale and Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale. Participants completed full assessments at baseline and Day 28, shorter weekly questionnaires during treatment and an exploratory home assessment on Day 42, two weeks after supplementation ended. The statistical analysis used mixed models that included treatment, time, their interaction and baseline scores for the relevant outcome, with additional adjustment for baseline fruit and vegetable consumption, waist-to-hip ratio and visual analogue stress score. False-discovery-rate correction was applied across families of secondary outcomes to limit the chance of false positives. The main analysis followed the intention-to-treat population, which included participants according to their randomized assignments.

For the primary GAD-7 outcome, the researchers identified a main effect of treatment, meaning average anxiety scores differed among the three groups over the study as a whole. The mushroom blend averaged 6.49, lower than 7.76 for Lion’s mane alone, with p = 0.018 and a standardized effect size of 0.51. There was also a treatment-by-time interaction, for which p = 0.034. That interaction was most evident at the end of treatment: on Day 28, the blend group’s mean GAD-7 score was 4.16 versus 6.50 in the Lion’s mane group, with p = 0.003 and a standardized effect size of 0.94. These comparisons establish better performance than Lion’s mane alone for the primary outcome in this trial; they do not demonstrate superiority over placebo for that outcome at Day 28. The study therefore supports a treatment difference between the two active products without showing that every active product outperformed an inactive control on the primary endpoint.

Secondary results were less definitive. The treatment-by-time interaction for HADS anxiety initially met the conventional statistical threshold, at p = 0.023, but it did not remain significant after correction for multiple testing, which produced an adjusted q value of 0.072. Uncorrected post hoc comparisons favored the blend over Lion’s mane on Day 28 and over placebo on Day 42, the latter occurring two weeks after supplementation stopped. The PSS treatment interaction also fell from nominal significance, p = 0.036, to trend level after correction, again with q = 0.072. At Day 28, the blend group had a lower mean PSS score of 16.86 than both placebo, at 19.79, and Lion’s mane, at 19.35. These exploratory comparisons should not be treated as confirmatory evidence. No significant treatment effects were found for stress measured by the visual analogue scale, fatigue or self-esteem, and the trial therefore did not establish a broad pattern of supplement-specific benefits across every psychological measure.

All three groups improved over time, including the placebo group. Mean GAD-7 scores fell from 10.08 at baseline to 5.42 on Day 28 across all participants and were 6.12 on Day 42. Anxiety measured by HADS, stress measured by the PSS and visual analogue scale, and fatigue all declined, while self-esteem increased from a mean of 15.59 to 18.56 by Day 28. The broad pattern means that improvements seen within an active-treatment group cannot automatically be attributed to that supplement. The investigators identified expectancy, increased attention to wellbeing during repeated assessments, the structure of taking part in a trial and self-monitoring as possible contributors. The study measured no cortisol, inflammatory markers or other biological indicators that could help explain either supplement-specific or participatory effects. It therefore could not establish a biological pathway for the observed differences or determine whether the two mushrooms interacted in a way that produced the primary result.

Qualitative responses broadly paralleled the quantitative pattern. Participants in the Lion’s mane group more frequently reported “no change” in an analysis of their reasons for identifying their treatment, while the blend group more often reported mood improvement in exploratory comparisons. These observations were based on open-ended responses, coded independently by two researchers, and were not substitutes for the controlled questionnaire endpoints. The qualitative pattern adds context to the main result, but it came from multiple exploratory tests, and its interpretation should remain cautious. Notably, the study cannot determine whether Reishi enhanced Lion’s mane, acted independently or merely accompanied a different quantity of Lion’s mane. The Lion’s mane-only arm received 1.8 g of that mushroom, whereas the blend provided approximately 1.08 g of Lion’s mane plus 0.72 g of Reishi, and there was no Reishi-only arm. A dose-matched design would be needed to separate the contributions of the ingredients.

Safety findings were broadly reassuring but do not establish long-term safety. Participants reported 50 adverse events, involving 31 individuals. One participant discontinued because of a headache, but that person had received placebo. Statistical comparisons found no significant difference in adverse-event frequency among the three groups, including after false-discovery-rate correction. The overall pattern was consistent with good short-term tolerability in this sample, although the trial was not designed to detect rare events. Its four-week intervention also cannot address longer-term safety, optimal dose, supplement composition, bioavailability or the durability of any benefit. The intended sample of 135 was not reached because of recruitment challenges, leaving 84 participants and reducing confidence that subtler effects would have been detected. A post-hoc power calculation suggested high power for the observed primary interaction, but such retrospective calculations do not remove the uncertainty associated with an undersized trial.

The trial tested a specific Lion’s mane and Reishi blend rather than establishing that either mushroom was responsible for the primary result. Lion’s mane contains compounds such as hericenones and erinacines, while Reishi contains triterpenoids, including ganoderic acids, and polysaccharides such as beta-glucans. Preclinical research has proposed effects on nerve growth factor, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuroinflammation and inflammatory signaling, but the mechanisms underlying human mood effects remain unsettled, and results from earlier human studies have been inconsistent. The present trial also does not show that functional mushrooms broadly treat anxiety. Instead, it identifies a comparatively strong primary-outcome signal for one commercial blend in stressed or anxious young women without psychiatric diagnoses, while finding widespread improvement across all groups and weaker, multiplicity-adjusted evidence for other measures. Confirmatory trials would need dose-matched single-ingredient and combination arms, larger and more diverse populations, longer follow-up, biological measurements and assessment of whether the observed differences are large enough to matter outside a research setting.

Subject of Research: Four-week Lion’s mane and Reishi supplementation trial assessing anxiety, stress and wellbeing in young women.

Article Title: The effects of four-week supplementation of Lion’s mane and a Lion’s mane and Reishi blend on prioritised mood and wellbeing measures in young women

Article References: Smith, E. F., & Docherty, S. (2026). The effects of four-week supplementation of Lion’s mane and a Lion’s mane and Reishi blend on prioritised mood and wellbeing measures in young women. Frontiers in Nutrition, 13, Article 1887408. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2026.1887408

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2026.1887408

Keywords: Lion’s mane, Reishi, anxiety, young women, randomized trial, supplementation, mood, stress, placebo, wellbeing, effects, four-week

The study, conducted by Orhan Balıkçı and colleagues, collected data from 756 accounting and finance professionals in the Marmara region of Türkiye. This professional environment was chosen because these positions frequently require concentration, analytical abilities, and prolonged focus on individual tasks, making them ideal for assessing whether certain types of social distance might operate differently than traditional beliefs suggest.

Workplace loneliness is defined as the distressing feeling that arises when employees perceive a gap between the social relationships they desire at work and those they experience. Traditional loneliness research differentiates between emotional loneliness, which reflects the absence of close, meaningful, and emotionally supportive relationships, and social loneliness, which refers to a lack of broader social integration, group belonging, or network embeddedness. Although these dimensions are theoretically distinct, organizational studies have rarely explored whether they lead to different outcomes in workplace settings.

The theoretical framework draws on Need to Belong Theory, which proposes that individuals have a fundamental need to establish meaningful, stable, and satisfying interpersonal relationships. From this perspective, emotional loneliness reflects a more fundamental deficit in the quality of relational bonds, whereas social loneliness primarily concerns the extent of integration into broader social networks. The study also employs Conservation of Resources theory, suggesting that individuals strive to obtain and preserve valuable resources such as emotional energy, interpersonal support, and social belonging. In situations where these resources are lacking, stress, burnout, and a decline in performance may occur.

Two particularly pertinent mechanisms are wellbeing and job crafting. Wellbeing encompasses employees’ positive psychological functioning, vitality, and overall mental health, all of which are closely linked to sustained performance. Job crafting refers to employees’ proactive efforts to redesign tasks, relationships, or perceptions of work to enhance their fit and motivation. Employees experiencing loneliness may experience declines in wellbeing and become less inclined to engage in adaptive job crafting behaviors, which may subsequently affect performance.

The data were analyzed using a multistep analytical approach. Descriptive statistics and reliability analyses were conducted using SPSS 21, followed by confirmatory factor analysis to examine the construct validity of the measurement model. Mediation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro for IBM SPSS Statistics, with bootstrapping procedures using 5,000 resamples to obtain robust estimates of indirect effects. A mediation effect was considered significant when the 95% bootstrap confidence interval for the indirect effect did not include zero.

The findings indicate that emotional loneliness had a significant negative effect on employee performance (β = −0.3569, t = −12.5998, p < 0.001). When wellbeing was included as a mediator, the explanatory power of the model increased from 17.39% to 27.46%. Wellbeing had a significant positive effect on employee performance (β = 0.5277, t = 15.6317, p < 0.001), while the direct effect of emotional loneliness became statistically insignificant, indicating full mediation. Similarly, when job crafting was included as a mediator, the model’s explanatory power increased to 29.12%, with job crafting having a significant positive effect on performance (β = 0.6047, t = 16.3605, p < 0.001) and the direct effect of emotional loneliness becoming insignificant, again indicating full mediation.

In contrast, social loneliness had a significant positive effect on employee performance (β = 0.0817, t = 3.6131, p < 0.001). When wellbeing was included as a mediator, the model’s explanatory power increased substantially to 35.29%. Both social loneliness (β = 0.1752, t = 9.5746, p < 0.001) and wellbeing (β = 0.4811, t = 16.4592, p < 0.001) had significant positive effects on performance, with the direct effect of social loneliness remaining significant, indicating partial mediation. The bootstrapping results confirmed that the indirect effect of social loneliness on performance through wellbeing was statistically significant (Effect = 0.0393, 95% CI [0.0110, 0.0730]). Similarly, when job crafting was included as a mediator, the model’s explanatory power increased to 36.69%, with both social loneliness (β = 0.1720, t = 9.4959, p < 0.001) and job crafting (β = 0.5670, t = 17.1305, p < 0.001) having significant positive effects, again indicating partial mediation.

The positive relationship between social loneliness and employee performance may appear counterintuitive, but it suggests that limited social embeddedness does not necessarily produce negative outcomes in all settings. In occupations such as accounting and finance, where sustained attention, analytical thinking, and individual task focus are important, lower levels of social interaction may reduce distractions and allow greater concentration on core responsibilities. However, these findings should be interpreted cautiously, as they do not imply that social loneliness is inherently beneficial, but rather that its consequences may depend on job design, task characteristics, and organizational context.

The study makes several significant theoretical contributions. It demonstrates the inadequacy of considering workplace loneliness as a unidimensional experience that produces similar outcomes in all circumstances. The distinction between emotional and social loneliness is both theoretically meaningful and empirically significant in the organizational context. The findings also strengthen the explanatory power of belongingness theory by emphasizing that loneliness is more closely connected to the quality of relationships than to their quantity. From a practical standpoint, managers should not regard workplace loneliness as a uniform problem affecting all employees in the same way. Organizations should focus not only on ensuring that employees are physically present within a team but also on enabling them to build meaningful relationships, feel supported, and develop a sense of belonging. Employee engagement programs should not be limited to social events or superficial team activities; mentoring programs, climates of psychological safety, inclusive leadership behaviors, and meaningful feedback mechanisms can be more effective tools for alleviating emotional loneliness. Additionally, instead of standard practices that force all employees into constant social interaction, managers should develop more flexible management approaches that consider task structure and individual work preferences. Creating organizational environments that support job crafting behavior—allowing employees to redesign their tasks, adapt their work methods, and exercise greater autonomy—can reduce the negative effects of loneliness and strengthen employee performance.

Subject of Research: Organizational Psychology

Article Title: Not all workplace loneliness is harmful: the mediating roles of wellbeing and job crafting in the relationship with employee performance

Article References: Balıkçı, O., Elçi, M., Kitapci, H., Artar, M., & Sener, I. (2026). Not all workplace loneliness is harmful: the mediating roles of wellbeing and job crafting in the relationship with employee performance. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1876048. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1876048

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1876048

Keywords: workplace loneliness, emotional loneliness, social loneliness, employee performance, wellbeing, job crafting, organizational psychology, workplace, loneliness, harmful, mediating, roles

The study, published in Supportive Care in Cancer, was led by Natalie Tuckey of the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute and Adelaide University, working in partnership with the advocacy organisation Myeloma Australia. Rather than designing a bespoke intervention from scratch, the team chose to evaluate an existing program called the Be Well Plan, a group-based mental health and wellbeing course typically delivered live over five weekly sessions. The program draws on techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness practices and positive psychology, all distilled from a systematic review of what genuinely improves mental wellbeing. Participants learn about thirty evidence-based activities and then build a personalised wellbeing plan, supported by a tracking tool that gives them feedback on their own resilience, strengths and distress.

Crucially, the researchers deferred any myeloma-specific adaptation until after the feasibility testing, a decision grounded in implementation science. The Be Well Plan had already been tested successfully in university students and, in a previous pilot by the same group, in women with breast cancer, where it showed clear mental health benefits. Before launching the myeloma pilot, the team consulted consumer advocates, specialist nurses, experts in culturally and linguistically diverse populations and mental health program designers, who agreed the intervention was likely suitable as delivered. The logic was that real-world feedback from actual patients would reveal refinements that a priori co-design could not anticipate, increasing the likelihood that a future adapted program would be accepted, implemented and sustained in clinical practice.

Twenty consumers aged between 38 and 72 took part, sixteen with multiple myeloma and four with smouldering myeloma, alongside four Myeloma Australia nurses who joined the sessions to inform future delivery. Recruitment ran for four weeks, drawing thirty-seven expressions of interest, of whom twenty-four completed baseline questionnaires. Twenty attended at least one session, averaging 4.2 of the five planned sessions, and all five sessions were delivered as planned via Zoom by a clinical psychologist and certified facilitator. The nurses were placed in separate breakout rooms during peer discussions so that patients could speak freely. Notably, more than half of those who withdrew before starting were from rural or regional areas, a signal the authors flag as a critical accessibility issue for future rollouts.

The quantitative results, while preliminary, were striking. Using a repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance across seventeen participants who completed both pre- and post-intervention measures, the team found a significant multivariate effect of time, with follow-up univariate tests revealing large improvements in mental wellbeing, measured on the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, and in empowerment, assessed with a modified health empowerment scale. Wellbeing scores rose from an average of 49.42 to 53.21, and empowerment scores climbed from 22.58 to 24.95, with partial eta squared values of 0.24 and 0.25 respectively, both well above the conventional threshold of 0.14 for a large effect. Changes in anxiety and depression, measured with the GAD-7 and PHQ-9, did not reach statistical significance, but their effect sizes fell in the medium to large range, suggesting that a properly powered trial may yet detect meaningful reductions in clinical symptoms.

One finding illustrates the messy reality of psychosocial research in cancer populations. The results proved sensitive to a single participant who experienced a substantial health decline during the intervention period, dragging down the group’s mental health outcomes. When exploratory analyses were repeated with that individual removed, all four outcomes showed significant, large effect size improvements. Yet the same participant continued attending the program and reported finding value in it, a paradox the authors say highlights why future trials must plan for the physical health fluctuations that are inevitable in this population. In a disease where bone pain, fatigue and chemotherapy-related cognitive fog can strike without warning, even the most carefully designed psychological study must accommodate the body’s unpredictability.

The qualitative arm of the study, analysed through inductive thematic analysis of focus groups, interviews and survey free-text responses, yielded three central themes. The first was the power of peer connection: patients described moving from distress and anger toward acceptance and gratitude, and valued meeting others living with the same condition, even when they were at very different disease stages. One participant noted that someone might suggest an approach you had never considered, helping your days get better. The second theme was the need for myeloma-specific content, with patients calling for clearer disease psychoeducation, simplified materials and better pacing, with one respondent pointing out that chemotherapy fog affecting concentration is a real thing and that bone pain or severe fatigue can make attending sessions extremely difficult.

The third theme concerned implementation: how the program should be delivered, by whom, and how it could be woven into routine myeloma care rather than offered as a separate service. Patients and nurses alike emphasised promotion by specialist nurses, collaboration with rehabilitation services and alignment with organisations such as Myeloma Australia. They also acknowledged risks, including potential distress for participants and emotional burden for facilitators, underscoring the need for structured facilitator support and clear strategies for managing group dynamics and sensitive content. Interestingly, the authors caution that the program must not drift into becoming purely a peer support group, since some participants preferred to focus on mental health strategies rather than hear detailed personal stories, which occasionally caused them distress.

Satisfaction with the program was encouraging, with 79 percent of respondents reporting they were satisfied or very satisfied, and nearly three-quarters saying the content presented new information most of the time. However, 36.9 percent indicated the program was not relevant to them some or most of the time, a figure that directly motivates the planned myeloma-specific adaptation. The study’s limitations are candidly acknowledged: the one-arm pre-post design without randomisation or a control group precludes causal inference, the sample was small and entirely self-selected among Caucasian and European consumers who expressed interest in research, and there was no long-term follow-up to determine whether gains persisted. The authors are explicit that these findings establish feasibility and identify necessary adaptations, not clinical effectiveness.

What makes the study notable is its methodological honesty and its commitment to consumer-informed research, an approach that remains inconsistently executed across health research despite widespread endorsement. By involving patients from the initial forums that identified the gap in myeloma mental health support through to the final review of themes, and by including both multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma patients in recognition of their shared psychosocial challenges across the disease continuum, the team has built a foundation for a program designed to resonate with its intended audience. The next step is a co-designed, myeloma-tailored version of the Be Well Plan, tested in a larger randomised controlled trial with longer follow-up. For a patient population facing an incurable disease, the message from this pilot is quietly hopeful: psychological support built with patients, not just for them, can move the needle on wellbeing and empowerment, and the roadmap for proving it at scale now exists.

Subject of Research: Feasibility of a consumer-informed mental health program for people with multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma

Article Title: Adapting a mental health program for people with multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma: a consumer-informed feasibility study

Article References: Tuckey, N., Iasiello, M., Cantley, M., van Agteren, J., Beer, H., Fassnacht, D. B., Ramsey, I., Edney, L. C., Moussa, R. S., Grundy, L., Ryan, M., Ali, K., & Wardill, H. R. (2026). Adapting a mental health program for people with multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma: a consumer-informed feasibility study. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(10), Article 937. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11163-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11163-2

Keywords: multiple myeloma, smouldering myeloma, mental health, wellbeing, consumer-informed research, psycho-oncology, Be Well Plan, feasibility study, empowerment, anxiety, depression, implementation science

The research is grounded in Self-Determination Theory, one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary psychology. The theory holds that human flourishing depends on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, the sense of acting volitionally and self-directed; competence, the sense of mastery and effectiveness; and relatedness, the sense of being connected and valued by others. Decades of meta-analytic work have shown that need satisfaction consistently predicts greater wellbeing, higher-quality motivation and lower illbeing across cultures and developmental stages, while need frustration — the active thwarting of these needs — is reliably associated with distress and maladaptive outcomes.

Emotion crafting is a relatively new concept within this tradition, defined as the proactive regulation of positive emotions. Unlike reactive strategies that manage emotions after they arise — suppressing anger after an argument, for example — emotion crafting involves deliberately seeking out activities or situations that elicit or strengthen positive emotions before an emotional stimulus occurs. Taking a walk in nature before a stressful exam is a classic example. The construct comprises two sequential components: awareness, knowing which situations or activities make one feel good, and action, actively taking part in those situations. Prior research has linked emotion crafting to higher positive affect, lower negative affect, life satisfaction, vitality and eudaimonic wellbeing.

What remained unclear was how this proactive skill relates to basic psychological needs in daily life. The researchers, led by Maria Elena Hernandez Hernandez of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology together with colleagues in Greece, Canada and Norway, hypothesized that the relation could operate in both directions. Proactively cultivating positive emotions might foster need satisfaction by creating more need-supportive experiences, while individuals who feel more autonomous, competent or connected might be better equipped to recognize and pursue activities that enhance their positive emotions. Because both emotion crafting and need fulfilment fluctuate considerably from day to day, the team adopted an intensive longitudinal diary design to capture these short-term dynamics with ecological validity.

The 117 participants, aged 18 to 65 with a mean age of 29.4 years, completed brief daily questionnaires for seven consecutive days. Each morning, they rated how much they wanted to experience seven specific positive emotions that day — activation, happiness, enthusiasm, pride, interest, alertness and satisfaction — capturing their positive emotion goals. Each evening, they completed measures of emotion crafting awareness and action, as well as a shortened scale assessing daily need satisfaction and frustration across the three needs. Approximately 80 percent of participants provided four or more days of complete data, and the researchers handled missing values through multiple imputation designed for multilevel datasets.

Technically, the analysis centered on multilevel structural equation models that isolated within-person variation — how each individual’s emotion crafting and need experiences changed from one day to the next, rather than how people differed from one another overall. Intraclass correlation analyses revealed that roughly 40 percent of the variance in the key variables occurred at the within-person level, confirming substantial day-to-day fluctuation. Preliminary factor analyses showed that some items loaded below acceptable thresholds, so the researchers constructed balanced item parcels for the emotion crafting action, need satisfaction, need frustration and positive emotion goals scales, pairing items with high factor loadings against those with low loadings to improve model stability. Post-hoc power analyses using Monte Carlo simulations indicated excellent power, exceeding 99 percent, to detect the within-person effects.

The results were striking. On days when individuals reported higher emotion crafting awareness, they also reported far higher emotion crafting action, with path coefficients approaching 0.90 in the moderated models. Emotion crafting action, in turn, strongly predicted higher need satisfaction and moderately predicted lower need frustration that same day. In the reversed models, days of higher need satisfaction predicted greater emotion crafting awareness, which then related to more action, while need frustration showed the opposite, negative pattern. The amount of variance explained in need satisfaction and frustration was large, suggesting that emotion crafting plays a meaningful role in shaping daily need experiences rather than merely accompanying them.

Mediation analyses added an important layer of interpretation. The contribution of emotion crafting awareness to need satisfaction was fully transmitted through action, indicating that knowing what makes one feel good translates into greater need fulfilment only when individuals actually seek out those positive emotion-inducing situations. Conversely, need satisfaction fostered action both directly and indirectly by first heightening awareness. Notably, no indirect links emerged in the need frustration models, suggesting that emotion crafting may be more effective at promoting optimal functioning than at buffering against need obstruction. The researchers propose that need frustration often stems from external constraints — controlling environments, social exclusion — that proactive positive emotion regulation may be less equipped to alter directly.

One hypothesis failed in an informative way. Positive emotion goals — how much participants wanted to feel good on a given day — did not moderate the link between awareness and action, nor did they directly relate to need experiences. Simply being aware of activities or contexts that foster positive emotions appears sufficient to trigger action, regardless of whether individuals hold explicit goals to feel a certain way. The authors suggest alternative moderators for future research, including self-efficacy and emotional intelligence, and note that between-person differences in positive emotion goals, which accounted for a substantial share of their variance, might operate through dispositional habit rather than daily fluctuation — a possibility their within-person design could not test.

Exploratory cross-lagged analyses revealed a temporal asymmetry with practical implications. Emotion crafting action on one day predicted both next-day need satisfaction and next-day awareness, but not vice versa. Although awareness is theoretically proposed to precede action, the two components appear reciprocally linked across different timescales: seeking out positive experiences on a given day may sharpen awareness of such situations in the short term, while awareness remains essential for action in the longer run. Repeated cycles of need satisfaction may progressively strengthen individuals’ capacity and motivation to engage in emotion crafting, fostering the self-reinforcing upward spiral described in Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory.

The study carries clear practical implications. Enhancing individuals’ awareness of positive emotion-eliciting activities and encouraging them to act on that awareness may offer a simple, low-cost pathway for fostering daily need satisfaction — consistent with positive psychology research showing that small, intentional activities can strengthen wellbeing. Because emotion crafting appeared more strongly related to need satisfaction than to mitigating frustration, such interventions may be particularly suitable for wellbeing promotion in non-clinical populations, though therapists could also guide patients in identifying situations that reliably elicit positive emotions and embedding them into daily routines. The findings also underscore the value of creating autonomy-supportive, competence-enhancing and relationship-nurturing environments, since emotion crafting is more likely to occur when basic psychological needs are met.

The authors caution that their sample was relatively small, predominantly composed of students in a wealthy country and largely well educated, limiting generalizability to more diverse populations. The seven-day time frame may not capture longer-term variations related to academic terms, work demands or seasonal effects, and the correlational design prevents causal inferences. Future research with larger, more heterogeneous samples and longer longitudinal designs spanning weeks or months could establish the robustness of these findings and model each need as a separate latent variable. Even so, the study integrates emotion crafting into the Self-Determination Theory framework in a way that broadens understanding of how proactive positive emotion regulation relates to daily functioning — and suggests that the deliberate pursuit of feeling good may be one of the most accessible levers people have for supporting their own psychological growth.

Subject of Research: A seven-day diary study shows that proactively seeking positive emotional experiences predicts daily satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness needs.

Article Title: Proactive strengthening of positive emotions predicts need satisfaction: the daily relations between emotion crafting and basic psychological needs

Article References: Hernandez Hernandez, M. E., Mouratidis, A., Ratelle, C. F., & Van der Kaap-Deeder, J. (2026). Proactive strengthening of positive emotions predicts need satisfaction: the daily relations between emotion crafting and basic psychological needs. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1618. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10190-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10190-w

Keywords: emotion crafting, self-determination theory, basic psychological needs, need satisfaction, need frustration, emotion regulation, positive emotions, diary study, wellbeing, positive psychology, multilevel modeling, daily dynamics

The stakes are considerable. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples define health holistically, encompassing the social, emotional, spiritual, and cultural wellbeing of both individuals and whole communities. Yet the measurable health gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains stark: according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 35 percent of that gap is attributed to social determinants, while another 35 percent remains unexplained, potentially reflecting cultural determinants that national health surveys simply do not capture. Following colonisation, persistent political, economic, and health inequalities have been driven by structural disadvantage, systematic discrimination, and racism. Despite this, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities continue to demonstrate remarkable strengths and resilience, drawing on social, cultural, and economic protective factors that promote community health and wellbeing.

ACCHOs have been central to this since 1971, providing holistic, comprehensive, culturally safe primary care that attends to social, cultural, and biomedical determinants of health. In 2019, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, NACCHO, formalised this commitment within the ACCHO Core Services and Outcomes Framework, enshrining a sector-wide mandate for community health promotion and empowerment. Internationally and within non-Indigenous Australian contexts, linking patients to social wellbeing and other support services such as housing, income support, employment, physical activity groups, art therapy, meditation, community gardens, and music has been referred to as social prescribing or social referral initiatives. These kinds of connections are already commonplace within ACCHOs’ model of care, but are rarely labelled as social prescribing. A recent national feasibility study on social prescribing in the Australian context advocates for learning from and supporting the integrated models of care pioneered by ACCHOs, and this new framework responds directly to that call.

To build the framework, the research team, led by Uday Narayan Yadav with colleagues including Chelsea Liu, Reece Griffin, Rosemary Wyber, Isabel Hanson, and Odette Pearson, conducted a targeted, concept-driven critical review across Google Scholar, PubMed, and publicly available ACCHO and NACCHO publications, identifying work that explicitly considered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in relation to social and cultural determinants of health. Using a conventional content analysis approach, they systematically coded ACCHO service functions related to social wellbeing and other support services, identifying distinct meaningful categories of ACCHO involvement across diverse programs and activities. The team then tested the resonance of the emerging framework with two ACCHOs and a NACCHO representative during development, and presented it at the Lowitja Institute’s International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference in 2025 to gather sector feedback from researchers, practitioners, and community-controlled stakeholders.

The result is a six-domain framework that maps the increasing levels of ACCHO involvement against the degree of control, oversight, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural input in program and service delivery. The first domain is direct delivery of services, where funded services or initiatives are provided directly by the ACCHO to individuals, consuming ACCHO resources directly, such as Tackling Indigenous Smoking and Social and Emotional Wellbeing programs. The second is delivery through hosting or partnerships, where ACCHOs provide services indirectly by partnering with other providers or co-locating them within the ACCHO space, such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care, health justice, and food insecurity responses. The third is commissioning of services, where ACCHOs allocate funding and contract with other organisations to provide services they cannot provide directly, including allied health, training for clinicians and staff, or research contracts for needs assessment and evaluation, giving them financial and contractual control but less day-to-day operational involvement.

The remaining three domains describe lighter-touch but still significant forms of engagement. The fourth is referral to other services, where ACCHOs navigate or connect people to other providers through a formal referral process, such as Rangers programs, homelessness support, Men’s and Women’s Shed programs, and walking groups. The fifth is promoting services, where ACCHOs passively provide information about other services through social media, pamphlets, information sessions, or posters, without partnering, referring, or contacting providers directly, such as displaying information about the Aboriginal Quitline. The sixth and broadest domain is improving social capital and social cohesion, encompassing employment creation, capacity-building training opportunities to obtain qualifications, supporting families in educating their children, community empowerment initiatives, cultural immersion workshops, and advocacy, including championing alcohol-related harm reduction in local Aboriginal communities.

The framework comes to life through concrete sector examples. In Perth, a social and emotional wellbeing team uses yarning-style conversations to assess holistic needs and provide services such as cultural connection through travel to country, engagement with family members, participation in cooking or hobby groups, and making new friends. In Far North Queensland, individuals are invited into programs depending on their needs, including Tackling Indigenous Smoking, a needle exchange, youth diversion, home maintenance, parenting groups, men’s and women’s groups, and healthy cooking groups. Some ACCHOs partner with legal service providers to offer on-site legal support for credit and debt, fines, payday loans, Centrelink issues, housing, family breakdown, family violence, child protection, and minor crime. Others support Elders in navigating residential aged care, home care, and day respite services, establishing referral clinics that connect health and community programs to aged care providers who assess Elders for cleaning, lawn mowing, home modifications, transport, showering, dressing, and mobility support. The Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services established the Solid Connections program to help people discover new skills and career pathways.

Beyond these specific services, ACCHOs function as a hub or one-stop shop for patients, addressing social and cultural determinants through an extraordinarily wide remit. They are the largest employer of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, employing over 3,500 Aboriginal people who comprise 55 percent of the total ACCHO workforce, and they are the primary setting for training Aboriginal Health Workers through in-service traineeship models and pathways to tertiary education. Their activities extend to accommodations for homeless people, justice-related services including co-located services in clinics, communities, and prisons, and post-release support for incarcerated people and their families. In some settings, particularly remote areas, they provide breakfast programs, elders’ lunches, aged care facilities, and assistance for the homeless. They also contribute to disaster preparedness and response during bushfires, floods, cyclones, and the COVID-19 pandemic, and play a leading role in providing culturally appropriate health information through health promotion resources, social media, and informal conversations.

The authors argue that describing this spectrum has several important benefits. First, it enables ACCHOs to clearly articulate their level of input to community members and governance bodies, including the extent to which they have control or influence over particular services, which is important for accountability where externally provided services vary in cultural safety. Second, a structured framework can help make visible the often-unrecognised work undertaken by ACCHOs, such as when they host in-reach services or display promotional materials, implicitly endorsing those services through their trusted community relationships, creating cultural and reputational responsibilities that are frequently unfunded. Third, a systemic approach to defining roles may support inter-agency collaboration by establishing shared goals, values, language, and understanding of partnership, which is often challenged by complex and unstable service networks, insecure funding mechanisms, and limited accountability for the cultural safety of partner-delivered services. Recent evidence from Far North Queensland shows that over 80 percent of upstream social, emotional, and wellbeing services were delivered by non-governmental organisations, raising questions about Indigenous participation in decision-making and control over service delivery.

The authors also acknowledge significant challenges. ACCHOs are often expected to support a broad range of activities despite already stretched organisational resources, and this work is frequently not recognised in funding models that prioritise clinical key performance indicators over holistic, community-identified needs. Where ACCHOs hold advisory rather than controlling roles, their capacity to influence service quality through cultural standards may be limited, posing reputational risks that require clear governance and escalation pathways when external providers do not meet agreed standards. Funding structures, commissioning arrangements, and workforce shortages may limit ACCHOs’ ability to expand their full remit, even when community demand is strong, and the authors argue that coordinated action across policy, commissioning, and workforce bodies is needed, alongside a national funding model to adequately support the sector. Ultimately, the six-domain framework offers care providers, researchers, and policymakers an opportunity to test this approach and expand foundational consultations with ACCHOs, highlighting the need for national-level research to understand and showcase best-practice initiatives, control, and financial needs in addressing the social and cultural determinants of health across the broader Australian context.

Subject of Research: “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations

Article Title: “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations

Article References: Yadav, U. N., Liu, C., Griffin, R., Wyber, R., Hanson, I., & Pearson, O. (2026). “Indigenous models of social prescribing”–a six-domain framework for social wellbeing and other support services delivered by Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 75, Article 101999. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101999

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.101999

Keywords: Indigenous, models, social, prescribing, six-domain, framework, wellbeing, other, support, services, delivered, Aboriginal

The study, conducted by Asma Alnuaimi of Rabdan Academy in Abu Dhabi, interviewed fifteen married working women living in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, all of whom were at least two hours’ travel from their nearest extended family. Using a six-phase thematic analysis guided by Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory, the research identified four interlocking themes: sustained emotional strain, coping strategies that helped but did not resolve the underlying deficit, organizational support that depended on individual managers rather than policy, and cultural expectations that refused to shrink even as the resources available to meet them disappeared.

The setting matters. Female labor force participation in the UAE now stands at just over 54 percent of the working-age female population, according to World Bank data cited in the study, and women’s participation increased by roughly 20.9 percent in 2024 alone. Women hold positions across government, the professions, and private enterprise at rates that would have been unusual a generation ago, and they make up a growing share of STEM graduates. Yet internal migration and urban concentration have pulled many of these women away from the kin networks their professional participation implicitly depended on. Grandparents, siblings, aunts, and cousins who once lived within walking distance now sit hours away by car, unreachable for the spontaneous school pickup or the emergency hospital stay.

The theoretical architecture of the study draws on two complementary frameworks. Social Support Theory, developed by researchers including Cobb, Cassel, and House, holds that relationships buffer individuals against stress by providing four distinct resources: emotional support that communicates being cared for, informational support that offers guidance, instrumental support that supplies tangible help such as childcare, and companionship support that conveys belonging. Cohen and Wills established in a landmark 1985 review that the protective effect of support is greatest when the form of support matches the demand the stressor creates. For married working women in the UAE, extended family historically provided all four forms simultaneously and without transaction. A paid nanny can supply instrumental support; she cannot easily supply the relational certainty that kin-based care carries, the unconditional availability that arrives without negotiation or fee.

Role Strain Theory, formulated by Goode in 1960, explains what happens when that buffer is removed. Goode identified three forms of strain: role overload, when the total volume of demands exceeds available time and energy; role conflict, when the expectations of two roles are fundamentally incompatible; and role captivity, when an individual feels obligated to remain in a role from which she would prefer to withdraw. All three are present in the lives of the women Alnuaimi studied. Without proximate family, caregiving and household tasks fall entirely to the woman and her spouse, creating overload. The cultural expectation that she will meet Emirati standards of family devotion while also meeting professional standards creates conflict, because the resources required to satisfy both simultaneously do not exist. And many of these women cannot leave their jobs without severe financial consequences, nor can they openly reduce their family engagement without social cost, producing captivity.

The interviews revealed how this plays out in practice. One participant described seeing her family only once or twice a month, a frequency that represents a substantial departure from the near-daily contact that is normal in Emirati family culture. Another said she sometimes felt so overwhelmed that she considered quitting her job just to regain balance, a sentiment consistent with research showing that turnover intention rises sharply among employees whose family circumstances are not adequately supported by their organizations. One woman had acted on those feelings, moving closer to her family even though it meant living apart from her husband, who still worked in Abu Dhabi. Another described entering emergency surgery without any family member by her side, relying completely on herself both emotionally and financially while raising children as a single mother in effect if not in law.

Notably, the absence of extended family did not always weaken marriages; in several cases it intensified them. Couples became more dependent on one another and more deliberately attentive to their relationship. One participant described how she and her husband had become more of a team, talking more, planning more, and growing closer because they had to rely on each other. Another described going out for coffee with her husband after the children fell asleep, a small ritual of deliberate protection that reflects the degree to which the relationship required active maintenance under pressure. This finding aligns with research on spousal resource-sharing under external stress, though the relational benefit arrived alongside an increased domestic burden that the couple now carried without external help.

The coping strategies participants employed were varied and, on their own terms, often genuinely adaptive. Problem-focused approaches included redistributing household and caregiving work between spouses through explicit schedules, relying on paid daycare, and delegating tasks to trusted nannies. Emotion-focused approaches included regular phone calls to family, building new social networks that became like family, prayer, daily gym sessions, and short trips with close friends. These practices align with a substantial evidence base: a 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that even brief restorative breaks during the working day reliably improve wellbeing and performance, and daily diary research has confirmed that micro-breaks enhance performance when overall work engagement is maintained. But the consistent limitation, stated by participants themselves, was that none of these strategies fully replaced what family proximity had provided. Paid childcare introduced transaction costs, financial and emotional, that kin care did not carry. Spousal collaboration was available only at the end of a working day that had already depleted both partners. Physical self-care provided temporary restoration without structural change.

Workplace support emerged as occasionally helpful and systematically insufficient. Some managers allowed early departure for family emergencies; one organization introduced one online day per week with flexible working hours, an intervention that one participant credited with keeping her in post after she had been on the edge of quitting multiple times. But the help was informal, unpredictable, and dependent on who the line manager happened to be. No participant described policies specifically designed to support women living without proximate family. This matches what Hammer and colleagues identified in their work on family-supportive supervisor behavior: such behavior, however effective when it occurs, is not a reliable organizational resource because it is not an organizational commitment. The gap between goodwill and policy was present across the entire sample.

Perhaps the most distinctive finding concerns culture. In the UAE, as in other collectivist societies, a woman’s obligations to her family are not negotiable in proportion to her circumstances. One participant put it directly: culturally, people assume there is always family support, but when you do not have it, you are still expected to manage everything perfectly. What she describes is precisely the role conflict and role captivity that Goode theorized, but in a more severe form than the theory was originally designed to capture, because it removes the possibility of legitimate renegotiation. Women in the UAE cannot openly reduce their family commitments without social cost; they cannot fully meet them without practical resources they do not have. The result is a form of strain that is structurally irresolvable at the individual level, which is why the study argues that institutional and policy responses are not optional supplements to individual coping but necessary preconditions for it.

The stakes extend beyond individual wellbeing. A meta-analytic review of seventy studies found that chronic loneliness and social isolation increase all-cause mortality by twenty-six percent, a risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day. Work-health imbalance independently predicts reduced wellbeing. Against this backdrop, the study’s practical implications are concrete: UAE employers should treat family-supportive arrangements, including remote working, predictable flexible scheduling, and subsidized childcare, as structural features of employment rather than discretionary concessions. Policymakers should expand access to affordable, high-quality childcare so that women without proximate family are not solely reliant on costly private provision. Community organizations should develop peer networks explicitly designed to replicate the relational, not merely the functional, character of kinship solidarity. With women constituting forty-five point four percent of the skilled female workforce but holding only sixteen point six percent of private-sector leadership positions, retaining women who are considering leaving because their domestic circumstances are inadequately supported is among the more practical things UAE employers can do to close the gap. The study is bounded by its sample size, geographic focus on Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and cross-sectional design, and the author calls for comparative and longitudinal research across Gulf Cooperation Council states to establish whether the mechanism identified here is specific to the UAE or more widely distributed across collectivist societies undergoing rapid economic transformation.

Subject of Research: The impact of geographic distance from extended family on social support, role strain, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: Extended family distance, social support, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates

Article References: Alnuaimi, A. (2026). Extended family distance, social support, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1872079. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1872079

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1872079

Keywords: extended family distance, social support, role strain, work-family conflict, UAE working women, collectivist culture, wellbeing, thematic analysis, workplace flexibility, childcare, Abu Dhabi, Dubai

The wellbeing economy, as the authors frame it, is an economy that prioritizes people and planet over profit. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines the Economy of Wellbeing as the capacity to create a virtuous circle in which citizens’ wellbeing drives economic prosperity, stability and resilience, and vice versa, with good macroeconomic outcomes sustaining wellbeing investments over time. According to the review, the concept is gaining support among governments, policymakers, budget holders, businesses and civil society, and it has been adopted in various forms by countries including Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, Costa Rica and Bhutan. Wales, for instance, has enacted the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015 and the Social Partnership and Public Procurement Act 2023, while New Zealand introduced a Wellbeing Budget in 2019 focused on child wellbeing and economic transformation.

The technical backbone of the new framework is a set of four cross-cutting policy priorities put forward by the World Health Organization, known as wellbeing capitals, which integrate human, social, planetary and economic wellbeing. Healthy societies, the authors note, build economies that ensure the prosperity of people, civil society and the planet by maintaining universal policies for housing and food, lifelong learning and literacy, and a stable ecological balance, with equity, inclusion and sustainability as guiding principles. Although many countries have recognized these four capitals as critical and direction-setting, the review points out that they had not been integrated into wellbeing economy research so far. That gap matters because WHO/EURO has identified twelve stakeholder groups that should undertake four key actions to promote, implement and evaluate the wellbeing economy approach, and the public health workforce operates across many of them, from academia and ministries to banks and funding bodies.

Methodologically, the team followed the Joanna Briggs Institute guidance for scoping reviews and the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews, registering a protocol on the Open Science Framework. The review used the JBI mnemonic PCC, with population attributed to public health reflecting the health of people and the planet, the concept of interest being the wellbeing economy and its capitals, and the context comprising competency-based education and training frameworks. The researchers searched four databases, Medline via PubMed, EMBASE via Ovid, Global Health via EBSCOHost and ERIC via EBSCOHost, with the final database search conducted on January 15, 2025. They then supplemented this with targeted searches of multilateral organizations, including the WHO European Wellbeing Economy Initiative, the WHO Institutional Repository for Information Sharing, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, the OECD and the World Bank, followed by backward and forward handsearching and direct contact with corresponding authors.

The scale of the screening effort was considerable. A total of 3,965 titles were identified through the four mechanisms, and after deduplication in Rayyan, pilot testing and independent full-text review, 27 documents representing 23 units of analysis were included. From these, the team extracted 38 frameworks, 54 domains and 423 competencies. The synthesis relied on a cross-walking process methodology previously used to study competencies in public health professional education: competencies were extracted and confirmed by two authors, verbs and descriptions were analyzed to eliminate duplicates and identify emerging competencies, and each competency was then mapped against one or all four actions of the wellbeing economy. Where the mapping revealed knowledge gaps that could not be filled from the literature, the researchers proposed new competencies themselves.

The result is a proposed Competency Framework with five domains and 31 competencies, 30 derived from the review and one proposed by the researchers. Domain one, Ethics and professionalism, contains five competencies covering self-awareness of one’s own behavior and values regarding humanity, acting openly and transparently according to the rule of law, understanding cultural differences by examining unconscious bias, challenging power differentials, and making evidence-informed decisions. Domain two, Determinants of health and wellbeing, is the largest with eight competencies, spanning action on wider determinants including climate and environmental change, protection of the environment, housing security, access to healthy foods and reduction of food insecurity, employment security and workplace fairness, school enrollment and literacy, access to quality primary care, and assessment of the long-term impacts of the economy on neighborhood-level advantage.

Domain three, Digital transformation and data literacy, reflects the increasingly technical character of modern public health practice. Its five competencies include distinguishing and using diverse data sources to interpret and evaluate health information and digital content, sorting facts from misinformation and disinformation, addressing gaps in digital literacy and integrating them into education and training programs, engaging and empowering citizens and communities to participate in the wellbeing economy through digital media, and promoting public understanding and awareness of artificial intelligence technologies. The inclusion of AI literacy is notable, and the source material the team drew on included OECD work on digital government skills, the DigComp 2.2 framework for citizens’ digital competence, and OECD analyses of the impact of digital technologies on wellbeing.

Domain four, Policy, politics and governance, contains six competencies focused on working across systems and sectors. These include contributing to systems that strengthen collaboration, communication and coordination across sectors and stakeholders for societal wellbeing, engaging with multiple governing sectors from local to international levels, making informed judgments about complex wellbeing and health policy issues, securing sustainable funding for health and wellbeing programs, engaging in policy development and implementation, and developing adaptive global health security frameworks with continuous monitoring, evaluation and improvement. Domain five, Building capacity for sustainable wellbeing economy, holds seven competencies emphasizing lifelong learning, leadership and entrepreneurship as agents of change, systems thinking and critical thinking to understand key drivers of wellbeing outcomes, economic evaluation methods to capture wider social benefits of health programs, expansion of provision and funding of care, social care, education and transportation services, improvement of regulation and funding of macroeconomic systems for wellbeing goals, and the use of tools to steer economic investment toward wellbeing goals.

The authors argue that the framework fills a genuine void. Existing competency frameworks for the public health workforce, such as the WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework for the Public Health Workforce in the European Region and the UK Faculty of Public Health Core Competences, were developed before the emergence of the wellbeing economy and its associated capitals, and primarily focus on public health functions. While both contain competencies related to wellbeing, such as building strategic alliances to improve population health or using public health intelligence to assess wellbeing, neither includes domains specifically dedicated to the wellbeing economy. The new framework is explicitly centered on the four capitals and maps competencies against the four actions of the wellbeing economy agenda, including fair and equitable investment in the capitals, delivery of public health goods and policies for healthy lives, and collaborative work across government and society. The authors also connect the ethics domain to the Inner Development Goals initiative, which promotes inner growth as a prerequisite for sustainable outer change.

The timing is significant. The final report of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All highlighted the urgent need for synergetic, coordinated work across disciplines, sectors and levels of government, leading WHO and its Member States to adopt a Resolution on the Economics of Health for All in 2024. A WHO Global Strategy is being developed for adoption in 2026, and WHO/EURO is progressing the agenda through a Wellbeing Economy Initiative focusing on public health priorities for investment with multiple co-benefits, including ageing well, youth mental health and inclusion, and addressing rural-urban disparities. The review’s limitations are acknowledged: only English-language literature was included, and the framework does not yet prioritize which competencies matter most for each stakeholder group, so the authors recommend complementing it with a consensus study such as expert panels or a Delphi technique. Still, they conclude that the framework is an important step toward defining the field, providing a basis for training, performance assessment, training needs assessment and public health policy development, and serving as an actionable tool showing how public health stakeholders and leaders can best improve the wellbeing of their communities and citizens while building more resilient, sustainable and prosperous economies for all.

Subject of Research: wellbeing economy competency framework in public health

Article Title: Towards a competency framework for wellbeing economy in public health: a scoping review

Article References: Rodríguez-Feria, P., Czabanowska, K., Dyakova, M., Giraldo-Noack, N., & Clemens, T. (2026). Towards a competency framework for wellbeing economy in public health: a scoping review. Public Health Reviews, 47, Article 1609947. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2026.1609947

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/phrs.2026.1609947

Keywords: wellbeing economy, public health, competency framework, scoping review, WHO, OECD, health policy, Towards, competency, framework, wellbeing, economy