The theoretical foundation is deceptively simple. Widely shared beliefs that make the status quo and its attendant inequalities seem fair and legitimate help satisfy three basic psychological needs. They reduce uncertainty, because a justified world is a predictable one. They dampen existential threat, because a legitimate order feels safer than an arbitrary one. And they support relational harmony, because endorsing the same system as those around us sustains a shared reality. By shifting blame away from systemic roots and toward individual or natural causes, system-justifying beliefs can offer solace from the negative psychological consequences of inequality, a phenomenon researchers call the palliative effect of ideology. Decades of empirical work, including a 2024 meta-analysis by Vargas-Salfate and colleagues, have accumulated substantial support for it. What remained unclear was how far the effect generalizes across age, across social groups, and across domains of inequality, through which psychological mechanisms it operates, and whether there are conditions under which it actually harms wellbeing.

The first contribution tackles the earliest stages of the life course. Biedron and colleagues conducted a systematic review, following PRISMA reporting guidelines, of 17 manuscripts containing 20 studies on motivated system justification among children and adolescents. System justification theory was developed and tested almost exclusively with adults, so the question of whether minors engage in the same motivated defense of the social order has long been open. The answer, it turns out, is yes. Minors, including those from disadvantaged racial, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds, do justify the system, and as in adult samples these tendencies are linked to palliative outcomes: higher self-esteem, fewer internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems, and stronger perceptions that society is fair. The review also documents developmental nuances, with evidence that the benefits of justification may shift across stages of childhood, suggesting the formative years are a critical period for the crystallization of legitimizing beliefs. The authors flag glaring gaps, too: almost no studies measure justification of the economic system specifically, and intersectional identities remain largely unexamined in youth samples.

Two empirical investigations then probe what happens when the people justifying the system are the very people it disadvantages. Lima and colleagues studied heteronormative system justification among lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in Brazil, drawing on a sample of 777 cisgender LGB participants. They tested a moderated mediation model linking heteronormative system justification, internalized homophobia, LGB in-group identification, and subjective wellbeing. Consistent with the palliative hypothesis, heteronormative system justification directly predicted higher subjective wellbeing. But among gay men, a second, indirect pathway ran in the opposite direction, through internalized homophobia: the same beliefs that soothed distress also deepened the internalization of stigma. In-group identification moderated the pattern, such that the palliative benefit was weaker among participants who identified most strongly with the LGB community. The study captures a fundamental group-system conflict: justifying the system may relieve individual suffering while simultaneously reinforcing the very stigma that causes it. Methodologically, it also underscores the value of measuring justification of a specific system, in this case the heteronormative order, rather than society as a whole, echoing earlier warnings from Sengupta and colleagues that dimension-specific legitimacy can behave very differently from general legitimacy.

Bertin and colleagues extend the same tension into the domain of race. They introduce a novel measure of racial system justification and test whether ethnic-racial identity attitudes mediate its association with psychological wellbeing among White and Black participants in the United States, 371 and 414 respectively across two studies. Two identity variables took center stage: racial salience, the degree to which an individual considers race in daily life, and racial self-hatred, the extent to which individuals dislike their own racial group. Among White participants, racial system justification was indirectly linked to better mental health through decreased racial salience and decreased racial self-hatred, with evidence of a serial pathway in which lower salience further reduced self-hatred. Among Black participants the process was more fraught. Racial system justification was indirectly linked to greater psychological distress through increased racial self-hatred, while a tentative second pathway suggested a simultaneous palliative association via decreased racial salience. The work imports a palliative-pernicious framework previously documented among sexual minorities, in studies by Bahamondes in Chile and by Suppes and colleagues, and proposes that the tension is best understood at the intersection of legitimizing beliefs and ethnic-racial identity.

The most sweeping contribution comes from Suppes and colleagues, who analyzed data from 13,973 respondents across 22 countries to disentangle two constructs that are correlated but conceptually distinct: prejudice toward gender and sexual minorities, and system-legitimizing beliefs that frame those minorities as threatening or morally transgressive. Although the two were positively correlated, they pulled wellbeing in opposite directions. Anti-GSM system-justifying beliefs predicted greater happiness and health, while anti-GSM prejudice predicted the opposite. Social conservatism partially mediated the association between system-legitimizing beliefs and wellbeing but not the link between prejudice and wellbeing, suggesting that the palliative function of anti-GSM ideology operates through a broader tendency to endorse the status quo, whereas the wellbeing cost of prejudice runs through a separate mechanism.

The researchers are careful to stress what this comfort is worth: a Band-Aid, not a remedy. The structural inequalities that legitimizing beliefs rationalize continue to harm the targets of prejudice, and ultimately the wellbeing of everyone involved. Relief for the believer is purchased with the continued existence of the injustice itself, a trade-off that no amount of individual psychological benefit can justify on moral grounds.

Taken together, the four contributions reaffirm that the palliative effect of ideology is robust but conditional. It generalizes across developmental stages, persists among marginalized identities in different parts of the Americas, and replicates across diverse national contexts. Yet the picture is more complex than a simple ideology-soothes account. The palliative mechanism coexists with pernicious pathways through which internalized stigma, ethnic-racial self-hatred, and the dampening of critical awareness may erode the wellbeing of disadvantaged group members and weaken their motivation to mobilize for social change. Crucially, the findings also show that system-legitimizing beliefs carry consequences distinct from those of raw prejudice, a dissociation with real implications for how scholars model the psychology of inequality.

The editors of the collection point toward the questions that should come next: which palliative mechanisms are unique to particular developmental stages, how cultural and political contexts shape the expression of palliative ideologies, and how multiple intersecting systems of stratification jointly condition these effects. The ultimate goal, they argue, cannot be to legitimize unjust arrangements for the sake of individual relief, but to transform the conditions that make ideology palliative in the first place.

For a field increasingly concerned with polarization, misinformation, and the resilience of hierarchies, the message of this research is pointed. The same cognitive machinery that helps people sleep at night in an unequal world is the machinery that keeps that world unequal. Understanding when belief in the system heals and when it corrodes is therefore not just an academic puzzle, but a prerequisite for any serious attempt at social change.

Subject of Research: The palliative effect of system-justifying ideology on psychological wellbeing across age, marginalized groups, and cultures

Article Title: Editorial: Current research on the palliative effect of ideology

Article References: Bahamondes, J., Goudarzi, S., Napier, J. L., & Suppes, A. (2026). Editorial: Current research on the palliative effect of ideology. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1907893. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1907893

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1907893

Keywords: system justification, palliative effect, ideology, social inequality, subjective wellbeing, sexual minorities, racial hierarchy, prejudice, internalized homophobia, political psychology, social change, youth development

Researchers at the Lifespan Brain Institute of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania took advantage of a fortuitous scientific circumstance. Years before the pandemic began, between May 2017 and August 2019, they had administered in-person clinical assessments and resilience questionnaires to a cohort of youth and young adults as part of work developing the Lifespan Risk and Resilience Battery. When the pandemic struck, the team recontacted participants and assessed their mental health remotely between May and August 2020, roughly 21 months after the baseline visits. Because resilience factors were measured before anyone knew a global crisis was coming, the design sidesteps the recall and reverse-causation problems that plague most pandemic-era research.

The analytic sample included 96 participants with a mean baseline age of 19.34 years, ranging from 8 to 29 years old. Fifty-one percent were female and 59 percent identified as People of Color. Critically, the cohort was psychiatrically enriched: 70 percent met criteria for a lifetime or current psychiatric disorder, including schizophrenia spectrum disorders in 15 percent and subthreshold psychosis-spectrum syndromes such as attenuated psychosis syndrome in 36 percent. Thirty percent had no diagnosis. This deliberate clinical heterogeneity meant the researchers could ask whether pre-existing resilience operated across a broad spectrum of psychiatric vulnerability, not merely in healthy community samples where the stakes are lower.

The study focused on two theoretically grounded resilience processes drawn from the 47-item Risk and Resilience Battery. The first was emotion regulation, assessed with five items from the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale Short Form that capture difficulties modulating emotional responses, such as trouble concentrating or controlling behavior when upset. Scores were reverse coded so higher values reflected greater regulatory capacity. The second was supportive close relationships, measured with four items from the Network of Relationships Inventory assessing the perceived quality of close family bonds, including feelings of care, admiration, and stability with parental figures and siblings. These factors were chosen because developmental resilience frameworks, notably Ann Masten’s account of resilience as ordinary magic arising from interacting intrapersonal and interpersonal systems, position them as distinct yet interconnected regulatory resources.

At follow-up, participants completed brief self-report measures of depression, anxiety, psychosis-spectrum symptoms, and sleep disturbance, including the Patient Health Questionnaire-2, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, a five-item PRIME short form, and the Insomnia Severity Index. The analytical strategy was rigorous. Multivariate regression models controlled for age, sex, race, baseline psychotropic medication use, time between visits, and, crucially, corresponding baseline symptom levels, so the findings reflect protection against new or worsening symptoms rather than simple symptom stability. Given the moderate sample size, the team used nonparametric bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples to generate bias-corrected and accelerated 95 percent confidence intervals, treating coefficients as significant only when those intervals excluded zero.

The results were clear and, in places, striking. Higher pre-pandemic emotion regulation predicted lower anxiety during the pandemic (p = .007), fewer psychosis-spectrum symptoms (p = .034), and fewer sleep problems (p = .002). Notably, resilience factors added 6.7 percent of explained variance to the anxiety model beyond covariates and baseline anxiety, a substantial incremental contribution. Supportive close relationships independently predicted fewer sleep problems (p = .022), although they were not associated with depression, anxiety, or psychotic-like experiences. Neither resilience factor related to depressive symptoms, and neither significantly changed the odds of crossing the screening threshold for elevated depression in supplemental logistic analyses. Baseline psychotropic medication use was not a significant predictor in any model.

The transdiagnostic breadth of the emotion regulation finding carries particular weight. Emotion regulation difficulties have long been implicated across depression, anxiety, and psychosis-spectrum conditions, and stress-diathesis models of schizophrenia posit that stress sensitivity and poor coping fuel psychotic-like experiences such as unusual thoughts, suspiciousness, and perceptual disturbances. The new data extend this literature by showing that regulatory capacity measured nearly two years before a chronic stressor predicted symptom levels across affective and psychosis-spectrum domains while that stressor was still unfolding. Mechanistically, the authors argue, emotion regulation likely functions as an upstream regulator of stress reactivity: individuals with stronger regulatory skills can modulate cognitive, affective, and physiological responses to adversity, reducing vulnerability that would otherwise cascade into multiple symptom domains.

The protective link between supportive family relationships and sleep points to a complementary, downstream mechanism. Theoretical accounts of interpersonal co-regulation propose that close relationships stabilize physiological arousal, dampen hypervigilance, and help restore daily rhythms, processes that are especially important for sleep onset and maintenance. The social buffering literature similarly suggests that supportive ties attenuate hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis reactivity and autonomic arousal, both of which disrupt sleep. During lockdowns, when families became the primary source of co-regulatory support, relationships characterized by emotional reassurance and felt security may have helped preserve healthy sleep routines. Because sleep disturbance is itself a transdiagnostic risk factor for mood, anxiety, and psychosis-spectrum conditions, protecting sleep during chronic stress may prevent broader psychiatric cascades.

The authors are careful to note that these two resilience processes probably do not operate in isolation. Supportive relationships may scaffold emotion regulation capacities through co-regulatory exchange, while individual regulatory skills in turn shape relationship quality and stability over time, creating reciprocal feedback between intrapersonal and interpersonal systems. The lifespan perspective of the sample, spanning ages 8 to 29, captures a window in which prefrontal regulatory networks continue maturing and the primary sources of support shift from parents toward peers, although the study was underpowered to formally test developmental moderation. Limitations also include the absence of baseline sleep measurement, differing symptom instruments across waves, unknown medication status at follow-up, and a clinically enriched sample that may limit generalizability to fully community-based populations.

Even with those caveats, the implications are consequential. As pandemics, climate-related disasters, and political instability make large-scale stressors an increasingly recurring feature of modern life, the study argues for investing in resilience before crises arrive rather than scrambling to treat distress afterward. Emotion regulation is demonstrably amenable to intervention: school-based social-emotional learning programs and transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to strengthen regulatory skills across diverse populations. Supportive relationships, meanwhile, can be cultivated through family-level interventions that enhance emotional availability and co-regulation. By showing that qualities measured in ordinary times predicted who fared better during extraordinary ones, the Philadelphia team has provided some of the strongest prospective evidence yet that resilience is not a vague abstraction but a set of identifiable, modifiable, and measurable protective processes with the potential to buffer mental health when the next global storm arrives.

Subject of Research: Prospective prediction of youth mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic from pre-pandemic emotion regulation and supportive close relationships

Article Title: Pre-Pandemic Emotion Regulation and Supportive Relationships as Protective Factors Across Development: Prospective Prediction of Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Article References: Kim, I. A., Ered, A., Himes, M. M., Gur, R. E., Rush, S., Moore, T. M., Barzilay, R., Calkins, M. E., & White, L. K. (2026). Pre-Pandemic Emotion Regulation and Supportive Relationships as Protective Factors Across Development: Prospective Prediction of Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02086-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02086-4

Keywords: emotion regulation, resilience, COVID-19 pandemic, mental health, supportive relationships, sleep problems, anxiety, psychosis-spectrum symptoms, youth development, protective factors, longitudinal study, Child Psychiatry & Human Development