Search Results (238)

Background: Social determinants of health—including both adversity and socioeconomic position—are known to shape physical health, health-related behaviors, and overall well-being. However, the psychological mechanisms that link these determinants to diverse outcomes remain insufficiently explored across international contexts. Objective: The objective of this study is to test whether sense of mastery and control over one’s life mediates the associations between key stressors (childhood abuse, financial insecurity) and socioeconomic resources (education, employment, and marital status) with a wide range of outcomes spanning health, behaviors, and well-being. Methods: Using cross-sectional data from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), we analyzed responses from more than 200,000 adults in 23 countries. Predictors included exposure to childhood abuse, perceived financial insecurity, and indicators of socioeconomic position (education, employment, and marital status). Outcomes included self-rated physical and mental health, depression, anxiety, smoking, drinking, physical activity, life satisfaction, and happiness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to evaluate both direct and indirect (mediated) effects through sense of mastery and control over life. Results: Stressors were associated with poorer health, higher engagement in risk behaviors, and lower well-being. In contrast, higher levels of education, employment, and being married were linked to more favorable outcomes. In all tested models, sense of mastery and control over life significantly mediated the effects of both stressors and socioeconomic resources on health, behaviors, and well-being outcomes. Conclusions: Sense of mastery and control over life may represent key psychological pathways linking both adversity and social advantage to diverse health-related outcomes. Interventions that enhance individuals’ perceived control may offer cross-cutting benefits to improve health, promote well-being, and reduce behavioral risk factors globally. Full article

Background: This study examines the psychosocial factors influencing resilience in Colombian victims of armed conflict, highlighting the role of personal, family, and community resources in mitigating trauma. Resilience is a dynamic process that enables individuals and communities to adapt to adversity. Given Colombia’s prolonged violence and forced displacement, trauma has significantly impacted both physical and emotional health. Methods: 200 adult conflict victims were recruited through snowball sampling and completed validated scales via a secure online platform. The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), the APGAR Family Scale, and the Brief Resilience Coping Scale assessed resilience, social support, and psychological well-being. Results: Findings indicate that family support was strongly associated with higher resilience, with participants exhibiting higher family support scores (mean = 15.6, SD = 4.47) demonstrating significantly greater resilience (p < 0.001). Additionally, resilient coping strategies (Exp(B) = 0.772, p < 0.001) and higher subjective happiness (Exp(B) = 0.864, p = 0.001) were identified as key predictors of resilience. Significant correlations were found between resilience and mental health outcomes, with higher resilience linked to lower anxiety (ρ = −0.388, p < 0.001) and depression (ρ = −0.388, p < 0.001). Education, employment, and socioeconomic status also positively influenced resilience, with individuals with higher educational levels (χ² = 21.265, p = 0.006) and income (χ² = 8.945, p = 0.030) showing higher resilience scores. In contrast, alcohol consumption (Exp(B) = 0.813, p = 0.014) was negatively associated with resilience. Conclusions: This study shows that resilience in conflict victims is influenced by both individual and social factors. Strengthening family and community support, along with improving coping strategies, is essential for long-term recovery, highlighting the need for targeted interventions to enhance psychosocial well-being in affected populations. Full article

Background/Objectives: Happiness is a main topic of psychological research, and as a catalyst for transformative change, it is capable of inspiring growth and well-being. This study aims to identify and understand the themes that compose visual representations of happiness in adolescents, while using an innovative qualitative methodology centered on visual research. Methods: Applying the ‘draw-and-write’ technique, Portuguese adolescents were asked to ‘Draw happiness’, generating a visual data set of 330 drawings, coined hSquares. Results: By order of prevalence, the thematic analysis identified eight key themes: ‘people’, ‘hobbies’, ‘love’, ‘smile’, ‘sports’, ‘basic needs’, ‘inner harmony’, and ‘human rights and equality’. The findings highlight the significance of social contexts, such as family and peer relationships, as central to adolescents’ happiness, while also emphasizing the importance of self-selected activities. Visual representations associated with basic needs and human rights emerged as novel contributions to the literature. Differences emerged by age, with younger adolescents often depicting single themes, whereas older adolescents integrated multiple themes in their drawings. Conclusions: This study provides a visual complement to the rich textual conversation about happiness and demonstrates the potential of visual methodologies in psychological research. Full article

Urban environmental settings influence human psychological states, contributing to varying mental health outcomes. This study examines the relationships between objective environmental features and psychological states at a fine scale. Using a geo-enabled survey tool, we collected data on individuals’ perceptions of their immediate environment within their daily activity space on an urban university campus. The psychological assessment included emotional and affective states such as perceived stress, fatigue, and happiness. Objective environmental properties were derived from high-resolution imagery to analyze the association between environmental settings and psychological responses. The data were analyzed using Spearman’s correlation, moderated multiple regression, and partial correlation networks. Our findings revealed that beneficial psychological states were positively associated with the quantity of natural elements in the immediate environment such as trees, water, and grass. Conversely, negative psychological states were positively associated with barren areas, parking lots, buildings, and artificial surfaces. These relationships were not significantly moderated by gender or ethnicity in our experiment. The interconnections of psychological states show distinct patterns in three different environmental settings, which are a mostly green environment, a mixed environment with green and artificial elements, and a mostly artificial environment. A difference in such interconnections between males and females has been observed. These results highlight the complex interplay between environmental features and mental state networks. Full article

Background/Objective: While positive emotions enhance productivity, little is known about whether income inequality will decrease if low-income individuals become happier. Methods: Relying on data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2018 and a regression-based decomposition method, this study investigates the contribution of happiness gap to income inequality. Results: The results show that a 1% increase in happiness leads to a 0.064–0.124% increase in income. This study employs average daily sunshine hours as an instrumental variable for happiness. The results from the two-stage least squares estimation also support the conclusion that an increase in happiness can lead to higher income. The decomposition results show that the happiness gap increases income inequality, although its contribution has decreased between 2010 and 2018. This positive effect is attributed to gaps in physical health and spare time devoted to learning. More precisely, happiness improves physical health among the upper-middle-income group and promotes spare time devoted to learning in the high-income group. Conversely, happiness narrows income inequality by reducing psychological stress in the low-income group. Conclusions: The results suggest that the enhancement of residents’ sense of acquisition, satisfaction and happiness, especially among the low-income group, thereby reducing income inequality. Full article

In recent years, the role of flourishing in mental health has gained growing recognition, making the establishment of psychometrically and culturally validated instruments crucial for advancing theory and practice. The aim of this study is twofold: first, to adapt the Multidimensional Flourishing Scale for use in Turkey and investigate its psychometric properties; second, to explore the interrelationships between indicators of flourishing and psychological distress symptoms using network analysis. A total of 529 undergraduate students, comprising 316 females (59.7%) and 213 males (40.3%), with a mean age of 21.65 years (SD = 1.67), participated in the study. The Multidimensional Flourishing Scale, the Flourishing Scale, and the Kessler Distress Scale (K10) were utilized for data collection. Confirmatory factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and the EBICglasso algorithm for network analyses were performed. The findings revealed that the Turkish version of the Multidimensional Flourishing Scale demonstrated a three-dimensional structure consistent with its original version, with satisfactory psychometric properties, including structural and convergent validity as well as reliability. Domain-level network analysis demonstrated that psychological well-being emerged as the most central node within the network, closely followed by psychological distress. Additionally, psychological distress was negatively associated with all domains of flourishing. At the item level, two symptoms of psychological distress, feeling depressed and feeling restless or fidgety, as well as three indicators of flourishing, feeling positive, feeling happy, and perceiving life as full of meaning, emerged as the most central nodes. These findings provide valuable insights into the central features of flourishing and psychological distress, which could potentially guide clinical practice. Further discussion and implications are elaborated upon in the study. Full article

The study examines how design quality, indoor air quality, and energy efficiency affect customer satisfaction in eco-friendly houses in Shanghai, China. Further, it examines how environmental awareness mediates community participation and resident satisfaction. A stratified sampling technique is used to collect the data from 742 eligible respondents in public and private eco-residential complexes. The results show that design, air quality, and energy efficiency improve customer satisfaction. At the same time, community engagement partially mediates these correlations, stressing the importance of social cohesion in enhancing residential area quality. Environmental awareness moderated the effects and boosted the happiness benefits of energy efficiency and indoor air quality. This research uses a comprehensive framework that includes psychological, environmental, and social components to make it stand out. Instead of studying green housing benefits in general, it accomplishes this inside China’s urban sustainability program. The results help policymakers, urban planners, and housing authorities make megacity green housing more desirable and livable. Full article

Background: The effectiveness of treatment depends on recognizing the needs and limitations of patients. Hope is a personal resource that facilitates the treatment and recovery process. Dispositional hope encompasses goal-directed action, whereas perceived hope lacks reference to specific content or behavior. This study examined which construct is more strongly related to psychological, physical, and emotional health. Perceived hope requires a new tool for measurement. Adaptation to the Polish cultural context is the second goal of this research. Methods: Data were collected in the international online study Barometer of Hope (n = 1608). Adult participants completed the PSH, ADHS, and a battery of self-report questionnaires assessing several key well-being outcomes. Results: Perceived hope appears to be a more salient construct related to psychological health than dispositional hope, although both aspects of hope demonstrate similar associations with physical health. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the hypothesized one-factor structure of the Polish version of the Perceived Hope Scale (PHS-PL), indicating high internal consistency as well as strong convergent and discriminant validity. The PHS-PL showed positive correlations with optimism, life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and dispositional hope, and negative correlations with depression/anxiety, loneliness, and negative affect. Additionally, perceived hope was negatively associated with the likelihood of a crisis scenario and positively associated with the likelihood of a flourishing scenario. Conclusions: Our findings confirm that hope is a health-enhancing resource. The PHS is a simple, short, culturally universal method that directly measures hope and can also be successfully used by non-psychologists, such as nurses, physicians, and caregivers. Full article

Self-esteem is a key topic in psychology and health research. It influences well-being, happiness, and even medicine. However, existing studies on self-esteem have yielded conflicting results, suggesting that a global consensus remains elusive. This study examines how demographic and socioeconomic factors influence self-esteem in Japan. We analyzed panel data sampled from the entire Japanese population, with separate estimates performed for marital status and gender to account for potential differences in the impact of these factors. Using a Bayesian panel logit model with the Markov chain Monte Carlo method and the ancillarity–sufficiency interweaving strategy for efficient estimation, we found similarities and differences compared with studies from other countries. Furthermore, when comparing the overall data with data stratified by marital status and gender, we observed significant differences in how these factors influenced self-esteem, even among the same individuals. These findings underscore the importance of considering such variations when incorporating self-esteem into medical and healthcare contexts. Full article

Within a stress-and-coping theory of forgiveness, two dimensions of forgiveness have been hypothesized—decisional forgiveness (DF) and emotional forgiveness (EF). Each is theorized to have different impacts on different dimensions of well-being—psychological, spiritual (or religious), social, volitional, and physical. A scoping review was performed to explore the associations of each dimension of forgiveness with each dimension of well-being. A total of k = 30 articles met the criteria for inclusion, and estimates of the association between DF and/or EF with one or more indicators of well-being were extracted. Both dimensions of forgiveness were positively linked to all dimensions of well-being, except that there were too few studies on physical well-being (e.g., self-rated physical health) to analyze. DF was generally more strongly related to indicators of spiritual well-being (e.g., faith maturity), psychological well-being (e.g., happiness), and volitional well-being (e.g., conciliatory behavior) than EF, whereas the inverse was observed for social well-being (e.g., marital satisfaction). However, because most studies were cross-sectional, firm conclusions about the associations of both DF and EF with well-being were limited by a paucity of robust studies. Suggestions to guide future research are provided, including the need for more rigorous longitudinal research and better evidence-based theorizing. Full article

Background/Objectives: Adolescence is a sensitive period of development marked by significant changes. The quality of life (QoL) of adolescents with atopic dermatitis (AD) can be substantially impacted by the disease. The chronic nature of AD is particularly significant: due to recurring (relapsing) skin lesions, adolescents are likely exposed to greater stress and depressive symptoms than those experiencing transient or one-time symptoms. Aesthetic and functional AD skin lesions during adolescence lead to reduced happiness, high stress and depression. Methods: In this review, we wanted to present the current knowledge on mental health, psychological features and psychiatric comorbidity of adolescents with AD, based on the previous studies/research on this topic presented in the PubMed database. Results: Previous studies have confirmed that sleep disturbances, behavioral disorders, internalizing profiles, depression and anxiety, stress symptoms and suicidality represent the most prevalent psychiatric comorbidities and psychological features in adolescents with AD. According to research data, adolescents with AD also reported a tendency toward feelings of sadness and hopelessness, and even suicidal thoughts and attempts. The relationship between sleep disturbances, psychiatric disorders, and suicidality in adolescents with AD is complex and multifaceted. Conclusions: Adequate social competencies are essential for healthy mental development, as their impairments may be associated with psychological alterations or psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence that potentially persist into adulthood. These findings highlight the need for continuous psychological evaluation and the implementation of intervention programs from an early age. Psychological interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, accompanied by psychopharmaceuticals, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (when indicated), seem to be the most beneficial treatment options in AD patients who have the most frequent psychiatric comorbidities: depression and anxiety. Full article

Given the importance of youth mental health for public policy, it is crucial to involve young people directly in participatory research to investigate their views and translate their demands into concrete actions. The aim of the study was to define the concept of mental wellbeing as perceived by a group of adolescent and young adult patients in two large hospitals in northwestern Italy and to find out, together with them, what institutions can do to promote youth wellbeing. Thirty-nine participants (13–25 years old, 90% female), divided into four groups, took part in a Photovoice workshop. Individual interviews were conducted with 21 participants and the transcripts were thematically analyzed. The photos were categorized into five themes: nature, traveling, passions and leisure, relationships, and animals. The definition of mental wellbeing can be traced back to eight themes: sharing experiences and emotions with others, calm and tranquility, personal fulfilment, sense of belonging, pleasant physical sensations, freedom and discovery, involvement and commitment, and happiness. The key recommendations for promoting mental wellbeing were providing information about mental health, tackling the stigma of mental illness, and providing psychological support in school and health services. The implications of these findings for policy makers involved in planning health services for young people are discussed. Full article

This study contributes to the understanding and promotion of mental health among sexual minority college students by examining a comprehensive range of mental health outcomes, including psychological distress and indicators of well-being. Using survey data from 521 students at a US state university, we applied the minority stress model and the minority resilience model, while also considering the minority mental health paradox, to compare mental health outcomes between sexual minority and heterosexual students. Our findings indicate that sexual minority students report higher levels of depression, anxiety, and self-harming behaviors compared to their heterosexual peers. Additionally, they score lower on measures of positive mental health and well-being, including inner peace, environmental mastery, happiness, life satisfaction, life purpose, self-perceived health, and fulfilling relationships. We further found that sexual minority students exhibit lower resilience, largely due to insecurities related to safety, food, and housing. These findings underscore the need for targeted programs and services to support the well-being of sexual minority students and foster healthier college environments. Full article

Background: The present research seeks to understand the impact of emotional intelligence on the psychological well-being of young graduates Well-being is closely linked to happiness and life satisfaction and occurs when individuals possess adequate psychological, social, and physical resources to manage life’s challenges. Emotional Intelligence, defined as the ability to recognize, understand, and regulate emotions, has been identified as a key factor influencing psychological well-being. Research highlights that individuals with higher emotional intelligence tend to experience greater life satisfaction, lower stress levels, and improved mental health. However, the specific impact of emotional intelligence on the psychological well-being of young graduates remains underexplored, particularly in the Portuguese context, making this study highly relevant. Methods:To investigate this impact, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of 209 young graduates in Portugal, which included emotional intelligence and psychological well-being items and a multiple regression model was used. Results: the results obtained indicate that emotional intelligence has a statistically significant influence on psychological well-being, where young people with higher levels of emotional intelligence showed higher levels of psychological well-being. Regarding age and sex, our data did not show a statistically significant relationship with emotional intelligence or psychological well-being. Conclusions: In summary, this study confirmed that young people with greater ability to manage their own emotions are more likely to experience higher psychological well-being. Full article

This study explores the passengers’ accessibility dilemma in Valparaíso, Chile, through field observations and laboratory experiments. The aim is to investigate the accessibility in metro stations based on the users’ emotional experience. Perceptions were reported through the emotions of passengers according to a circumplex psychological model and an accessibility ranking. Passengers reported their emotions (e.g., stress, sadness, relaxation, and happiness) during different trip moments. Results indicate that rearranging train seats parallel to movement creates a more spacious aisle, enhancing mobility and evoking positive emotions such as happiness. However, an unexpected rise in sadness suggests that social dynamics may influence emotional responses, warranting further investigation. Overcrowding increases stress and sadness, emphasizing the need for capacity management to improve passengers’ emotional experiences. Field observations reveal that early journey stages, such as walking to the station or waiting on the platform, are associated with unpleasant experiences due to poor infrastructure and accessibility barriers. In contrast, train rides foster more positive emotions, credited to better accessibility onboard. Passenger dissatisfaction arises from issues such as elevator malfunctions, inconsistent train schedules, and inadequate station accessibility. This study could help to understand passenger behavior when the accessibility conditions of metro stations and their surroundings are changed. Further studies will expand the concept of emotions by considering social and psychological factors and explore different types of stations and their surroundings considering a larger sample size in laboratory experiments and field studies. Full article