Good for self or good for others? The well-being benefits of kindness in two cultures depend on how the kindness is framed

Effectiveness of 234 interventions to improve life satisfaction: A rapid systematic review

This rapid review evaluates interventions aimed at improving life satisfaction and aids policymakers, researchers, and practitioners by identifying research strengths, gaps, and future directions for life satisfaction research. Intervention inclusion criteria were: use of a control group; delivered in high-income OECD country; randomised control trials or quasi-experimental studies; published between Jan 2011-Oct 2023; English language; uses a validated life satisfaction outcome measure. Of 9520 search results across five academic databases and grey literature sources, a total of 189 studies with 234 intervention arms met criteria for inclusion. The six themes (18 total subthemes) identified were: Emotion-based activities (intrapersonal and interpersonal, n = 154); Didactic emotional development (n = 30); Health promotion (n = 31); Social media (n = 4); Music (n = 3); and Multi-component interventions (n = 12). Meta-analyses were possible in six subthemes and examined overall standardised mean differences (SMD) in life satisfaction from pre-to post-intervention between the intervention and control group. The review primarily identified intrapersonal (related to self) emotional activities as generally associated with small improvements in life satisfaction: mindfulness (SMD: 0.28 (95% Confidence Interval: 0.13, 0.42)), gratitude (0.19 (0.11, 0.27)) and therapy (0.33 (0.12, 0.53)). Additionally, meta-analysis revealed a moderate effect of emotional skills development training (SMD 0.50 (0.12, 0.88)) and a small effect of exercise (SMD: 0.33 (0.04, 0.62)) on life satisfaction. Subthemes with mixed evidence (i.e., some interventions were effective while others were not) included: positivity and prosocial activities, emotional regulation and resilience training, health promotion education, 'other' intrapersonal emotion-based activities which could not otherwise be categorised, and multi-component interventions. The findings of this rapid review offer comprehensive insight into effective interventions for improving life satisfaction as well as areas for further research.

Kindness Is the Language That the Deaf Can Hear and the Blind Can See: Kindness, Theory of Mind and Well-Being in Adolescents

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

This mixed-methods, cross-sectional study explored adolescent understandings of kindness, and interconnections amongst Theory of Mind (ToM; ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others), kindness, compassion, and social-psychological well-being components in 318 participants aged 10-18 (Mage = 14.58, SD = 2.31).

METHODS

Participants completed a battery of self-report measures and wrote responses to open-ended questions about kindness in different relational and situational contexts.

RESULTS

Most adolescents gave other-oriented, psychological definitions of kindness, increasing in detail with age. Content analysis revealed main themes of helping, followed by proactive support and respect, and differed according to the identity of the recipient (stranger, self, others), and situational context (home, school). Results showed significant positive correlations between perceptions of kindness and social (but not psychological) well-being, with gender and age differences. High levels of ToM related to high levels of perceived compassion and kindness for others, and the relations strengthened with age.

CONCLUSIONS

The results highlight implications for future research on adolescents' perceptions of prosociality, and kindness-based mental health interventions that promote social cognition and prosocial acts.

Untying the Text: Organizational Prosociality and Kindness

The scholarly field of organizational prosociality is experiencing a renewed interest, yet despite its long track record, researchers still disagree on the definitions of primary concepts. Two umbrella terms, prosocial behaviors and kindness, are particularly baffling, as they are defined similarly, at times used synonymously, yet the differences between them are unclear. Consequently, the field suffers from conceptual ambiguity, which hampers its development. In this brief critical paper, we provide a review of the definitions of prosocial behavior and kindness, in an attempt to semantically untie the text, unpack the context, and discuss the subtext that underlies these concepts. Our analysis suggests that the two concepts overlap in their emphasis on dispositions and actions that aim to promote the welfare of others. However, acts of kindness and prosocial behaviors differ in actors, their target recipients and scale. Acts of kindness are performed by an individual and directed at a person or a small group, while prosocial behaviors can be performed by a person or an organization, and can be directed at a person or a group, but may also be directed at a much larger entity: an organization, community, nation, or society at large.

Self-regulation and Tolerance for Uncertainty as Resources for the Subjective Well-being of Modern Youth: A Cross-cultural Aspect

The study of the socio-cultural specifics of subjective well-being, its determinants and resources are an important task of modern psychology. The authors present the results of an empirical study, the purpose of which is to identify the features of the relationship between conscious self-regulation and tolerance for uncertainty and subjective well-being in young people of different ethnic groups. The study involved 1435 respondents aged 18-35 from five regions of Russia (Karachay-Cherkess Republic, Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Republic of North Ossetia - Alania, Stavropol Territory, Moscow and the Moscow Region), belonging to the dominant ethnic groups in them. The design of the empirical study included an assessment of differences in indicators of subjective well-being, tolerance or intolerance for uncertainty and conscious self-regulation among various representatives of ethnocultural groups, as well as an analysis of the relationship between these indicators, in particular, using structural modeling. The results obtained confirm the influence of the cultural context of income on the level of subjective well-being. Less prosperous, as they consider themselves, are young people from ethnic groups where the socio-economic situation of the region does not provide opportunities for self-realization of the individual. The study has revealed two types of regulatory profiles: (1) a profile with a harmonious structure with a relatively pronounced general level of self-regulation, which is observed among the Russian respondents from Moscow and the Moscow region; and (2) a relatively accentuated profile, characteristic of Karachays, Circassians, Ossetians, and Russians (from the Stavropol Territory), expressed in the desire for a clear programming of their actions, their compliance with certain norms. It has been established that young people from the southern republics are less tolerant of uncertainty: they tend to solve problems in a situation of uncertainty in a ‘ready-made’ algorithm determined by traditions. Finally, the authors reveal the structure of relationships between the predictors of subjective well-being, which are presented in the form of models. The central place in these models belongs to conscious self-regulation and its basic cognitive-regulatory processes and personal-regulatory properties, which, both directly and indirectly, due to the mediator role of tolerance or intolerance for uncertainty, affect the subjective well-being of young people. The results of the study contribute to a deeper understanding of the ethno-regional specificity of the predictors of the subjective well-being of today’s youth and can serve as a basis for assisting in constructing interaction with representatives of other cultures and developing strategies for actively overcoming difficulties in a situation of uncertainty.

The effects of gratitude and kindness on life satisfaction, positive emotions, negative emotions, and COVID-19 anxiety: An online pilot experimental study

The continuous surge in the number of confirmed diagnoses and fatalities associated with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused debilitating economic, educational, social, and psychological issues. However, little is known about how psychological interventions may boost well-being outcomes amid the pandemic. This research addresses this gap by examining the effects of gratitude and kindness interventions on life satisfaction, positive emotions, negative emotions, and COVID-19 anxiety via an online pilot experimental study. A 3-week online pilot experiment was implemented among 107 Filipino undergraduate students (M = 20.27; SD = 1.10). These participants were randomly assigned to kindness (n = 37), gratitude (n = 32), and control (n = 38) conditions. The results showed that there were significant differences on positive emotions when controlling for the baseline well-being, gratitude, and kindness scores across all conditions (i.e., gratitude, kindness, and control). Participants assigned in the gratitude and kindness conditions had significantly higher scores on positive emotions than those in the control condition. The findings point to the emotional benefits associated with promoting gratitude and kindness during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research contributes to scarce literature on the applicability of well-being interventions in non-Western cultural contexts.

Cultural Differences in the Hedonic Rewards of Recalling Kindness: Priming Cultural Identity with Language

Recent theory suggests that members of interdependent (collectivist) cultures prioritize in-group happiness, whereas members of independent (individualist) cultures prioritize personal happiness (Uchida et al. Journal of Happiness Studies, 5(3), 223–239 Uchida et al., 2004). Thus, the well-being of friends and family may contribute more to the emotional experience of individuals with collectivist rather than individualist identities. We tested this hypothesis by asking participants to recall a kind act they had done to benefit either close others (e.g., family members) or distant others (e.g., strangers). Study 1 primed collectivist and individualist cultural identities by asking bicultural undergraduates (N = 357) from Hong Kong to recall kindnesses towards close versus distant others in both English and Chinese, while Study 2 compared university students in the USA (n = 106) and Hong Kong (n = 93). In Study 1, after being primed with the Chinese language (but not after being primed with English), participants reported significantly improved affect valence after recalling kind acts towards friends and family than after recalling kind acts towards strangers. Extending this result, in Study 2, respondents from Hong Kong (but not the USA) who recalled kind acts towards friends and family showed higher positive affect than those who recalled kind acts towards strangers. These findings suggest that people with collectivist cultural identities may have relatively more positive and less negative emotional experiences when they focus on prosocial interactions with close rather than weak ties.

Development of the Polish-Language Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale and Its Further Validation

This article presents four studies aimed at developing a Polish-language version of the newest measure of life satisfaction, i.e., the English-language Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale (RLSS), and efforts towards its further validation. The pre-final Polish version of the RLSS (RLSS-PL) established in Study 1 was subsequently investigated in three online validation studies. In these studies, we replicated the findings obtained by the authors of the original RLSS regarding the unidimensionality of RLSS-PL and its high internal consistency. We also determined the correlations between the RLSS-PL and other measures including life satisfaction, affect balance, positive and negative affect, psychological well-being, subjective happiness, personality traits, values, socially desirable responding, awareness of the research hypothesis, and demographic characteristics. Further validation of the RLSS-PL involved our establishing correlations between the RLSS-PL and previously unanalyzed psychological constructs such as social and emotional well-being, gratitude, self-esteem, positive orientation, and mindfulness. In addition, we have determined the test-retest stability of the RLSS-PL over three-month and six-month intervals. The findings provided evidence that the RLSS-PL is a unidimensional, valid, reliable, and stable measure of life satisfaction in reference to the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS).