the psychology of esports a systematic literature review

The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review

Affiliations.

1 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Izabella utca 46, Budapest, 1064, Hungary.
2 Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
3 International Gaming Research Unit, Psychology Department, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.
4 Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Izabella utca 46, Budapest, 1064, Hungary. [email protected].
PMID: 29508260
DOI: 10.1007/s10899-018-9763-1

Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators. These findings draw attention to the new research field of professional video game playing and provides some preliminary insight into the psychology of esports players. The paper also examines the similarities between esport players and professional gamblers (and more specifically poker players). It is suggested that future research should focus on esport players' psychological vulnerability because some studies have begun to investigate the difference between problematic and professional gambling and this might provide insights into whether the playing of esports could also be potentially problematic for some players.

Keywords: Competitive video gaming; Esport; Gambling; Gaming motivations; Poker; Professional video gaming; Video games.

Publication types

Systematic Review
Behavior, Addictive / psychology*
Competitive Behavior
Gambling / psychology*
Internal-External Control*
Video Games / psychology*

Grants and funding

K111938/Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office
KKP126835/Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office
CA16207/Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, COST Action

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01-06-2019 | Review Paper

The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors: Fanni Bányai, Mark D. Griffiths, Orsolya Király, Zsolt Demetrovics

Published in: Journal of Gambling Studies | Issue 2/2019

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The psychology of esports : a systematic literature review / Fanni Bányai... [et al.]

Bányai, Fanni

Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of ‘esports’ (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators. These findings draw attention to the new research field of professional video game playing and provides some preliminary insight into the psychology of esports players. The paper also examines the similarities between esport players and professional gamblers (and more specifically poker players). It is suggested that future research should focus on esport players’ psychological vulnerability because some studies have begun to investigate the difference between problematic and professional gambling and this might provide insights into whether the playing of esports could also be potentially problematic for some players.

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IN: Journal of gambling studies, 2019, vol. 35, pp. 351-365.
Comparative studies
Sports betting
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The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review

Summary ( 3 min read), introduction.

Playing video games has become one of the most popular recreational activities, not just among children and adolescents, but also among adults too (Entertainment Software Association 2017).
In summary, according to these definitions and descriptions, esports are alternate sports, and a special way of using video games and engaging in gameplay (Adamus 2012) .
The second criterion concerns institutional stability, which means esport requires centralized rules for regulation and stabilization to be recognized as a sport, and not just viewed as a juvenile recreation activity (Jenny et al. 2016) .
Many researchers have examined the motivations of gamers, and even if the theoretical basis and the examined video game genres are different, some general and common motivational patterns have been found according to various empirical studies carried out.
Furthermore, there are no systematic reviews of the psychological literature to date.
The present study aimed to collate and review all the empirical studies concerning esport from a psychological perspective published between 2000 and 2017.
Given that competitive gaming only started to occur after videogames could be played online and against other people, the year 2000 was chosen as a start date for the search because the playing of videogames competitively did not exist prior to this date.
The data collection included all studies published between January 2000 to July 2017.
The following keywords were used in the respective search engines: 'esport video gam*'; 'professional gam*'; 'pro gam*'; 'competitive video gam*'; 'esport competitive video gam*'; 'sport video gam*' and 'professional video gam*'.
Based on the inclusion criteria (i.e., an empirical study containing new primary data and published in a peer reviewed journal in the English language), a total of 22 papers were excluded because they were either non-empirical (n=11), were published in conference proceedings or student theses (n=8), or were not specifically focused on esport (n=3).

Becoming an esport player

In a study by Seo (2016) , the author focused on different perspectives of esport definition, and examined whether esport was fun or work (or neither) by attending esports tournaments in a number of countries and via in-depth interviews with 10 professional eSports players.
Seo (2016) characterized professional esport playing as a serious leisure activity, following Stebbins' (1982) definition.
When players gain a more developed competency, they experience the enjoyment of the gaming itself again (achieving stage).
They 'lose' the glory and satisfaction they experienced earlier (and enter the slumping stage) before having to recover (recovering stage).
The authors drew attention to the motivational patterns that change during the development of an esport player, highlighting the fact that esport players use these particular video games differently from a casual gamer.

The characteristics of esport players

A recent study by (Himmelstein et al. 2017 ) interviewing five esport players identified the mental skills and techniques used by esport players in achieving optimal performance in a highly competitive gaming environment.
The stronger motivations of spending time on esport playing were competition, peer pressure, and skill building for actual playing of sport.
Compared to traditional sport behavior involvement, the study explored similarities between esport and traditional sport consumption (i.e., game attendance, game participation, sports viewership, sports readership, sports listenership, online usage specific to sports, and purchase of team merchandise).
The competition, challenge, and escapism motivations were identified as the need gratifications obtained through esport.

Motivations of esport spectators

As noted above, esport not only includes players, but also includes organizers and sponsors of esport championships, esports commentators, and the viewing esports audience (Adamus 2012; Jenny et al. 2016; Jonasson and Thiborg 2010) .
Lee, An, and Lee (2014) examined the characteristics of 103 esport spectators, who attended the 2013 League of Legends World Championship Finals.
Findings demonstrated that esport viewers watched professional gaming because they enjoyed the drama that occurred during esport matches, as well as the recreation, game commentary, and skills displayed by the professional gamers.
Furthermore, team attachment and game commentary strongly contributed to the satisfaction of esport viewing.
From a different perspective, Hamari and Sjöblom (2017) surveyed 888 esport viewers and investigated esport consumers' motivations, to better understand how and why they used this type of media to satisfy their needs based on uses and gratifications theory (Katz et al. 1973) .
The present review aimed to review all empirical studies examining the psychology of esports, and to draw attention to a new field of video game research.
These studies not only provided data about why professional gamers act in such competitive ways, but also showed that becoming a professional esport player appears to be similar to the process of becoming a professional athlete in any given sport.
The playing activity becomes a part of working life, and can negatively affect the concept of playing as free activity.
Borrowing from the perspective of problematic gambling, further esport research could focus on the fact that professional video game players can also be affected by problematic use due to the level of stress they have to face during practices and competitions.
In addition to the increasing popularity and attraction of esport, and the psychology of video gaming more generally, these phenomena are often framed as problematic, because of the lack of physical activity and its sedentary nature (van Hilvoorde 2016 ; van Hilvoorde and Pot 2016) or the intensive, excessive use (Griffiths 2017) .
There is a paucity of empirical data and further research is needed before any definitive conclusions can be made concerning the psychology of esports.
To earn the 'sport-status,' esports need to be accepted as a sport worldwide ( van Hilvoorde and Pot 2016; Witkowski 2012 Witkowski , 2009)) , and is already under consideration in about 40 countries (International e-Sports Federation 2017).
Examining the phenomenon of esport could reduce the stigma that some professional gamers may face (individuals, teams, and staff, including coaches, managers), and also identify and help overcome any potential difficulties (e.g., the process of becoming a professional player, coping with stress during training and/or matches, problematic video game use).

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Figures ( 1 )

Table 1. Summary table of esport focused psychological studies

Content maybe subject to copyright Report

the psychology of esports a systematic literature review

513 citations

270 citations

93 citations

75 citations

67 citations

View 5 citation excerpts

Cites background from "The Psychology of Esports: A System..."

... In light of the growing attention among scholars on gamingdisorder, intensive and excessive videogame use among esport gamers raise interesting questions about the nature of addiction [1,16,23,24]. ...

... , money, fame) in becoming esport gamers [1]. ...

... , need of tension, experiencing new, exciting) [1]. ...

... Increasing numbers of gamers now see video game playing as an opportunity to make a financial living that could potentially change players' gaming motivations [1,16]. ...

... Esports as professional (competitive) gaming started to gain prominence in the early 2000s [1]. ...

14,963 citations

View 2 reference excerpts

"The Psychology of Esports: A System..." refers methods in this paper

... …(2017) USA Five esport players Semi-structured interviews with competitive League of Legend players Interview analysis based on the inductive and deductive content analysis (Elo and Kyngäs 2008) To identify the mental skills and possible obstacles of esport players to achieve better performance. ...

... (2017) USA Five esport players Semi-structured interviews with competitive League of Legend players Interview analysis based on the inductive and deductive content analysis (Elo and Kyngäs 2008) To identify the mental skills and possible obstacles of esport players to achieve better performance. ...

13,996 citations

View 1 reference excerpt

"The Psychology of Esports: A System..." refers background in this paper

... Building on the work of Caillois (2001), Brock (2017) argued that esport could lead to the pursuit of extrinsic rewards over intrinsic ones by playing video games (Ryan and Deci 2000; Ryan et al. 2006). ...

2,900 citations

... Similarly to Seo (2016), Kim and Thomas (2015) explored the process how a video game player becomes an esport player utilizing activity theory (Engeström 1993, 1999; Engeström et al. 1999). ...

2,522 citations

2,466 citations

Related Papers (5)

Frequently asked questions (14), q1. what contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "the psychology of esports: a systematic literature review" .

The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. These findings draw attention to the new research field of professional video game playing and provides some preliminary insight into the psychology of esports players. The paper also examines the similarities between esport players and professional gamblers ( and more specifically poker players ). It is suggested that future research should focus on esport players ’ psychological vulnerability because some studies have begun to investigate the difference between problematic and professional gambling and this might provide insights into whether the playing of esports could also be potentially problematic for some players.

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "The psychology of esports: a systematic literature review" ?

The present review systematically collated all the published peer-reviewed empirical studies concerning the psychology of esport players, to draw attention to the topic to academics and researchers in an emerging field of gaming activity, and to encourage future empirical studies in the field of sport psychology. However, there is a paucity of empirical data and further research is needed before any definitive conclusions can be made concerning the psychology of esports. Regarding future research directions, further comparison and evaluation of sports and esport is needed, developing the similarities and the differences between such activities. Accepting esport as a genuine sport and the emerging popularity of this activity could lead future empirical studies to applying the tools and methodologies of sport psychology in their design.

Q3. What are the main motivations of MMORPG players?

Among the motivations for playing were achievement motivations (advancement, mechanics, competition), social motivations (socializing, relationship, teamwork), and immersion factors (discovery, role-playing, customization, escapism).

Q4. What is the popular genre in esports?

Although the FPS and the RTS genres have retained their popularity, the new MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games have become the most popular genre in esports.

Q5. What are the important elements underlying gaming motivations?

For instance, Vorderer and his colleagues (Vorderer 2000; Vorderer et al. 2003) found that the most essential elements underlying gaming motivations are interactivity and competition.

Q6. What are the common sports consumption elements among esport players?

However in-game participation, radio listenership, and team merchandise purchase were less common among esport players than traditional sport players.

Q7. What is the purpose of the present review?

The present review aimed to review all empirical studies examining the psychology of esports, and to draw attention to a new field of video game research.

Q8. What is the popular recreational activity in video games?

Playing video games has become one of the most popular recreational activities, not just among children and adolescents, but also among adults too (Entertainment Software Association 2017).

Q9. What is the effect of novelty on esport viewing?

novelty (i.e., enjoyment of seeing new players and teams on the sport scene) had a moderate association with esport consumption, but the enjoyment of aggression (i.e., witnessing aggressive/hostile behavior by the players), escapism (i.e., using media to forget/avoid everyday problems), and acquiring the knowledge (i.e., learning about players and teams, collect information, learn new skills) positively influenced the frequency of esport spectating.

Q10. How many papers were excluded from the literature review?

based on the inclusion criteria (i.e., an empirical study containing new primary data and published in a peer reviewed journal in the English language), a total of 22 papers were excluded because they were either non-empirical (n=11), were published in conference proceedings or student theses (n=8), or were not specifically focused on esport (n=3).

Q11. What is the main argument of Brock (2017)?

Building on the work of Caillois (2001), Brock (2017) argued that esport could lead to the pursuit of extrinsic rewards over intrinsic ones by playing video games (Ryan and Deci 2000; Ryan et al. 2006).

Q12. What is the meaning of "Playing video games in the higher stages of this model"?

This means that playing video games in the higher stages of this model are considered as work (extrinsic motivations) rather than leisure (intrinsic motivations).

Q13. What does Caillois cite as the main argument for esport?

According to previous game studies, Caillois (2001) argues that competitive gaming in general has a negative impact on people and society when gaming engaged in as a free activity becomes a work activity.

Q14. What were the main goals of Seo’s study?

Seo’s (2016) research goals were threefold, to explore: (i) the elements of esport consumption that make the activity attractive to a career of a professional esport player, (ii) the reasons why esport players want to pursue such a career opportunity, and (iii) how players progress through the identity transformation to aquire a professional gamer identity.

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The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review.

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Demetrovics Z 1
Griffiths MD 2

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Demetrovics Z | 0000-0001-5604-7551
Bányai F | 0000-0003-4911-2399

Journal of Gambling Studies , 01 Jun 2019 , 35(2): 351-365 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-018-9763-1 PMID: 29508260

Abstract

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References

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PMC10361539

Health Benefits of Esports: A Systematic Review Comparing the Cardiovascular and Mental Health Impacts of Esports

Kofi d seffah.

1 Internal Medicine, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology, Fairfield, USA

2 Internal Medicine, Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, Athens, USA

Korlos Salib

3 General Practice, El Demerdash Hospital, Cairo, EGY

Lana Dardari

Purva dahat.

4 Medicine, St. Martinus University Faculty of Medicine, Willemstad, CUW

Stacy Toriola

5 Pathology, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology, Fairfield, USA

Travis Satnarine

6 Pediatrics, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology, Fairfield, USA

Zareen Zohara

Ademiniyi adelekun.

7 Family Medicine, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology, Fairfield, USA

Areeg Ahmed

8 Internal Medicine, California Institute of Neuroscience, Thousand Oaks, USA

Sai Dheeraj Gutlapalli

9 Internal Medicine, Richmond University Medical Center Affiliated with Mount Sinai Health System and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA

10 Internal Medicine Clinical Research, California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology, Fairfield, USA

Deepkumar Patel

Safeera khan.

Sports all over the world are celebrated and embraced as an indicator of triumph of youth and the human experience. Esports have increasingly come to be associated with an industry likened to traditional sports. Professional gamers who continuously define new standards in the areas of gaming, entertainment, and esports have emerged. This systematic review sought to find out the extent to which these virtual sports affect cardiovascular and mental health, both positively and negatively, and if this is comparable to traditional sports to any degree. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses, we reviewed journals and full-text articles that addressed the topic with keywords, such as esports, cardiovascular, mental health, gaming, and virtual reality. Six articles were selected after quality assessment. In summary, rehabilitative medicine currently benefits the most from this entertainment platform, with comparable findings in the positive and negative effects on mental health. Cardiovascular health appears to benefit from esports, with an increase in physical activity with use, but is not at the level of replacing traditional sports. Unlike as seen with traditional sports, addiction to gaming appears to be a steadily emerging issue that mental health practitioners will, in the not-so-distant future, have to lay ground rules for if esports are to be incorporated in everyday affairs.

Introduction and background

Electronic sports (esports) are gamified interactions propelled by electronic modules in which participants interact through a computer intermediary [ 1 ]. These interactions may be collaborative or competitive. When individuals or groups compete against one another, with a defined set of rules, we deem this a game. Games are played, developed, and won with tactics and strategies, which increase cognitive flexibility [ 2 ]. Collaborative sports, such as rowing, hockey, and soccer, on the other hand, provide another unique set of social skills. Typically, concepts, such as fan bases, material rewards, fitness, and training styles, have been associated with traditional sports of all kinds. Today, like many collaborative and competitive endeavors around the world, esports is growing and gaining attention with viewership [ 3 ]. It has, over the years, come to be incorporated into sports festivals around the globe. Between 2018 and 2021, there were over 400 million viewers of esports worldwide, with viewership expected to continuously rise in the coming years. The pandemic is notably an enabler in the rise of this trend. It is predicted that the total earnings of players around the world from esports will exceed US$500 million by the end of 2023 [ 4 ].

Esports are reported to improve reflexes and eye-hand coordination, although data appear mixed [ 5 ]. Memory, attention, and awareness are noted to be enhanced by some of these games [ 6 ]. At the onset of the COVID era, esports provided a sense of community and engagement to players and participants, although this growth was accompanied by increased threat to cybersecurity and intellectual property [ 7 ]. As opposed to traditional sports, esports seem to come with unique drawbacks, with regard to health. Long-term users of video games report eye strain and a higher frequency of refractive errors [ 8 ]. Some games are associated with high stress levels and burnout. Video games may also disrupt sleep patterns [ 9 ].

This article takes note of the above information as it pertains to esports and video games. We note that there is a gap in knowledge with regard to esports and cardiovascular health. While other health modalities can boast of improving cardiovascular indices, it is hard to rule esports in or out in this regard. Do esports cause detriments to the cardiac function in the long run? Are there any benefits or advantages to cardiovascular morbidity or mortality when it comes to esports? Are effects purely user dependent? Moreover, we seek to find out the effects of esports on mental health. Much has been reported that is related to addiction, betting, depression, and anxiety. This paper seeks to find out if these devices are indeed tools that may be channeled to improve mental well-being or if they are a source of impending problems.

Reporting Guideline

This systematic review was written according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines [ 10 ].

Database and Search Strategy

Our search was initiated between February 12, 2023 and February 19, 2023. The following databases were used as a part of our search: PubMed, MedLine, PubMed Medical Subject Heading (MeSH), ResearchGate, ScienceDirect, and Science.gov . Keywords chosen for the search include "eSports," "health," "mental health," "cardiovascular health," "computer games," "video games," "virtual reality," and "exergames." In addition to the above keywords, the following was employed in the search using PubMed MeSH ((((("Health"[Mesh]) AND "Virtual Reality" [Mesh]) AND "Sports"[Mesh]) OR ( "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy"[Mesh] OR "Exergaming"[Mesh] )) OR ( "Exergaming/injuries"[Mesh] OR "Exergaming/physiology"[Mesh] OR "Exergaming/psychology"[Mesh] )) AND ( "Video Games/adverse effects"[Mesh] OR "Video Games/psychology"[Mesh] ). Searches were conducted with the help of Booleans operators AND, OR, in various search engines of the databases, limiting findings to papers written between 2017 and 2023. Table Table1 1 is a summary of our search strategies.

MeSH: Medical Subject Heading

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

We were interested in all individuals, regardless of age, who used a human-computer interface or an electronic game, to achieve both sport and non-sport endpoints. We believe that this also satisfactorily embraces the domain of esports, in being goal-oriented, either collaborative or competitive, with clearly set expectations. All individuals who patronize esports as users of video games or spectators, for any length of time or duration, for any reason, be it professional or recreational, were included in the population study. Studies selected were full texts, regardless of the study style or type. Assessing the extent to which esports can replace traditional sports by way of health benefits was the main outcome of interest. The health outcomes of esports against traditional sports, which generally involves whole-person involvement and more physicality, were investigated. More succinctly, the role of esports on the cardiovascular, mental, and overall health was compared to that of traditional sports. We were not interested in the degree of usage/patronage as much as the experience following usage and the impact on cardiac and mental health. Table Table2 2 further summarizes our criteria.

Screening of Articles

After obtaining articles based on the above criteria, two lead authors further narrowed them down based on the scope of the study. Conclusions, abstracts, titles, and method sections were reviewed at this phase. Duplicates were manually identified and deleted. The resultant selection was then subjected to quality assessment. Figure Figure1 demonstrates 1 demonstrates our screening process.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is cureus-0015-00000040705-i01.jpg

PRISMA: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

Quality Appraisal

Two independent investigators (the first and second authors) performed article selection, assessment, and analyses in each step. If there was a contradictory result regarding an article’s eligibility, its full text was reassessed by consensus within the group. A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) checklist was used in assessing both systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The Newcastle-Ottawa classification tool was used in assessing cross-sectional studies. The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) checklist was used in assessing case reports. Only studies with a quality appraisal of 60% and above were selected for the final evaluation. Table Table3 3 highlights the quality appraisal tools employed in this study.

AMSTAR: A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews; JBI: Joanna Briggs Institute

As this review was designed to be a mixed-methods study, we found it more pragmatic to work with a purely systematic review, without an additional meta-analysis. Studies in the area are largely observational, with little recourse to blinding, as this was noted by various research groups to be a limiting factor, nearly impossible or even unethical, in administering devices to individuals without at least a partial disclosure. This affected the study designs and outcomes, but this was not unexpected. A total of eight systematic reviews and meta-analyses were sampled in the selection phase. Of these, three were selected following quality assessment [ 11 - 13 ]. Table Table4 4 summarizes the quality appraisal process for the systematic reviews.

AMSTAR: A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews; PICO: population, intervention, control, and outcomes

A total of five cross-sectional studies were brought under review. Following the quality assessment, two articles remained for the review. Table Table5 5 summarizes the appraisal process for the cross-sectional studies.

*Demonstration of degree of approval per guidelines in the Newcastle-Ottawa classification tool

One report was reviewed using the JBI checklist and was accepted [ 16 ]. Table Table6 6 summarizes our findings per the checklist.

Source: Niedermoser et al. [ 16 ]

Table Table7 7 is a summary of articles selected for the final review in this publication. Categories were itemized as areas of interest in this paper, that is, cardiovascular and mental health. Findings were also summarized to reflect the areas of interest, often reflecting conclusions drawn by respective authors.

Esports and Cardiovascular Disease: Benefits

Increasingly, all over the world, esports is gaining popularity and momentum. Going further, some international sports events are introducing virtual tournaments as a part of their content [ 17 ]. A form of these sports, called exergames, aims to increase physical activity and promote cardiometabolic health [ 17 ]. Moreover, the use of wearable electronic devices has been associated with increased motivation for health-seeking behavior and cardiovascular health as a whole [ 18 ]. The awareness provided through electronic media remains vital, as amateur and professional gamers will have to incorporate traditional methods into their daily activities in order to obtain optimal outcomes [ 19 ]. In addition, the platforms that host these games are increasingly being used to promote awareness of healthy habits, including ergonomic tips and campaigns against smoking. Examples of gaming devices associated with improved health include motion sensing controllers, such as mats, boards, and gloves [ 20 ]. In addition, casual video games and even exergames have been identified as stress-reducing activities, overall, when used in the right manner [ 21 ]. Stress reduction is key in preventing adverse cardiovascular outcomes. Our studies show that virtual reality games, an increasingly popular platform for gaming, have the potential to promote physical activity based on the design of the game. Exercise capacity was noted to improve with virtual reality-guided training methods in one study. This was particularly true for those undergoing cardiac rehabilitation. The study went as far as noting improvements in total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein as a benefit of engaging in virtual sports [ 11 ]. The idea of rehabilitation was further buttressed by Sardi et al. [ 12 ], when addressing the role that virtual sports may play in mainstream health. Conclusively, both studies that tackled the domain on cardiovascular health and esports/virtual gaming noted improvement in physical activity as a clear benefit [ 11 , 12 ].

Esports and Cardiovascular Diseases: Harms

We maintain that the effects of gaming are both in-game and after-game. In-game systolic blood pressure and heart rates were considerably higher in gamers during play and could potentially be a trigger for adverse outcomes in patients with borderline or established heart diseases [ 22 ]. In contrast to traditional sports, esports is not associated with the expenditure of energy nor the metabolic benefits derived from the former [ 23 ]. Although, anecdotally, games like chess have been linked with the burning of calories, quoted at up to about 6000 calories a day [ 24 ], it is hard to tell whether the physical demands and long hours of training and decreased calorie intake in preparation for games contribute to these calorie losses or if these losses are purely from the intensity of a single bout. By contrast, sedentary lifestyles and physical inactivity, both associated with chess in particular and esports as a whole, are a leading risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality [ 25 , 26 ]. Our sampled studies highlighted the role of esports, consoles, and video games in promoting physical activity especially in the area of rehabilitation, including physical and cardiovascular [ 11 - 13 ]. It appears that the intent, design, and execution of these devices and software decide for the most part how far the cardiac gains or harms play out. Highlighting both harms and benefits to the heart, the verdict remains uncertain, as to whether or not to consider esports and virtual games as actual sports [ 27 ]. At this time, it would be premature to consider esports a suitable and complete substitute for traditional sports and exercise. Indeed, it is recommended that professional and amateur gamers incorporate regular physical activity in non-gaming mode/traditional activity in order to enhance their gameplay and promote their overall health [ 25 ].

Esports and Mental Health: Benefits

The virtual platform has been associated with stress relief, skill-building, improved resilience, improved attention and focus, and a reduction in risks of depression, anxiety, and related mental health disorders [ 11 - 13 ]. The role of esports in social connectedness and resilience was highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, when more engagement was fostered using these platforms worldwide [ 15 ]. However, many of these benefits may be viewed as side benefits while enjoying the game. Its role in rehabilitation, on the other hand, appears to require intentional design [ 12 ]. Moreover, the benefits appear more noticeable in controlled or supervised settings [ 28 ]. We will not discount the role of the Hawthorne effect in this finding. In addition, device use limitation may be associated with better outcomes in terms of the positives outlined above [ 16 , 28 ]. Overall, targeted use of esports for a specific domain of mental health may hold benefits comparable to those of traditional sports [ 29 ]. Other benefits worth highlighting include improved eye-hand coordination, spatial awareness, attention, and focus, depending on the game and in-game competencies [ 30 ]. As things stand, formal training methods are at the inchoate stage for professional gamers [ 30 ].

Esports and Mental Health: Harms

Addiction remains of great concern in the engagement of online sports. Even regular, non-professional gamers are at risk. Non-substance addiction has gained attention in medical circles and is of growing concern [ 16 ]. The elements driving these behaviors may largely be driven by tools incorporated into the software [ 14 ], although addiction in general has heritable features [ 31 ]. There appears to be a relationship between screen time and negative outcomes, such as eye strain, poor posture, sedentary lifestyle, anxiety, and depression [ 29 ]. It goes further. There is a negative correlation between device use and sleep duration, with more screen time yielding poorer sleep quality [ 32 ]. In addition, professional players are exposed to similar amounts of psychological stress as witnessed among traditional sportsmen [ 29 ]. It is interesting to note that the problems created by this new avenue of entertainment are solved by more established, old therapies [ 16 ].

Esports and Other Areas of Health

There is ample evidence to support the notion that esports benefit musculoskeletal health, rehabilitation, and recovery. They may serve as the stopgap in recovery and help stall frailty [ 11 - 13 ]. Cognitive benefits have also been underscored [ 13 ]. A professional esports player must however pay attention to musculoskeletal health, eye health, nutrition, and sleep and has to purposefully maintain social connectedness, lest run the risk of long-term decline with chronic illness [ 16 , 33 ]. Financial health is of great concern to those with addiction, who may have no guidance as to the demands of their ambition and what it takes to achieve the professional status [ 3 , 16 ].

The Future of Esports and Health

For a rapidly emerging international platform, esports may benefit from better regulations, for the sake of player health, cybersecurity, and the protection against marketers [ 4 ]. As more is understood about our behaviors around these sources of entertainment, health warnings and limits may be developed to curb non-substance addiction [ 14 , 16 ]. Beyond therapy and rehabilitation, more entertainment-directed games may be developed, engineered free of craving and addictiveness, as we master and understand the drivers of gambling and addiction that surround these devices [ 14 ].

Limitations

This study is a systematic review of the various components of cardiovascular and mental health importance related to esports. Nonetheless, it has limitations: First, no measurable extents of such findings are provided in this article. For this reason, we are unable to say emphatically to what extent the various findings play a role, what the interplay of these findings yields, and whether there are confounders to these findings. While some findings, such as improvement in physical activity and increased risk of non-substance addiction, have been serially replicated and hence may be deemed credible, other findings, such as effects on depression, share contrasting views that this article is ill equipped to address. Second, our paper did not address other domains of healthcare, besides mental and cardiovascular health. Third, we will not downplay the role of the Hawthorne effect in the few positives recorded in both the cardiovascular and mental health domains. Areas for further studies include the therapeutic role of virtual gaming on pulmonary and neurological health and development.

Conclusions

While producers of esports and gaming tools have the goal of marketing and selling their content, consumers remain exposed to varying degrees of cognitive stimulation, whose effects on other specific domains of health continue to be uncovered. We sought to highlight the role of esports in cardiovascular and mental health. We wanted to find out, objectively, if heart health stood to benefit long term from these devices and their content. We also sought to find out if mental health stood to gain from continued use of gaming devices. Our findings show that there are specific domains of rehabilitation and physical therapy that benefit from such device use. Targeted at recovery, esports serve as excellent tools of engagement in rehabilitative medicine. There appears to be more potential for therapeutics, granted that the right legislature, regulations, and funding are directed at this. Sadly, esports however are not a suitable substitute for traditional sports in the domain of cardiovascular health. Mental health shows comparable benefits from esports as with traditional sports. Professional gamers are exposed to the considerable risk of increased all-cause mortality by engaging in esports. Unfortunately, what constitutes "adequate safety measures" has not been universally agreed upon. Addiction prevention, eye health, hearing health, mental health, and cardiovascular health domains host only arbitrary rules and guidelines from the esports community. In conclusion, these devices are tools, and tools will remain as useful as we decide to make them. Moreover, although these devices and platforms have come to stay, the onus is on proponents and consumers to arm themselves and their dependents from the harms.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank the following individuals and organization for the tremendous support they offered in putting this work together. First, I am grateful to the team supervisor Dr. Safeera Khan, for her patience, guidance, and insightful feedback throughout the process. Her mentorship and expertise have shaped my approach to studies such as this one and have set me on the path of deeper learning. To my colleagues Korlos Salib, Lana Dardari, and Maher Taha, I say a big thank you for sharing your time and experience in this area, helping me overcome barriers that would otherwise have stalled the publication. To Purva Dahat, Stacy Toriola, and Travis Satnarine, I say a big thank you for the collaboration and fruitful discussions that shaped my approach in this paper and my understanding of the overall subject matter. I also would like to thank Zareen Zohara, Ademiniyi Adelekun, and Areeg Ahmed, who contributed to the article by proofreading my work several times and providing additional feedback when it was needed. This endeavor would not have been possible without them. Finally, the organization of countless meetings and beating deadlines may not have been possible without the persistence and patience of Areeg Ahmed, Sai Dheeraj Gutlapalli, and Deepkumar Patel, whom I am deeply grateful. I would also like to thank the NeuroCal Institute for taking the initiative to build this team of researchers, from which this article has been accomplished. I do wish them well in all their endeavors. Humbly, I remain the first author of this publication and will make data readily available upon request through [email protected]. Data are stored as database search findings and quality appraisal tables.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review

2018, Journal of gambling studies

Related Papers

Mark D Griffiths

Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators. These findings draw attention to the new research field of professional video game playing and provides some preliminary insight into the psychology of esports players. The paper also examines the similarities between esport players and professional gamblers (and more specifically poker players). It is suggested that future research should focus on esport play-ers' psychological vulnerability because some studies have begun to investigate the difference between problematic and professional gambling and this might provide insights into whether the playing of esports could also be potentially problematic for some players.

Behaviour & Information Technology

Joseph Macey , Henri Pirkkalainen

Contemporary digital technologies have facilitated practices related to games whereby users often produce and consume content for free. To date, research into consumer interactions has largely focused on in-game factors, however, the intention to both play the game and to make in-game purchases are influenced by outside factors, including game streams and game-centred communities. In particular, the growth of competitive gaming, known as esports, offers a new channel for consumer engagement. This research explores the potential for esports to be a significant factor in understanding both intentions to play and spend money on games. Our study draws from Motivations Scale of Sports Consumption to empirically investigate the relationship between esports spectating motivations and game consumption: Watching Intention, Gaming Intention, and Purchasing Intention. This survey uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to analyse data collected from a sample of video game players (n = 194). This research contributes empirical evidence of the relationship between esports spectating and game consumption, with the relationship between Watching Intention and Gaming Intention found to be particularly strong. Finally, while the MSSC is an adequate measure for esports spectating, additional aspects specific to esports require further investigation, consequently, there may be more optimal measures which can be developed. ARTICLE HISTORY

Joseph Macey

An established body of research exists in which playing video games has been associated with potentially problematic behaviours, such as gambling. An issue highlighted by the recent emergence of game-based gambling practices such as loot boxes, social network casinos, free-to-play game mechanics, and gambling using virtual goods and skins. This study investigates relationships between a range of gambling activities and the consumption of video games in general, and the newly emergent phenomenon of esports in particular. In addition, these practices are considered in relation to established measures assessing game addiction and problematic gambling. The study employs Partial Least Squares modelling to investigate data gathered via an international online survey (N = 613). Video game addiction was found to be negatively associated with offline gambling, online gambling, and problem gambling. Video game consumption had only small, positive association with video game-related gambling and problem gambling. Consumption of esports had small to moderate association with video game-related gambling, online gambling, and problem gambling. The primary finding of this study are that contemporary video games are not, in themselves, associated with increased potential for problematic gambling, indeed, the position that problem gaming and problem gambling are fundamentally connected is questioned.

Journal of Emerging Sport Studies

During recent years, while electronic sports (esports) has increasingly become a positive mainstream cultural phenomenon, it also may have several socioeconomic implications, such as the growth of esports betting. Much like betting in sport, betting on esports has become a prominent form of gambling. However, there is still a paucity of knowledge on the demographic characteristics of this gambling cohort, particularly in regard to its relationship to video game play and spectatorship. In the present study, past-year video gamers (N = 1368) completed an online survey. Survey questions inquired about their esports event spectating, video game play, and esports betting behaviours, as well as general demographic questions. Video gamers who bet on esports were a distinct cohort from their counterparts: younger, more likely to be male, lower frequency of video game play, higher frequency of esports spectatorship, and more likely to watch esports in a social setting (e.g., with others). By providing a background on gamers' behaviours this work contributes to the growing body of research into the dynamic profile of esports play, spectatorship, and gambling. Findings are reflective of the growing interrelation of gambling and gaming behaviours, a subject garnering increasing attention from governments, regulatory agencies, public health specialists and clinicians, and the related industries themselves.

New Media and Society

The parallel media related to sports, gaming and gambling are expanding, exemplified by the emergence of esports and game-related gambling (e.g. loot boxes, esports betting). The increasing convergence of these phenomena means it is essential to understand how they interact. Given the expanding consumer base of esports, it is important to know how individuals' backgrounds and consumption of game media may lead to esports betting. This study employs survey data (N = 1368) to investigate how demographics, alongside consumption of video games, esports and gambling can predict esports betting activity. Results reveal that both spectating esports and participation in general forms of gambling are associated with increased esports betting, no direct association was observed between the consumption of video games and esports betting. Findings suggest that while games may act as a vehicle for gambling content, highlighting the convergence of gaming and gambling, there is no intrinsic aspect which directly encourages gambling behaviours.

Giulia Sotero

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to investigate why do people spectate eSports on the internet. The authors define eSports (electronic sports) as "a form of sports where the primary aspects of the sport are facilitated by electronic systems; the input of players and teams as well as the output of the eSports system are mediated by human-computer interfaces." In more practical terms, eSports refer to competitive video gaming (broadcasted on the internet). Design/methodology/approach-The study employs the motivations scale for sports consumption which is one of the most widely applied measurement instruments for sports consumption in general. The questionnaire was designed and pre-tested before distributing to target respondents (n ¼ 888). The reliability and validity of the instrument both met the commonly accepted guidelines. The model was assessed first by examining its measurement model and then the structural model. Findings-The results indicate that escapism, acquiring knowledge about the games being played, novelty and eSports athlete aggressiveness were found to positively predict eSport spectating frequency. Originality/value-During recent years, eSports (electronic sports) and video game streaming have become rapidly growing forms of new media in the internet driven by the growing provenance of (online) games and online broadcasting technologies. Today, hundreds of millions of people spectate eSports. The present investigation presents a large study on gratification-related determinants of why people spectate eSports on the internet. Moreover, the study proposes a definition for eSports and further discusses how eSports can be seen as a form of sports.

Robin W Streppelhoff

The bibliography is intended to illustrate the state of research on different types of video games (e-sports and serious games) in connection with sport culture. For this purpose, scientific publications from sport-specific databases but also from databse portals of economics and education were put together when they appeared there in connection with "sports" or "e-sports". The data sets stem from the sport information portal SURF, SportDiscus, FIS Education and EconBiz. Due to multiple assignments, the majority of the 369 references included in this collection are "serious games" (192 entries), followed by "E-Sport" (161) and the chapter "Definitions and Influences" (59). In Germany, in 2018 there was a broad public discussion on e-sports and its relation to organized sport. Thus this development is described in more detail in the introduction than the area of serious games. It is intended to provide a brief insight into the scene and the social context with regard to organized sport. For this purpose, the genres of games are outlined and the public debate in the media, politics and organized sports presented.

Internet Research

Joseph Macey , Max Sjöblom

Purpose-Esports (electronic sports) are watched by hundreds of millions of people every year and many esports have overtaken large traditional sports in spectator numbers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate spectating differences between online spectating of esports and live attendance of esports events. This is done in order to further understand attendance behaviour for a cultural phenomenon that is primarily mediated through internet technologies, and to be able to predict behavioural patterns. Design/methodology/approach-This study employs the Motivation Scale for Sports Consumption to investigate the gratifications spectators derive from esports, both from attending tournaments physically and spectating online, in order to explore which factors may explain the esports spectating behaviour. The authors investigate how these gratifications lead into continued spectatorship online and offline, as well as the likelihood of recommending esports to others. The authors employ two data sets, one collected from online spectators (n ¼ 888), the other from live attendees (n ¼ 221). Findings-The results indicate that online spectators rate drama, acquisition of knowledge, appreciation of skill, novelty, aesthetics and enjoyment of aggression higher than live attendees. Correspondingly, social interaction and physical attractiveness were rated higher by live attendees. Vicarious achievement and physical attractiveness positively predicted intention to attend live sports events while vicarious achievement and novelty positively predicted future online consumption of esports. Finally, vicarious achievement and novelty positively predicted recommending esports to others. Originality/value-During the past years, esports has emerged as a new form of culture and entertainment, that is unique in comparison to other forms of entertainment, as it is almost fully reliant on computer-human interaction and the internet. This study offers one of the first attempts to compare online spectating and live attendance, in order to better understand the phenomenon and the consumers involved. As the growth of esports is predicted to continue in the coming years, further understanding of this phenomenon is pivotal for multiple stakeholder groups.

eSports Yearbook 2017/18

Ruth S. Contreras Espinosa , Bruno Duarte Abreu Freitas , Pedro Correia

Carina Assunção

The present study argues against the deterministic view that professional gaming should be constructed as a sport (Taylor, 2012; Voorhees, 2015). The stereotypical male gamer is examined against the user representations created for esports; i.e. athletic masculinity and geek technology user. How does this sit with individuals’ performance of gender, work and sport? Using a framework of game studies and science and technology studies, 10 females and males involved in esports were interviewed. Irrespective of gender, competition was a high motivation to develop skills in professional gaming. Individuals in esports view gaming as fun, first and foremost. They usually refer to their ‘day jobs’ and potential future careers derived from university studies. It was found that in general, those who have a past of practicing organised sports more readily accept the label of athlete. Discussions about the toxic environment in esports were explicit with female gamers but only implicit with male ones. Women in the lower ranks affirmed it is ubiquitous and two strategies to deal with it were mentioned; ignore and mute voice chat to silence toxic players, or confront and retaliate. Men implicitly spoke about hostility between competitors and the need to rapidly obtain skills to surpass them.

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Active Student Participation in Whole-School Interventions in Secondary School. A Systematic Literature Review

REVIEW ARTICLE
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Published: 04 May 2023
Volume 35 , article number 52 , ( 2023 )

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Sara Berti ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5238-1077 1 ,
Valentina Grazia 1 &
Luisa Molinari 1

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This review presents a reasoned synthesis of whole-school interventions seeking to improve the overall school environment by fostering active student participation (ASP) in school activities and decision-making processes. The aims are to describe the selected programs, assess their methodological quality, and analyze the activities soliciting ASP. Among the 205 publications initially provided by the literature search in the academic databases PsycINFO and Education Research Complete, 22 reports met the inclusion criteria of presenting whole-school interventions that solicit ASP in secondary schools, and were thus included in the review. Such publications referred to 13 different whole-school programs, whose implemented activities were distinguished on a 5-point scale of ASP levels, ranging from Very high ASP , when students were involved in a decision-making role, to Very low ASP , when students were the passive recipients of content provided by adults. This review contributes to the literature by proposing an organizing structure based on different levels of ASP, which provides clarity and a common ground for future studies on student participation. Overall, the in-depth description of activities offers a framework to researchers and practitioners for planning interventions aimed at improving the learning environment and contributing meaningfully to the far-reaching goal of encouraging student participation in school life.

The Role of School in Adolescents’ Identity Development. A Literature Review

Monique Verhoeven, Astrid M. G. Poorthuis & Monique Volman

Wellbeing in schools: what do students tell us?

Mary Ann Powell, Anne Graham, … Nadine Elizabeth White

Social support in schools and related outcomes for LGBTQ youth: a scoping review

Enoch Leung, Gabriela Kassel-Gomez, … Tara Flanagan

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Research in educational psychology is consistent in showing that the quality of the school environment largely affects student well-being. Indeed, students’ experiences of a supportive school context have a significant impact on positive behaviors, such as academic achievement (Brand et al., 2008 ; Hoy, 2012 ) and good relationships among students and between students and staff (Cohen et al., 2009 ; Thapa et al., 2013 ). Conversely, the poor quality of the learning environment predicts negative outcomes, such as substance use (Weatherson et al., 2018 ) or bullying (Låftman et al., 2017 ).

In view of this, schools need to face the challenge of implementing interventions aimed at changing and improving the learning environment in the direction of promoting positive behaviors and reducing negative outcomes. One of the most promising directions in this regard is based on the adoption of whole-school approaches whose key features are the focus on overall school systems instead of on specific problems (Bonell et al., 2018 ).

The literature on whole-school interventions is broad (see, for example, Charlton et al., 2021 , for an extensive review on whole-school interventions focused on school climate), but it suffers from two major gaps. First, it relies primarily on programs applicable to elementary schools, while studies on high school populations are rarer, presumably because of the multiple challenges derived from the implementation of programs in such complex contexts (Estrapala et al., 2021 ; Vancel et al., 2016 ). Second, despite the importance generally attributed to the active involvement of students in the programs, to our knowledge, no previous reviews have specifically investigated the degree and the characteristics of student participation in such interventions. To address these limitations, in this article, we present a systematic literature review on whole-school interventions carried out in secondary schools and based on programs that envisage students’ active participation and involvement.

Whole-School Interventions for Improving the Learning Environment

In educational research, some reviews and meta-analyses (Charlton et al., 2021 ; Merrell et al., 2008 ; Voight & Nation, 2016 ) have critically synthesized and discussed studies on school interventions aimed at improving the learning environment. These programs have considered different outcomes of improvement, ranging from a general focus on school climate dimensions—e.g., relational aspects, institutional organization, and safety—to more specific aspects, such as bullying, violence, or substance use. However, the degree of effectiveness of such programs remains controversial. For example, a meta-analysis by Ttofi et al. ( 2008 ) indicated that school-based bullying prevention programs were able to bring about positive results, while another meta-analysis on the same topic (Merrel et al., 2008 ) concluded that evidence in this direction was only modest.

More positive results concerning the effectiveness of interventions were reported by Allen ( 2010 ) with reference to programs conducted by means of a whole-school approach. In her literature overview of studies designed to reduce bullying and victimization, the author concluded that whole-school interventions generally showed at least marginal evidence of improvement. Despite these encouraging findings, the studies conducted with a whole-school approach in secondary education contexts were rare. Among these, a well-established framework of whole-school interventions mostly implemented in middle schools is the School-Wide Positive Behavior Support program (for reviews, see Gage et al., 2018 ; Noltemeyer et al., 2019 ), which is a multi-tiered framework engaging students, school staff, and families for the delivery of evidence-based behavioral support aligned to students’ needs (Horner et al., 2004 ). By and large, the study results in this framework are again promising in suggesting a connection between such programs and school improvement, although the evidence is generally moderate and only regards a few of the considered outcome measures.

The mixed or weak results reported in the cited reviews solicit further exploration of the specific characteristics of whole-school interventions. In particular, a major limitation of the literature is the lack of an in-depth analysis of the types of activities proposed to students in each program, especially as far as their direct involvement is concerned. Given the importance attributed to student engagement in school life (Markham & Aveyard, 2003 ), this is a relevant area of inquiry that can inform researchers and practitioners willing to design and conduct whole-school interventions calling for students’ involvement.

Student Involvement in School Intervention

The importance of students’ involvement and participation finds a theoretical ground in the self-determination theory (see Ryan & Deci, 2017 ), according to which people who are self-determined perceive themselves as causal agents in life experiences, being proactive and engaged in the social environment. Studies examining such human disposition in adolescence supported the relevance of self-determination for quality of life and identity development (Griffin et al., 2017 ; Nota et al., 2011 ) and as a full mediator in the negative association between stress and school engagement (Raufelder et al., 2014 ).

In the light of these assumptions, educational and school psychologists have launched scientific and professional debates on the ways in which schools can implement favorable conditions for students to feel active and co-responsible for their educational and academic pathways (Carpenter & Pease, 2013 ; Helker & Wosnitza, 2016 ; Schweisfurth, 2015 ). These debates have reached consensus across-the-board on the recognition that school change and improvement are best fostered by intervention programs in which students are offered opportunities to get actively involved in school life (Baeten et al., 2016 ; Voight & Nation, 2016 ). For this goal to be achieved, all educational agencies are called upon to promote interventions capable of supporting activities that require student involvement and participation (Antoniou & Kyriakides, 2013 ).

The importance of students’ active participation in the school environment has also been confirmed by a substantial amount of literature investigating over time the association between high student involvement and positive learning environments. Mitchell ( 1967 ) reported that school climate is related to the extent of student participation and interaction during school life. Epstein and McPartland ( 1976 ) showed that student opportunities for school involvement were related to satisfactory outcomes. In a 1982 review published, Anderson claimed that “the type and extent of student interaction that is possible within a school appears to be a significant climate variable” (Anderson, 1982 ; p.401). A few years later, Power et al. ( 1989 ) described a program implemented in several contexts and characterized by high student involvement, whose results showed that a high rate of student participation led to their capacity to take on responsibility for building an effective learning environment and positive climate. More recent studies (Vieno et al., 2005 ) have confirmed that democratic school practices, such as student participation in decision-making processes, play a significant role in the development of a sense of community at individual, class, and school levels. The review by Thapa et al. ( 2013 ) confirmed the importance of student classroom participation as a variable affecting school climate and academic achievement.

On these theoretical and empirical grounds, providing space to student voices in decision-making and school change emerges as a powerful strategy for improving school environments and enforcing the success of programs (Mitra, 2004 ). The construct of student agency fits in well with this approach, as it refers to the students’ willingness and skill to act upon activities and circumstances in their school lives (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011 ). Representing adolescents’ authentic, proactive, and transformative contributions to school life (Grazia et al., 2021 ), agency is fostered by school environments capable of soliciting and valorizing students’ active participation in educational practices and school decisions (Makitalo, 2016 ) and encouraging them to feel co-responsible with teachers and staff for their school lives (Mameli et al., 2019 ). The value of agency has been confirmed by research showing its positive associations with motivation and the fulfilment of basic psychological needs (Jang et al., 2012 ) as well as with the perception of supportive teaching (Matos et al., 2018 ).

Despite the agreement on student participation as a crucial feature for the success of programs capable of improving students’ school life, to our knowledge, previous literature reviews on school interventions have not focused specifically on the extent and way in which students are given a voice and are involved in the programs. In view of this, in the present work, we set out to search, in the existing literature, for interventions specifically based on activities in which students were not just the recipients of activities but rather took on an active and decision-making role. For our purposes, we use the notion of active student participation (ASP) to include the variety of ways in which students are given the opportunity to participate actively in school activities and decisions that will shape their own lives and those of their peers.

Review’s Aims

Previous reviews (Charlton et al., 2021 ; Estrapala et al., 2021 ; Voight & Nation, 2016 ) have provided extensive descriptions of whole-school interventions aimed at improving school environments or reducing school problems, suggesting their effectiveness. Moreover, a growing amount of literature has found that students’ active involvement in their school life is a crucial feature for improvement. Our general goal was to move forward by conducting an in-depth examination of existing whole-school interventions based on activities promoting ASP in secondary schools, by providing a reasoned synthesis of their characteristics and implementation. The choice to focus on secondary schools was driven by the evidence that this developmental stage has so far received less attention in whole-school intervention research (Estrapala et al., 2021 ; Vancel et al., 2016 ).

Given the large heterogeneity of existing intervention programs, both in terms of participants (specific subgroups vs general student population) and targets of improvement (specific abilities vs general school environment), it was essential to set clear boundaries for the study selection. As this was a novel undertaking, we chose to focus on whole-school interventions directed to the overall student population and aimed at improving the school climate as a whole. This allowed us to select a reasonably homogeneous sample of studies, with the confidence that future reviews will advance our knowledge by considering more specific fields and populations.

The review’s aims were (a) to describe the selected programs on the basis of their focus, country, duration, age of participants, and research design; (b) to assess the soundness of the research design and methodologies adopted in each study in order to provide evidence of the methodological quality of the selected programs; and (c) to differentiate among various levels of ASP in the program’s activities and, for each of these levels, to describe methods and activities carried out in the programs.

The present review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses 2020 updated statement (PRISMA 2020; Page et al., 2021 ). In line with the terminology proposed by the authors, in the following sections, we use the term study for every investigation that includes a well-defined group of participants and one or more interventions and outcomes, report for every document supplying information about a particular study (a single study might have multiple reports), and record for the title and/or abstract of a report indexed in a database. In addition, for the specific purposes of the present review, we use the term program when referring to an implemented whole-school intervention that has specific characteristics and is usually named, since more than one study may be conducted with the same program.

Eligibility Criteria

Studies were eligible for inclusion in the review if they were (i) written in English language; (ii) published in peer-reviewed academic journals; and (iii) aimed at assessing psychological effects of whole-school interventions that solicit ASP in secondary schools; thus, studies in which students were involved solely as recipients of activities delivered by adults were excluded. Moreover, in line with the review’s aims described above, studies were excluded from the review if they were (i) focused on specific subgroups of students (e.g., ethnical minorities or LGBTQ students); (ii) solely aimed at improving specific skills (e.g., literacy or mathematics); and (iii) solely focused on physical health (e.g., nutrition or physical activity).

Information Sources and Search Strategy

A literature search was conducted via EBSCO, including the academic databases PsycINFO and Education Research Complete, last consulted on April 9, 2022. The entered search terms were school-wide interventions OR whole-school interventions OR school-wide programs OR whole-school programs OR school-wide trainings OR whole-school trainings AND secondary school OR high school OR secondary education. By means of the software’s automated procedure, we searched these terms in the abstracts and filtered the results according to the first two inclusion criteria, selecting articles in English and published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

Selection and Data Collection Process

The records of each study were screened by two researchers, and the potentially relevant studies were further assessed for eligibility by three researchers, who read the full text independently. Moreover, some records relevant to the purposes of the research were identified through the references of the included documents ( forward snowballing ; Wohlin, 2014 ). Data from each included report were searched by two researchers, who worked independently to extrapolate the information relevant to the review, which were (a) the study characteristics; (b) the indicators of methodological quality; and (c) the program activities.

Detailed information about the selection process is provided in the PRISMA flow diagram (Fig. 1 ). The literature search provided 205 total records, and reduced to 169 after the automatic deduplication provided by EBSCO. After the application of our inclusion and exclusion criteria, 62 records were selected for full text reading. Of the 107 excluded records, 37 did not report interventions (e.g., they presented only school surveys), 25 were informative papers on initiatives and/or interventions without assessments, 15 focused only on academic skills attainment, 11 referred to primary schools, 10 focused on minorities, 6 were reviews of books or DVDs, and 3 only evaluated physical health as an outcome. After the full text reading of the 62 selected reports, 48 were excluded as they only discussed aspects related to implementation (e.g., feasibility or fidelity) without assessing the psychological effects of the intervention on students ( n = 23) or did not solicit ASP during the intervention ( n = 25). Thus, 14 reports were included in the sample. In addition, 10 reports were identified by sifting through the references of the selected documents ( forward snowballing ; Wohlin, 2014 ). After the full text reading, two of them were excluded as they did not assess the effects of the intervention. At the end of the selection process, the final sample of the present review included 22 reports, which referred to 16 studies and 13 programs.

PRISMA flow diagram

Study Characteristics

The main information about each study is reported in Table 1 . As for the focus of the interventions, three macro-areas were identified: (a) prevention of violence (nine studies and twelve reports), including programs for less bullying, cyberbullying, dating violence, sexual violence, and aggression; (b) promotion of mental health (five studies and seven reports), including programs for addressing depression and suicide risk and for promoting general psychological health; (c) promotion of positive emotional and relational school climate (two studies and three reports), including programs for enhancing school connectedness and school climate.

Within each macro-area, in Table 1 , the programs are listed following the alphabetical order of the program name. Out of the studies focused on preventing violence, three referred to unnamed anti-bullying programs, which in the present review were labeled Anti-bullying_1 , Anti-bullying_2 , and Anti-bullying_3 ; the other studies on the topic referred to an anti-cyberbullying program named Cyber Friendly School ; an anti-bullying program named Friendly School ; a bystander program aimed at preventing dating violence and sexual violence, named Green Dots ; a program aimed at preventing bullying and aggression, named Learning Together ; and an anti-bullying program named STAC , which stands for Stealing the show, Turning it over, Accompanying others, Coaching compassion. The studies focused on promoting mental health comprised a school research initiative aimed at preventing depression, named Beyond blue ; an intervention aimed at promoting mental health, named Gatehouse Project ; and a program to prevent suicide risk, named Sources of Strengths . Out of the studies focused on promoting positive emotional and relational school climate, one referred to the Restorative Justice program, aimed at promoting healthy and trusting relationships within the school, and the other referred to a program aimed at the promotion of a good school climate, named SEHER , which stands for Strengthening Evidence base on scHool-based intErventions for pRomoting adolescent health.

A large majority of the studies were conducted in the USA, some were carried out in Australia and the UK, and a few studies in India and China. The studies varied in duration, ranging from one to seven school years, and the number of schools involved in the intervention, ranging from 1 to 75. About half of the studies involved students from all grades while the other half was targeted only for some grades. Lastly, the reports varied in its research design: the majority conducted experimental group comparisons (EGC), but also other quantitative research designs (O) were present along with some qualitative designs (QUAL). To make text and tables more readable, the 13 included programs were renamed with a program ID consisting of the initials of the program name. Similarly, the 22 included reports were renamed with a report ID , consisting in the program ID followed by the surname of the first author and the publication year, all separated by underscores. Report ID and Program ID are reported in Table 1 .

Assessment of Methodological Quality

To assess each report’s methodological quality, we searched in the literature for a rigorous and comprehensive set of indicators and eventually decided to use as a reference the standards for evidence-based practices identified by the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC, 2014 ), which include indicators on setting and program description, fidelity, and reliability of outcome measures. Although the standards were originally recommended for the specific field of special education, they are considered appropriate to evaluate studies in all educational settings and were previously used by Charlton et al. ( 2021 ) in a systematic review studying the effects of school-wide interventions on school climate perceptions. Given that our aim was not to identify evidence-based practices but more generally to assess the methodological quality of the reports included in the review, some of the identified indicators were not applicable to our material. For this reason, among all the indicators described in the document (CEC, 2014), we selected those that provided a general overview of each report’s methodological quality. The selected indicators, their corresponding number in the CEC document, and a short description for each are reported in Table 2 .

In more detail, we applied a more extensive set of indicators to reports which fit the CEC definition of experimental group comparison design (EGC, as reported in Table 1 ), where participants were divided into two or more groups, both randomly and non-randomly, to test the effects of the interventions. For reports based on qualitative analyses and on quantitative analyses not consistent with the EGC design (QUAL and O, as reported in Table 1 ), we used a more limited set of indicators (indicators 1 to 6, as described in Table 2 ) and included a brief description of the research aims and methods. In the assessment of methodological quality, interrater reliability was achieved as three independent researchers read each report in detail, and the attribution of each indicator was discussed and agreed upon.

The assessment of methodological quality for the EGC reports is summarized in Table 3 . The findings show that most studies were strong in contextualizing the research, clearly describing the intervention program (either directly or with references to previous work) and conducting quality analyses. Weak points emerged to be related to the assessment of fidelity implementation (indicators 4 and 5 in Table 3 ), both with reference to adherence to the intervention program and to the dosage received by participants. Results for studies with qualitative analyses or quantitative analyses not EGC are reported in Table 4 . Like the ECG reports, most of these studies appeared strong in contextualizing the research and describing the intervention program, while fidelity of implementation received less attention (indicators 4 and 5 in Table 4 ).

Levels of Active Student Participation

As required by our inclusion criteria, all the selected programs were based on interventions that solicited ASP. However, from the careful analysis of the studies, we realized that the program activities promoted very different forms of ASP. Three independent researchers thus considered in detail each activity described in the programs and eventually agreed to score it on a 5-point scale (see Table 5 ), distinguishing among activities that solicit various levels of ASP. The scale partly followed the school participation scale of the HBSC questionnaire as defined by De Róiste et al. ( 2012 ). It ranged from Very high levels of ASP, attributed to activities in which students were given a fully decision-making role, to Very low levels of ASP, given to activities in which students were just the recipients of activities delivered by adults. In line with our inclusion criteria, in no programs, students were involved solely as recipients of activities delivered by adults (Very low ASP). Moreover, levels were not mutually exclusive, so that each program might include different levels of ASP.

In Table 5 , we report all the considered ASP levels, with the specifically related activities, and the coding of each program. It should be specified that the distribution of activities in the various levels was based on a qualitative accurate analysis of the role attributed to students and not on the number of students involved in each program’s activities, which varied to a great extent. In more detail, Very high ASP was attributed to interventions in which students were involved in processes with a direct organizational impact on school roles, curricula, and policies; this included two types of activities, i.e., student involvement in decision-making processes and the formation of school action teams comprising students. High ASP was recognized when students were still involved in organizational activities, but their role was limited to the implementation of activities and did not directly impact on school curricula and policies; it consisted of three activities, i.e., presentation of students’ works, leading of activities for peers, and leading of activities for adults. Moderate ASP was attributed when students were asked to express their viewpoints and opinions, without having a decision-making power, however; it comprised activities in which students were called to express their points of view on various school issues, either by the provision of platforms to share ideas, concerns, or suggestions, or by the organization of interactive school assemblies, or by their involvement in surveys based on data collection (e.g., by means of questionnaires) on specific aspects of their school life. Low ASP was attributed when the students’ activation was limited to a specific task required within a structured format designed by other people, including training for student leaders, interactive group activities, and individual activities. Finally, activities were coded as Very low ASP when students were involved as the passive recipients of contents provided by adults, through lecture-style lessons, viewing of videos, or distribution of didactic material. The activities provided for in each program are described at length in the following paragraphs, considering activities scored in every specific level of ASP.

For the sake of completeness, in Table 5 , we added a final column in which we indicated additional program activities that involved the staff. They comprised the formation of school action teams made up of adults, training, and the provision of materials for the staff. As the description of these activities goes beyond the scope of our investigation, we will not describe them in detail.

Very High ASP: Making School Rules

As can be seen in Table 5 , activities implying involvement of students in decision-making processes were identified in six programs. In AB3, during a school assembly, students were invited to develop a whole-school anti-bullying policy, while in later activities, they were asked to identify strategies to be implemented in the school to prevent bullying. In CFS, school staff and student leaders conducted whole-school activities helping students to review school policies to promote a positive use of technology. In FS, the intervention aimed to help the transition between primary and secondary school was co‐developed with students who had already made such a transition. In GP, the use of peer support and leadership was encouraged to increase opportunities and skills for students to participate in decision-making processes within the school; in addition, at a classroom level, rules were negotiated by teachers and students and displayed in each classroom. In RJ, during the first year of implementation, staff and students developed a plan for pathways of primary, secondary, and tertiary restorative interventions; in the following years, students’ leadership roles and collective decision-making activities increased, so that students themselves were able to advance whole-school initiatives and activities, to map out course goals and determine which projects they would embrace. Finally, in SE, some health policies were discussed with the principal, teachers, and students before being finalized in a school action team meeting and disseminated at whole-school level.

Activities consisting in the creation of school action teams (or school action groups) including students and teachers were identified in three programs (see Table 5 ). In AB2, a school action group with both students and staff was formed to define action plans and training for staff on restorative practices at whole-school level and to implement a new school curriculum focusing on social and emotional skills. In LT, a school action group comprising around six students and six staff was formed to lay down school policies and coordinate interventions, based on the feedback from the student data collection. In SE, a school health promotion committee, consisting of representatives from the school board, parents, teachers, and students, was formed to discuss issues submitted by the students and to plan the activities for the future years based on the feedback from the activities already carried out. In addition, a peer group of 10 and 15 students from each class discussed health topics and student concerns with adult facilitators, in order to develop an action plan and to help in organizing various activities, such as contests and school assemblies.

High ASP: Organizing School Events

Three types of activities were included in this level of ASP. As reported in Table 5 , five programs solicited the creation of different student artifacts . AB1 included a student-made video on bullying to be presented to all the students. In GP, student artifacts were presented to audiences such as parents, other students, teachers, and members of the community. In SS, student leaders made presentations for peers to share personal examples of using the strengths provided by the program. In RJ, students engaged in collaborative, interactive writing activities based on analytical reflection for the realization of a rubric co-developed by students. SE included the contribution of all the students, teachers, and the principal in the realization of works like write-ups, poems, pictures, or artwork, on specific topics for a monthly wall magazine publication. SE also envisaged contests among students, such as poster-making and essay writing, linked to the monthly topic of the wall magazine.

Activities regarding the organization of student-led activities for peers were found in four programs (see Table 5 ). In CFS, student leaders (four to six in each intervention school) conducted at least three important whole-school activities to promote students’ positive use of technology for raising students’ awareness of their rights and responsibilities online; they also provided cyberbullying prevention trainings for peers. In SS, student leaders (up to six in the school) conducted activities aimed at raising awareness of Sources of Strengths , generating conversations with other students, providing presentations about the strengths proposed by the program, and engaging peers to identify their own trusted adults. RJ included student-led restorative circles with students, workshops for students, and peer-to-peer mentorship on restorative practices. In SE, student leaders (between 10 and 15 in each class) conducted peer group meetings to discuss on relevant health topics.

In two programs, student-led activities for adults were organized (see Table 5 ). In CFS, student-led activities provided information to the teaching staff about the technologies used by students and cyberbullying prevention training given to parents. In RJ, circles and workshops on restorative practices were implemented by the students for the staff.

Moderate ASP: Expressing Personal Views

Three types of activities were included in this level of ASP. As can be seen in Table 5 , two programs provided platforms where students could express their personal views on various topics. In BB, students, families, and school staff were provided with platforms to share information and communication on mental health issues. In SE, platforms were used to raise concerns, make complaints, and give suggestions, either anonymously or by self-identifying, on the intervention topics.

Interactive assemblies for students to discuss on the main intervention topics were organized in three programs (see Table 5 ). AB1 provided a first interactive school assembly to discuss respect and bullying, and later assemblies at class level to further discuss the themes emerged during the whole-school assembly. Similarly, AB3 included a school assembly where students were encouraged to get involved in the development of a whole-school anti-bullying policy, followed by three lessons during which the class teacher facilitated a discussion in each class aimed to raise awareness about bullying and to think about school-based solutions. SE included group discussions for generating awareness about health issues, to be discussed during the school assemblies that took place four times a month.

In six programs, students were given a voice by data collections to be used in the process of school changes (see Table 5 ). AB1 included a bullying report form that students, in addition to staff and parents, filled in to report bullying incidents. AB3 provided feedback from student data collection during the school assembly as a basis for discussing whole-school anti-bullying strategies. In LT, annual reports on students’ needs, drawing from student surveys in relation to bullying, aggression, and school experiences, guided the action teams to define school policies and coordinate interventions. In BB, summaries of student and staff data on current school structures, policies, programs, and practices related to student well-being, collected annually, were used by the team to create an “action plan” for changes across the school, both at the classroom and whole-school level. In GP, the profile emerging from the student surveys on school environment guided school teams in the definition of priority areas and strategies within each school, both by coordinating existing health promotional work and introducing new strategies that met the needs of a specific school. In SE, the school action team planned school activities based on reports and discussions on issues presented by the students.

Low ASP: Trainings

A low level of ASP was identified in three types of activities. As can be seen in Table 5 , four programs included trainings for student peer leaders . CFS provided a 10-h training for peer leaders to lead whole-school activities on the positive use of technology. GD provided a 5-h bystander training for student leaders to recognize situations and behaviors that could lead to violence or abuse and to identify active bystander behaviors to be performed either individually or collectively to reduce the risk or effect of violence. ST provided a 90-min training session and two 15-min booster sessions on bullying, which included icebreaker exercises, hands-on activities, and role plays. SS provided a 4-h interactive training for peer leaders aimed at developing protective resources in themselves and encouraging peers to grow such resources as well.

Eight programs included interactive group activities (see Table 5 ). In AB3, students worked in small groups to identify the types of bullying in the school and to discuss strategies to prevent bullying, with the support of bullying scenarios with discussion questions. In CFS, interactive activities included problem-solving, quizzes, and case studies on the use of technology to prevent cyberbullying. LT included various interactive activities aimed at preventing violence, ranging from informal practice, for example, using “affective” statements to communicate feelings, to formal practices, for example hosting a restorative “circle” where participants were encouraged to express emotions and create emotional bonds after problematic or disruptive behavior. BB provided a range of interactive teaching methods, such as small-group exercises, role plays, and quizzes, for reflecting on mental health issues. GP provided activities as small group work and class discussion, by also implementing interactive teaching strategies, such as using questions to kindle discussions and emphasizing the importance to consider different perspectives on a topic, encourage challenges, and debate ideas. SS included peer-to-peer messages and activities wherein student leaders shared examples of strengths that have helped them to overcome personal challenges and invited their peers to participate in interactive tasks. RJ included many interactive practices, such as restorative circles, interactive writing activities, and peer-to-peer mentorship to broaden the impact of restorative practices. SE included monthly contests for students, such as elocution, debates, and quiz games.

Finally, in BB program, some individual activities , in addition to group tasks, were conducted (see Table 5 ). Such activities consisted of individual writings and self-reflection on specific topics, aimed at building or enhancing sense of self-worth, belonging, control, purpose, future, and humor, which were considered to protect against mental health problems.

Very Low ASP: Students as Recipients

Activities in which student’s role was overall that of the recipients of actions taken from adults were of three types. As can be seen in Table 5 , six programs included lecture-style lessons . AB1 included the speech by a nationally known speaker about respect and bullying and the presentation of the Social Support System to students by their English teachers. AB3 included the presentation of summary feedback from the pre-test questionnaires during a school assembly and three lessons, delivered by the class teachers, on school bullying. CFS included lessons led by class teachers, aimed at improving online social skills, focusing, in particular, on positive communication, resilience, self-management, conflict resolution, and social responsibility. GD included a 50-min persuasive lesson led by adults focused on violence victimization, perpetration, and prosocial behaviors. LT included adult-led lessons on social and emotional skills. SE organized workshops led by teachers or program facilitators on effective study skills, such as time management, learning style, note-taking, reading comprehension, memorization techniques, and concentration techniques.

Three programs included the viewing of videos during the implementation (see Table 5 ). AB1 and AB3 provided a video on school bullying for all the students. BB provided video or DVD materials on mental health issues.

Finally, three programs provided students with informative materials (see Table 5 ). AB1 provided a form with several responses for intervening against bullying, which offered alternatives to the traditional method of apportioning blame and punishing bullies. Similarly, AB3 provided a worksheet on possible responses to bullying. FS provided educational magazines on bullying issues. BB provided many materials, such as individual student workbooks, a review poster, master copies of resources for all activities, and homework worksheets.

The aim of this systematic review was to provide a reasoned synthesis of whole-school interventions in secondary school capable of improving the school environment by assigning an active role to students. The first result that warrants consideration regards the number of publications that met our eligibility criteria to select whole-school interventions based on activities soliciting ASP in secondary schools. Despite the wide interest of researchers on the topic of whole-school interventions in general (see Bonell et al., 2018 ; Charlton et al., 2021 ), our selection and data collection process eventually provided only 22 reports referring to 16 studies that fostered ASP during the intervention. This result calls for further work in the field. Based on the emphasis given by educational and political agendas about the importance of empowering students in their role as active participants in schools, first of all, and in societies, subsequently, research should not overlook the question of how to improve their participatory skills by involving them in school activities and decisions (Markham & Aveyard, 2003 ). More investment in this direction is needed to evaluate the consistency and efficacy of the existing programs, to eventually reach consensus on the intervention protocols that schools can implement to improve their learning environment. Results related to each of our specific aims will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

Characteristics of the Selected Programs

As for the first aim of the review, concerning the description of the identified literature, several reflections arise from our results. Considering the year of publication, we found growing interest by researchers in the field, as most reports were published in the last few years, i.e., from 2018 to 2021. This may be considered positive indication that research has identified student participation in school interventions as a crucial topic on which to invest for future works. As for the focus of the selected literature, most of the included studies concerned the reduction of violent behaviors, referring for the most part to bullying, while the promotion of a more general positive emotional and relational school climate is the less investigated topic. Notwithstanding the overall need to fill in this limitation of research, these results suggest that future studies should address the issue of how it is possible to create better school environments for students starting from their own involvement and decision-making roles. This is consistent with the direction indicated by Bonell et al. ( 2018 ), who upheld the importance of focusing more on overall school systems rather than on specific problems. The implementation of a larger number of programs fostering ASP in order to improve school climate and learning environments would thus be important to understand how to support students in dealing with the variety of non-specific problems that can arise during school life. Indeed, as confirmed by the literature, a positive school climate is related to higher academic achievement (Berkowitz et al., 2017 ; Kutsyuruba et al., 2015 ) and fewer problematic behaviors, violence (Reaves et al., 2018 ), and psychological malaise at school (Aldridge and McChesney, 2018 ). Finally, looking at the country of the selected program implementation, most of the studies were conducted in the USA, some in Australia and the UK, and a few in India and China. To our knowledge, with the exception of the two anti-bullying programs carried out in the UK and included in the current review, no other studies were conducted in European countries. With caution, as in many other countries researchers may have developed programs that could not be included in this review due to the inclusion criteria, we consider this as a gap in the literature that future work should fill, especially considering that school policies and organizations are very different between continents. In this regard, it would be interesting both to replicate existing programs and to develop revisited or new interventions specifically adapted to the context of the country’s school system, a work that would also fulfil the aim to increase the ecological validity of the proposed activities.

Methodological Quality of the Selected Reports

The second aim of the review was to assess the soundness of the research design and methodologies adopted in the selected studies. In this regard, we found that the considered reports were robust overall, as they met most of the considered indicators of methodological quality. In particular, most of the studies, based both on EGC or on other designs, described and contextualized the intervention and provided adequate analyses. Beyond the generally good methodological quality of the included studies, consistently with previous examinations of intervention programs (Charlton et al., 2021 ), we found a weakness concerning the fidelity of implementation, as this indicator was observed in only about half of the considered programs. Given that fidelity is a fundamental aspect for the evaluation of the intervention efficacy (O’Donnell, 2008 ), future studies should consider this important factor, by adding it to the evaluation of the programs for providing adequate monitoring tools that include qualitative and process indicators. Overall, however, the literature on the interventions meeting the criteria for our review, albeit limited, relies on methodologically sound grounds that allow us to draw some conclusions on programs and activities actively involving students and to offer suggestions for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Program Activities and Levels of ASP

As for the third and last aim of the review, i.e., concerning the analysis and description of ASP activities proposed in the various programs, our results offer material for an innovative way to look at the programs and points the way to future research in the field. In particular, some points should be highlighted. First, we were able to show that a variety of ASP activities can be used in interventions, from those requiring students to directly act on school programs and policies to those in which students are merely involved as recipients of contents delivered by school staff. From the careful and independently conducted analysis of all program activities, we were also able to grade such activities on a scale ranging from very high to very low levels of ASP. This may be a useful tool for researchers, as it advances a way to develop and organize interventions fostering different levels of ASP activities, to be selected on the basis of the research focus and aims. The effort to identify different levels of ASP also has the merit of introducing some degree of clarity and order in the great variability of program activities. While the importance of student involvement and participation was generally recognized in the literature (Baeten et al., 2016 ; Schweisfurth, 2015 ), our in-depth description shows that not all forms of participation are equal, and thus offers a tool to differentiate between them. This advances our understanding of the concept of student participation both on a theoretical and methodological level.

Beyond this general picture of ASP activities, our findings show that the interventions based on the highest levels of ASP are those aimed at generally improving the school environment, i.e., the Restorative Justice and SEHER programs. These programs included all but one of the activities defined as Very High ASP or High ASP , while all other programs usually provided only one or two of them. This result can offer interesting insights if taken together with the above-reported considerations on the importance to promote overall school improvement, and not to restrict the focus on one or few specific problems. On the basis of this result, we tentatively advance that when the study scope is broad and the theoretical approach is systemic, interventions are more directly centered on lending a voice to students and assigning to them a decision-making role. This again supports the importance of promoting whole-school interventions targeted toward the general learning environment.

Limitations and Conclusion

We are aware that the findings of the present literature review should be considered in the light of certain limitations. First of all, our choice to include only studies published in peer-reviewed journals in English requires some caution. While this selection criteria allowed us to provide a picture of the international literature, this might entail the loss of programs published in other languages that nonetheless contribute to the issue and deserve to be explored in future reviews. Secondly, in the present work, we did not address the issue of cross-cultural similarities and differences in schooling and education, which may influence the way ASP is conceived and valorized in the school context. However, the levels of ASP activities we proposed have the strength of resulting from the analysis of programs from several countries and may thus offer a basis for future discussions on the cross-cultural validity of practices fostering ASP. Furthermore, the present review has focused only on secondary school programs. While this choice was needed for guaranteeing clear references and boundaries to our findings, it also leaves to be explored whether our proposed classification of ASP activities could also be applied to younger students. Given the developmental and organizational differences between primary and secondary levels of education, this issue certainly merits further exploration in future reviews.

As the aim of our review was to provide an in-depth and reasoned description of existing studies based on ASP and of the activities adopted to promote the active role of students, testing the efficacy of these studies was beyond the scope of the present work. While future research may advance this line of inquiry, based on the evidence that different outcomes are considered in such a small number of studies, it seems premature to move toward extensive efficacy testing such as meta-analyses. Rather, at present, it is probably more feasible and desirable to have an increasing amount of literature focusing on ASP in whole-school interventions, to collect further evidence of robust programs and activities, especially with regard to high ASP. As a possible further research question in this direction, we suggest it would also be useful to assess whether the ways of actively involving students may change depending on the intervention target outcomes or on the number of students taking part in the activities. Lastly, while this is true for any review of the literature, it should nonetheless be acknowledged that our syntheses and reflections are dependent upon the choices made in the article selection process. For example, our inclusion and exclusion criteria (i.e., focusing on general participants and targets of intervention) may have restricted our sample. With this in mind, we followed closely the PRISMA guidelines and detailed each step of the process, so that readers can be well informed and future research may build as seamlessly as possible from our work.

Despite the mentioned limitations, this review provides a literature advance in its in-depth examination of existing whole-school interventions that include active student participation in secondary school. Their description and reasoned synthesis make available to researchers and practitioners an overview of specific programs and activities that are being used to actively involve students in processes of change. This in turn can inform reflections and experimentations as to how to integrate and improve the existing provision. In this direction, the major effort and contribution of the present review is the proposal of an organizing structure based on different levels of ASP for analyzing interventions, which allows to classify the specific activities included in each program. Such an effort provides a common ground for reflections and future studies on active student participation, as a shared classification can be instrumental for planning new interventions or evaluating the actual degree of students’ active involvement in the implemented programs. Overall, this work significantly contributes to the far-reaching goal of encouraging student participation in school life, and more specifically in the transformation of their learning environment, so that they can be empowered in shaping it to be increasingly responsive to their insights, ideas, and needs.

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All the authors contributed to the study conception and design. Literature search was conducted by Sara Berti; assessment of methodological quality was supervised by Valentina Grazia; draft of the introduction and overall supervision were performed by Luisa Molinari. All the authors contributed to data analyses, draft of the manuscript, and critical revisions of the work and they eventually approved the final manuscript.

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Berti, S., Grazia, V. & Molinari, L. Active Student Participation in Whole-School Interventions in Secondary School. A Systematic Literature Review. Educ Psychol Rev 35 , 52 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09773-x

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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Measuring resilience for chinese-speaking populations: a systematic review of chinese resilience scales.

1 Department of Communication Studies, College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, United States
2 School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
3 Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, United States

Introduction: Despite the rapid growth of interdisciplinary resilience research in Chinese contexts, no study has systematically reviewed individual-level measurement scales for Chinese-speaking populations. We report a systematic review of scales developed for or translated/adapted to Chinese-speaking contexts, where we assessed how widely used scales fare in terms of their psychometric qualities.

Methods: Studies included in this review must have been published in peer-reviewed English or Chinese journals between 2015-2020 and included self-reported resilience scales in Chinese-speaking populations. Searches were conducted in PsycINFO, CNKI (completed in May 2021), and PubMed (completed in January 2024). We developed coding schemes for extracting relevant data and adapted and applied an existing evaluation framework to assess the most frequently used resilience scales by seven methodological criteria.

Results: Analyses of 963 qualified studies suggested that Chinese resilience scales were used in a diverse range of study contexts. Among 85 unique kinds of resilience measures, we highlighted and evaluated the three most frequently used translated scales and three locally developed scales (nine scales in total including variations such as short forms). In short, resilience studies in Chinese contexts relied heavily on the translated 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, which scored moderately on the overall quality. The locally developed Resilience Scale for Chinese Adolescents and Essential Resilience Scale received the best ratings but could use further development.

Discussion: We discussed how future work may advance widely used scales, and specified seven methodological recommendations for future resilience scale development with existing and new scales in and beyond the Chinese study contexts. We further addressed issues and challenges in measuring resilience as a process and called on researchers to further develop/evaluate process measures for Chinese-speaking populations.

1 Introduction

Resilience has become a catch-all term for how individuals, communities, and nations cope with and adapt to disruptions, adversities, or stressors. Pioneered in developmental psychology, resilience scholarship has flourished across multiple areas of psychology and related disciplines (e.g., anthropology, communication, education, and medicine; Southwick et al., 2014 ; Houston and Buzzanell, 2020 ). Researchers have conceptualized resilience as a trait, process, and/or “positive” outcome ( Southwick et al., 2014 ) and have offered numerous operational definitions and measures ( Windle et al., 2011 ). Additionally, resilience scholarship has grown beyond its Western (and English-speaking) academic origins and cultural boundaries ( Southwick et al., 2014 ), responding to critiques of earlier research being acultural/acontextual ( Ungar, 2015 ).

Contributing to this movement are resilience studies in Chinese (speaking) contexts, such as how Chinese internet marketers’ “psychological resilience” could promote their sense of career success when shifting work conditions were complicated by the pandemic ( Wang and Gao, 2022 ), and how, through resilience, social support buffered Chinese college students against anxiety due to experiencing prolonged lockdowns ( He et al., 2022 ). Overall, studies in Chinese-speaking regions and cultures often attend to disruptions salient in, if not unique to, Chinese cultural contexts (e.g., left-behind children of migrant workers; academic stress associated with college entrance examination). Scholars have developed, translated, and adapted resilience measures for Chinese-speaking populations ( Liu et al., 2017 ). However, assessing resilience in Chinese (and other non-English-speaking) contexts raises issues of translations and adaptations of the construct’s conceptualization and operationalization across cultural groups ( Farh et al., 2006 ), compounded by the multiplicity of available measures.

Measurement reliability and validity are critical for obtaining scientifically useful information about resilience ( Windle et al., 2011 ), and issues of contextualization must be considered when developing resilience measures across cultures ( Farh et al., 2006 ; Southwick et al., 2014 ). Given the rise of interdisciplinary resilience studies in Chinese contexts since the mid-2010s and that Chinese remains the language with the second largest native-speaking population ( Ethnologue, 2023 ), 1 it is important to (a) identify frequently used scales in various contexts, (b) assess how widely used scales (both adapted from English and locally developed) fare in terms of their psychometric qualities, and (c) outline directions for future research on resilience measurement in Chinese contexts. In this study, we address these goals with a focus on individual-level resilience in Chinese-speaking populations and analyze peer-reviewed articles published in either English or Chinese from three major databases ( Jackson and Kuriyama, 2019 ). Specifically, we focus on articles published over the six years of 2015–2020, from when a surge of resilience scholarship in Chinese contexts began to occur to the start of the COVID pandemic. We evaluate commonly used measures in Chinese contexts using a framework adapted from Windle et al. (2011) , which builds on a widely cited methodological publication ( Terwee et al., 2007 ) to organize a range of criteria for evaluating a measure’s psychometric quality. In applying their framework to cross-cultural/linguistic work, we identify additional qualities crucial for translational work. In what follows, we review conceptions of resilience and the emergence of resilience research in China, explain how we adapt Windle et al.’s (2011) framework for assessing resilience scales, and articulate our aims.

2 Literature review

2.1 conceptualizations of resilience.

Resilience research is characterized by “definitional diversity,” which has raised confusion about what resilience is and how to best characterize processes and/or outcomes of resilience ( Luthar et al., 2000 ). Reviews written in both English and Chinese commonly discern three foci—trait, outcome, and process—for understanding resilience (e.g., Fletcher and Sarkar, 2013 ). The trait view treats resilience as an individual characteristic, a stable trait/set of traits, or innate qualities people possess ( Block and Block, 1980 ; Connor and Davidson, 2003 ; Campbell-Sills and Stein, 2007 ). When people are faced with risks and adversities, specific resilience traits (e.g., ability to cope with change, persistence) function as a protective factor to enable individual adaptation and thriving. Scholars have problematized seeing resilience as a static trait for its acontextual assessments applied to complex social and cultural contexts (e.g., people facing poverty) and for the implied assumption that only some people have resilience or are resilient ( Walsh, 2002 ; Ungar, 2004 ).

The outcome view conceptualizes resilience as the presence of positive developmental and/or adaptive outcomes, such as “healthy” attributes and behaviors ( Werner et al., 1971 ), among different demographic groups that have experienced conditions commonly considered “unhealthy,” “risky,” or “adverse” ( Masten and Barnes, 2018 ). Early work in developmental psychology reflects this approach, such as studies on the stress resistance and thriving of children living with Schizophrenic parents ( Garmezy, 1974 ). These studies typically consider protective factors—both internal, such as personal resilient qualities (e.g., self-esteem), and external, such as environmental considerations (e.g., family support and community climate)—that enable positive adaptive responses to adversities ( Richardson, 2002 ). In short, resilience is the presence of positive results despite difficulties, according to the outcome view.

The third view conceptualizes resilience as a “dynamic process” ( Luthar et al., 2000 ), neither just the protective factors nor the adaptive outcome, but rather elements involved in experiencing, adapting to, and transforming adversities over time and across situations ( Buzzanell, 2010 ; Windle, 2010 ; Fletcher and Sarkar, 2013 ). Richardson (2002) theorized that resilience begins with disruptions to “biopsychospiritual” homeostasis. An expansive term, “process” may refer to (a) underlying mechanisms by which protective factors interact with risk factors to enable adaptation ( Rutter, 1990 ), (b) how humans as open systems successfully adapt to disturbances ( Masten, 2015 ), and (c) ways in which individuals harness resources from contexts to sustain well-being despite difficulties ( Panter-Brick and Leckman, 2013 ). Windle (2010) defined resilience as the process of “effectively negotiating, adapting to, or managing significant sources of stress or trauma” facilitated by “assets and resources within the individual, their life and environment” (p. 163), the nature of which may vary across the life course.

Scholars have not only identified distinct conceptualizations of resilience but also suggested guidelines for identifying appropriate resilience scales. This latter area of scholarship is less developed, as Windle et al. (2011) contended in their attempt to create a “robust evaluation framework” for (English) resilience scales (p. 2).

2.2 Resilience research in Chinese contexts

Resilience research in China and within geopolitical borders politically, historically, and culturally affiliated with China started in the 2000s ( Yu and Zhang, 2005 ). Although resilience has been considered a construct developed by “Western” academics, particularly psychologists in the United States, scholars soon found similar ideas rooted in Chinese cultural and linguistic traditions. Such commonalities prompted researchers, such as Ungar (2009 , 2015) , to argue that although resilience research centers around Western psychological discourse, resilience phenomena manifest in universal and specific ways within and across cultural borders and through diverse ways of living and being.

In Chinese, resilience has been translated into “ fu yuan li ” (ability to recover), “ kang ni li ” (ability to resist adversity), “ xin li tan xing ” (emphasizing a “psychological” trait, the idea of “bouncing back,” and a sense of elasticity), and “ ren xing ” (a bendable, stretchable feature) by scholars in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ( Liu et al., 2015 ). Some scholars draw from Chinese idioms, Taoist and Confucianist values, and traditional dialectical (co-dependent) views on adversity ( ni jing ) and growth or fortune to suggest that “ ren xing ”—a naturally developed term—best captures the meanings of resilience in everyday Chinese (e.g., Yu and Zhang, 2007 ; Hu and Gan, 2008 ). Diverging translations of resilience reflect conceptual inconsistencies. For example, translating resilience as “ fu yuan li ” implies an “ability” or “capacity,” whereas “ ren xing ” implies that resilience is a “trait” or “feature.”

Scholars also have translated and/or created resilience scales for use in Chinese cultural contexts. Popular scales such as the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC; Connor and Davidson, 2003 ) and the Resilience Scale (RS; Wagnild and Young, 1993 ) have been translated, validated, and sometimes adapted to Chinese contexts. These scales also have inspired the development of localized scales (e.g., Hu and Gan, 2008 ). Prior research, however, has not systematically assessed which Chinese resilience scales are used most commonly nor evaluated their psychometric properties.

2.3 Existing systematic reviews and current goals

Windle et al. (2011) provided a “robust methodological review” of English resilience measures for researchers and clinicians whose selection of instruments previously might have been “arbitrary and inappropriate” (p. 2), by applying the psychometric properties proposed by Terwee et al. (2007) to assess English resilience scales (see Table 1 ). 2 Specifically, Windle et al. (2011) identified 19 measures, including 15 original measures and four variations (e.g., CD-RISC-25 vs. CD-RISC-10), and they reported ratings of these measures on their content validity, internal consistency, construct validity, reproducibility/reliability, and interpretability. These criteria offer a useful framework for the current study given its and Terwee et al.’s (2007) influence and how they further inform at least two recent systematic reviews on resilience measures ( Zhou et al., 2020 ; Windle et al., 2022 ). 3

Table 1 . Scale evaluation rubric (adapted from Windle et al., 2011 and Terwee et al., 2007 ).

Although no systematic review of individual-level resilience measures in Chinese contexts exists, a few narrative literature reviews written in Chinese provide insights for identifying and selecting measures. Specifically, Liu et al. (2017) discussed the progress, current understandings and models of resilience, and future directions of “domestic and foreign/international” resilience studies. They provided a list of commonly used scales developed in Chinese or other languages (mostly English). They also reported Cronbach’s α reliability for several listed scales. Similarly, Liu et al. (2015) reviewed popular scales organized around investigated populations (e.g., scales for children and teenagers). For each scale, the authors summarized its Cronbach’s α value, dimension(s), item numbers, whether it has been translated and validated, and study populations (e.g., students and nurses). However, as narrative reviews, these authors’ identification, selection, and evaluation of scales were not driven by a comprehensive review process.

In this project, we build on Windle et al.’s (2011) review to systematically synthesize Chinese resilience studies, extending it in two ways. First, applying it to a more recent period may reveal new trends, issues, and findings (or lingering problems) concerning resilience. Therefore, we review Chinese resilience studies published between 2015 and 2020. This time frame was informed by the search results of the first database that showed a noticeable increase in resilience research in 2016; hence, to map trends in the growing literature but in a still manageable scope, we limited the review to studies published between 2015 and 2020. Second, Windle et al. (2011) provided guidelines for resilience scales based on studies reported in English. In comparison, we address similar goals in the context of translating and developing scholarship from one language to another. We, hence, add two criteria to assess the extent to which (a) cultural and linguistic appropriateness is addressed when developing Chinese resilience scales ( Farh et al., 2006 ) and (b) the factor structure of resilience measures in Chinese contexts is examined and replicated (see Table 1 ).

Our first goal is to identify the contexts (e.g., left-behind children, urban–rural migration) where resilience testing is relevant, as illuminated by included studies, as resilience is contextualized in disruptive events, and experts from multiple disciplines have emphasized how context matters for studying resilience ( Southwick et al., 2014 ). We further aim to (a) identify the most frequently used resilience measurement scales for Chinese-speaking populations in studies from 2015 to 2020 and examine these scales’ popularity in relation to specific study contexts, and (b) address how such scales fare in terms of their psychometric properties. In so doing, we not only capture research developments that laid the foundation for the current boom in Chinese resilience scholarship but also make informed recommendations/guidelines for advancing and selecting research instruments in future.

The review process and report were guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA; Moher et al., 2015 ; Page et al., 2021 ).

3.1 Eligibility criteria

Studies included in this systematic review met the following inclusion criteria. First, included articles must have been (1) published in peer-reviewed outlets between 2015 and 2020, (2) based on primary study results from the use of self-report resilience measurement scales, and (3) full-text accessible. Second, the primary language used by the population of interest in the included studies must have been Chinese. 4 Third, included studies must have operationalized resilience as (1) a single concept, (2) multiple related subscales/sub-dimensions, or (3) part of a broader construct (e.g., positive psychological capital; Luthans et al., 2007 ) and was treated as an independent subscale in analyses (see Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Eligibility criteria.

3.2 Databases search

A systematic search was first conducted between July 2020 and May 2021 in two databases. For studies published in English, we chose PsycINFO for its coverage of more than 2,000 journals across multiple related disciplines (e.g., psychology, health, sociology, management, and communication). We then used China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) to access reports published in Chinese. CNKI is the largest academic database in China containing a wide range of sources from all disciplines, with its built-in search system enabling more targeted searches (e.g., considering quality and topics). To ensure our systematic review was comprehensive, we conducted an additional search in PubMed in January 2024. In the early scoping stage, the first author emailed six researchers cited in other reviews or studies for obtaining original scales in Chinese not available through databases, two of whom responded.

In PsycINFO and PubMed, the Boolean search query “(resilience OR resiliency OR resilient) AND (China OR Chinese)” was used. Filters applied to PsycINFO included “Linked Full Text” and “Peer Reviewed.” The first PsycINFO search was in July 2020 and was completed by another search in May 2021, with an added date limiter “2020/07/01–2020/12/31” for completing 2020 results. Based on learned experience, additional filers were added for PubMed results: “Humans,” “Chinese,” and “English,” and published between “2015/01/01” and “2020/12/31.” The search query in CNKI, with the adjusted time frame, was informed by existing conceptual reviews (e.g., Yu and Zhang, 2005 ) that identified commonly used translations of “resilience” (i.e., “‘心理弹性’ + ‘心理韧性’ + ‘复原力’ + ‘抗逆力’”). Specifically, “弹性” and “韧性” were both common words (e.g., in mechanical engineering and biology). We included the modifier “心理 (psychology/ical)” to avoid retrieving numerous irrelevant records (e.g., resilience of mechanic systems). We then limited the search by discipline. For example, we unselected “basic science” (e.g., physics), “engineering,” and “agriculture” while only keeping relevant ones such as healthcare, humanities, social sciences, communication, and management. To ensure quality and consistency with the peer-reviewed work in (primarily) English databases, we further filtered the search using CNKI’s built-in citation index-based qualifying system (SCI, EI, PKU Core, CSSCI, and CSCD) for academic journal publications.

3.3 Selection

We began by screening PsycINFO records/abstracts, which were coded for whether it (a) named a specific resilience scale (e.g., CD-RISC), (b) explicitly described measuring resilience, (c) clearly used Chinese-speaking sample(s), or (d) was clearly unqualified (e.g., mouse models, systematic reviews, and qualitative reports). To be prudent, full-text articles were assessed if there was any indication that a study used a resilience measure. These abstracts usually mentioned at least one of the following: (a) a specific resilience scale, (b) some relationship between resilience and other variables, (c) studies on phenomena often conceptually related to resilience (e.g., post-traumatic growth) despite missing the word “resilience,” and (d) resilience as a keyword.

The first author independently started the screening while the team met periodically to discuss results and ambiguous cases until the completion of a detailed code book (see Table 2 ). Then, the fourth author screened 50 randomly selected records for inclusion/exclusion to check reliability; however, several disagreements between the two coders occurred (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.57). 5 We, therefore, met to further clarify the criteria, after which another interrater reliability check of 50 more studies was run (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.96), with the sole disagreement addressed through discussion. The first author reexamined coded records and proceeded to screen the remaining, including CNKI and PubMed records. Duplicates were removed. 6 Assisted by other authors, the first and second authors retrieved full-text reports that passed abstract screening for further assessment; ineligible and inaccessible reports were excluded. Figure 1 demonstrates the screening processes.

Figure 1 . The review process (adapted from Page et al., 2021 ; the PRISMA template is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ).

3.4 Data extraction

3.4.1 coding study context.

To address our first goal, we coded the specific context in which resilience was investigated in each study. Determining context was an emic sensemaking process (i.e., identifying and building categories from the ground up) whereby we identified and coded context categories based on included studies. Detailed instructions and specific categories and descriptions are elaborated in the Supplementary Table S1 . For the PsycINFO reports, the team met periodically (e.g., after every 50 studies were coded) to discuss study contexts until the finalization of a context codebook, using which two authors independently coded the CNKI reports (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.91), while one author coded the later added PubMed reports. Disagreements/uncertainties were addressed through group discussion.

3.4.2 Scale identification and evaluation

The first author recorded the resilience scale(s) used in each report, which was later checked by two other authors. Reports including results about two resilience scales (e.g., CD-RISC and RS) were listed two times, and different versions of the same scale (e.g., CD-RISC-25 vs. CD-RISC-10) were noted. The frequency of each scale became evident through this process, whereby we determined specific scales to be further evaluated. We then referred to in-text citations and references of relevant reports to identify the scale development and/or translation and validation study/studies reporting the original scale development and/or translation work (hereto referenced as “original reports”) for selected scales. If a translated scale had multiple referenced sources of translations in relevant studies, the most frequently referenced translation was selected. For example, for the 14-item Resilience Scale, which had three referenced translated versions, the version by Tian and Hong (2013) was used because it has been used more frequently than others (e.g., Chung et al., 2020 ). Next, the first and second authors retrieved the original reports for each scale to be evaluated.

Table 1 presents the rubric adapted from Windle et al. (2011) , which shows seven criteria (e.g., content validity, internal consistency) relevant to evaluating the psychometric properties of resilience measures in this project, including “factor structure” and “contextualized translation” that were added given their importance for assessing scales across languages and cultures ( Farh et al., 2006 ). The rubric follows Windle et al.’s (2011) 3-point scoring system, including “2” fully meeting, “1” partially meeting, and “0” failing to meet (or missing information about) a given criterion. For example, for internal consistency, a “2” rating means that factor analyses with adequately sized samples (i.e., 7* #items and > = 100) have been conducted and Cronbach’s α values 0.70–0.95 per dimension have been reported ( Terwee et al., 2007 ). A “1” can mean doubtful design (e.g., inadequate sample size) or, for a multidimensional scale, Cronbach’s alphas for no more than half of its dimensions are outside of the previous range. Finally, a “0” means problematic value(s) per dimension regardless of design and/or missing information (for more details, see Table 1 ). Using Windle et al. (2011) to further illustrate, regarding internal consistency, a scale receives a “1” for not reporting Cronbach’s alphas for subscales despite acceptable whole-scale alpha, whereas a one-factor (tested through EFA and CFA) scale with an alpha between 0.70 and 0.95 gets a “2.” For test–retest reliability, a scale is rated “1” despite good ICC (e.g., 0.87) for inadequate retest sample size (<50), whereas a “0” is given to a scale without reported test–retest reliability. Importantly, the scores are ordinal, meaning that a score for one specific criterion enables the ranking of selected scales by the given criterion; sum scores per scale enable a ranking of scales on overall psychometric qualities (with seven criteria, sum scores for measures can range from 0 to 14 points, with 14 being the highest possible score). Terwee et al.’s (2007) system uses symbols (e.g., “+”/“?”), which is less effective in demonstrating overall qualities.

Using the criteria, the two authors evaluated original reports and corresponding scales independently. The team met to clarify the rubric and address disagreements. Then, one author performed the rating independently, and all three coders reached 100% agreement. Although most evaluation criteria were assessed from the original reports, we sought information about some criteria (e.g., internal consistency and test–retest reliability) from relevant articles. Additionally, two authors recorded Cronbach’s alphas of the evaluated scales reported in relevant reports (if available). For scales used over 100 times (CD-RISC and RSCA), we randomly selected 50 studies for each scale.

In total, 963 reports (301 PsycINFO, 551 CNKI, 111 PubMed) met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review (see Figure 1 ). In these included articles, resilience assessment occurred 973 times in various contexts using a range of measures (some studies used two to three resilience scales, e.g., Li et al., 2018 ). Among these assessments, we identified 85 unique self-report resilience measurement scales (a scale and its variations, such as short forms, are considered one in this count) (see Supplementary Table S2 ).

4.1 Chinese resilience research contexts

Our first aim was to identify contexts where resilience testing has been conducted. Among the 963 research reports, the largest group ( n = 332, 34.5%) focused on health conditions. These studies were characterized by their clear foci on mental or physical disorders (e.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; Deng et al., 2018 ), diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS; Gao et al., 2018 ), illnesses (e.g., cancer; Ye et al., 2018 ), and/or public health concerns (e.g., aging framed in such a matter; Tan et al., 2016 ). This group also included studies on temporary or lasting conditions where some level of medical care was required (e.g., pregnancy; Ma et al., 2020 ). In these studies, participants were commonly patients, survivors, or caregivers.

Next, 176 studies (18.3%) used resilience scales in a general context as part of a survey for a mental health index/profile of a population not known for facing specific risks, such as “healthy individuals” and college students in some cities (e.g., Kong et al., 2018 ). The general context usually considered no specific stressor, or alternatively, a range of adversities/stressors/risk factors such as unspecified childhood adversity ( Li et al., 2014 ) or chronic or short-term stress as a common experience ( Ramsay et al., 2015 ; Shi and Wu, 2020 ). Two contexts determined by the physical settings (of social organizing) were work , occupational, and/or organizational challenges ( n = 158, 16.4%) and school life and academic challenges ( n = 32, 3.3%). Studies in these categories usually focused on routine challenges associated with these settings, such as workplace burnout and fatigue common to stressful occupations (e.g., medical professionals and civil servants; Qiu et al., 2020 ) and academic burnout ( Ying et al., 2016 ).

The next context concerned experiences and trends associated with systemic, socio-cultural-economic phenomena in and beyond contemporary China ( n = 158, 16.4%). These studies examined a range of overlapping, publicly aware “ social problems” as complex forms of adversity, often involving the marginalization of specific populations, such as urban–rural migrant workers (e.g., Yang et al., 2020 ) and families (e.g., Gao et al., 2020 ), left-behind children (e.g., Gao et al., 2019 ), migration/immigration (e.g., Yu et al., 2015 ), and LGBTQ+ groups (e.g., Yang et al., 2016 ). Moreover, resilience scales were also used in micro contexts concerning the common and specific challenges of relating , including personal, family, and community relationships ( n = 58, 6.0%), such as parent–child conflict ( Tian et al., 2018 ) and older adults losing their sense of community ( Zhang et al., 2017 ). Additionally, we decided to present abuse and bullying as a unique context ( n = 31, 3.2%), given the specificity of the behaviors, usually with the intention to harm, and the ways such events involve similar experiences of victimization (e.g., fear and isolation) across settings (e.g., school, workplace, and family; Zhou et al., 2017 ; Lin et al., 2020 ).

Furthermore, researchers examined resilience in the context of natural disasters ( n = 29, 3.0%), such as post-traumatic stress disorder and growth linked to experiencing an earthquake ( Xi et al., 2020 ) or rainstorm disaster ( Quan et al., 2017 ) and shidu after an earthquake ( Wang and Xu, 2017 ). 7 Finally, 31 studies (3.2%) focused on resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Ye et al., 2020 ). We identified the pandemic as a separate context due to the magnitude of this atypical event and the multiple ways in which it disrupted social order. In sum, these findings show the broad range of life disruptions explored in interdisciplinary resilience research with Chinese populations.

4.2 Chinese resilience scales

Our second aim was to identify which resilience scales have been used most frequently with Chinese-speaking populations, including whether the popularity of scales varies across contexts. Only three scales (including their variations) accounted for at least 5% of the total 973 times of resilience assessment, including the CD-RISC scales (54.9%), RSCA (12.5%), and various versions of RS combined (8.4%). The CD-RISC and RS were translated scales, whereas the RSCA was a locally developed measure.

Given our desire to focus on popular scales, including both translated and locally developed, we decided to limit our focus to the three most frequently used translated scales (including both the original version and common variations) and a matching number of locally developed scales when conducting a detailed evaluation of psychometric properties (see below). We specifically focused on the following nine Chinese scales organized into six groups: (1) CD-RISC-25 ( Yu and Zhang, 2007 ) and CD-RISC-10 ( Wang et al., 2010 ); (2) RSCA ( Hu and Gan, 2008 ); (3) three versions of the RS including RS-25 ( Lei et al., 2012 ), RS-14 ( Tian and Hong, 2013 ), and RS-11 ( Gao et al., 2013 ); (4) the 14-item version of the Ego-Resiliency Scale (ER-14 CN; Chen et al., 2020 ); (5) the Essential Resilience Scale (ERS; Chen et al., 2016 ); and (6) the Resilience Trait Scale for Chinese Adults (RTSCA; Liang and Cheng, 2012 ). To address which of these scales were used most frequently in different contexts, we performed a cross-tabulation analysis to show how “popular” these scales were in each context. The CD-RISC-25 was the most popular choice across most study contexts, including “general” (49.7%), “health” (67.0%), “work” (68.9%), “school” (41.7%), “relational” (42.0%), “disaster” (79.2%), and “COVID-19” (57.1%). The RSCA was used most frequently in the remaining “systemic” (52.4%) and “abuse” (40.9%) contexts (see Table 3 ). In short, CD-RISC-25 dominated resilience testing in Chinese.

Table 3 . Scale * context crosstabulation (only counting reports related to evaluated scales).

4.3 Scale quality

Our third aim was to assess the psychometric properties of widely used translated and locally developed Chinese resilience measures. The nine scales (including multiple variations of the top six scales) were evaluated based on seven criteria. Scales received a score of “0” (e.g., no information provided) to “2” (e.g., criterion met using rigorous procedures) for each criterion, resulting in an overall score ranging from 0 to 14 possible points. Overall, locally developed scales tended to score higher than translated ones, but none achieved the highest possible rating (see Table 1 for the rating system and Table 4 for ratings of each scale).

Table 4 . Summary of scale assessments.

4.3.1 Content validity

The three locally developed measurement scales (i.e., RSCA, ERS, and RTSCA) received the full score for content validity. All three clarified their aims, discussed resilience and its cultural relevance in Chinese contexts, and involved the target population in item creation/selection (e.g., items were written based on themes in interviews with Chinese participants). Although all translated scales clarified aims and defined resilience, descriptions of target population involvement in the item translation/selection process were not found in the original articles reporting the Chinese versions of these scales.

4.3.2 Internal consistency

Regarding the CD-RISC-25, Cronbach’s alpha for one of the subscales (optimism) was only 0.60 ( Yu and Zhang, 2007 ). The same subscale has displayed less than optimal internal consistency in other studies as well (e.g., Cai et al., 2017 ). For RTSCA, the internal locus of control subscale (out of five) was 0.60. Nonetheless, all studies reported accepted Cronbach’s alphas (i.e., 0.70–0.95) for the total scales with adequate sample sizes. Additionally, we calculated the average alphas (if reported) of these scales. Results were as follows: CD-RISC-25 and –10 = 0.90 and 0.90; RS-25, −14, and −11 = 0.92, 0.90, and 0.86; ER-14 = 0.82; RSCA = 0.83; ERS = 0.92; RTSCA = 0.86.

4.3.3 Factor structure

The authors of RS-25, ER-14, and RSCA examined the proposed or revised factor structures of their measures by conducting EFA and CFA in separate samples. Additionally, for the CD-RISC-25, CFA results failed to retain the original five-factor structure; therefore, Yu and Zhang (2007) conducted EFA and proposed a three-factor structure for the scale. Although they did not replicate the three-factor structure in an independent sample, other researchers have done so (e.g., Xie et al., 2016 ). Similarly, ERS’s three-factor structure tested through a single CFA ( Chen et al., 2016 ) was replicated by Lau et al. (2020) . RTSCA’s five-factor structure was confirmed in one sample ( Liang and Cheng, 2012 ) and was replicated in Li et al. (2017) . Wang et al. (2010) conducted an EFA to explore CD-RISC-10’s one-factor structure, which was then verified by Cheng et al. (2020) through CFA and in the case of RS-14, Tian and Hong (2013) reported two factors through EFA, which were verified in later structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses (e.g., Huang et al., 2020 ). Therefore, these measures were rated highest (i.e., “2”) for the factor structure criterion. RS-11 received a “0” because insufficient information was available to judge whether its factor structure was supported or replicated.

4.3.4 Construct validity

Four measures (CD-RISC-25 and -10; RSCA; ERS) achieved the full score regarding construct validity. The other scales received the intermediate score due to a lack of clarity. That is, although validation studies for measures assessed resilience along with other literature-informed, conceptually related constructs and reported significant relationships among them, the authors did not formulate hypotheses or clearly state some type of expected relationship (directional or not) between resilience and these constructs before reporting statistical tests.

4.3.5 Test–retest reliability

Adequate information about test–retest reliability was available for five measures (CD-RISC-10, RS-25, −14, and −110, and RTSCA) in their original or most popular versions. However, none achieved the full score for two reasons: failing to report intraclass correlation coefficients and using small sample sizes. The test–retest correlation coefficient for CD-RISC-10 was 0.90 across two weeks, 0.31 after six months for RS-25, and “ranged from 0.53 to 0.85” with “86% > 0.70” for RS-14 ( Tian and Hong, 2013 , p, 1500). The sample sizes for these studies, however, were small (below 40), which constitutes a design issue according to Windle et al. (2011) , given that correlations from small samples contain greater sampling error. For RTSCA, the coefficient for the full scale was 0.88 after three weeks; however, the coefficients for three of the five dimensions were smaller than 0.70; its retest sample of 47 individuals also did not fully meet the criterion. The coefficient for RS-11 was 0.62, therefore failing to meet the criterion. The authors of RSCA ( Hu and Gan, 2008 ) mentioned a “retest” in Chinese; however, it used a new group of participants instead of returning members of an existing sample. It is worth noting that although test–retest information was missing from Yu and Zhang (2007) , one included study ( Xie et al., 2016 ) that examined the psychometrics of this version of CD-RSIC-25 did report test–retest reliability of 0.66 across two months. The coefficient for a version of Chinese ER-14 utilized in an unpublished dissertation (cited by a few; Li, 2008 ) was 0.71 across a month with a retest sample of 198 people.

4.3.6 Interpretability

Information demonstrating potential differences in scoring between or among subgroups of a reference population was available for all but CD-RISC-25 and RTSCA. However, none achieved the maximum score because they did not identify and report results about at least four subgroups and/or present the means and standard deviations.

4.3.7 Contextualized translation

Four measures (ER-14, RSCA, ERS, and RTSCA) fully met this added criterion that considered whether researchers (a) clarified/justified whether they viewed resilience as universal, context-specific, or containing elements of both and (b) considered cultural and linguistic appropriateness during scale development or translation. RSCA was perhaps the most rigorous as Hu and Gan (2008) considered different available translations for resilience and chose the most suited one by referencing Taoist values and then creating items informed by the results of thematic analysis of qualitative interviews. For the ERS, Chen et al. (2016) considered resilience a universal concept, and they developed and revised the wording of scale items in both Chinese and English by consulting experts and conducting pilot tests with native speakers in both contexts. For the RTSCA, Liang and Cheng (2012) explained available translations for “resilience” emphasized “Chinese cultural background” when interviewing experts for item generation and conducted a pilot test to finalize items. When Chen et al. (2020) translated the ER-14 CN, they established their position (universal and cultural-specific) and addressed how items may have changed in different translations. The translation and back-translation were an iterative process involving researchers, a third-party expert fluent in both languages, and another reviewer. Other translated scales used the standard translation-back-translation technique without additional information on contextualized translation, therefore receiving the intermediate score.

5 Discussion

Scholars have stressed the importance of cultural and social contexts for understanding the shapes, trajectories, and determinants of resilience ( Southwick et al., 2014 ). Our review identified nine such contexts in which empirical testing of resilience was conducted (e.g., health/illness, natural disasters, workplace challenges). After identifying 85 groups of unique self-report scales, we chose to focus on three widely used translated scales and three locally developed scales, which, when different versions of the same measure were considered (e.g., CD-RISC-25 and CD-RISC-10), resulted in nine total scales. The CD-RISC scales accounted for over half of the reported tests in our sample, and perhaps not surprisingly, CD-RISC-25 was the most popular measure in general, health, work, school, relational, disaster, and COVID-19 contexts. Considering the CD-RISC-25’s immense popularity and contribution, we discuss how its application might be advanced. Following this, we offer recommendations for future resilience scale development/refinement, including more focus on process-oriented scales, and acknowledge the limitations of our systematic review.

5.1 Future considerations for CD-RISC-25-CN

Extant knowledge about resilience in Chinese contexts relies heavily on the translated CD-RISC-25, yet the scale scored only moderately (7/14) on overall quality (see Table 4 ). Given this, future research should continue scrutinizing the scale’s content validity and translation. The simultaneous universality and cultural specificity of resilience have been widely acknowledged, which Yu and Zhang (2007) discussed when explaining the changed factor structure for their translation of the CD-RISC-25 (i.e., three factors in Chinese contexts as opposed to five factors in U.S. contexts). Since their original contribution, however, researchers have not further explored whether the scale taps qualities that may be saliently associated with resilience in Chinese contexts. For example, the items in both languages are notably individualistic (e.g., I will/can/take the lead), while “traditional” Chinese cultures are characterized by communal and relational orientations and the contemporary Chinese “self” is socially and individually oriented (reflecting the merger of global cultures; Kolstad and Gjesvik, 2014 ), what Lu and Yang (2006) termed a “composite self.” Given this, research might assess whether the scale’s content, predictive, and convergent validity might be enhanced by modifying or adding items ( Farh et al., 2006 ) to tap these qualities. As a second example, Yu and Zhang (2007) stated that “Chinese people are probably the least religious people in the world” (p. 27) to explain the changed factor structure and no longer salient “spiritual influence” with one item explicitly mentioning “God” merged into “optimism” (which might in part explain why the alpha value of this specific dimension has been subpar across studies). Resilience researchers might consider how Chinese contexts are characterized by religious/spiritual diversity (rather than simply lacking religion; Chao and Yang, 2018 ). These issues could be addressed by reexamining the content validity and language of the current version and subsequently updating the scale, whose factor structure could then be explored and test–retest reliability reexamined. Our point here is not to discount the value of research findings based on the translated CD-RISC-25, as the scale clearly has been heuristic. We suggest that scale validation is an ongoing process, and issues such as content validity and contextualized translation are critical to consider when more than half of recent Chinese resilience studies have employed this measure. Advancing this influential scale is one critical area for future research.

It is worth noting that RSCA and ERS, both developed in China and involving Chinese-speaking populations, scored the highest (11/14 points). Given that the RSCA focuses on adolescents, one direction for researchers is to develop a version for the general population through similar rigorous processes (see Hu and Gan, 2008 ; discussed more later). The ERS, which is relatively new, needs further validation across contexts. Importantly, test–retest reliability for both RSCA and ERS is yet to be established.

5.2 Future recommendations

In this section, we draw on evaluation results to provide seven methodological recommendations for future resilience scale development work with existing and new scales worth considering in and beyond the Chinese study contexts.

First, regarding content validity (see Section 4.3.1 and Table 1 ), future work could explicitly engage with target populations and/or consult third-party experts (e.g., someone who is familiar with resilience in Chinese contexts either because of lived experience or extensive learning) in item translation, selection, and/or adaptation. These additional processes, which may result in modified item wording, are commonly expected in new-scale development ( Worthington and Whittaker, 2006 ). Developing culturally adapted versions of existing scales in a new language should not be exempted from these steps ( Farh et al., 2006 ).

Second, studies should habitually report Cronbach’s alphas for scales, and, for multiple-dimension instruments, consider evaluating internal consistency for subscales rather than only overall scales. These practices were surprisingly absent in many of the included studies. In addition, scholars recently have argued that McDonald’s omega is a better test of a (sub)scale’s internal consistency (i.e., unidimensionality), so future research should consider reporting omega ( Goodboy and Martin, 2020 ; Hayes and Coutts, 2020 ).

Third, future work should carefully examine the contextual translation of resilience scales (see Farh et al., 2006 ) as well as their factor structure in unique cultural situations. We added a new criterion to evaluate the factor structure of a scale. As shown in existing work, such as the case of CD-RISC-25 ( Yu and Zhang, 2007 ), the factor structure can be sensitive to translation ( Chen et al., 2020 ). When introducing, translating, and applying a scale developed and validated in a different source language and cultural context, researchers must consider the heterogeneity regarding the factor structure of translated versions. Specifically, variations in how items are translated may result in inconsistency. For example, although Tian and Hong (2013) reported a two-factor structure for RS-14—which was replicated in other studies in both simplified and traditional Chinese (e.g., Chung et al., 2020 )—a new translation of the scale showed a one-factor structure ( Chen et al., 2020 ). Moreover, translating a generic scale into a more specific context (or vice versa) in the same language may also yield a changed factor structure. For example, when Hao et al. (2015) adapted the five-factor RTSCA for the specific occupation of civil servants, EFA suggested a four-factor structure instead.

Fourth, given that more than half of the evaluated scales were tested without clear hypotheses regarding resilience’s relationship with study constructs (i.e., dubious design, Windle, 2010 ), future work with new or existing scales should clearly articulate their rationale for testing associations between resilience and associated constructs as informed by theory and/or existing literature, rather than only mentioning possible relationships among constructs.

Fifth, future researchers should include test–retest with adequate sample sizes and justified time intervals in their design. Test – retest reliability is the most problematic property in the results (see Table 4 ). When assessed at all, researchers tended to perform retests using small (below 50) samples, which may partly explain the dubious coefficients (below 0.70) reported in some studies. 8 Test–retest results could further inform a discussion on situations under which resilience should be expected to remain stable or change over time. For example, a trait measure that assumes the stability of resilience over time should result in higher test – retest coefficients than a measure based on the changing process view on resilience, where the way in which resilience is enacted might change over time (see below). Additionally, only a few studies reported the ICC (e.g., Lo et al., 2014 ; Hsieh et al., 2016 ) even though Terwee et al. (2007) deemed it “the most suitable and most commonly used reliability parameter for continuous measures” for its consideration of “systematic differences [as] part of the measurement error” (p. 37). Future studies should report the ICC.

Sixth, future work could begin exploring minimal important change (MIC), concerning interpretability, for Chinese resilience scales . MIC was not assessed for selected scales (as it was not for English scales, see Windle et al., 2011 ), which was indeed acknowledged as a limitation in an excluded Singaporean study, where CD-RISC-10 was validated in English-speaking patients with axial spondylarthritis ( Kwan et al., 2019 ). In clinical research, MIC concerns the threshold where patients begin to perceive their internal change over the course of treatment to be important, which enriches the interpretation of results from the perspective of recipients of the treatment (for a systematic guideline on methods, see Terwee et al., 2021 ). Exploring MIC in future research could promote an understanding of resilience stemming from dialogue between researchers and participants (e.g., through anchor questions; Terwee et al., 2021 ), rather than based on assumptions that small but statistically significant changes in researcher-defined outcomes would have a meaningful impact on participants’ lives.

Seventh, future researchers should address the universality and/or cultural specificity of their concept of interest as well as consider how similar (but nuanced) experiences and phenomena are presented across specific living languages (see Farh et al., 2006 ). This suggestion reflects our alignment with the current consensus that considers resilience as both “universally observable” and “culturally specific” human (biological and social) experiences expressed in numerous ways ( Southwick et al., 2014 ). Regardless of whether scholars translate an existing scale from another culture or locally develop a scale for self-report instruments, procedures for ensuring that the items make sense to a variety of participants in the target language could further enhance rigor and ethics, as well as contribute to content validity. Translation work requires taking additional steps beyond standard translation and back-translation. A recent effort in translating, applying, and validating the 14-item ego resiliency scale ( Chen and Padilla, 2019 ; Chen et al., 2020 ) presents an example of researchers taking manageable steps to demonstrate awareness and sensitivity to culture and language. Chen and colleagues considered resilience to be both universal and culturally specific and addressed how the scale items had changed in previous translation studies. Their back-translation involved several experts fluent in both English and Chinese, who met to reach a conceptual and translational consensus. The version was then reviewed by a third party. Researchers might also gather pilot data from both expert and lay persons and adjust the translation accordingly, similar to early-scale development ( Worthington and Whittaker, 2006 ).

5.3 Moving beyond trait conceptions of resilience

We also call for more future attention on developing and assessing the psychometric qualities of process-oriented measures in individual resilience in Chinese-speaking contexts. Scholars in our review predominantly took the trait approach to resilience assessment in that over half of the tests employed some version of the CD-RISC scale, which is known for its trait view. Original authors of all but one evaluated scale also aligned with the trait view. For example, for the RS-25, resilience is defined as a “personality characteristic that moderates the negative effects of stress and promotes adaptation” ( Wagnild and Young, 1993 , p. 165). Ego-resilience/resiliency, as the name implies, is considered part of the ego structures maintaining the personality system ( Block and Kremen, 1996 ). Notwithstanding the importance of examining how resilient traits or trait resilience relate to other phenomena, interdisciplinary resilience theorizing has endorsed a more complex and comprehensive process views where resilience systems consider interconnected mechanisms mobilizing protective and risk factors ( Windle, 2010 ; Panter-Brick and Leckman, 2013 ; Southwick et al., 2014 ). Luthar et al. (2000) have long suggested that examining what (and to what extent) specific mechanisms (e.g., informal support) mediate the effect of protective factors (e.g., religiosity) is crucial for prevention and intervention designs for populations in need (e.g., Chiu et al., 2020 ). In short, individual-level resilience assessment in Chinese contexts in the recent past has not moved very far from the long-established individual-trait view; available tools from process perspectives remain mostly underused or underdeveloped in translation work. To encourage resilience process assessment in Chinese contexts, we help highlight some process-focused measures and discuss future directions.

Two of the more frequently used scales (see Supplementary Table S2 ) are based on process views of resilience. The RSCA ( Hu and Gan, 2008 ) attempts to assess resilience as a dynamic process through which adverse life events interact with protective factors. Nevertheless, specifically developed from the perspective of adolescents and largely concerning the parent–child relationship, this scale may not be appropriate for other contexts and populations (e.g., adults experiencing chronic illness). Hu and Gan demonstrated a rigorous way of involving target populations and developing a scale from the ground up before testing and revising new samples. Studies replicating their procedures (and adding testing–retesting reliability) in adult and/or general samples to develop population/context-appropriate scales could advance the current resilience process studies. In addition, the Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA) conceptualizes resilience as a multidimensional construct referring to “important psychological skills or abilities [and] the individual’s ability to use family, social and external support systems to cope better with stress” ( Friborg et al., 2003 , p. 66), which aligns with seeing resilience as complex processes encompassing interacting protective systems (e.g., Rutter, 1990 ). However, the English-to-Chinese translation needs further scrutiny and development, considering that there are several referenced translations of RSA and that the factor structures of the scale were not consistent across different samples (e.g., Yang and Lv, 2008 ; Peng et al., 2011 ; Ma et al., 2019 ).

Furthermore, process views may focus on the connections between individuals and surrounding systems, including how protection/adaptation emerges from the interactive process ( Masten, 2015 ). For example, another translated, population-specific scale in our data, the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM; Liebenberg et al., 2012 , 2013 ; Ungar and Liebenberg, 2011 ) operationalizes resilience process with emphases on specific communicative practices (e.g., talking about adversity itself), social construction, nonstatic interpretation, and contextual sensitivity. Although not yet used often, Xiang et al. (2012) translated and performed factor analyses for the 28-item version, which resulted in a 27-item Chinese version. Early translation and validation work of the 12-item version has been provided by Mu and Hu (2016) . The Family Resilience Assessment Scale FRAS ( Sixbey, 2005 ) based on Walsh’s (2016) family resilience framework is worth mentioning for similarly tapping family interactions, though the FRAS has at least three Chinese versions with different numbers of items (see Li et al., 2016 ; Fan et al., 2017 ; Chiu et al., 2019 ). More recently, Wang and Lu (2022) translated and initially validated Walsh’s (2016) questionnaire. Although we have excluded these latter scales from this review, given our focus on self-report measures for individual-level resilience, these scales should be of interest to family resilience researchers who wish to advance process views on resilience.

Additionally, we highlight a recent development in resilience theorizing that fully commits to the focus on social interaction. Buzzanell (2010 , 2019) has proposed a communication theory of resilience (CTR) that theorized resilience as five communication processes, which different levels of agentic actors (e.g., individuals and organizations) perform/enact to maintain and/or transform normalcy and meaningfulness in responses to disruptive trigger events. 9 Based on this theory, Wilson et al. (2021) developed a 32-item Communication Resilience Process Scale (CRPS) in a series of three studies with participants from the United States. The CRPS includes seven subscales tapping the five CTR resilience processes at the individual level (e.g., the process of “crafting normalcy” is subdivided into maintaining current routines and creating new ones). When using the CPRS, researchers first ask participants to recall and describe a significant life disruption (one event or a series of events) that they have faced within a timeframe (e.g., the past two years) before completing self-report items about the extent to which they enacted communicative practices reflective of the resilience processes. Kuang et al. (2022 , 2023) recently translated and contextualized the CRPS into a Chinese version with a retained factor structure but six additional items and slight changes to item wording based on pilot results and feedback from native speakers and experts. The validation work of any measurement is, of course, an ongoing process. Therefore, this process scale needs to be further evaluated in terms of a full range of psychometric standards.

5.4 Limitations

Resilience scholarship is growing quickly; therefore, while capturing trends in the recent past, we are simultaneously missing new ones. A quick search in any database would show that resilience publications had continued growing since 2021, likely due to the pandemic. Researchers should consider conducting similar reviews in future to track ongoing attempts to develop and validate resilience measures. By the same token, scholarship on resilience would also benefit from similar measurement reviews for other languages and cultures. Next, multiple translations of “resilience” are used in Chinese studies, which may orient the conceptualization of resilience differently ( Hu and Gan, 2008 ). We did not take into consideration the various translations in the screening and coding for this review; hence, this task could be addressed in future work. Similarly, how well a scale fits its target population age-wise is also an important future concern. Furthermore, our data and screening results might be limited due to not using chain referential sampling to find all possible existing studies and unique scales; however, the 963 reports we identified are sufficient to capture trends such as which research contexts are being explored and which scales are being used most often (i.e., the nine scales we evaluate in depth). Finally, considering the scope and limited available resources, we only used CNKI to collect reports published in Chinese. Future reviews should consider including other Chinese information sources as well.

In closing, we present this first effort to systematically review Chinese resilience measurement scales, in which we identify a list of contexts relevant to empirical testing of resilience in Chinese and commonly used scales. Based on these results, we direct researchers’ attention to actions and practices through which future instrument development work can be more rigorous, such as when assessing test–retest reliability or translating English scales for different languages and populations. Because studies have predominantly provided validation evidence for scales based on trait conceptualizations of resilience, we also call for more focus on developing/evaluating process measures that assess how Chinese individuals and groups create or enact resilience in response to life’s inevitable disruptions.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

ZT: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. KK: Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. SW: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. PB: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. JY: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Data curation. XM: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Data curation. HW: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The project was partially supported by ZT’s startup research funds granted by the College of Wooster for open access publishing, and by the second author’s University Initiative Scientific Research Program at Tsinghua University (2022THZWJC07) for the research process.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1293857/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ It is important to clarify that in this review, we aim at the broad, plural sense of Chinese contexts, by which we refer to the use of Chinese (as a language group) and cultural affiliations rooted in historicity.

2. ^ Terwee et al.’s (2007) proposed psychometric properties include as follows: (1) content validity, (2) internal consistency, (3) criterion validity, (4) construct validity, (5) reproducibility (including agreement and reliability), (6) responsiveness, (7) floor and ceiling effects, and (8) interpretability. However, several criteria (i.e., gold standard, reproducibility-agreement, floor and ceiling effects, and responsiveness) are typically meaningful in medical/clinical contexts (e.g., clinical trials, interventions, and changes) but are less relevant to the current stage of resilience research (see Windle et al., 2011 ; Zhou et al., 2020 ; Windle et al., 2022 ) and thus were excluded from this review.

3. ^ Zhou et al. (2020) systematically reviewed family resilience questionnaires in both English and Chinese studies; however, our manuscript focuses on individual-level measurement, given that most Chinese resilience scales are cast at the individual level. Only considering English reports, Windle et al.’s (2022) review is specific to scales for people (samples from various countries) living with dementia and their caregivers and hence is less relevant to our review, which looks at scales for Chinese-speaking populations who are facing a wide range of disruptive life events.

4. ^ The data were collected from contexts where Chinese was the primary language, regardless of whether the research report was written in English or Chinese. These criteria enabled us to infer the primary research language if not explicitly identified. For example, a study whose sample was a local community in Shandong province or Hong Kong most likely used scales in simplified or traditional written Chinese (syntactically and semantically similar if not identical), whereas a study whose participants were South African women was unlikely to have used Chinese. Based on the screening of PsycINFO articles, we decided to focus on studies utilizing Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Macao, and/or Taiwanese samples because all qualified articles’ samples were affiliated with one or more than one of these areas/regions. Articles were excluded, if the information provided was inadequate to infer the use of Chinese resilience scale(s) (e.g., no mention of the study population).

5. ^ Krippendorf’s alpha was calculated using Hayes and Krippendorff’s (2007) SPSS macro and selecting nominal as the level of measurement, given that whether a study should be included (yes/no) is a nominal-level variable.

6. ^ There were 193 duplicate records between PsycINFO and PubMed, two between PubMed and CNKI, and none between PsycINFO and CNKI. We used a Chinese search query in CNKI, which enabled us to include many reports published in Chinese.

7. ^ These three examples also illuminated other contexts; however, as acute, highly disruptive events that overturn not only individual lives but also environments, natural disasters could override other more routine challenges.

8. ^ The size of test–retest result depends on (a) the time interval between tests (longer intervals may justify smaller correlations) and (b) sample size (small samples have more sampling error).

9. ^ Specifically, people adapt and/or transform by crafting normalcy (e.g., holding onto rituals and creating new routines), performing identity anchors (e.g., meaningful roles and values that guide action), mobilizing communication networks (e.g., reaching out to strong/weak ties), enacting alternative logics (e.g., reframing events, using humor to lighten challenges), and foregrounding productive action while legitimating negative emotions (e.g., validating fear/anger while still choosing to take steps toward important goals).

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Keywords: resilience, Chinese cultural contexts, cross-cultural scale adaptation, measurement, scale development, systematic review

Citation: Tian Z, Kuang K, Wilson SR, Buzzanell PM, Ye J, Mao X and Wei H (2024) Measuring resilience for Chinese-speaking populations: a systematic review of Chinese resilience scales. Front. Psychol . 15:1293857. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1293857

Received: 13 September 2023; Accepted: 11 March 2024; Published: 28 March 2024.

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Copyright © 2024 Tian, Kuang, Wilson, Buzzanell, Ye, Mao and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Zhenyu Tian, [email protected]

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Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90

He helped pioneer a branch of the field that exposed hard-wired mental biases in people’s economic behavior. The work led to a Nobel.

Daniel Kahneman, a balding man with glasses wearing a blue blazer and a tie. stands in front of a red brick building and smiles.s

By Robert D. Hershey Jr.

Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his partner, Barbara Tversky. She declined to say where he died.

Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky , a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making. (Ms. Tversky, also a professor of psychology at Stanford , had been married to Professor Tversky, who died in 1996. She and Professor Kahneman became partners several years ago.)

As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.

“His central message could not be more important,” the Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker told The Guardian in 2014, “namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.”

Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does the loss of $100 hurt about twice as much as the gaining of $100 brings pleasure?

Among its myriad implications, loss-aversion theory suggests that it is foolish to check one’s stock portfolio frequently, since the predominance of pain experienced in the stock market will most likely lead to excessive and possibly self-defeating caution.

Loss-aversion also explains why golfers have been found to putt better when going for par on a given hole than for a stroke-gaining birdie. They try harder on a par putt because they dearly want to avoid a bogey, or a loss of a stroke.

Mild-mannered and self-effacing, Professor Kahneman not only welcomed debate on his ideas; he also enlisted the help of adversaries as well as colleagues to perfect them. When asked who should be considered the “father” of behavioral economics, Professor Kahneman pointed to the University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler , a younger scholar (by 11 years) whom he described in his Nobel autobiography as his second most important professional friend, after Professor Tversky.

“I’m the grandfather of behavioral economics,” Professor Kahneman allowed in a 2016 interview for this obituary, in a restaurant near his home in Lower Manhattan.

This new school of thought did not get its first major public airing until 1985, in a conference at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, a bastion of traditional economics.

Professor Kahneman’s public reputation rested heavily on his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which appeared on best-seller lists in science and business. One commentator, the essayist, mathematical statistician and former option trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the influential book on improbability “The Black Swan,” placed “Thinking” in the same league as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

The author Jim Holt, writing in The New York Times Book Review , called “Thinking” “an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.”

Shane Frederick, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a Kahneman protégé, said by email in 2016 that Professor Kahneman had “helped transform economics into a true behavioral science rather than a mere mathematical exercise in outlining the logical entailments of a set of often wildly untenable assumptions.”

An Accessible Writer

Professor Kahneman propagated his findings with an appealing writing style, using illustrative vignettes with which even lay readers could engage.

Professor Kahneman wrote, for example, that Professor Thaler had inspired him to study, as an experiment, the so-called mental accounting of someone who arrives at the theater and realizes that he has lost either his ticket or the cash equivalent. Professor Kahneman found that people who lost the cash would still buy a ticket by some means, while those who lost an already purchased ticket would more likely go home.

Professor Thaler won the 2017 Nobel in economic science — officially the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Professor Kahneman shared his 2002 Nobel with Vernon L. Smith of George Mason University in Virginia. “Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend,” Professor Holt wrote in his 2011 Times review . Professor Tversky died in 1996 at 59.

Much of Professor Kahneman’s work is grounded in the notion — which he did not originate but organized and advanced — that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).

Others have personified these mental modes as Econs (rational, analytical people) and Humans (emotional, impulsive and prone to exhibit unconscious mental biases and an unwise reliance on dubious rules of thumb). Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe these rules of thumb. One is the “halo effect,” where in observing a positive attribute of another person one perceives other strengths that aren’t really there.

“Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents,” the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2011 . “They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers, and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.”

But Professors Kahneman and Tversky, he went on, “yielded a different vision of human nature.”

As Mr. Brooks described it: “We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness.” He added: “Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.”

The work of Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky, he concluded, “will be remembered hundreds of years from now.”

In the Shadow of Nazis

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, into a family of Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to France to the early 1920s. After France fell to Nazi Germany in World War II, Daniel, like other Jews, was forced to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. His father, the research chief in a chemical factory, was seized and interned at a way station before deportation to an extermination camp, but he was then released under mysterious circumstances. The family escaped to the Riviera and then to central France, where they lived in a converted chicken coop.

Daniel’s father died just before D-Day, in June 1944, and Daniel, by then an eighth-grader, and his sister, Ruth, wound up in British-controlled Palestine with their mother, Rachel. (Daniel had been born in Tel Aviv during an extended visit with relatives by his mother.)

He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a major in psychology, completing his college studies in two years. In 1954, after the founding of the state of Israel, he was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces as a second lieutenant.

After a year as a platoon leader, he was transferred to the psychology branch, where he was given occasional assignments to assess candidates for officer training.

The unit’s ability to predict performance, however, was so poor that he coined the term “illusion of validity,” meaning a cognitive bias in which one displays overconfidence in the accuracy of one’s judgments. Two decades later this “illusion” became one of the most frequently cited elements in psychology literature.

He married Irah Kahan in Israel, and they soon set off for the University of California, Berkeley, where he had been granted a fellowship. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology there. He returned to Israel to teach at Hebrew University from 1961 to 1977. The marriage ended in divorce. (Professor Kahneman held dual citizenships, in the United States and Israel.)

In 1978, Professor Kahneman married Anne Treisman, a noted British psychologist who shared his interest in the study of attention, which was the chief subject of his early work. The two of them ran a lab and wrote papers together. In 2013 she received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama. She died in 2018. He and Ms. Treisman had long been friends with the Tverskys.

In addition to Ms. Tversky, he is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, Michael Kahneman and Lenore Shoham; two stepdaughters from his second marriage, Jessica and Deborah Treisman; two stepsons from the same marriage, Daniel and Stephen Treisman; three grandchildren; and four step-granddaughters. He lived in Greenwich Village for many years.

It was in Jerusalem, while developing a training course for Air Force flight instructors, that Professor Kahneman had “the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career,” as he wrote in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee.

He had started to preach the traditional view that to promote learning, praise is more effective than punishment. But a seasoned colleague insisted otherwise, telling him, as Professor Kahneman recalled:

“On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.”

The colleague had insisted — and convinced Professor Kahneman — that statistically people may do very well in something in one instance or very poorly in another, but that in the end they tend to regress to the mean, or average.

“This was a joyous moment, in which I learned an important truth about the world,” Professor Kahneman wrote. “Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

His collaboration with Professor Tversky — their peak productive years were 1971 to 1981 — was exceptionally close, so much so that it inspired the author Michael Lewis to write a book about them, “The Undoing Project : A Friendship That Changed Our Minds” (2016).

“Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs — a joint mind that was better than our separate minds,” Professor Kahneman wrote in his Nobel autobiography. Later, in “Thinking,” he wrote, “The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.”

Mr. Lewis reported that the two men worked on a single typewriter, often amid uproarious laughter and shouts in Hebrew and English, and that they had sometimes flipped a coin to determine whose name would be listed first on a paper.

But they also feuded, particularly when Professor Kahneman thought he was being denied proper credit. One falling-out lasted years, ending finally with a reconciliation. Professor Kahneman was solicitous during his colleague’s final illness (he died of metastatic melanoma) and was his main eulogist at his funeral in 1996.

One product of their collaboration was a finding that overconfidence in conjunction with optimism is an extremely common bias, which leads people to think that wars are quickly winnable and that building projects will be completed on budget. But Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky considered such bias necessary in the end for capitalism to function.

Professor Kahneman’s North American career included teaching posts at the University of British Columbia and Berkeley before he joined the Princeton University faculty in 1993.

His most recent book is “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” (2021), written with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony. In The Times Book Review, Steven Brill called it a “tour de force of scholarship and clear writing.”

The book looks at how human judgment often varies wildly even among specialists, as reflected in judicial decisions, insurance premiums, medical diagnoses and corporate decisions, as well as in many other aspects of life.

And it distinguishes between predictable biases — a judge, for example, who consistently sentences Black defendants more harshly — and what the authors call “noise”: less explainable decisions resulting from what they define as “unwanted variability in judgments.” In one example, the authors report that doctors are more likely to order cancer screenings for patients they see early in the morning than late in the afternoon.

The book, like his others, was an outgrowth of Professor Kahneman’s lifelong quest to understand how the human mind works — what thought processes lead people to make the kinds of decisions and judgments they do as they navigate a complex world. And toward the end of his life he acknowledged that so much more was to be known.

In an interview with Kara Swisher on her Times podcast “Sway” in 2021, he said, “If I were starting my career now, I would be choosing between artificial intelligence and neuroscience, because those are now particularly exciting ways of looking at human nature.”

Robert D. Hershey Jr. , a longtime reporter who wrote about finance and economics for The Times, died in January. Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2 ...
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature ...
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport ...
PDF The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators. These findings draw attention to the new research field of ...
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators.
The psychology of esports : a systematic literature review / Fanni
Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature ...
The psychology of esports: a systematic literature review
The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (i) the process of becoming an esport player ...
Setting the scientific stage for esports psychology: a systematic review
ABSTRACT. Competitive gaming, better known as electronic sports (esports), is rapidly growing in popularity. We systematically reviewed the available literature regarding the psychological aspects of esports using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) evidence-based reporting checklist and a Population, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcomes ...
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological interest about esports and then to examine the similarities of esports to professional and problem gambling. As a result of a systematic literature search ...
(PDF) Setting the scientific stage for esports psychology: a systematic
We systematically reviewed the available literature regarding the psychological aspects of esports using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P ...
PDF The psychology of esports: A systematic literature review
The psychology of esports: A systematic literature review Abstract Recently, the skill involved in playing and mastering video games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of 'esports' (electronic sports). The aim of the present paper was to review the main topics of psychological
Setting the scientific stage for esports psychology: A systematic review
Competitive gaming, better known as electronic sports (esports), is rapidly growing in popularity. We systematically reviewed the available literature regarding the psychological aspects of esports using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) evidence-based reporting checklist and a Population, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcomes (PICO ...
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
As a result of a systematic literature search, eight studies were identified that had investigated three topics: (1) the process of becoming an esport player, (2) the characteristics of esport players such as mental skills and motivations, and (3) the motivations of esport spectators. These findings draw attention to the new research field of ...
Setting the scientific stage for esports psychology: a systematic review
ABSTRACT Competitive gaming, better known as electronic sports (esports), is rapidly growing in popularity. We systematically reviewed the available literature regarding the psychological aspects of esports using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) evidence-based reporting checklist and a Population, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcomes ...
Health Benefits of Esports: A Systematic Review Comparing the
Professional gamers who continuously define new standards in the areas of gaming, entertainment, and esports have emerged. This systematic review sought to find out the extent to which these virtual sports affect cardiovascular and mental health, both positively and negatively, and if this is comparable to traditional sports to any degree.
The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review
Discussion The present review aimed to review all empirical studies examining the psychology of esports, and to draw attention to a new field of video game research. However, as demonstrated via a systematic literature search, few studies exist focusing on the psychological aspects of esports.
Esports Psychology: A Systematic Literature Review
This systematic esports medicine literature review discusses the growing phenomenon of esports and the limited research that has been conducted on the psychology of esports. Esports have gained significant popularity in recent years, with a global audience of 385 million and an esport economy that grew 41.3% to reach $696 million in 2017.
Definitions of Esports: A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis
We conducted a systematic review of 461 peer reviewed, full papers that provide a definition of esports. Findings highlighted the growth of the esports field across different domains, and increasing global interest in esports, but a lack of consensus regarding definition of the term.
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR): A PRISMA-guided systematic
The present PRISMA-guided article systematically reviews the current state of research on the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). A systematic literature search was conducted in Pubmed, SCOPUS, and Web of Science (last search: March 2022) selecting all studies that conducted quantitative scientific research on the ASMR phenomenon. Fifty-four studies focusing on ASMR were retrieved ...
Active Student Participation in Whole-School Interventions ...
The present review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses 2020 updated statement (PRISMA 2020; Page et al., 2021).In line with the terminology proposed by the authors, in the following sections, we use the term study for every investigation that includes a well-defined group of participants and one or more interventions and outcomes ...
Measuring resilience for Chinese-speaking populations: a systematic
3.2 Databases search. A systematic search was first conducted between July 2020 and May 2021 in two databases. For studies published in English, we chose PsycINFO for its coverage of more than 2,000 journals across multiple related disciplines (e.g., psychology, health, sociology, management, and communication).
What is the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response? ASMR phenomenon
A new comprehensive review of scientific literature sheds light on ASMR, revealing it as a clearly defined phenomenon that elicits a consistent experience. The paper was recently published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory Research and Practice.
Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90
He helped pioneer a branch of the field that exposed hard-wired mental biases in people's economic behavior. The work led to a Nobel. By Robert D. Hershey Jr. Daniel Kahneman, who never took an ...
Applied Sciences
The aim of this review was to evaluate if the properties of digitally produced dental acrylic resins improved when reinforced with compounds. A literature search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases for the past 10 years. Combinations of keywords were chosen to reflect the PICO question: Do digitally produced dental acrylic resins loaded with compounds have better ...

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The Psychology of Esports: A Systematic Literature Review

Becoming an esport player

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Motivations of esport spectators

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References

Adamus, T. (2012). Playing computer games as electronic sport: In search of a theoretical framework for a new research field. In J. Fromme & A. Unger (Eds.), Computer games and new media cultures: A handbook of digital games studies (pp. 477–490). Dordrecht: Springer.

The qualitative content analysis process.

Engeström, Y. (1993). Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 64–103). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Prevalence and Outlook of Doping in Electronic Sports (Esports): An Original Study and Review of the Overlooked Medical Challenges.

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