Mixed-orientation marriages (MOMs)—unions in which one partner is heterosexual and the other identifies as a sexual minority—remain understudied in the Philippine context despite the country’s rigid heteronormative legal and cultural framework. This qualitative study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to examine the lived experiences of six self-identified lesbian and gay Filipinos (five gay men, one lesbian woman) in MOMs. Grounded in Husserlian phenomenology and Prospero Covar’s Banga framework from Filipino Psychology, the study explored how participants entered, navigated, and integrated their homosexual identities within heterosexual marital structures. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using IPA’s hermeneutic process. Four superordinate themes emerged, organized under the acronym RUNWEY: Reasoning (converging antecedents into marital union), Unfolding (management of identity disclosure), Weathering (relational consequences of homosexuality), and Yielding (identity integration). Entry into MOMs was shaped by both internalized motivations—love and procreative desire—and contextual influences, including familial pressure and identity uncertainty. Disclosure dynamics varied by the timing of sexual identity recognition and produced distinct patterns of openness and concealment in marital and parent-child relationships. Despite persistent sociocultural and relational challenges, participants demonstrated resilient integration of identity. These findings underscore the need for culturally informed psychological interventions and more equitable legal frameworks for sexual minorities in the Philippines.
This study evaluated the suitability of the RCADS-MDD for assessing depressive symptoms among 805 Vietnamese lower secondary school students by examining its internal structure, reliability, measurement invariance, associations with related constructs, short-term temporal stability, and measurement error. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a one-factor structure at both assessment waves, with good internal consistency, although average variance extracted remained below the conventional threshold. Longitudinal configural, metric, and threshold invariance were supported, indicating that scores could be meaningfully compared across the two assessment occasions. Measurement invariance was also supported across gender, grade level, and school at both waves, supporting the comparability of scores across key student subgroups. Correlations with related psychological constructs provided additional evidence for the interpretability of RCADS-MDD scores. Scores demonstrated moderate rank-order stability over the short retest interval. However, indices of absolute agreement, standard error of measurement, minimal detectable change, and Bland-Altman analysis indicated that small changes in individual scores may reflect measurement variability rather than meaningful change. Overall, the findings support the RCADS-MDD as a suitable measure for assessing depressive symptom severity and for group-level comparisons among Vietnamese lower secondary school students, while caution is warranted when interpreting small score changes at the individual level.
The study aimed to develop a psychoeducation intervention program for formal female caregivers and test its feasibility and acceptability. This paper follows the program development model as its intervention development framework, presenting the planning and development phase and the feasibility and acceptability testing of the psychoeducation program for formal female caregivers. In the first phase of the study, program planning and development, we determined the program components using qualitative data, including a review of related literature, theoretical foundation, needs assessment, and thematic analysis. The study population consisted of 25 participants who were formal female caregivers, subject matter experts, and expert evaluators, purposively selected for program planning and development, as well as the pilot run. Among them, 7 formal caregivers were interviewed individually and later joined the focus group discussion. The 3 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) were invited to individual interviews to gain insights on interventional approaches appropriate for formal caregivers. Themes elicited from individual interviews and focus group discussions were analyzed thematically. Related literature was also reviewed and served as a basis for determining the Caregiving Stress Model and the Cognitive Behavioral Theory as theoretical bases. All 17 participants who were formal female caregivers completed the needs assessment using the Caregiver Burden Inventory and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. In the second phase of the study, the focus is on assessing the feasibility and acceptability of the program developed. Thus, 5 expert evaluators participated in evaluating the developed program. They were all licensed psychologists who were involved in program development. The 10 formal female caregivers were invited to try out the developed program and were asked for their feedback and suggestions to improve it. The efficacy of the psychoeducation intervention is reserved for subsequent research.
The purpose of this study was to examine changes in parent-child behaviors when the parent was interacting with a smartphone. Technoference or everyday interruptions from smartphone use may lead to lower levels of parent-child engagement. In some cases, the “mere presence” of a smartphone can interfere with interactions, even when the phone is not used. Using a repeated measures design, 30 parent-child dyads (Parents: 26 mothers, 4 fathers, Mage = 33.97 years, SD = 4.93; Children: 16 girls, 14 boys, Mage = 37.14 months, SD = 10.32 months) were videotaped interacting with toys across three conditions including a texting condition, where the parent received and responded to unpredictable text messages, a “mere presence” condition where parents expected to receive text messages, but did not, and a no phone condition where the phone was turned off and out of sight. Videotapes of the dyads were coded for parent and child behaviors across the three conditions. As expected, parents were less responsive, less likely to scaffold their child’s behavior, and engaged in less coordinated joint attention when texting compared to the no phone condition. Children produced more bids for attention when the parents were texting compared to no phone condition. The “mere presence” of a smartphone did not impact the parent or child’s behavior, with responses resembling the no phone condition. These results suggest that actively using a smartphone compromises parent and child behaviors, but the mere presence of the phone does not.
Impairments in emotional regulation and adverse experiences in early childhood are considered key factors in the development of personality disorders. However, existing theoretical approaches remain fragmented, failing to provide an interdisciplinary synthesis of the neurobiological, psychological, and interpersonal mechanisms within a single explanatory framework. This study aimed to reveal the relationship between deficits in affective regulation and early traumatisation as mutually reinforcing factors in the development of personality pathology, substantiating this relationship at multiple levels. This narrative review with elements of conceptual synthesis is based on 41 sources from PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar covering the period from 2020 to 2025. These sources include meta-analyses, longitudinal cohort studies, randomised controlled trials, and qualitative investigations from Kosovo, Norway, Lebanon, Canada, and other countries. According to the analysed studies, borderline personality disorder is characterised by limbic hyperreactivity associated with emotional abuse, with an odds ratio=11.02; conversely, antisocial personality disorder is characterised by prefrontal hypoactivation and a blunted cortisol response. The reviewed sources indicate that epigenetic modifications of the FK506 binding protein 5 (FKBP5) gene and accelerated biological ageing according to the GrimAge clock (β=0.12; p=0.03) constitute components of a cascading molecular mechanism linking early trauma with neurostructural changes. The literature analysis showed that emotional dysregulation forms a continuum ranging from affective overreactivity (cluster B) and overcontrol (cluster C) to incongruence (cluster A). Mentalisation deficits, self-compassion, and social support were described as mediators of the ‘trauma-personality pathology’ relationship. According to the results of meta-analyses, trauma-informed dialectical behaviour therapy reduces symptoms of borderline personality disorder with an effect size of g=-0.82. Group schema therapy demonstrates an effect size of g=0.859, and eye movement desensitisation shows d=0.65 for psychological symptoms. The four-level substantiation – carried out at molecular-neurobiological, developmental-interpersonal, psychological, and clinical-phenomenological levels – reveals the basis for a stratified approach.
