Open Access
Case Report
09 October 2025A Case Report of Telehealth Assessment for Adolescent Anxiety, Depression and COVID-Related Grief
Rates of anxiety and depression in children and adolescents have steadily risen over the past decade, and the arrival of COVID-19 exacerbated existing psychological problems for many youth. In the context of these increased rates and the pandemic lockdown, telepsychology, including virtual assessment, evolved as a cornerstone of mental health practice. There are salient benefits to telepsychology, most notably its convenience and accessibility, which have contributed to its expanded application across different types of problems and populations. At the same time, it can pose challenges in acquiring a comprehensive picture of client functioning. This article presents a case study of an adolescent with combined anxiety and depression who was referred for teletherapy during COVID-19, with an emphasis on the assessment intake. Results from a multi-method approach to the assessment are provided along with a brief discussion of treatment and future implications for the practice of telepsychology with youth and families.
Open Access
Review
23 October 2025Adaptive Time Management: A Life-History Framework Integrating Mental Time Travel, Mortality Awareness, and Anticipatory Decision-Making
Adaptive time management is a newly developed life-history framework that integrates humans’ capacity for mental time travel with mortality awareness as a strategic process for time and resource allocation. Rather than triggering terror management, we conceptualize mortality awareness as an adaptive cue that recalibrates subjective time perception and episodic future thinking. This framework maps three key life-history factors (resource scarcity, unpredictability, and harshness) onto corresponding decision premises: perceived remaining time, death’s uncertainty, and life’s inevitability. We review evidence suggesting that: (1) constricted horizons accelerate delay discounting and favor immediate, fast strategies; (2) unpredictability of death (temporal variation of death) evokes emotions and prompt strategic present-oriented choices that secure survival under high-risk conditions; (3) inevitability of death (life’s finitude) fosters slow strategies through resource bet-hedging mental travel that allows time measure and management; and (4) episodic end-of-life thinking elicits anticipatory emotions that adaptively regulate self-control and cognitive reappraisal. We also introduce preliminary findings on “life-history intertemporal meditation” as a potential intervention for adaptive regulation. Finally, we discuss adaptive time management in applications in death education and mental health. Together, this framework highlights how harnessing life-history mental time travel and mortality awareness can promote adaptive decision-making and emotional resilience across the lifespan.
Open Access
Review
17 November 2025Self-Directed Learning Across the Lifespan Regarding Psychological Flow—A Topical Assessment of Recent Publications with High Recall and High Precision
Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological flow and self-directed learning have a well-researched and direct connection. Lacking is an investigation of this relationship across the lifespan—the aim of this review. A search of seven primary databases and one supplementary database (searched eight different ways) with the keywords “self-directed learning, lifespan, psychological flow”—for English-language empirical research studies in peer-reviewed publications—provides this assessment of recent publications with high recall and high precision. The hypothesis is that distinct topics are recognizable, concerning the relationships among self-directed learning, lifespan, and psychological flow, regarding how self-directed learning promotes psychological flow throughout the lifespan. As a quasi-scoping review, the standardized PRISMA-ScR is the methodology. The supplementary database search, without Boolean functions, and yielding the highest returns, produced the five results included. Corroborating the hypothesis, three Csikszentmihalyi-inspired topics synthesize the results: (1) feeling better in the moment, (2) body and mind are in harmony, and (3) improving the quality of life. Based on the synthesis, the level of meaning the learner ascribes to their work determines the relationship among the three keywords. The conclusion is that the relevance of flow to self-directed learning throughout the lifespan depends on learner engagement in supporting their work-related purpose and meaning regarding the learning material.
Open Access
Article
17 November 2025Implicit Social Comparison: An Effective Approach to Promote Positive Attitudes Toward Aging Among Older Adults
Previous studies have consistently demonstrated that positive attitudes toward aging are associated with better psychological well-being and cognitive performance among older adults. Building upon these findings, the present study focused on memory improvement as a direct indicator of cognitive benefit derived from more positive self-perceptions of aging. Specifically, we examined whether an implicit social comparison manipulation could enhance older adults’ memory performance by altering their attitudes toward aging. A total of 161 community-dwelling older adults (M = 66.88 years) were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: Better-self (downward comparison), Worse-self (upward comparison), Equal-good, Equal-bad, and Control. In four experimental conditions, an adopted directed-thinking task was used to activate attitudes toward one’s own and peers’ aging in different combinations, implicitly triggering upward or downward social comparisons. Attitude toward own aging (ATOA), attitude toward peers’ aging (ATPA), self-superiority (ATOA–ATPA), and memory performance were assessed before and after the manipulation. Results showed that significant changes in self-superiority were found only under the two contrast conditions. Specifically, self-superiority increased in the Better-self group and decreased in the Worse-self group. Moreover, the Better-self group demonstrated greater memory gains than the Control and Worse-self groups. These findings suggest that implicit downward comparison can serve as an effective, non-defensive strategy to strengthen older adults’ self-perceptions of aging and to produce short-term improvements in memory. The study extends prior research on social comparison in old age by linking its psychological and cognitive effects within a single experimental framework.
