Background: loneliness is a common experience for adolescents, yet the voices of adolescents are missing from current conceptualisations of loneliness. That means, measures that have been created based on current conceptualisations may miss important contexts of adolescence, such as the roles of friendships, that determine the way loneliness is experienced. The current study aims to centre adolescent voices to identify how they conceptualise loneliness and what strategies they consider to be useful for adolescents to cope with loneliness. Method: thematic framework analysis (TFA) was conducted on qualitative interviews with young people aged 8–14 years in Belgium and Italy to identify salient themes in their conceptualisations of loneliness. Results: Loneliness was conceptualised as a negative emotional state involving negative thinking patterns that occurs when an individual perceives they are missing out on a desired aspect in their social relationships. Coping strategies related to alleviating negative affect, and aiding social reconnection. Conclusions: friendships with peers were understood to be central to adolescent loneliness experiences. In line with that, loneliness was seen to be experienced at school. Age-related differences in friendship expectations were identified, highlighting how developmental needs relate to the loneliness experience.

Objectives:To explore what sources of well-being are rated meaningful by older adults in residential care and how they are related to two important well-being outcomes. Method: Two cross-sectional questionnaire studies were conducted in a sample of care residents without cognitive disability (n = 329) and with Alzheimer's disease (n = 104). Structural equation modelling was used to test a hypothesized and exploratory model of different sources as predictors of presence of meaning in life (POM) and satisfaction with life (SWL). Results: Family and Health were rated most meaningful by residents with and without dementia. In both studies, the hypothesized model showed adequate fit with the data. For cognitively intact residents, Personal Growth, Spirituality/Religion, and Interpersonal Relationships predicted POM, while Family and Leisure predicted SWL. Exploratory testing identified Leisure as a possible additional predictor of POM. For residents with Alzheimer's disease, Personal Growth and Society/Community predicted POM, while Family predicted SWL. Conclusion:For older adults in residential care, many sources of well-being remain highly meaningful and some are directly related to the experience of meaning and life satisfaction.Both for residents with and without dementia, continued or increased investment in moments that foster personal growth and family relationships might be especially valuable.

Grace is a central theme in religious traditions but receives only recently attention by psychologists. Conceptualizations of grace seems predominantly constructed within theological and theoretical frameworks, whereas these conceptualizations may be poorly aligned with the definitions of grace of lay persons. This study clarifies the concept of grace and creates a bottom-up definition, based on the understanding of non-experts in a secularized society. A total of 456 Belgian adults (64 % female, mean age = 50.04) provided descriptions of grace in an online survey.A multidisciplinary coding team conducted quantitative and qualitative content analysis (Nvivo). The following themes and categories emerged (1) virtuous qualities: grace is recognized in a multitude of good qualities with forgiveness as the ultimate example;(2) extra-ordinary gift: grace is something you receive unmerited, the nature of the giving goes beyond mere fair exchange; (3) transcendent and immanent setting: grace is encountered in the realm of the divine as well as in human relationships and daily life; (4) profound experience: the giving and receiving of grace entails an articulated personal involvement leading to new beginnings and freedom and (5) profound feelings: the experience of grace is accompanied with positive feelings and states often preceded by negative feelings and states. Distribution of categories by respondent's age, gender and religiosity showed a robustness of underlying characteristics in the definition of grace. However, significant group differences are found: believing and older participants described more often extra-ordinary and transcendent characteristics, whereas non-believers used more referrals to faults and forgiveness. Believing people used more positive feelings and women used more virtuous qualities in describing grace.The importance of further investigating the psychological dynamics of grace and its capacity for enhancing well-being is highlighted.

Background and Objectives Meaning in life is an important aspect of positive psychological functioning for older adults. Limited work suggests the relevance of the experience of meaning for people with dementia, but research into this experience from their personal perspective is lacking. The current study provides an in-depth investigation of the lived experience of meaning in life for older adults with Alzheimer’s disease. Research Design and Methods The study was conducted following the phenomenological reflective lifeworld approach. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 older adults (+65) with Alzheimer’s disease living either at home or in a nursing home in Belgium. Data analysis was an iterative process aimed at illuminating the constituents and essence of the phenomenon. Results The essence of the experience of meaning in life for participants was understood as “continuing to participate in the dance of life as oneself.” This experience was further clarified in four closely intertwined constituents: (a) feeling connected and involved, (b) continuing everyday life as oneself, (c) calmly surrendering and letting go, and (d) desiring freedom, growth, and invigoration. Discussion and Implications Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of meaning in life as experienced by older adults with Alzheimer’s disease themselves. They emphasize the relevance of the concept for psychological dementia research and offer original insight for the inclusion of meaning in life as an important aspect of holistic dementia care.

The aim of the present study is to clarify the lay experience of grace through person-level narratives. This empirical qualitative study follows a bottom-up approach, not restricted by specific theoretical assumptions, and includes a large and heterogeneous group of Belgian participants. The sample (recruited online) was composed of 456 participants (64% women, mean age = 50.04, age range from 18 to 93 years). Data consisted of 456 written narratives describing the experience of grace. They were analysed using a thematic analysis and thematic network approach with the help of a qualitative data management package Nvivo 12 pro. The resulting thematic network visualizes the experience of grace in the flow of time with (a) antecedents, grace can happen anywhere and anytime, but difficulties often precede grace; (b) the core experience is one of receiving an unmerited free gift in response to failure or brokenness or as an encounter with goodness and beauty, and this can be given by the divine or by other people and lastly (c) consequences entails a transformation at the intrapersonal, interpersonal and/or situational level. Our approach allows for an ecological and bottom-up understanding of grace as experienced nowadays in a secularized country and can empirically inform future studies about the connection between grace and psychological flourishing.