Shared Feelings Research Articles

Using a socially-engaged arts approach to exploring how diverse socio-cultural groups accessed, valued, engaged with and benefited from an urban treescape during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper presents a socially-engaged arts approach to exploring the variety and specificity of cultural benefits urban park-users associated with its treescape during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the cultural ecosystem services framework, cultural benefits are understood in terms of positive impacts to ‘experiences’ (our relational interactions with the environment), ‘capabilities’ (our knowledge and abilities in relation to environmental interaction) and ‘identities’ (our perceptions of our relationship with the environment). The research captured evidence of a broad range of people’s interactions with the human and non-human world, whilst opening up an inclusive space for respondents to reflect on and share feelings about the significance of these experiences. The methods employed attracted a range of ‘quieter voices’ to participate, particularly more vulnerable park-users. They also attended to the multiple levels at which people connected with treescapes during this time, from less conscious material engagements to more emotionally and culturally driven transactions. This case study research highlights the important role of the park’s treescape in supporting people to feel better during the COVID-19 crisis and their cultural associations and ties to it. However, it also explores feelings of concern for and perceived lack of influence over this valued resource as potentially disbenefiting wellbeing. It identifies experiences of environmental anxiety, emerging from a lack of certainty over and agency within urban green spaces and treescapes and the benefits they can provide. It concludes that management of treescapes and greenspaces should be sensitive to impacts on environmental emotion.

Substitutive trauma: preparing grounds for the Russian attack on Ukraine.

This article introduces a new concept, that of "substitutive trauma," which refers to the utilisation of unprocessed collective traumatic experiences by political leadership to create shared feelings of victimhood and vengeful at-titudes within a population, protecting them onto new target/object. The analysis explores how a substitutive trauma-based psycho-po-litical dynamic culminated in February 2022 in Russia's war against Ukraine. The article argues that the community of traumatic stress professionals, studying and understanding macro-societal processes can contribute to reducing and ameliorating such destructive psycho-political developments.

The divided town of Český Těšín/Cieszyn as the most integrated part of the Czech-Polish borderland: A life in the cross-border educational togetherness or side by side?

Abstract The (non)contribution of schools towards cross-border integration in the divided town of Těšín/Cieszyn, located on the Czech-Polish border, is analysed in this article. The pandemic-related border closures revealed a substantial level of togetherness in this town, manifested by various social activities. Moreover, a part of these (during the pandemic restricted) cross-border social practices were those in education. We applied a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to diagnose the directions of cross-border educational flows, the approach of schools towards the identified joint cross-border social practices, and the possible level of togetherness. As a result, one-sidedness (Polish pupils attending schools in the Czech Republic) of cross-border flows was identified – which also follows the direction of a cross-border workforce. Except for the schools with Polish as the instruction language, located in the Czech part of the town, primarily serving Polish speakers living in the Czech Republic, we can mention hardly any mutually shared feeling of togetherness and an actual place-based approach towards educational governance in this divided town. We observe some ties in education between the autochthonous Polish minority in the Czech Republic and the Poles in Poland, without the involvement of pupils or teachers of Czech ethnicity, who do not reflect opportunities behind the border.

Using Virtual Patients to Support Empathy Training in Health Care Education: An Exploratory Study.

Empathy is essential for effective patient care. Yet, research shows suboptimal empathy in patient-practitioner interactions. Intelligent virtual patient simulations may offer an effective educational tool for empathy training. This observational study explored the quality of speech pathology of students' empathy responses in virtual patient simulations. Using the 7-point Empathic Communication Coding System (ECCS), we examined 72 students' empathic communication during a 12-week virtual patient interview series as part of their standard curriculum across 4 cohorts (a total of 388 empathic responses). The ECCS data were tallied and graphically displayed. We compared year groups (cohorts from 2015 to 2018), changes over semester, and differences between virtual patients. Median ECCS scores were 4 of a maximum of 6 (interquartile range, 3) across all interviews. Most students (89%) scored between a level 2 (implicit recognition) and level 5 (confirmation) with only a few responses scoring at the lowest 2 levels of empathy (0: denial, 0.5%; 1: automatic recognition, 2%) or the highest level of empathy (6: shared feeling or experience, 9%). Students consistently acknowledged patients' feelings and often offered an action, solution, or reassurance. However, shared feelings or experiences were infrequent. Although virtual patient simulations do not replace experiential learning such as simulation, standardized patients, and clinical practicum, they offer a safe environment to practice skills. This article provides support for designing larger controlled clinical trials and provides insights for educators on how to design virtual patient empathic opportunities of varying complexity for students.

Narratives of Women and Gender Relations in Chinese COVID-19 Frontline Reports in 2020.

This article analyzes the representation of women in Chinese news reports about COVID-19 in order to examine the consequences of the pandemic on gender relations in China. It draws on the linguistic framework of appraisal theory for identifying evaluative language and takes Chinese news reports on the COVID-19 frontline in 2020 as the major data sources. The study finds that while the narrative about women's capacity in combating the virus, resolution in the face of adversity, and sense of responsibility help build a shared feeling of community to reconstruct the disturbed social order, the descriptions about the evaluation and feelings of female characters lead to undesirable outcomes in gender relations in China. Specifically, the newspapers' reports on COVID-19 mainly focus on group interests and accomplishments and overlook women's contributions in containing the pandemic. Meanwhile, the news reports devoted to constructing model female characters that highlight transcendent qualities place considerable pressure on everyday women. Furthermore, journalists tend to infuse their reports with gender bias when depicting women, including aesthetic appreciation of appearance and a focus on emotional reactions and domestic roles, which hinders the professional identity of women. This article sheds light on gender relations in China amid the pandemic, as well as the study of gender equality in media discourse.

Whose Time Are: We Speaking In?

Whose Time AreWe Speaking In? Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi (bio) For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the question of time. When I was a young adult, sixteen or seventeen, I can’t recall exactly, my fixation on time grew to such dramatic proportions that the only exit route I had left was blanket denial of its existence. I was living in Irvine, California, then and, for very grave reasons I will get to, I was reading the existentialists, their writings on suicide and nothingness—Sartre and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche—without understanding a lick of what they were saying. But I read on, convinced that understanding was not the point. I was confident that the landscape was being transformed through my immersion in their words. I can see now with the backward glance adulthood offers that I was right to keep reading even if their sentences remained somewhat opaque and illegible to me. What I learned by enduring the feebly lit forests of language is that if we persevere in our search for truth or for a sense of justice—or, in my case, for an axis around which to organize an [End Page 192] itinerant life—literature will show up in our lives as if alerted to metamorphose our consciousness. Sentences, whether beautifully crafted or brutal and assaultive in their revelatory ambitions, have the power to elevate us out of bitterness, shield us from the icy burn of numbness. What is clear to me now, on the cusp of forty, is that literature saved me from forever folding the little immigrant’s kiosk that was my life, so utterly exhausted was I from the repeat injury of watching those whom I most intimately love collapse under the weight of their own psyches. Literature offered me a dwelling place to sort out my troubled intimacies. I was living with my mother when I first developed a reading practice. It was just the two of us, and she had stopped speaking. She had been that way since my brother, two years older than me, had been assaulted and nearly died two years earlier, when we lived, briefly, in Reno, Nevada. We had moved to Reno from Tehran in the mid-nineties. Our mother was a Sai Baba follower at the time, and she had met an Iranian family who shared her beliefs at the Sai Baba Ashram in India. With the exception of their yearly trips to India, the family my mother had befriended lived in Reno, and they’d invited us to set down roots near them so that we could be in community together. They were one of two Iranian families we knew and the only people we socialized with when we weren’t in school. We often meditated together and ate vegetarian food and drove to Lake Tahoe for a swim or gathered for large family meals at their home, which was so huge I couldn’t understand how they found one another in it. The scale of the houses, grocery stores, and schools, the “personal space” people kept between them when they spoke to one another, the vast empty spaces between houses—it all seemed strange to us. My brother and I were accustomed to Tehran’s intimacy; its crowds and its rambunctious warmth, its narrow backstreets lined with poplars, the bazaar-e-Tajrish with its arched passageways and pressed bodies where we bought groceries, the [End Page 193] unspoken shared feeling among most citizens that we were living under siege. In Reno, we were entirely out of step with our surroundings, a feeling perpetuated by the confused gaze of others as they took in our bodies, our presence, our manner of speech. We’d arrived in Reno dressed in clothes we’d purchased in Turkey en route to America; we hadn’t spoken English since we were children, when our father still lived with us, and had grown accents in the interim. Farsi’s rhythms coated our English and our mannerisms had become distinctly Iranian. My brother got the worst of it. I had a certain self-possessed take-me-as-I-am-or-don’t attitude that...

Emotional awareness for fun digital communication

Improving digital communication skills is a necessity in the era of information technology, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and after the pandemic has passed, this need remains. We have to adjust or we fall behind. In digital communication we must strengthen the skills of stringing words, that's the only effective way to share ideas and feelings. Humans are emotional creatures. We always feel first than we think about our feelings. The alignment of impulses in the brain reaches the limbic system first, we feel. Then the impulses are processed in the cerebri cortex, we become able to think about our feelings. It's important to be able to do emotional animation consciously. Emotional animation is an attempt to bring to life positively valued emotions such as pleasure, relief, compassion, empathy, gratitude, etc., and controlling negatively valued emotions such as anger, sadness, hate, disgust, etc. We need to improve communication skills to level four, which are safe and comfortable sharing feelings. The comfort of speaking to share feelings is the result of being created, not happening unconsciously. It's important to be aware when speaking. The most visible technique that can be trained is confirmation. Confirmation is effective for careful linking with partners. This editorial provides examples communication through chatting application Whatsapp. What about the availability of emoticons and stickers in the WhatsApp platform? Can't it be used to replace intonation and body language? It can indeed be used in the right situations so as to strengthen the words. However, overuse of emoticons and stickers makes messages less personal. We also become less than optimal in the way we are present and respond to the presence of others. Finally, the way we communicate is rooted in character, but character formation takes a long time. Being aware to do emotional animation in every conversation is a simple short-term solution in fixing communication problems. In digital communication, making optimal the ability to string words is the right choice.

Treehouses and superheroes: A design-based study of psychological ownership in collaborative creativity through exchanges of presents

Collaborative creativity is often promoted in higher education. However, studies have indicated that collaborative creativity can entail demotivation and a loss of psychological ownership of the creative product. This is especially true when students do not know each other well and when many students are expected to work together and inspire one another. The purpose of this article is to present, discuss, and investigate a didactic design principle that addresses these challenges. Through a design-based research project, we developed and tested a design in which students collaborated in creative processes through exchanges of presents. In two separate studies, students worked in groups to develop treehouses and superhero camps. The different groups gave presents to one another in the form of creative add-ons for the treehouses and camps. The results indicated that exchanging presents established a productive space in which the students could work together without losing feelings of ownership. Therefore, we propose that the theoretical concept of psychological ownership should be expanded to include feelings of ownership that are neither exclusive nor shared, but rather adopted. Adopted ownership enables creative interactions that neither depend on shared feelings of ownership nor compromise exclusive feelings of ownership. The main contribution of this article is the testing and production of a theory of psychological ownership and collaborative creativity, as well as the validation of specific design principles that promote successful collaboration in creative processes.

Understanding Sophia? On human interaction with artificial agents

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) create an increasing similarity between the performance of AI systems or AI-based robots and human communication. They raise the questions: whether it is possible to communicate with, understand, and even empathically perceive artificial agents; whether we should ascribe actual subjectivity and thus quasi-personal status to them beyond a certain level of simulation; what will be the impact of an increasing dissolution of the distinction between simulated and real encounters.(1) To answer these questions, the paper argues that the precondition for actually understanding others consists in the implicit assumption of the subjectivity of our counterpart, which makes shared feelings and a „we-intentionality” possible. This assumption is ultimately based on the presupposition of a shared form of life, conceived here as „conviviality.”(2) The possibility that future artificial agents could meet these preconditions is refuted on the basis of embodied and enactive cognition, which links subjectivity and consciousness to the aliveness of an organism.(3) Even if subjectivity is in principle impossible for artificial agents, the distinction between simulated and real subjectivity might nevertheless become increasingly blurred. Here, possible consequences are discussed, especially using the example of virtual psychotherapy. Finally, the paper makes case for a mindful appproach to the language we use to talk about artificial systems and pleads for preventing a systematic pretense of subjectivity.

Emotional reactions to infertility diagnosis: thematic and natural language processing analyses of the 1000 Dreams survey

Research questionWhat are the emotional effects of infertility on patients, partners, or both, and how can qualitative thematic analyses and natural language processing (NLP) help evaluate textual data? DesignA cross-sectional, multi-country survey conducted between March 2019 and May 2019. A total of 1944 patients, partners, or both, from nine countries responded to the open-ended question asking about their initial feelings related to an infertility diagnosis. A mixed-method approach that integrated NLP topic modelling and thematic analyses was used to analyse responses. Sentiment polarity was quantified for each response. Linear regression evaluated the association between patient characteristics and sentiment negativity. ResultsCommon emotional reactions to infertility diagnoses were sadness, depression, stress, disappointment, anxiety, frustration, confusion and loss of self-confidence. NLP topic modelling found additional reactions, i.e. shared feelings with partners, recollections about causes of infertility and treatment experience. Responses to the open-ended question were brief (median: three words) with 71.8% conveying negative sentiments. Some respondent characteristics showed small but significant associations with sentiment negativity, i.e. country (Spain, China and France were more negative than the USA, P < 0.001, P < 0.003 and P < 0.009 respectively), treatment engagement (no treatment was more negative than one or more treatment, P = 0.027) and marital status (missing/other was more negative than divorced, P = 0.003). ConclusionInfertility diagnoses create an emotional burden for patients and partners. The mixed-method approach provides a compelling synergy in support of the validity of these findings and shows potential for these techniques in future research.

Grief Aesthetics

Abstract An excerpt from an experimental series, “Grief Aesthetics” is a lyrical essay on intimacy and writing. The essay participates in the double black study of eroding and composing a new sentence, a new sentence sounded in refusal (of the social pact of writing, of grammar), a new sentence forged in friendship (of thinking with, of writing with). On one level, “Grief Aesthetics” is concerned with inherited grief, the remains of stolen life, the residual desire for romance in contemporary black art. The essay considers the loss of romantic love in conversation with Terence Nance's feature and short films An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and Swimming in Your Skin Again, in conversation with a single recurring line from a poem in Taylor Johnson's Inheritance. At another level, “Grief Aesthetics” is a sort of ars poetica on the process of writing and at this level is preoccupied with the poetic line, the sentence (thinking about sentences), the space in writing, the mundane moments in between the emergence of a line or series of lines and declension as it occurs in the gaps. At every turn “Grief Aesthetics” practices creating in “commonsense” (a shared feeling, a shared aesthetics) among contemporary artists whose works evoke a sense of grief, (dis)placement, loss, loneliness, homelessness, desire, tenderness, friendship, bliss.

“Men are not raised to share feelings” Exploring Male Patients’ Discourses on Participating in Group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Existing literature on the psychology of men and masculinity indicates that men face specific mental health difficulties. Overall, men seem more reluctant to seek out mental health services than women. This study explores the ways in which seven male patients talk about their experiences of participating in cognitive-behavioral group therapy in the context of outpatient Danish mental health services. Employing a discourse analytical approach, this study investigates how traditional masculinity ideals affect the men’s accounts of participating in cognitive behavioral group therapy. The analysis indicates that traditional masculinity informs the interpretative repertoires men apply to describe their preconceptions of therapy and engaging in therapy. In turn, these common-sense understandings make certain subject positions available, which may be gendered. The relevance of the findings for future gender sensitive psychotherapy practice with men is discussed.

Gossip, the Common Denominator

Gossip, the Common Denominator

Interview with Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process in Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is the author and co-editor of many books and collections, including The Failure of Certain Charms: And Other Disparate Signs of Life (2008). His novel The Light People (1994) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Following some of the stages in his career and personal story, which he kindly accepted to share with me, this interview highlights some of the crucial key issues concerning Native American people and cultures, questions that still need a wider transnational space both inside and outside academia. Discrimination based on language has influenced the history of Native American people for centuries, starting from the forced education of the young in the 19th century and continuing in the 20th, in the context of Hollywood film productions. Linguicism, language-based racism (Phillipson 1992), is a topic that needs to be addressed in the light of the recent flourishing of extremist thought worldwide, which carries the abused rhetoric of ‘us vs them’ (van Dijk 2015) and, at the same time, spurs protest movements. This reflection goes hand-in-hand with the controversial topic of the appropriation of Native American cultural practices by old and new wannabes (non-people who are so much fascinated by Native American cultures that end up imitating them by, for example, choosing a Native name or emphasising certain aspects of the culture which they admire, often basing their beliefs on stereotypes), whilst people living in the Reservations are still neglected and the Native American and Alaskan Native population register extremely high suicide, homicide and alcoholism rates compared to the U.S. all races population (especially women). But, the efforts and educational programs aimed to preserve languages and cultures (like the Lakota Language Consortium or the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language programs), the vibrancy of the artistic scene in the visual, literary and music fields, the various forms of activism and community engagement projects (such as, for example, the MMIWG movement – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – the water protectors protest at Standing Rock, known as #NoDapl, or the prayerful journey called Run4Salmon in California) are also to be acknowledged as milestones in the process of regaining self-sovereignty by Native people. Against the background of these considerations, I am pleased and honoured to share thoughts, feelings and emotions with Gordon Henry.

What is it to Lose Trust? Covid-19 Pandemic, Extended Minds and Shared Feelings

Since the emergence of the Covid-19 outbreak, the world has faced profound changes, with different levels of impact on human experience. Besides immediate health, economic, and political issues, psychological and existential impacts have also emerged. It is no exaggeration to say that even our taken-for-granted, embodied being in the world has profoundly changed, with collectively felt impacts. In this paper, I argue for a general description of the Covid-19 experience. I suggest that loss of trust emerges as a pervasive dimension of these strange times, de-structuring the whole web of human relations since then. As an essentially affective category, trust can be described at the most basic level as a pre-intentional bodily orientation towards ourselves, others, and the world in general. A critical point is that loss of trust cannot be described as an internal and individual emotion, but rather, as an essentially relational and socially extended affective phenomenon. Another critical point is that, due to social distancing measures, loss of trust has to be understood mostly as a technologically scaffolded form of emotional sharing. I end by calling attention to the potential and present mental health impacts of losing trust.

How emotions shape feminist coalitions

This article develops a framework for conceptualizing the emotional dimensions of coalitions, with particular focus on how power operates through emotion in different varieties of feminist coalitions. The article proposes three interrelated areas in which emotion shapes feminist coalitions: (1) Feelings towards coalition partners: feelings of mistrust, anger, fear, or their reverse grow from histories of interaction and unequal power. These make up the emotional landscape of intersectional coalitions, which operate through a tension between negative emotions and attempts at empathy or mutual acceptance; (2) Shared feelings: feminist coalitions build on shared fear of threat or anger at a common enemy; and (3) emergent emotions in collective action. Coalition partners possess distinct emotion cultures. Joint collective action can cement bonds when all participants’ emotion cultures are reflected, or weaken coalitions when the reverse is true. In all three of these areas, organizers engage in emotional labour in order to create or maintain coalitions. These three dynamics are illustrated with examples from intersectional feminist coalitions, the Women’s Marches, and interactions between feminists and conservatives opposed to pornography.

Socially Shared Feelings of Imminent Recall: More Tip-of-the-Tongue States Are Experienced in Small Groups.

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states are typically defined as feelings of imminent recall for known, but temporarily inaccessible target words. However, TOTs are not merely instances of retrieval failures. Clues that increase the subjective likelihood of retrieval success, such as cue familiarity and target-related information, also have been shown to elicit feelings of imminent recall, supporting a metacognitive, inferential etiology of the TOT phenomenon. A survey conducted on our university campus provided anecdotal evidence that TOTs are occasionally shared among people in small groups. Although shared TOTs may suggest the influence of social contagion, we hypothesized that metacognitive appraisal of group recall efficiency could be involved. There should be more instances of remembering in several heads than in one. From this, we conjectured that people remembering together entertain the inference that successful retrieval is more likely in group recall than in a single-person recall situation. Such a metacognitive appraisal may drive a stronger feeling of closeness with the target word and of recall imminence, precipitating one (or more people) into a TOT state. We used general knowledge questions to elicit TOTs. We found that participants reported more TOTs when remembering in small groups than participants remembering alone. Critically, the experimental manipulation selectively increased TOTs without affecting correct recall, suggesting that additional TOTs observed in small groups were triggered independently from the retrieval process. Near one third (31%) of the TOTs in small groups were reported by two or more participants for the same items. However, removing common TOTs from the analyses did not change the basic pattern of results, suggesting that social contagion was not the main factor involved in the observed effect. We argue that beyond social contagion, group recall magnifies the inference that target words will be successfully retrieved, prompting the metacognitive monitoring system to launch more near-retrieval success “warning” (TOT) signals than in a single-person recall situation.

Moral Inquiry Beyond Objectivism and Subjectivism

Abstract There is a shared feeling among those familiar with pragmatism that, if applied in practice, the teachings of Peirce, James, Dewey, and their heirs could prove extraordinarily helpful in our current uncertain times—times of persistent moral disagreements and almost irreparable social conflicts. But to what extent is this feeling justified? What is the nature of these infelicitous circumstances? And, what makes pragmatism such a suitable approach? In this article, I claim that the main reason behind the ineffectiveness with which we have traditionally addressed our differences is the uncritical acceptance and enactment of a pernicious dichotomy between objectivism and subjectivism. As I argue, it is pragmatist philosophers who most clearly understood the urgency to find an alternative to these extreme positions and who most successfully accomplished this task; it is to them, I claim, we must now turn if we are to more effectively address our disagreements and conflicts.

Italian Community Psychology in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Shared Feelings and Thoughts in the Storytelling of University Students.

This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspective of Community Psychology. The aim was to investigate young people's experiences because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. The research involved 568 university students, 475 females, and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years (SD = 4.836). The collected data were analyzed with the Grounded Theory Methodology, using the Atlas 8.0 software. From the textual data, representative codes were defined and grouped into 10 categories, which reflect the individuals' prosocial attitudes, behaviors, and values. These categories formed three macro-categories, called: “Collective Dimensions,” which includes Connectedness, Solidarity, Italian-ness, Social Problems, and Collective Mourning; “Prosocial Orientation,” which includes Trust and Hope; and “Collective Values,” which includes Values of Freedom, Respect of Social Rules, and Civic-Mindedness. All these macro-categories are indicative of the shared feelings experienced by Italians during the first time of the pandemic. Further practical implications of these results will be discussed, including a consideration of the risk of developing distress and improving well-being, as well as promoting preventive behaviors.

Unravelling socioeconomic school composition effects on higher education enrollment: the role of students’ individual and shared feelings of futility and self-efficacy

Despite the massification of higher education, social inequality in higher education outcomes still persists. It is known that secondary schools’ socioeconomic composition is at least partly responsible for this social inequality. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which socioeconomic composition affects higher education enrollment are still poorly understood. Based on the attribution theory, this study expects students’ feelings of academic self-efficacy and sense of futility to act as underlying mechanisms. Additionally, given that individual self-efficacy beliefs and individual sense of futility are shared among students within schools — that is, schools have different self-efficacy and futility cultures — we investigate whether these cultures are consequential for higher education enrollment and program choice. Results of binomial logistic multilevel analyses on the data of the International Study of City Youth ( www.iscy.org ) in Ghent, consisting of 1214 Flemish students across 29 schools, indicated that students in low socioeconomic composition schools are less likely to enroll in higher education because these schools are characterized by high futility cultures. In contrast, high self-efficacy and self-efficacy cultures are positively associated with the choice for academic bachelor programs, but they did not explain socioeconomic composition effects. We conclude that educational policies should aim at increasing a sense of control over academic outcomes in order to improve social equality in higher education outcomes.