A cross-cultural study of 1,401 young adults has found that people who recalled more supportive, responsive and socially connected childhood experiences also tended to report better well-being and stronger social relationships in adulthood. The pattern appeared in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, although the researchers found an important boundary: those childhood experiences did not consistently predict how generously or cooperatively people behaved when real money was at stake in economic games.
The study, published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, examined a framework known as the evolved developmental niche, or evolved nest. It brings together childhood experiences such as affectionate touch, responsive caregiving, self-directed play, social embeddedness and a positive emotional climate. Rather than asking only whether adversity leaves lasting scars, the framework asks whether positive developmental experiences may contribute independently to later flourishing.
Looking beyond the absence of adversity
Research on childhood and adult health has often concentrated on adverse childhood experiences. That literature has been important for identifying long-term associations between early adversity and later physical, psychological and social outcomes. But avoiding harm is not necessarily the same as providing the conditions that support healthy development.
The evolved nest framework focuses on a broader developmental environment. In the present study, participants reflected on seven components spanning childhood from birth to age 18: positive and negative touch, social embeddedness, self-directed play, responsive care, and positive and negative emotional climates at home. The researchers combined these responses into a measure they called developmental nestedness.
The central question was whether greater developmental nestedness would be associated with adult personal well-being, social relationships and prosociality across substantially different cultural settings. The researchers also wanted to know whether the relationship extended beyond what people said about themselves to what they actually did in incentivised economic games.
How the three-country study worked
The study was preregistered and initially recruited 512 participants in the United States and 508 in the United Kingdom through Prolific Academic during September and October 2024. A further 713 participants were recruited in Japan through GMO Research in December 2024. All were aged 18 to 34.
After prespecified data-quality exclusions, the final analytical sample contained 1,401 participants: 492 from the United States, 489 from the United Kingdom and 420 from Japan. Average ages were 28.1 years in the US, 27.6 in the UK and 28.6 in Japan, and women made up roughly half of each national sample.
Adult outcomes were deliberately broad. Personal well-being included health, life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety, beliefs about the character of the world and perceived relative deprivation. Social relationship measures included neighbourhood belonging, perceived support, relationship satisfaction and attachment. General prosociality included trust and self-reported social preferences.
The researchers then added a behavioural test. Participants played incentivised economic games, including trust, dictator, ultimatum, public-goods and coin-flip tasks. This allowed the team to compare self-reported prosocial tendencies with decisions carrying financial consequences.
Regression models controlled for age, gender, household income, participants’ education, parental education and subjective socioeconomic status during childhood. The researchers also corrected for multiple hypothesis testing. Because response styles can differ between cultures, outcome measures were standardised within each country before the main comparisons.
Well-being and relationships showed the clearest pattern
Developmental nestedness was associated with every measured indicator of personal well-being in the United States and United Kingdom after demographic controls and multiple-testing corrections. In Japan, it was associated with every personal well-being measure except one of the measures concerning beliefs about whether the world is alive.
The non-standardised results illustrate the size and direction of several relationships. A one-point increase in developmental nestedness was associated most strongly with a 1.06-point increase in previous-day happiness in the US, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.77 to 1.36. In the UK, the strongest association was with feeling that activities in life were worthwhile, at 1.08 points, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.82 to 1.35. In Japan, the strongest reported relationship was with lower relative deprivation, with a coefficient of -0.38 and a 95% confidence interval from -0.52 to -0.23.
Social relationships showed a similarly broad pattern. In the US and UK, developmental nestedness was associated with every relationship measure except avoidant attachment. In Japan, it was associated with every measure except secure and anxious attachment.
A one-point increase in developmental nestedness was associated with a 0.54-point increase in the ability to rely on others during a serious problem in the US and a 0.56-point increase in the UK. In Japan, the largest relationship coefficient was for satisfaction with personal relationships, at 1.02 points.
Trust increased, but economic games told a different story
The findings became more nuanced when the researchers turned to prosociality. Developmental nestedness was positively associated with eight of 11 self-reported prosociality measures in the US and four of 11 in the UK. In Japan, only general trust showed a significant positive relationship.
Trust was nevertheless the strongest self-reported prosocial association in all three countries. A one-point increase in developmental nestedness was associated with increases in trust of 1.05 points in the US, 1.14 in the UK and 0.70 in Japan.
But none of the incentivised prosociality measures was significantly associated with developmental nestedness in any of the three countries after the controls were applied. In other words, adults who remembered more supportive childhood environments generally described themselves as more trusting or prosocial, particularly in the US and UK, but they did not reliably behave more prosocially in the one-shot economic games.
That discrepancy matters. The researchers found only a weak correlation of 0.18 between self-reported and incentivised measures of prosociality. They argue that the two approaches may be capturing different constructs: questionnaires may reflect broader tendencies across real-world situations, while abstract one-shot games may capture responses to a highly specific experimental setting.
Positive and negative childhood experiences were not simply opposites
The team also tested whether the seven evolved-nest components really belonged on a single continuum. The original one-factor model fitted the data poorly, prompting an exploratory factor analysis. Across all three countries, the experiences separated into two interpretable clusters.
The positive-experience factor contained a positive emotional climate, affectionate touch, responsive care, social embeddedness and play. The negative-experience factor contained negative emotional climate and negative touch. Together, the two factors explained 53.7% of variance in the US, 58.3% in the UK and 50.1% in Japan.
When both factors were entered into the same models, each retained independent associations with several adult outcomes. Positive experiences were related to relationship satisfaction, neighbourhood belonging, the ability to rely on others and secure attachment in all three countries. Negative experiences were associated with greater anxious and fearful attachment across the three samples.
For personal well-being and social relationships, positive childhood experiences were generally more strongly associated with adult outcomes than negative experiences were. This is an important distinction for policy and family-support research. It suggests that a developmental agenda focused exclusively on preventing harmful experiences could overlook potentially meaningful benefits associated with actively building positive ones.
The cultural similarities were stronger than the differences
One purpose of the study was to test whether the associations survived across different cultural settings. Most did. Models allowing the relationship between developmental nestedness and adult outcomes to vary by country improved fit for only three general-prosociality measures. For most well-being and relationship outcomes, the direction of the associations was broadly consistent across the US, UK and Japan.
That does not mean childhood experiences operated identically everywhere. The weaker associations with several prosociality measures in Japan could reflect a social environment in which interdependence and prosocial norms are reinforced more broadly, potentially reducing the apparent influence of family-level variation. The researchers also found that their measures were approximately, but not fully, invariant across countries, which is why they avoided straightforward comparisons of national mean scores.
Why the findings do not prove cause and effect
The study is observational, so it cannot establish that positive childhood experiences caused better adult well-being. Adults were asked to remember experiences stretching back to early childhood, which introduces the possibility of recall bias. Current well-being could also influence how people remember their childhoods.
The researchers tried to probe that concern. A subset of US participants completed the childhood measure twice, and the resulting scores were highly consistent, with an intraclass correlation of 0.95. Changes in current life satisfaction, happiness or anxiety were not significantly related to changes in recalled developmental nestedness. That strengthens confidence in the measure’s stability, but it does not eliminate retrospective bias or reverse causation.
Other limitations include the restricted age range of 18 to 34, the broad treatment of childhood as the entire period from birth to 18, incomplete measurement invariance across countries, possible social-desirability effects and the omission of ethnicity and urban versus rural upbringing from the adjusted models. The researchers also note that experiences during the earliest years may be especially important while simultaneously being the hardest for adults to remember accurately.
What the study adds
The results add weight to an increasingly important distinction in developmental research: reducing adversity and creating positive developmental conditions are related goals, but they are not necessarily interchangeable. Affection, responsive care, opportunities for play, social connection and a positive home climate may each form part of a broader developmental environment associated with later flourishing.
At the same time, the economic-game results offer a useful caution against turning a broad association into an overly simple claim about character. Participants who recalled more positive childhood experiences were not consistently more generous or cooperative when behaviour was tested under financial incentives. The strongest evidence concerns self-reported well-being, relationships and trust, not a universal increase in prosocial behaviour.
Longitudinal research following children into adulthood will be needed to determine whether the associations are causal and how they change over the life course. For now, the cross-cultural consistency suggests that research on childhood development may benefit from measuring not only what went wrong, but also what went right.
Source Information
Study: The Evolved Nest in Childhood: Relation to Adult Well-being and Social Capital Across Cultures
Authors: Eugene Malthouse, Nobuyuki Hanaki and Gordon D. A. Brown
Journal: Journal of Happiness Studies, Volume 27, Article 130
Published: 30 September 2026
DOI: 10.1007/s10902-026-01109-0
