When the teens and young adults in Spain’s child welfare system were asked about their experiences in residential care facilities, psychologist Luis Armando Parra had a good idea of what they would have to say.

Since arriving at those facilities, each had been open about their LGBTQ+ identities. The 15 teens participating in a study conducted by Parra and a larger team of researchers from the Netherlands and Spain talked about roommates who didn’t want to share a bathroom or sleep in the same room at night. They talked about their lives before being taken from their homes, and how they felt rejected by their parents for who they are.

Although Parra had expected these kinds of stories, they were surprised to hear stories about people who cared for these teens, the ones who didn’t misgender them, or who let them dye their hair, or who accepted and advocated for them just as they are. 

“Some of these kids had gone through so many traumatic experiences,” said Parra, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Davis and director of the Arcoíris Research Collective, “but somehow in the middle of all that they found support in one person, a caretaker or another peer in the in the house and they felt like they had everything they needed.”

Parra has built their career so far studying how sources of outside stress put people at a greater risk of depression or anxiety. However, they and others at UC Davis are taking a new approach, expanding research in positive psychology that focuses on how social connection and positive experiences like joy can improve mental health and help people across LGBTQ+ communities to thrive.

“The time calls for a more complex understanding of not just queer discrimination and its impact,” said Parra, “but how they process the world and feel like they have a sense of mastery and self-worth, all these components that are really critical when everything in our contemporary world and society in the U.S. is attacking that person about something that can't be changed.”

What Is minority stress and how does It affect LGBTQ+ mental health?

Parra is an expert on minority stress, a field of research that explains how stressful experiences like discrimination, fear of rejection and violence harm mental and physical health. However, they think now that there are limits to how understanding the effects of stress can support LGBTQ+ people.

“Every year we get the same questions,” they said. “It's minority stress, but is our mental health getting better? The answer continues to be no. Things are still pretty bad for a lot of queer communities.”

Their research with teens in the Spanish welfare system brought them back to a paper they co-authored in 2017 with Paul Hastings, a professor of psychology and Parra’s Ph.D. advisor at UC Davis. That study found that support from peers buffered queer teens from the emotional harm of feeling rejected by their families. Participants who reported greater support from their close friends had lower levels of anxiety and depression.

“People overcome significant adversity and they find joy in even the simplest things,” Parra said. “That can be just having one really close friend, someone that you can talk to, so you don't carry the weight yourself.”

But resistance also makes a difference, which they documented in a recent paper from the study with the teens in Spain. Some of the teens ignored the insults. Others educated themselves about their rights. One participant directly confronted a care professional who called a non-binary person on TV mentally ill. 

One of the teens educated a peer that their non-binary identity is not something they are ashamed of nor something they need to hide. They reported saying, “‘We have to coexist here. You follow your path, I follow mine. I don't care about your life. You don't get involved in mine.’ And that's how it ended.”

These acts of resistance, said Parra, were a means for these young people to cultivate their own resilience. 

How positive psychology adds balance, participation and joy in LGBTQ+ research

Positive psychology focuses on strengths and positive emotions that help people live a more fulfilling life. A current research project at UC Davis is focused on queer joy while also creating space for the research participants to define their own experiences. 

“People assume what discrimination typically looks like, and it's not to say that they're wrong by assuming that these experiences are universal but we might miss a lot of the details for the kinds of discrimination someone is facing,” said Adam Nissen, a post-doctoral fellow in the Beck Personality Lab at UC Davis. “It also might not make sense for me to say what queer joy looks like or that all people should experience it in the same way.”

Nissen’s study asks participants in part to write their own explanations of what brings them joy as well as when they have experienced it in the previous week. 

Participants wrote about finding joy while being with particular friends and family. They wrote about being able to go out with their partner without worrying about being judged.

There were also surprises. In additional to describing what identify affirmation was like for them, people wrote about personal experiences, like enjoying a particular drink at the park or taking part in their favorite hobby.

“That's really exciting, because it means that people can accurately tell us what is important to their well-being,” said Nissen. “It highlights what we're missing when we assume what the experiences of queer joy or just any queer experience looks like.”

It seems like an obvious connection: people who feel joy more often will generally be happier in their lives. However, the potential benefits of experiencing joy aren’t guaranteed among a community of people who regularly experience discrimination for being who they are.

As a point of comparison, Nissen also includes measures of negative experiences, such as discrimination. Both can have a different impact on a person’s sense of well-being. Joy might also counteract negative experiences as a buffering factor.

The study is not yet published, but preliminary findings suggest that experiences of joy do predict well-being in the moment. Also, for many people, the predictive power of joy is comparable or even stronger than the predictive power of negative experiences like prejudice, discrimination or feeling a lack of social safety. 

By including both types of experiences — both positive and negative — Nissen hopes to capture a more holistic and complete picture of queer well-being.

Connecting to hope from the past

The AIDS Memorial Quilt, a way to remember the lives of people who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, is considered the largest community arts project in history. It was conceived of in San Francisco by activist Cleve Jones in 1985, and today it comprises roughly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 people. 

Rose Bern, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at UC Davis, said the HIV/AIDS epidemic partly drove research in psychology that sought to understand how AIDS-related stigma and other forms of LGBTQ+ prejudice affected people’s lives. Gregory Herek, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis, was a pioneer in this research.

Bern included a version of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in this year’s undergraduate course PSC 158: Sexual Orientation and Prejudice. It was the first time the course was taught in the nearly ten years since Herek retired.

She said that this generation of students, and she herself, have no direct experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and few connections to people who do. Bern asked her students to watch the YouTube series Surviving Voices, where people talk openly about who they are and their experiences with HIV/AIDS. She guided students in thinking about their own relationship with joy, pain or resilience, whether they are part of the LGBTQ+ community or an ally. 

Every student created their own panel that they printed and brought to class, along with statements describing a survivor’s story and how they incorporated it into what they made. The collection of panels became like a living museum. 

“Quite a few were talking about how existence is resistance, and I think this has been a big part of this class,” said Bern. “I really wanted this to serve as a way to honor not just folks who have survived and continued to thrive who are living with HIV/AIDS but also to think about the future generation of queer and trans folks and allies who are imagining what queer hope, joy and resistance can look like in this kind of world.”

How social connection and joy can push beyond resistance alone

Right now, LGBTQ+ protections are disappearing. A January 2025 executive order reversed protections for transgender federal government employees and LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors. The UCLA Williams Institute wrote that this move puts at risk people who have consistently experienced discrimination and harassment. However, even before these policies, reports have documented a rise in anti-LGBTQ+ violence. 

“Ultimately it's society and other people creating difficulties for people, not their identity,” said Parra. “It’s how they’re treated based on these ideologies and belief systems that are really violent and hurtful, but we have known that for decades. What we know less about is how people don’t just survive or resist but how they are finding joy.”

Right now, Parra is working with past and current LGBTQ+ foster care youths and colleagues in Spain and the Netherlands to translate the book Queer and in Care: Journeys through care being young and LGBTQIA+ (University of Groningen Press, 2025) from English to Spanish. It is a detailed guide for queer youth to help navigate being young, queer and in the care system.

The book’s co-authors include people who have been in the care system, and with advice on how to advocate for themselves it includes advice on self-care, like making art, going out for a walk and making sure to shower every day. These small efforts might seem simple, but Parra said that they really matter.

“These are really indicators of self-care,” they said, “and the importance of them being upheld is so they can feel better at least within that.”

Social support is especially critical at that age, they said, even if communication is a challenge. Research has shown that the presence of Gender and Sexuality Alliance clubs leads to a wide range of improvements to well-being for queer kids. 

Parra thinks the strongest protective factor against the social stresses continuing to increase today is likely to be social connection. Research has consistently shown that feeling connected to someone else has a wide range of benefits that stretch beyond mental health alone.

“It's having that supportive relationship or that loving unconditional person that's going to love you for who you are,” said Parra.

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