Perceived psychological safety, state social connection, and student flourishing in collaborative music activities: a three-wave longitudinal study

Abstract

Collaborative music activities can support relationships and well-being, but the present study did not directly test music-specific mechanisms such as synchrony or collective expression. Instead, it examined a general interpersonal process within higher music education: whether students’ individually perceived psychological safety was longitudinally associated with flourishing through state social connection. A three-wave survey was completed by 341 university music students from 23 groups at three Chinese universities, with approximately 6 weeks between waves. Psychological safety was analyzed as an individual perception rather than as a shared team construct. Robust maximum likelihood estimation, full information maximum likelihood for partial missing data, cluster-robust standard errors, and 5,000 bootstrap samples were used. After baseline social connection and autoregressive effects were controlled, T1 perceived psychological safety was associated with higher T2 state social connection ( β = 0.350, p < 0.001), which was associated with higher T3 flourishing after prior flourishing was controlled ( β = 0.274, p < 0.001). The indirect effect was significant (B = 0.0949, β = 0.096, 95% BCa CI [0.054, 0.142]); the direct effect was not ( β = −0.004, p = 0.941). Model comparisons did not uniquely support a one-way sequence: AIC favored a reciprocal model, BIC favored the more parsimonious hypothesized model, and prior social connection significantly predicted later perceived psychological safety. The findings therefore support a longitudinal indirect association alongside a plausible reciprocal process between perceived safety and connection. They should be understood as evidence for a general group-process model examined in a heterogeneous music-education context, not as evidence for a uniquely musical or causal mechanism.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Frontiers in Psychology, 2026 · DOI ↗