I checked 4 preprints servers on Tuesday, June 02, 2026 using the Open Science Foundation API. For the period May 26 to June 01, I found 370 new paper(s).

MediArxiv

Rage Influencer: Charismatic Anger, Workplace Communication, and the Mimetic Reproduction of Organizational Culture
Koichi Hiraoka
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This paper introduces the concept of the “Rage Influencer” to explain how charismatic high-performing actors spread anger, intimidation, public reprimands, and dominant emotional expressions through workplace communication as seemingly effective and imitable models of success. Existing research has examined related figures and behaviors, including toxic workers, brilliant jerks, abusive supervisors, petty tyrants, workplace bullying, and toxic leadership. However, these concepts primarily explain harmful behavior, lack of cooperativeness, hostile supervision, or negative effects on subordinates. They do not sufficiently explain why anger sometimes becomes attractive, imitated, and reproduced as organizational culture through everyday communicative practices. This paper conceptualizes anger not merely as a failure of emotion regulation, but as an emotional and communicative resource that may be exchanged for influence, legitimacy, control, and voice within specific workplace environments. When anger is expressed by actors who possess charisma, high performance, symbolic status, or organizational authority, it may be misrecognized as seriousness, responsibility, decisiveness, or strong leadership. In such cases, anger is not only disliked; it is also learned and imitated through speech, silence, public correction, labeling, written messages, and everyday interaction. Drawing on theories of charismatic authority, social learning, prestige bias, emotional contagion, psychological safety, organizational silence, and memetic reproduction, this paper theorizes how anger becomes culturally transmitted within workplaces. It distinguishes between broad and narrow meanings of the Rage Influencer. In the broad sense, the concept may include political agitators, religious leaders, war mobilizers, or social media figures who spread anger, hostility, resentment, or victimhood into collective action. In the narrow sense, which is the focus of this paper, the Rage Influencer refers to a workplace actor who uses performance, authority, charisma, and symbolic legitimacy to make anger appear effective, legitimate, and imitable. The paper argues that the danger of the Rage Influencer lies not simply in anger itself, but in the transformation of anger into a charismatic success style. Anger becomes harmful when it is made attractive by charisma, justified by performance, protected by symbolic status, and reproduced through imitation. Therefore, organizational intervention should not focus only on individual anger management. It must redesign the emotional selection environment in which anger is rewarded, silence is mistaken for stability, and dominant emotional communication is misrecognized as competence.

MetaArxiv

Practice Changes to Improve Database Name Reporting: Suggestions for Libraries, Searchers, and Database Vendors
Melissa L. Rethlefsen
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Though seemingly simple, transparently and fully reporting database names searched in systematic review and other related review type documentation is extremely challenging. Working together with database vendors, it may be possible for librarians and library staff to implement changes that will make it easier for everyone to understand what database they are searching. A combination of minor changes (listing the complete name of the Ovid MEDLINE file searched, e.g.) and major changes (assigning RRIDs to all possible database segments and making them part of downloadable search histories) would provide increased transparency and reproducibility long term.
Computer-generated content as a structural cause of journal retractions, 2020–2026
Anton Sokolov
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Retractions reveal failures the record otherwise hides. In 2012, a landmark PNAS study showed that misconduct, not error, accounted for most retracted papers. This Brief Report updates that signal for the generative AI era. Using Retraction Watch records through May 2026, it shows that retractions tagged as computer-aided or computer-generated content did not disappear after the 2023 Hindawi cleanup. In 2025, with the Hindawi contribution at zero, the AI-content share of all retractions remained at one-quarter (23.6%), from other publishers. The finding matters because it separates a one-publisher event from a wider publishing-system condition that researchers, editors, and funders should recognize: computer-generated content is now a durable documented cause of retraction, not merely an artifact of a single publisher's record.
“PubPeer is okay, but 
”: researchers' perceptions of post-publication reviews
Wytske Hepkema; Frederique Bordignon; Willem Halffman; YJ Erden; Nathanne Rost; Raphaël Lévy
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Objective We study how researchers perceive comments pertaining to their papers on the debated post-publication peer review platform PubPeer. Methods We surveyed two groups: the commented group were researchers that received a critical comment on their article (10,603 sent, 80 respondents); and the citing group were researchers citing these articles, as a proxy for the wider community (84,325 sent, 720 respondents). Results Among our respondents, the majority of commented authors knew of the PubPeer comment prior to the survey, compared to only a minority of citing authors. In both groups, the majority indicated that the issue raised on PubPeer did not affect the conclusions of their paper. Commented authors most frequently replied on PubPeer and/or contacted journal editors; citing authors largely did not act. Qualitative analysis revealed four types of defences used to minimise consequences: epistemic defence, honest error, contextual defence, and shifting responsibility. Respondents’ opinions about PubPeer varied between positive, negative and ambivalent, and anonymity was the main concern. Conclusion PubPeer's contribution to correcting the scientific record remains indirect, operating through retractions rather than through behavioural change in researchers. A diffusion of responsibility limits its correcting ambition, highlighting the need for complementary post-publication debate venues.
STAMPED principles for reproducible research objects
Austin Macdonald; Cody Baker; Isaac To; Yaroslav O Halchenko
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Scientific claims increasingly rely upon the interplay of code, data, and computational environments. Yet the record of how they are used together is often incomplete, scattered, or lost. This undermines rigor, reproducibility, reusability, and efficiency. Previous approaches have improved the governance of digital objects but do not specify how research objects ought to be structured and managed so they can be re-executed and extended. The community is missing a shared vocabulary for this operational layer. Building on recurrent practices and convergent patterns across disciplines, we formalize seven principles: Self-containment, Tracking, Actionability, Modularity, Portability, Ephemerality, and Distributability (STAMPED). Together they give researchers guidelines for building and assessing research objects that others can trust, rerun, and build upon. We frame each principle as a spectrum so that adoption is incremental and starts from existing practice. We support each principle with normative requirements, an interactive checklist, and a map of enabling tools. As conventions mature, tooling improves, and AI agents become increasingly involved in research workflows, the goals of rigor, reproducibility, reusability, and efficiency are becoming more attainable. STAMPED gives researchers, collaborators, reviewers, and agents a common language, concrete goals, and an aligned direction for making computational research more durable. https://github.com/stamped-principles/stamped-paper/
Tracking and mainstreaming replications in the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences
Helena Hartmann; Flavio Azevedo; Lukas Röseler; Lukas Wallrich; Alaa Aldoh; Mahmoud Medhat Elsherif; Meng Liu; RĂ­an O’Mahoney; Zoran Pavlović; Robert Reason
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Replicability is a cornerstone of scientific progress. Yet, replications are often undervalued, and are sometimes seen as redundant, unimportant, or lacking novelty. This impedes their broader adoption in research and beyond. In response, the credibility revolution calls for slower, more deliberate science and greater responsiveness to fallibility. In this perspective piece, we argue that (a) replications are essential for validating scientific claims, (b) replications need to be made more visible, recognized, and integrated into research and educational practices, and (c) we can change the way we view and judge replication results. We propose a framework where replication studies can be systematically tracked and normalized through the Replication Hub as part of the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) initiative, with the goal of enhancing the visibility, integration, and cumulative impact of replication research across disciplines.
Improving Acknowledgments Sections To Better Credit Research Contributors
Alex O. Holcombe; Rasmus Pedersen; Malgorzata Lagisz; Pietro Pollo; Marton Kovacs; Mohammad Hosseini
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Formal recognition of research contributions is critical for career advancement and the allocation of research funding. However, some contributions are mentioned only in the acknowledgments section, which are not indexed by scholarly databases, resulting in almost no recognition for those involved. We contextualize this shortfall in terms of contributorship, the movement to recognize specific research contributions rather than relying on authorship. Broadening the range of recognized individuals is currently advanced through two routes: reducing restrictions on authorship, and unbundling manuscripts into smaller elements, such as datasets and protocols, that receive their own attribution. Here we focus on a third route, enhancing the contents and metadata of acknowledgments sections, by capitalizing on existing infrastructure and standards. We propose: 1) when acknowledging individuals, authors include ORCIDs (subject to the acknowledgees’ approval) and, where applicable provide CRediT information; 2) publishers solicit identities of acknowledgees in a similar way to how they do so for authors in their submission portals; and 3) publishers include metadata of acknowledgees in JATS-XML files. Implementing these steps could encourage scholarly databases to index non-author contributors. The ensuing increase in visibility for research contributors, such as technicians and library professionals could result in greater recognition of non-author roles.

PsyArxiv

Adaptive Regularization via Extreme Value Distributions for Gaussian Graphical Models
Alexander P. Christensen; Jeongwon Choi
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Edge selection in Gaussian graphical models is fundamentally a variable selection problem where pairwise relationships determine construct validity and variable importance in psychological networks. Network estimation relies predominantly on L1 regularization, whose uniform shrinkage systematically underestimates edge and centrality parameters. Alternative penalties overcome this bias but rely on fixed hyperparameters that do not adapt to the signal in the data. We develop a family of data-adaptive regularization penalties grounded in extreme value theory. Across 290 empirical psychological datasets, we show that absolute partial correlations are well-described by the Weibull distribution. Using this empirical regularity, we derive Weibull, Gumbel, and Exponential penalties that approximate L0 penalization and calibrate to each dataset's noise floor rather than assuming a fixed signal level. A large-scale simulation spanning two network topologies and various sample sizes (N = 100-10,000) demonstrates that the adaptive penalties achieve high specificity at small sample sizes while continuing to accumulate sensitivity as sample size grows with low parameter bias and high rank-order centrality congruence relative to field standards. Empirically, method choice alone determined centrality rankings at sample sizes typical in psychology. The Weibull penalty is recommended as a principled default given the interpretability of its parameters.
Cognitive reappraisal changes cognitive evaluations more than affective experiences
Henna Vartiainen; Erik C Nook
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Cognitive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves changing one’s interpretation of a situation to change its emotional impact. Cognitive reappraisal studies typically assess changes in valence ratings following reappraisal as the primary dependent variable, but scholars have recently documented that valence ratings can take two forms: affective valence (i.e., the positivity/negativity of one’s hedonic internal feelings) and semantic valence (i.e., the positivity/negativity of one’s cognitive evaluation of the stimulus). Because typical rating instructions do not distinguish between these forms of valence, it remains unknown how strongly cognitive reappraisal shifts either one. We address this gap through two preregistered studies. In Study 1, N=155 participants completed a classic cognitive reappraisal task in which they either responded naturally to or cognitively reappraised negative images. Critically, we manipulated whether participants rated either affective valence, semantic valence, or “default” valence (conventional instructions). Reappraisal significantly improved valence ratings in all conditions, but reappraisal most strongly influenced semantic valence and least strongly affective valence. Interestingly, default valence behaved most similarly to semantic valence, suggesting that existing reappraisal studies largely document changes in semantic evaluations, more than affective experiences. Study 2 (N=105) replicated these effects within-subjects. These results extend research on affective and semantic valence by demonstrating that they vary in their responsiveness to regulation. Additionally, they suggest that existing research likely overestimates the impact of reappraisal on felt emotional experiences, prompting new perspectives on past findings and more focused methods for assessing the hedonic impact of emotion regulation.
Who Looks Nice: A Novel Methodology to Visualize Children's Mental Representations
Uliana Solovieva; Daniel N Albohn; Alexander Todorov; Lin Bian
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Humans rapidly form prosocial evaluations from physical appearance, and these impressions profoundly shape social interactions. Yet, little is known about the developmental origins of mental representations of “nice” individuals and if these representations reflect visual stereotypes, or appearance cues that shape first impressions. Computational models of young children’s mental representations are essential for addressing these questions, but existing methods are largely limited to older children and adults because they require many trials to generate stable models. In the present research, we adapted a data-driven Generative Reverse Correlation (GRC) method and introduced a child-friendly version capable of visualizing children’s individual- and group-level mental representations in just 40 trials, with children as young as three. In Study 1, children 3-7 (N = 160) categorized 40 synthetic faces as nice or mean to generate mental models. Ratings revealed that the majority of children—across gender and age groups—associate "niceness" with women and individuals high in perceived trustworthiness, happiness, and femininity, highlighting the early emergence of appearance-based stereotyping. In Study 2, children 5-9 (N = 165) categorized faces as nice or smart to compare non-oppositional traits. Findings replicated associations from Study 1, demonstrating that visual stereotypes of niceness emerge across different comparison traits. Together, these results suggest that impressions of niceness are already structured by stable visual biases in the preschool years. Our approach provides a powerful tool for making young children’s mental representations directly observable and offers new opportunities to track the developmental origins of biased impression formation.
Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes V. Reversals of trends from 2021-2024
Tessa Elizabeth Sadie Charlesworth; Meriel Doyle; Mahzarin R. Banaji
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Between 2007-2020, implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes declined in bias steadily and were forecasted to continue toward attitude neutrality. But, since 2020, five years of new data (2021-2025) from 2.8 million U.S. respondents reveal that past trends have stalled or, in some cases, even reversed. The largest reversals in bias emerged for sexuality, transgender, race and skin-tone bias which increased by 12%-22% on implicit measures and by 24%-300% on explicit measures. Age, disability, and body weight bias, also increased, but at slower rates. Breakpoint analyses showed that implicit attitudes were the earlyindicators of change, reversing trend ~1 year earlier than explicit reports. For most topics, reversals were widespread across demographic groups and even extended to an international sample of 274,884 non-U.S. respondents. However, younger respondents who had previously shown the largest decreases in bias now showed increases in bias, and interactions with politics and gender (e.g., young conservative men were most likely to increase). Exploratory analyses ruled out various single-cause explanations. Instead, the best explaination is that 2020-2021 marked a turning point in the sociopolitical climate, whereby co-occurring existential threats from the covid-19 pandemic, amplified economic insecurity, political sectarianism, and online toxicity likely shaped the observed increases in intergroup bias. Together the data show that large populations of individual-level attitudes are continually shaped by more macro, societal-level events, with the full-spectrum data from 2007-2025 showing both reductions and increases in bias over nearly two decades.
Open Pilot Trial of a Single Session Consultation Service for Clients at StrongMinds Uganda
Rosco Kasujja; Ian Sotomayor; Peter Birungi; Morris Ndeezi; Erica Szkody; Jessica L. Schleider
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The need for mental health services in Sub-Saharan Africa far exceeds the availability of support, creating long waitlists for the few services that are in place. To address this crisis, implementing evidence-based, single-session interventions for individuals seeking treatment may provide timely relief. StrongMinds—a mental health charity organization serving youth and adults in Uganda—piloted a Single-Session Consultation (SSC) service for new treatment-seekers with elevated depressive symptoms, as indicated by a score on a screener survey suggesting the presence of at least mild depression. To optimize its reach and fit with StrongMinds’ service delivery model, the SSC was delivered by trained lay providers in both individual and group-based formats. Within two months (September-October 2023), the SSC was delivered to 200 Ugandan adults with elevated depression symptoms (ages 16-86; 73% female) upon initial outreach for StrongMinds’ group psychotherapy services. SSC clients reported significant improvements in hopelessness and depression symptoms at 2-week (ds = -0.73, -1.12) and 1-month follow-ups (ds = -0.96, -1.44), while waiting for group psychotherapy. SSC clients reported high SSC satisfaction (M = 4.47/5), and intervention effects did not significantly differ by delivery format (i.e., individual vs. group format). Results suggest the SSC’s acceptability, feasibility, and utility as a low-intensity, scalable intervention for adolescents and adults in Uganda on waiting lists for longer-term psychotherapy.
Automating Reproducibility Checks Using Large Language Models
Yoel Inbar; David Tannenbaum
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Computational reproducibility checks are essential for scientific credibility, but most published papers are never independently verified because manual reproducibility audits are difficult and time-consuming. We tested whether an agentic large language model (LLM) could perform computational reproducibility checks at scale. We benchmarked computational reproducibility checks performed by an LLM analyst (Claude Opus 4.7, running in the Claude Code harness) against results from a large human reproducibility audit of statistical claims in the social and behavioral sciences. The LLM analysts agreed with human analysts on 86% of claims, and when the two disagreed, follow-up adjudication found the LLM was correct 87% of the time. Agentic LLMs can now perform human-quality reproducibility checks relatively cheaply and easily, putting large-scale audits within reach for journals, meta-scientists, and individual researchers.
Psychometric Validation of a Deep Learning-based Foreground Speech Detection Algorithm for Everyday Conversation Detection
Amanda Marie Bernal; Johannes Leonhard Klinz; Valeria Pfeifer; David Sbarra; Charles L Raison; Nicole Nugent; Rajat Hebbar; Shrikanth Narayanan; Matthias R. Mehl
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Passive ambient audio sampling bears great potential for objectively measuring daily social activity and its association with wellbeing and health. However, detecting true conversations via human annotation is labor-intensive, and automatic labeling via audio signal processing has thus far only received proof-of-concept validation. Here, we conduct a comprehensive psychometric validation of a deep learning-based foreground speech detection algorithm for conversation activity detection (CAD) from ambient audio sampled with the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) method (Hebbar et al., 2021). We assess the CAD algorithm’s validity as an objective measure of conversation activity using four archival EAR datasets with human ground-truth conversation annotations (N = 566 participants, n = 167,539 audio recordings). Specifically, we evaluate, across the four samples, the degree to which the CAD algorithm converges with human-annotated conversation activity, yields temporal stability estimates of conversation activity, and replicates patterns of external correlates (with demographic, wellbeing, and personality measures) comparable to those derived from human ground-truth annotations. We further compare the distributional properties of conversation activity derived from the CAD algorithm and human ground-truth annotations and use this information for thresholding the algorithm’s continuous conversation activity estimates. Overall, the CAD algorithm evidences strong psychometric properties for estimating conversation activity across a range of participants and study characteristics, suggesting that it is suitable for at-scale deployment to objectively measure daily socializing from passively sampled ambient audio.
A Framework for Evidence-Based Psychotherapy with AI (EBP-AI)
Elizabeth Cameron Stade; Philip Held; H. Andrew Schwartz; Shannon Wiltsey Stirman; johannes Christopher Eichstaedt
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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems and large language models (LLMs) offer substantial potential to augment or even fundamentally change elements of psychological assessment and treatment. However, current AI technologies have yet to demonstrate the capacity to effect meaningful and sustained clinical change. This gap reflects both the limited integration of clinical science knowledge into language models and applications built using them, as well as the mismatch between the brief, minutes-long nature of most AI interactions and the months-long course of most evidence-based treatments. Here we introduce the Evidence-Based Psychotherapy with AI (EBP-AI) framework, which articulates a set of principles for developing effective clinical AI applications: 1) psychodiagnostic assessment, 2) longitudinal case conceptualization, 3) appropriately dosed intervention planning, 4) meaningful progress evaluation, 5) rigorous validation with clinical populations, 6) attention to real world implementation and use, 7) clinically appropriate style, and 8) understanding clinical psychology as a living science. We introduce a set of key technical questions for the development and evaluation of clinical LLMs and AIs aligned with these principles. Despite their potential, current clinical AIs fall short, in part due to issues with memory, sycophancy, and prioritizing short-term helpfulness over long-term clinical impact. Responsible and ethical design of effective, clinical-science-based AI systems will require understanding their limitations and strategically extending their capabilities.
“Glimmers of Hope”: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Unconditional Perinatal Cash Transfers and Maternal Hope
Connor Appelman; Crystal L. Cederna; Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez; Jenny LaChance; Maya Wolock; Melodie Marsh; H. Luke Shaefer; Mona Hanna
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Unconditional child cash transfer programs are implemented to reduce economic hardship, yet little is known about their effects on positive psychological capacities that support well-being, such as hope. This mixed-methods study examined associations between exposure to Rx Kids – a universal and unconditional perinatal cash transfer program – and maternal hope. Survey data from 966 mothers were analyzed using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design. Mothers exposed to Rx Kids were significantly more likely (p<0.05) to report feeling hopeful, being hopeful about life, and maintaining hope in difficult times. Thematic analysis of interviews with 46 enrolled mothers indicated increased stability, greater capacity to think ahead, and enhanced confidence in navigating parenting and everyday life. Findings suggest that hope is a malleable psychological resource that may be strengthened through upstream economic interventions, underscoring the value of incorporating positive psychological functioning into evaluations of social policy.
BitterBuster: a virtual world for understanding naturalistic patch foraging
John P Kasarda; Jyotika Bahuguna; Angela Zhang; Hua Tong; Yuan Tan; Ruizi Wang; Michael Tarr; Timothy D. Verstynen
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Optimal patch foraging requires the ability to discern valuable resources and harvest them efficiently. This process requires integrating across multiple learning systems, including perceptual, structural, and value-based mechanisms. We explored how these varied learning systems contribute to foraging efficiency through a novel virtual foraging videogame. Human participants (N=60) navigated a virtual world with four neighborhoods (patches) populated with houses, searching for “bitter Oomplets,” characterized by the union of specific body colors and textures. Each neighborhood had a different overall probability of containing bitter Oomplets and, within each, specific house locations predicted the relative rate of bitter Oomplets. Participants proficiently learned to discriminate Oomplet types and strategically allocate their time to higher-probability neighborhoods. However, they did not learn the spatial predictors within neighborhoods. Importantly, we found no interaction between these two distinct learning abilities in determining foraging ability, suggesting that the impact of the perceptual and reward learning systems are independent of one another in human foraging efficiency.
Substitutability of Cocaine and Social Interaction in Male and Female Rats Before and After Intermittent Access Cocaine Self-administration
Eliza M. Brooks; Toni Bird; Felipe Rego; Claudia G. Olivero-Gamez; Alan Silberberg; David Kearns
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Rational and objectives: Previous studies have found that cocaine and social interaction act as substitutes in male rats, but it is unknown whether they are also substitutes in female rats. The two purposes of the present study were to compare male and female rats on the way cocaine and social reinforcement economically interact and to determine whether exposure to intermittent access (IntA) cocaine self-administration changes the interaction. Methods: In a first phase, male (n = 16) and female (n = 17) rats were allowed to choose between cocaine and social reinforcement available at varying prices to determine how these reinforcers economically interact. Then, half of the rats of each sex received 12 sessions of IntA cocaine self-administration while the other half served as no-cocaine homecage controls. In a final phase, the way that cocaine and social reinforcement interacted was redetermined. Results: Cocaine and social reinforcement were partial substitutes in male rats, replicating previous findings. In contrast, these reinforcers were not substitutes in females, but instead were independent economic goods. During IntA cocaine self-administration, female rats escalated their intake over sessions, but males did not. IntA cocaine exposure had no impact on reinforcer interactions. Conclusions: The sex difference in the way that cocaine and social reinforcement interacted suggests that one or both of these reinforcers may serve different functions in male and female rats. The results of this study contribute to growing research on the way that the broader behavioral economic context contributes to choice between drug and non-drug alternatives.
Exploring the interaction between channel selection strategy and masker type on speech perception with a cochlear implant simulation
Lidea Shahidi; Lee Chong Shinn Caleb; Robert P. Carlyon; Tobias Goehring
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Cochlear implants (CIs) transmit speech information to auditory neurons with an implanted electrode array. Some CI devices use a channel selection strategy that chooses a subset of electrodes with the highest energy in each stimulation cycle. This leads to a sparser signal for stimulation that has been proposed to mitigate the detrimental effects of interactions between electrode channels due to electrical current spread. Findings from several studies indicated that this approach delivers benefits in masked speech perception, but interpretation is complicated by unequal exposure to CI coding strategies. We explored whether the potential benefit of channel selection depends on the temporal fluctuations of the masker and designed a study to measure the interaction between channel selection and three masker types using fixed and adaptive speech tests. We performed a vocoder-based simulation experiment in 24 normal-hearing listeners to avoid confounding factors such as familiarity with channel selection or individual differences in CI stimulation. Channel selection did not lead to a benefit in speech perception in the three masker types when using fixed target-to-masker ratios at -3 and +3 dB. In line with our hypothesis, there was an interaction effect between channel selection and masker type. Channel selection produced a small but significant 1.14 dB reduction in speech reception thresholds and 6% improvement in percent correct scores for the stationary masker type, but not for the other two masker types. These findings are in line with previous studies which found a small benefit with channel selection in a stationary masker but also show that there is likely no benefit in more realistic masker conditions with temporal fluctuations. Further research is warranted to develop intelligent channel selection strategies that consider the masker type and level, and ideally select the most relevant channels for speech perception and an individual listener.
Female Beauty Ideals in the Digital Age: A Structural Equation Model of the Impact of Social Media Pressure on Body Image and Disordered Eating
Rocío Vizcaíno-Cuenca; Gracia Cristina Villodres; Francesca Guizzo; Andrés R. Riquelme
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y image research has primarily focused on the effects of social media platform usage; however, it has largely overlooked the impact of social media pressures through the lens of gender roles. The present study employed structural equation modelling to examine the effect of social media pressure on body image concerns and examined the power of beauty standards related to gender roles to explain this relationship. A total of 393 female social media users completed measures assessing social media use frequency, social media pressure, internalization of beauty standards, social physique anxiety, self-esteem and disordered eating. Outcomes revealed that social media pressures directly predict disordered eating, with additional indirect effects through internalization of the thinness ideal (associated with the female role). In contrast, internalization of the muscular ideal (associated with the male role) did not explain this relationship. Notably, the study examined a model in which women who reported greater social media pressure and greater internalization of the thinness ideal also exhibited higher levels of social physique anxiety and lower self-esteem, both of which were associated with greater disordered eating. These findings expand understanding of social media pressure and offer valuable insight for prevention and intervention targeting body image-related disorders.
"But Look What She Posted": The Influence of Sexist Attitudes, Rape Myths, and Self-Sexualization on Victim Blaming in Unsolicited Genital Image Incidents
Carmen RodrĂ­guez-DomĂ­nguez; RocĂ­o VizcaĂ­no-Cuenca; Mercedes DurĂĄn
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Research has highlighted the prevalence of (hyper)sexualization of women on social media, which has been related to the perpetration and justification of cyber-sexual violence. One common form of this type of violence is the unsolicited receipt of genital images, often minimized and justified through victim blaming. This study, involving 512 Spanish participants, explores individual (attitudes) and situational (self-sexualization of the woman victim on social media) predictors of victim-blaming in incidents of unsolicited images of men’s genitalia. Participants completed measures of benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, consensual sexting attitudes, and rape myth acceptance, and were randomly assigned to read one of two vignettes: one in which a woman posted sexualized pictures and another where she posted non-sexualized pictures. In both scenarios, the woman received an unsolicited image of men’s genitalia. Finally, we assessed the extent of victim blaming. Results showed that the sexualized woman victim was blamed more than the non-sexualized woman victim, particularly among participants with higher benevolent sexism. Notably, men (vs. women) displayed higher levels of victim-blaming toward the sexualized (vs. non-sexualized) woman victim, which had an indirect effect of the endorsement of benevolent sexism and rape myth. These findings contribute to understanding the perception of cyber-sexual violence and provide insights for the prevention and intervention of such behaviors.
Unveiling the Social Perception of Cyber-Sexual Exploitation Against Women Streamers: A Thematic Analysis of Reactions toward “Amouranth Case” on X
RocĂ­o VizcaĂ­no-Cuenca; Alba SĂĄez-Lumbreras; JesĂșs L. MegĂ­as
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Social media shapes social interactions, exposing women to cyber-sexual exploitation and judgment. In October 2022, streamer Amouranth reported abuse by her partner, sparking public reactions. This study analyzed posts from five days around the report using thematic analysis. Most responses minimized the case, blamed the victim, or criticized platforms, while some defended her with feminist or paternalistic arguments. Findings highlight how online/offline dualism justifies cyber-sexual violence, especially against female streamers as counter-stereotypical victims. Yet, online spaces also enable resistance and support. The study discusses theoretical and practical implications.
The CURI Model: An Integrated Agent-Based Framework for Studying Belief Dynamics in Social Media Information Ecosystems
Jens Koed Madsen; Toby Pilditch
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Computational models of belief dynamics in social media typically isolate a single mechanism (algorithmic filtering, cognitive bias, or network homophily). This isolation makes it hard to study the interactional effects between mechanisms, which a growing empirical literature suggests are central to understanding how information travels in information ecosystems. We present the Computational Understanding of Reliability and Information (CURI) model, an agent-based simulation that integrates the core components identified by Bak-Coleman et al. (2021) as needed for ecosystem-level modelling: citizens with Bayesian belief updating and optional confirmation bias, dynamic social networks with algorithmic feed curation, heterogeneous broadcasters with distinct motivations, social media companies making economic decisions, and regulators with enforcement capacity. We report three illustrative experiments. A 3×3×3 factorial crossing confirmation bias, belief-congruent feed filtering, and network selection homophily shows that the model exhibits confirmation bias as the dominant psychological factor (ηÂČ = 0.143), no detectable effect of belief-congruent feed filtering (ηÂČ < 0.001), and a significant psychology–structure interaction (p = 0.045). A 2×2×2 follow-up that varies the content environment shows that disinformation prevalence dominates the model's variance decomposition (ηÂČ = 0.490) and moderates the psychology–structure interaction (three-way interaction p = 0.041). Sensitivity analyses across four model dimensions confirm the interaction direction. We derive empirical predictions from each model finding and discuss the calibration work needed to move from conceptual model to validated tool.
Towards Natural Behaviour Processing for Representation and Prediction of Digital Human Behaviour
Clemens Stachl; Brittany I Davidson; Gabriella M. Harari
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Studying how people behave and understanding why their actions unfold differently are major goals of psychological science. However, most research relies on nomothetic approaches that aggregate behavioural data into summary statistics, obscuring person-specific patterns that afford person-specific understanding. The progressing proliferation of digital technologies such as smartphones, wearables, and computermediated systems now generates fine-grained, temporally ordered records of everyday behaviour, creating unprecedented opportunities to study both systematic interindividual differences and patterns of intra-individual variation. Here, we propose Natural Behaviour Processing (NBP) as a framework for analysing digital behavioural data using sequence modelling approaches adapted from natural language processing. We argue that behaviour shares critical structural properties with language: both involve a repository of possible actions (vocabulary), systematic patterns governing how elements typically combine (grammar), and context-dependent meaning (semantics). These structural parallels motivate applying sequence-based models that have revolutionised language processing to the study of behaviour more broadly. We review pioneering studies on diverse topics of research, including life outcomes, decision-making, social media use, consumer behaviour, online education, and health, demonstrating that sequential approaches capture person-specific patterns that are typically lost in aggregation. We discuss the challenges facing NBP adoption, including the tension between predictive modelling and theoretical understanding, the need for large-scale curated behaviour datasets, and methodological training requirements. The adoption of NBP could transform the way psychology operationalises, conceptualises, and ultimately understands human behaviour by simultaneously accounting for person-specificity in real-world complexity while maintaining predictive performance at population levels.
SCEIMA: Social Coordination Evaluation through Integrated Model Analysis
Bavo Van Kerrebroeck; Caroline Palmer; Guillaume Dumas; Alexander Pantelis Demos
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Computational models are increasingly used as interactive partners in studies of human coordination, yet it remains unclear whether observed differences in human behavior reflect properties of the models themselves, changes in human behavior elicited by such artificial partners, or both. We introduce SCEIMA (Social Coordination Evaluation through Integrated Model Analysis), a two-stage framework designed to disentangle human-specific, model-specific, and interaction-driven contributions to coordination in human–machine interaction paradigms. In the empirical stage, human participants perform a coordination task with both human partners and computational models, establishing reference human–human and human–model interaction patterns. In the analytical stage, the same models are paired with one another and optimized through simulations to reproduce empirical coordination metrics. Comparing human–human, human–model, and simulated model–model interactions reveals whether coordination differences arise from intrinsic model dynamics, from human adaptation to artificial partners, or from their interaction. SCEIMA treats computational models as contrastive instruments whose capacity to elicit and reproduce human behavior can be systematically evaluated. We illustrate the framework with two distinct case-studies, a sensorimotor synchronization task and a conversational turn-taking task, showing how distinct outcome patterns diagnose the sources of coordination differences. By providing a principled methodological framework for evaluating interactive computational models, SCEIMA improves interpretability in human–machine interaction research and informs the design of artificial agents that coordinate with humans more naturally and responsively.
Integrating theory-driven and data-driven computational psychiatry
Samantha Mombelli; Samaneh Roghani Zanjani; Kian Godhwani; Alban Voppel; Aryamman Aiyaar; Tihare Zamorano; Timothy Friesen; Valentin Guigon; Caroline J Charpentier; Franziska Knolle
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Computational psychiatry has advanced through two parallel traditions: theory-driven models that aim to explain the mechanisms underlying psychiatric symptoms, and data-driven approaches designed to improve prediction and clinical decision-making. Although both approaches have generated important insights, their integration could support clinical translation. Using psychosis onset prediction as a case study, we propose a mechanism-first, iterative framework in which computational models, empirical data, and predictive tools inform and refine one another. Within this framework, theory guides model and task design, while data-driven approaches support stratification, validation, and comparison across computational hypotheses. This integration may improve generalizability across clinical cohorts, support individualized risk estimation, and facilitate the identification of mechanistically informed subgroups. We also discuss the potential role of computational parameters as biomarker-like features within predictive models, alongside challenges related to reliability, scalability, and ethical implementation. Integrating theory- and data-driven approaches may help computational psychiatry develop clinically useful and mechanistically interpretable models.
To Regulate or Not To Regulate? Situational and Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation Initiation in Daily Life
Tabea Springstein; Anna Bankston; Tammy English
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Situational and individual differences shape how and why people regulate emotions but whether emotion regulation is initiated remains understudied. We hypothesize that, for example, less familiar situations might be associated with more regulation initiation and people who believe emotions are controllable initiate regulation more frequently. Using experience sampling (N = 216; 7x/14 days), we found participants initiated regulation 60% of the time over the past two hours. As predicted, people initiated regulation in less familiar, less pleasant contexts, and with more dominant, less warm social partners. Unexpectedly, individuals who believe emotions are uncontrollable were more likely to initiate regulation, even after accounting for affect. These findings highlight that while attention has mostly focused on strategy selection or efficacy, meaningful situational and individual differences also exist at the emotion regulation initiation stage when individuals determine whether to expend regulatory resources to maintain well-being.
Public Risk Judgments of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Psychometric Structure, Exposure Routes, and Cross-National Differences
Nick Simonsen; Aleksandr Pravednikov; Carl Johan Lagerkvist; Sonja Perkovic
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Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are pervasive in everyday life and pose well-documented public health risks, yet little is known about how lay perceptions of EDC risks are structured and how they vary across exposure routes and regulatory contexts. Drawing on the psychometric paradigm of risk perception, we conducted a large cross-national survey (N = 1,966) in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants evaluated 18 EDC-related activities across nine canonical risk attributes, ranked perceived health risks by exposure route (consumption, inhalation, dermal contact), and reported perceived severity, susceptibility, general exposure, institutional trust, and sociodemographic characteristics. Across all three countries, risk perceptions exhibited a robust two-dimensional structure corresponding to affective-dread and cognitive-controllability dimensions. However, the relative salience of these dimensions varied systematically: cognitive-controllability cues accounted for more variance in Denmark, whereas affective-dread cues were more prominent in the UK and US. Perceived risk also varied consistently by exposure route, with consumption judged the most risky, followed by inhalation and dermal contact, a hierarchy that showed minimal cross-country variation. At the individual level, greater knowledge of EDCs consistently predicted higher perceived severity, while gender, age, income, parenthood, and institutional trust showed context- and outcome-specific associations. By extending the psychometric paradigm to chronic, diffuse chemical hazards embedded in everyday activities, this study demonstrates that EDC risk perceptions reflect stable affective-cognitive dimensions while remaining sensitive to exposure routes and governance contexts, offering theoretically grounded insights for risk communication and policy design.
Cholera vaccination readiness in six African countries: A psychological and ecological study
Mattis Geiger; Lars Korn; Hellen Temme; Cornelia Betsch
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Objectives: This study examines the psychological construct vaccination readiness against cholera in six African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda) based on the 7C model of vaccination readiness (measuring confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, collective responsibility, compliance, conspiracy). This allows testing the generalizability of the 7Cs to a non-WEIRD and previously under-researched infection context with a low to moderate vaccination rate (< 50%), which can provide valuable insights for vaccine roll-out and epidemic (and pandemic) preparedness. Methods: A total of 14,132 English-speaking participants were recruited via an online survey on Facebook. Measurement invariance analyses showed scalar invariance, which allows cross-country mean comparisons and supports the generalizability of cholera vaccination readiness across countries. Results: At the individual level, vaccination readiness was significantly associated with self-reported vaccination status against cholera (d = 0.32) and general vaccination status across several vaccines (r = .35). Individuals with personal experience with cholera showed higher vaccination readiness (d = 0.14). At the country level, average vaccination readiness correlated strongly with cholera incidence over the past three years (ρ = .89), suggesting a higher vaccination readiness in countries with higher disease burden and risk. Conclusion: The study provides evidence for the generalizability of the 7C model across countries and infectious diseases and shows that cholera vaccination readiness is related to self-reported risk and disease experience. For pandemic preparedness the data suggest that vaccination readiness builds where disease experience already exists, leaving populations without prior exposure at greatest risk during a novel outbreak.
Effects and Moderators of Message Frames and Message Themes on Self-Care in Hong Kong China and United Kingdom - An Experiment
Siu Kit Yeung; Winnie W. S. Mak; Chun Ming Lee
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Background Recent studies have investigated the effects of message framing on mental health self-care and help-seeking mostly with western samples. Past studies have also shown evidence for regional differences in aspects such as self-care, somatization, mental health literacy, regulatory focus, and optimism between Hong Kong China and United Kingdom. Messages that are congruent to more common characteristics of people in different regions may boost effects and comparing messages that are regarding mental health, physical health, and both may inform individually or culturally-congruent message choices. Methods With samples from United Kingdom and Hong Kong (n = 465), we investigated the effects of gain versus nonloss framing and message themes on self-care intentions, mindfulness practice decision, and reactance as well as potential individual and regional moderations. Linear regressions and logistic regressions were conducted. Results There was evidence for higher counterarguing among participants who received the nonloss-framed mental health plus physical health message relative to people who received the gain-framed combined message and the nonloss-framed mental health message. Results indicated no support for regional moderation and weak to no evidence for individual difference moderation of optimism and regulatory focus for framing and perceptions or beliefs regarding mental health and physical health for themes. Exploratory, inconsistent, tentative, and uncertain evidence found that physical health messages may work better for prevention-focused people, mental health messages may result in better outcomes for promotion-focused people, and gain-framed messages may drive higher self-care intentions among people who perceive mental health as more important. Conclusions Our study showed no support for anticipated individual and cultural moderation effects, but found suggestive and inconclusive support for interaction between regulatory focus and message themes as well as message framing and perceived importance of mental health. Before applying in the real-world, further replications and follow-up studies are needed to examine reliability and mechanisms of such findings that may be due to alignments in message and dispositional construal levels but may also be due to chance. Keywords: Message Framing, Message Themes, Individual Moderators, Regional Moderation, Tailoring, Mindfulness
The Impact of Co-speech Gesture on Sentence Memory and Metacognitive Confidence
Yang Liu; Tilo Kircher; Luyao Chen; Yifei He; Benjamin Straube
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Gestures often accompany speech during daily communication, but gestures do not automatically make spoken information easier to remember. It remains unclear which gesture cues make sentences memorable and whether they also make memory easier to monitor. Here, across two sentence-recognition experiments, we tested how gesture presence, gesture–speech relatedness, and sentence type shaped later recognition and confidence. Gesture presence alone did not reliably improve memory. Instead, recognition depended on the information of the encoding context: object-related/action materials were remembered better in Experiment 1, and semantically related gestures improved recognition when gestures were present throughout Experiment 2. We also observed selective metacognition effects: in Experiment 1, metacognitive efficiency was selectively elevated for object-related sentences accompanied by tool-use gestures, whereas semantic relatedness improved memory without reliably improving metacognitive efficiency in Experiment 2. Exploratory individual-difference analyses further suggest that higher self-reported gesture production and perception abilities were associated with stronger confidence-accuracy coupling across experiments. These findings suggest that gestures support sentence memory when they provide meaningful encoding cues, but accurate self-monitoring of memory depends on more restricted cues. Together, these findings support a context-sensitive account of gesture effects on memory and metacognitive monitoring in multimodal language processing.
When you're with me, baby, the skies will be blue for all my life? A dyadic longitudinal study of relationship happiness through midlife
Georg Henning; Rebekka Weidmann; Dikla Segel-Karpas; Sophie Potter; Jenna WĂŒnsche
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Romantic relationships are critically important for a range of psychosocial outcomes across the lifespan, but few studies have examined relationship happiness in midlife. We investigate the trajectories of relationship happiness of romantic couples in midlife and examine whether children in the household, work status, and gender predict these trajectories. Dyadic latent growth curve models were applied to six waves of longitudinal data from N = 2,363 mixed-gender romantic couples (Mage = 48.28, SD = 7.27) in the Swiss Household Panel. A random-intercept cross-lagged panel model was run to investigate interconnections within couples. Relationship happiness decreased slightly, with steeper declines among younger participants. Female gender, having children and continuously not working were associated with less happiness. At some waves fluctuations in men’s happiness predicted fluctuations in women’s happiness and vice versa. We discuss the need for further research on interindividual differences as well as implications for improving relationship happiness during midlife. Keywords: couples, dyads, relationship satisfaction, midlife, contextual development
Finnish teachers' prerequisites and requisites for inclusive music education in grades 1–9
Oula Mommo; Riikka Mononen; Katja Sutela
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This study examined Finnish music teachers’ prerequisites and requisites for inclusive music education from the perspectives of perceptions of inclusive music education, pedagogical starting points, and needs for ideal teaching. Teachers (n=18) teaching in grades 1–9 were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. Using a thematic analysis, five overarching themes were identified. The school climate was crucial to music education, as music is intertwined with the school's culture. However, inclusive education and its policies pose challenges for music educators. Teachers’ strong pedagogical foundation was a key component for a successful inclusive education. Furthermore, teachers had the ethos of equal participation as a right for every pupil. Therefore, fostering teachers' pedagogical foundation for inclusive music education would be crucial in addition to basic resources for quality music education.
Bodily responses to bullying
Birgitta Paranko; Sarah Malamut; Claire F. Garandeau; Christina Salmivalli; Lauri Nummenmaa
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Peer victimization has marked long-term somatic and psychological consequences for individuals, but little is known about acute bodily responses to bullying. We mapped bodily sensations and emotions evoked by bullying and other social behaviours across four experiments involving 1255 participants. In Experiment 1, the participants rated the observed behaviour as well as their own subjective emotions and reactions evoked by social scenarios described in written vignettes. In Experiment 2, the participants indicated on a human silhouette the bodily regions in which they felt changes in activity while imagining themselves in scenarios described by the same vignettes. In Experiment 3, these procedures were replicated with first-person video stimuli. To compare the bodily sensations evoked by bullying with emotion-specific bodily sensations, we quantified bodily maps of discrete emotions in a separate study (Experiment 4). Bullying experiences induced by both vignettes and videos evoked consistent bodily sensations in the head, chest, stomach, and hand regions. In line with the strong bodily responses, bullying exposure evoked stronger distressing emotions, higher arousal, and greater emotional distance from others in comparison to conflict, neutral, and prosocial conditions. Furthermore, comparisons with the bodily maps of discrete emotions suggest that bodily sensations evoked by bullying reflect the experience of multiple negative emotions. These results highlight the significant bodily component of the bullying experience and underline bullying as a distressing and embodied experience in adulthood, indicating that bodily experiences should be better accounted for in interventions designed for victimized children and youth.
An existential perspective on counseling climate emotions
Max van der Linden; Sara Helmink
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The climate crisis is forcing us to consider how to deal with inevitable environmental and societal changes that will deeply affect our personal lives. Climate emotions are normal responses to the current precarious situation. As long as they don't interfere significantly with daily life, these emotions are not problematic and can even be helpful in responding appropriately to this crisis. For those experiencing problems with their emotional responses to climate issues, counseling can be helpful. It can provide support in accepting these emotions, reconnecting with nature, and fostering commitment to (collective) action. Linking these three themes in counseling to existential concerns such as freedom, identity, connection, meaning, happiness and personal growth can deepen and accelerate a client's development towards a (greener) life of greater acceptance, connection, agency and meaning.
Three-Step State Space Mixture Modeling to Compare Dynamic Processes Across Many Individuals
Manuel T. Rein; Leonie V. D. E. Vogelsmeier; Jeroen Vermunt; Kim De Roover
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Researchers are often interested in modeling unobserved heterogeneity in dynamic processes of latent variables between individuals. This can be achieved with state space mixture modeling, a method that identifies discrete subgroups of individuals who follow qualitatively distinct processes. However, jointly estimating the measurement model of the latent variables, the structural model (the dynamic process), and the mixture components can be computationally demanding and fit indices conflate measurement model fit and structural model fit. Separating the estimation of measurement model and structural model offers faster computation time, easier interpretation of fit indices and various other advantages. To leverage these advantages, we present Three-Step State Space Mixture Modeling, an extension of the Three-Step Latent Vector Autoregression framework to state space mixture modeling. We demonstrate the method’s performance in obtaining correct estimates of the structural parameters and cluster memberships by means of a simulation study and illustrate the method with an empirical example.
Assessing chronic pain processes longitudinally: Validation of the German “Assessing Chronic Pain Processes” (ProCEss) item set
Verena Eunike Hofmann; Julia Glombiewski; Marlene F. Prasch; Saskia Scholten
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Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has become increasingly feasible with technological advances, capturing dynamic fluctuations in symptoms and processes. EMA is ecologically valid and can reduce recall biases. However, there is a lack of thoroughly validated items. Therefore, the “Prozesse Chronischer Schmerzen ErfaSSen” (ProCEss; engl. „Assessing Chronic Pain Processes”) item set was developed for an EMA coverage model, i.e. a broad range of the day shall be captured instead of single momentary experiences. In multiple studies, practitioners (n = 18 + n = 12) and affected persons (n = 12 + n = 12) contributed to establishing content validity through an adapted Discriminant Content Validity Method and Cognitive Interviews. Findings from these studies informed the development of written and audio-visual comprehensibility aids, designed and evaluated in a healthy sample (n = 128) to replace extensive participant instruction procedures. Across studies, both affected persons and practitioners rated the items positively with regard to comprehensibility and relevance. Feedback of affected persons contributed to item refinement, and the item set was reduced from 29 to 25 items. The evaluation of the comprehensibility aids further supported the comprehensibility of the item set in general. The ProCEss item set is among the first validated instruments for assessing chronic pain processes using EMA in German. The current study supports its relevance and comprehensibility. Other forms of validity have to be established in future research, and comprehensiveness might be enhanced by future extensions of the item set.
Groove Emerges Through Repetition: The Temporal Dynamics of Prediction and Organization
Satoshi Kawase; Kei Eguchi
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Groove is commonly defined as the pleasurable urge to move in response to music, yet its temporal dynamics remain insufficiently understood. This study investigated how groove evolves with repeated exposure to rhythmic patterns of different lengths. A total of 2,295 participants each evaluated one of 32 drum break stimuli varying in cycle length (2, 4, or 8 beats) and number of repetitions. Groove increased in a saturating manner with rhythmic repetition, particularly for shorter patterns, whereas longer patterns elicited higher initial groove but smaller increases across repetitions. To account for these dynamics, we proposed a nonlinear model combining a saturating growth component and a damped oscillatory term. Within a predictive coding framework, the model fit the data well and generalized across validation procedures. These findings suggest that groove is not determined solely by stimulus duration but emerges through iterative stabilization of predictive processes, reflecting both gradual increases in predictive precision and transient fluctuations in prediction error.
A priori power analysis for ANOVA interaction effects with the anovapowersim R package: a short introduction
Shaheed Azaad
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Although power analysis has become increasingly accessible over time, researchers still find it challenging to compute power for complex ANOVA interactions. anovapowersim is an R package that enables users to easily specify between, within, and mixed interactions of varying complexity and simulate power based on a target effect size. This tutorial provides a short introduction to the package's core functionality, along with worked examples and sample R code.
"Know Thyself" Through the Heart? How Cardiac Interoception Mediates Emotion Regulation and Responds to Vagus Nerve Stimulation
Yaping He; Likun Ge; Haoran Shen; Yi Jiang; Jianfeng Zhang; Hugo D Critchley; Gao-Xia Wei
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Emotion regulation (ER) helps maintain mental health by modifying emotional responses through psychological distancing and reappraisal. Although it is proposed that interoceptive mechanisms likely underpin effective ER, evidence linking interoception and ER is limited to cross-sectional studies. We investigated whether actively modulating interoception influences emotional responses and the effectiveness of ER. We undertook three complementary experiments to characterize the relationship between cardiac interoception and ER capacity (operationalised as reduction in self-rated arousal evoked by negative emotional stimuli). Study 1 (N=100) found that higher heartbeat discrimination accuracy predicted greater ER capacity. Study 2 used cardiac interoceptive training in a randomized controlled design (N=70) to show that a single 10-minute training session enhanced heartbeat discrimination accuracy and improved ER capacity. Study 3 used an interoceptive manipulation, transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS), in a single-blind, sham-controlled, crossover design (N=36), to show that taVNS increased heart rate variability, enhanced interoceptive (heartbeat discrimination) performance accuracy, and improved ER capacity. Mediation analysis indicated that improved interoceptive accuracy partially mediated taVNS’s effect on ER capacity. Together, these findings link cardiac interoceptive sensitivity to individual differences in ER capacity and further demonstrate that interoceptive manipulations (cardioceptive training or taVNS) are effective interventions for enhancing ER capacity.
Trust Issues: Social Learning Under Misaligned Goals
Liang Lee; Valerii Chirkov; Shen Tian; Charley M Wu; Alexandra Witt
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Computational models of social learning often assume learners and demonstrators share identical or at least positively correlated goals. Yet this assumption limits applications to real-world scenarios, where preferences may be misaligned or even opposed. We address this gap by extending the socially correlated bandit task to settings where agents need to learn when social information is positively correlated, uncorrelated, or negatively correlated, analogous to learning whom to trust or distrust. We introduce Social Correlation–Adjusted LEarning (SCALE), a multi-output Gaussian Process model that learns the covariance structure between agents' preferences. Using simulations, we characterize the model's performance across social environments and outline a path toward agents that can dynamically infer social correlations from experience. Our model allows us to reframe prior experimental observations, and lays the groundwork for future experimental work on the integration of preferences into individual decision-making.
Willful Ignorance in the Context of Antibiotic Prescribing
Alina Schneider; Miroslav Sirota; Rian Gross; Lars Korn; D. Elisabeth C. Sievert; Cornelia Betsch; Robert Böhm
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Healthcare professionals tend to overprescribe antibiotics despite knowing the risks of antibiotic resistance. This tendency, amplified under diagnostic uncertainty and patient pressure, suggests that mechanisms beyond lack of risk awareness or knowledge sustain overprescription. One such mechanism may be willful ignorance—deliberately avoiding information about the consequences of one’s prescribing decisions. By allowing healthcare professionals to justify immediate antibiotic prescriptions that prioritize short-term self-interests over long-term collective benefits, willful ignorance may contribute to persistent overprescribing. Despite its practical relevance, this psychological mechanism has not yet been empirically investigated in the context of antibiotic prescribing. To test this empirically, we conducted a preregistered online experiment with healthcare professionals (N = 698) from the United States and the United Kingdom. Participants completed an adapted version of the Moral Wiggle Room Task, a behavioral decision-making paradigm designed to investigate willful ignorance. This task compares choices across a full information condition with low diagnostic uncertainty, and a hidden information condition with high diagnostic uncertainty that can be voluntarily reduced. The results support the presence of willful ignorance in antibiotic prescribing. Healthcare professionals were more likely to prescribe antibiotics immediately in the hidden vs. full information condition. Even healthcare professionals who voluntarily reduced diagnostic uncertainty prescribed more antibiotics immediately than those who received diagnostic information involuntarily. These results highlight the role of willful ignorance in antibiotic prescribing and suggest practical implications for policymaking, such as promoting transparent environments to guide appropriate antibiotic prescription choices.
Conceptualizing Sigma factor (Σ−factor) model— Insights from cardiovascular autonomic dysregulation in Psychopathology.
Farhad Montazeri
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Purpose: This study explores hemodynamic measures for patterns of autonomic system dysfunction in correlation with psychopathology within a large, diverse sample of adolescents. Methods: The study was conducted on 10,191 subjects from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), with simultaneous measurement of psychopathology, using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), and hemodynamic status (resting vital signs). Adrenergic arousal windows were identified via diurnal sensitivity analysis. Hierarchical Clustering Analysis of subjects with measurements performed during these windows identified a hemodynamic cluster, composed of indices that correlated with the psychopathology cluster, made of CBCL scales. The hemodynamic cluster was dimensionally reduced to a composite measure—” the Fractional Hyperadrenergic Index” (FHI). Next, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analyzed the association between this measure and psychopathology load (based on the p-factor model), while controlling for demographic covariates. Results: Heart rate is positively correlated across CBCL syndromic, and DSM scales, with a distinct bimodal diurnal rhythm, mirroring known adrenergic arousal windows in the early morning and late afternoon. This correlation happens in synchrony with a narrowed pulse pressure, in a distinct pattern of alpha-adrenergic hyperadrenergia at rest, mimicking the hyperadrenergic Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), caused by preload reduction secondary to dysfunction at norepinephrine (NE) synaptic level, and the resulting blood pooling. There is striking similarity with NE synaptic level dysfunction at the central nervous system level, observed in psychiatric patients. FHI is found to be a highly significant, independent predictor of the total load of psychopathology, measured by CBCL ‘total problems’ scale (ÎČ= 0.79, p < .001). Conclusion: NE Synaptic-level dysfunction appears to be the major link between psychopathology and cardiovascular autonomic dysregulation. The same synapses regulate neuro-immune axis, Considering the immune system dysregulation in psychopathology, it seems like this and other intertwined etiologies, (i.e. inflammation) results in a multi-systemic dysregulation in correlation with psychopathology. We propose the Sigma-factor (Σ−factor) model, that encapsulate psychopathology, not in isolation, but in correlation with the rest of multi-systemic pathology (i.e. cardiovascular hyper-adrenergia, allergy, auto-inflammation, joint instability, scoliosis, flat feet, seizure, migraine, etc.) paving the road for multi-systemic diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.
Mapping International Best Practices in Climate–Mental Health Facilitation and Professional Certification: A Scoping Review Protocol
Andrian Liem; Rohmaningtyas Hidayah Setyaningrum; Reginapta Nitya Prasetyani; Arif Tri Setyanto; Lexine Stapinski
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Climate change poses escalating threats to psychological well-being, yet no internationally recognised certification framework for climate–mental health facilitation currently exists in the peer-reviewed literature. This protocol describes a scoping review that aimed to map international models, frameworks, and best practices for professional training and certification in climate–mental health facilitation. The review addresses five sub-questions covering competency domains, existing training models, structural features, cultural and ethical considerations, and evidence gaps. Guided by the Population–Concept–Context (PCC) framework and the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), six electronic databases and targeted grey literature sources will be systematically searched. Two independent reviewers will screen records and chart data using a standardised form. Findings will be synthesised through narrative description and a comparative benchmarking matrix. The expected outcome is a consolidated evidence base that will inform the development of a culturally adapted certification scheme for Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, and signal directions for future research and policy in climate psychology and mental health workforce development.
Norm Commitment as a Link Between ‘Dark’ Personality and Norm Violation
Marie Joséphine Hamatschek; Miriam Wittpoth; Celina Marke
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‘Dark’ personality traits predict criminal action, yet the underlying mechanism remains underspecified. We propose legal norm commitment (LNC) – an affectively anchored inner bond to the law – as an underlying mechanism. Based in a criminal-psychological action theory, LNC is assumed to build on (a) belief in the law (requiring overlap between inner direction and the law, or DLO; plus moral-emotional imperativeness) and (b) attachment to significant others. In a sample of incarcerated and free participants (N = 387), we assessed psychopathy (boldness, meanness, disinhibition), Machiavellianism, narcissistic entitlement, guilt proneness, LNC, and a catalogue of specific past norm violations via self-report. We used mediation analyses to test whether the norm violation tendency was predicted by the LNC (components) contained in the personality traits (implying conceptual overlap, not a causal relation). DLO partly accounted for personality–norm violation associations for all expected traits, but not for disinhibition, supporting a mechanism-based distinction between ‘dark’ and dysregulatory traits. Attachment and imperativeness showed no mediating effects. Among the traits investigated, meanness and guilt proneness shared the most variance with behaviorally effective LNC components. Given these preliminary findings, LNC as a value-free, mechanism-based concept might clarify some of the ‘darkness’ of personality.
Not One Approach to Rule Them All: How to Achieve Valid Cross-Group Assessment for Climate Change
Thomas GĂŒltzow; Gjalt - Jorn Peters
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Driven by human activities, the global climate crisis and its related behaviors vary significantly across demographic groups, meaning that effective behavior change interventions must account for this diversity. To develop these interventions, researchers must understand the behavioral determinants that influence actions, a process routinely achieved using validated survey instruments. However, traditional psychometric approaches are ill-equipped to accurately estimate validity across diverse populations. This article illustrates how narrative response models offer a vital alternative. By implementing these models, researchers can establish robust validity across different sociodemographic groups while simultaneously refining construct definitions and improving the measurement instruments themselves.
Does Potential to Change Positively and Negatively Valenced Health Behaviors Influence their Self-Concept Relevance? A Registered Report
NA; Amy Wang; Ruishi Wang; Elizabeth Ann Johnson
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Drawing on research on possible selves and motivated cognition, we propose that people prefer relating their actions to their potential than to their objective accomplishments. Addressing mixed evidence on whether people’s frequently enacted behaviors inform their self-concepts, we hypothesize that the relationship between behavioral frequency and self-concept relevance is shaped jointly by beliefs about the changeability of specific behavioral patterns and behavioral valence (operationalized here as harmful vs. beneficial to health). For negatively valenced behaviors, we expect beliefs regarding one’s potential to change a specific behavioral pattern to attenuate the relation between behavioral frequency and self-concept relevance, such that indulging frequently in a negatively valenced behavior (e.g., eating highly processed foods) would be incorporated into one’s self-concept to a lesser extent as a function of believing one can change that behavior. For positively valenced behaviors, we expect beliefs regarding one’s potential to change a specific behavioral pattern to potentiate the relation between behavioral frequency and self-concept relevance, such that engaging frequently in a positively valenced behavior (e.g., eating fruits and vegetables) would be incorporated into one’s self-concept to a greater extent as a function of believing one can change that behavior. We tested the fit of these ideas to multilevel correlational data reported in Study 1 (N = 324 following preregistered data exclusions). To examine the causal role of changeability beliefs, we propose using materials piloted in Study 1 in an experiment, in the form of a registered report (planned N = 425, with statistical power estimated at .91).
Toward a unified theory of social relationships and social networks
Jae-Young Son
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Navigating the social world requires representing how people relate to one another and how people are connected in a network. Though both are forms of relational knowledge, it is difficult to unify them in a single theoretical framework. I hypothesize that the statistics of observation may be sufficient to learn both network structure and an intuitive theory of relationships.
Better Together? Facial Expressions as a Mechanism Shaping Enjoyment During Shared Experience
â€ȘArgaman Bell Meir‬‏; Liron Amihai; Daniel Toledano; Inbal Ravreby; Yaara Yeshurun
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We explored the impact of shared experiences on enjoyment, focusing on the role of facial expressions. Participants (N=190) listened to humorous audio-clips with a friend or alone, while their facial expressions were recorded via Zoom. Our Primary analysis showed that friend presence influenced enjoyment in a content-dependent way: enhancing enjoyment for knock-knock jokes and reducing it for stand-up. Across both types of humor, friend presence amplified the intensity of happy facial expressions. Complementing these findings, a post-hoc mediation analysis revealed that these happy expressions partially accounted for shared experiences' effect on enjoyment, suggesting they are a key mechanism linking social context to affective responses. Friends also exhibited facial expression synchronization, reflecting communicative responsiveness to one another. Importantly, these effects were reduced when participants could not see each other. These findings suggest that facial expressions actively shape enjoyment during shared experiences, offering insight into how people connect, and co-experience the world together.
Empirically derived effect size guidelines for social, individual differences, and cognitive psychology
Shaheed Azaad
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It is common and recommended practice in psychology to report standardised effect sizes alongside significance tests. As Cohen (1988) notes, the interpretation of these effect sizes as either small, medium, or large should depend on the field of research. The present study analysed 13,194 effects from 3,302 articles to empirically derive thresholds for social psychology (SP), individual differences psychology (IDP) and cognitive psychology (CP). Thresholds (in Pearson’s r) were smallest for SP (small: .17, medium: .24, large: .34), followed by IDP (small: .19, medium: .27, large: .41), while CP produced the largest effects (small: .24, medium: .34, large: .51). Thresholds for within-subjects designs (based on bias-corrected dz, or g) followed a different pattern: effects were smallest for IDP (small: 0.27, medium: 0.44, large: 0.78), slightly larger for SP (small: 0.33, medium: 0.49, large: 0.74), and largest for CP (small: 0.45, medium: 0.64, large: 0.95). Effect sizes were smaller in all fields when studies were preregistered. Confidence intervals for these estimates and conversions to other effect size metrics (e.g., d and η2) are provided.
The impact of grouping by ability on children’s thinking about academic performance
Jellie Sierksma; Astrid M. G. Poorthuis; Hanna Schleihauf
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Group distinctions have a profound impact on how children perceive themselves and their social world. Grouping is also common in education: Across the world, children are grouped by their presumed ability to address learner variability. Ability grouping practices aim to improve children’s learning outcomes, but educational research shows it does not always do so. Little research has addressed the psychological changes that ability grouping sets in motion. Integrating social and developmental-psychological, educational, and sociological research, we postulate that ability grouping may induce essentialism, which is the idea that group membership is determined by stable, internal essences. We tested this hypothesis across two preregistered studies (total N = 418, 5-11 years). Children watched animated videos of classrooms in which individual children were either grouped according to their performance or not grouped. An internal meta-analysis showed that ability grouping led children to attribute performance more to internal, stable causes (i.e., someone’s intelligence). Children were also less likely to attribute low performance to external causes (i.e., bad luck) and expected low performance to be more stable over time when classrooms were grouped. Ability grouping can thus lead children to essentialize academic performance, which may have negative downstream consequences for children’s self-views, academic motivation, and peer relations.
Effects of Positive-Negative Message Framing on Health-Related Attitudes, Intentions, and Behaviors: A Meta-Analytic Review with particular focus on Health Behavioral Characteristics Moderators and Cultural-level Moderators
Siu Kit Yeung; Ching Wan Li; Gabriel M.H. Cheung; Hoi Ching Yu; Yuxuan Zheng; Chun Ming Lee; Erik Yan Ching Persson; Winnie W. S. Mak
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Health message framing refers to ways in which information about favorable consequences of adhering to health recommendations and unfavorable consequences without adhering to health recommendations can be presented (Cesario et al., 2013; Rothman et al., 2006; Joyal-Desmarais et al., 2022). Findings have been mixed and contradictory with hundreds of studies being conducted since the previous large-scale meta-analysis on health message framing (Gallagher & Updegraff, 2012). This study included three-level meta-analyses on message framing studies regarding health behavioral attitudes, behavioral intentions, and behaviors, with 1295 effect sizes, 430 studies from 66 countries. Comparing positive-framing and negative-framing, results indicated tentative evidence for very small positive-framed advantage for health promotion and/or illness prevention that involved encouragement of healthy behavior (g = 0.04) and support for very small negative-framed advantage (g = -0.08) for health detection. Furthermore, moderation of behavioral frequency was inconclusive. Comparing gain-framing and loss-framing, loss-framing outperformed gain-framing for people from collectivistic and survival-oriented cultures/samples (gs = -0.26 to -0.29), with tentative evidence for gain-framing advantage for individualistic cultures (g = 0.07). Findings showed inconclusive evidence for moderation of indulgence-restraint, power distance, and dialecticism. We also found support for gain-framing advantage for health recuperation behavioral intentions (g = 0.20). Implications and directions, including culturally-congruent health communication (Betsch et al., 2016), more analyses and research on real-world benefits, costs, and risks of message framing choices, and realistic effect size expectations for sample size determination, were discussed. We called for more multi-regional studies, experiments that tease apart confounds, and studies examining mechanisms. Keywords: message framing, health behavior, behavioral function, cultural moderation, meta-analysis
Black Woman-Performed R&B and Gospel from Individual to Collective Resilience
Ireti DeBato-Cancel; Cass Dykeman
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Black woman-performed R&B and Gospel song lyrics serve as cultural archives of emotional and spiritual life, yet little empirical research has examined the linguistic and psychological signatures that distinguish these two genres. This study used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) software to analyze two corpora of 64 songs each, one of Black woman-performed R&B and one of Black woman-performed Gospel, spanning 1945 to 2024. Results revealed statistically significant differences on six of 21 variables tested, with the largest effects emerging for Religion (d = 1.18), Lifestyle (d = 1.02), and Feeling (d = 0.50). Gospel lyrics scored significantly higher on Religion and Lifestyle, while R&B lyrics scored higher on Feeling, She/He, Positive Emotion, and Anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to culturally responsive counseling practice, with implications for how clinicians can draw on Black women's musical traditions as a resource for emotional processing, identity affirmation, and collective resilience.
Interpreting FMS and SSQ Cybersickness Ratings via User Tolerance in Virtual Reality
Jonathan Kelly; Michael Dorneich; Stephen Gilbert
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Cybersickness remains a persistent challenge limiting the usability of virtual reality (VR), yet commonly used subjective measures such as the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) and the Fast Motion Sickness (FMS) scale are often difficult to interpret in terms of user outcomes. In particular, there is limited guidance on how specific values on these scales relate to user tolerance or the likelihood that users will discontinue a VR experience due to discomfort. This work addresses this gap by calibrating cybersickness severity interpretations against early termination of a VR experience. In Study 1 (N = 183), participants played an immersive VR game for up to 20 minutes and were free to terminate the experience at any time. Using a Behavioral Risk Banding (BRB) framework, logistic regression linked a modified 0-10 version of the FMS (FMS-10) and post-exposure SSQ scores to dropout probability, yielding behaviorally grounded risk severity bands (mild, moderate, severe, extreme). Survival analyses then showed how these bands mapped onto tolerance over time, revealing a transitional region marked by heightened individual variability. Study 2 (N = 304) evaluated the robustness of these categories across variation in VR content and mitigation context by applying the Study 1 thresholds without re-estimation. Although absolute dropout risk varied, the ordering and behavioral meaning of severity categories were preserved. Together, these results provide a practical, behaviorally grounded framework for interpreting cybersickness ratings in terms of user tolerance and usability across VR contexts.
Perceptions and Adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence Among Physical Therapy Professionals in Ohio: A Cross-Sectional Survey
Jie Hao; Adam Lockwood; Ryan L. Farmer
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Background and Purpose: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly accessible to healthcare professionals, yet little is known about how physical therapists (PTs) and physical therapist assistants (PTAs) perceive and use these technologies. This study examined the extent and nature of generative AI adoption, perceptions of AI quality and ethicality, barriers to use, and training needs among physical therapy professionals in Ohio. Methods: A cross-sectional survey following STROBE guidelines was distributed to Ohio Physical Therapy Association members via email in April–May 2025. The analytic sample comprised 389 respondents (285 PTs, 104 PTAs). Descriptive statistics characterized adoption patterns, perceptions, barriers, and training experiences. Mann-Whitney U tests with Benjamini-Hochberg correction compared attitudes between professional groups. Results: The majority of PTs (57.9%) and PTAs (75.0%) reported no work-related AI use in the past six months. Among users, AI was applied primarily to administrative tasks such as answering questions, generating emails, and creating summaries rather than direct clinical decision-making. Nearly all users reported editing AI-generated content before professional use (PTs: 91.7%; PTAs: 96.0%), and over 97% of both groups had never entered personally identifiable information into AI systems. Perceptions of AI-generated content quality were cautiously neutral, with PTs rating quality slightly higher than PTAs across all domains. Both groups endorsed practitioner AI training as an ethical priority (PTs: M = 4.89; PTAs: M = 4.20 on a 7-point scale). More than half of respondents reported no formal workplace AI policy (PTs: 54.4%; PTAs: 60.6%), and the vast majority had received no training in AI prompt development (PTs: 81.8%; PTAs: 84.5%). The most common barriers were unfamiliarity with AI tools, uncertainty about clinical integration, and concerns about accuracy. PTs held significantly more favorable attitudes toward AI than PTAs regarding trust, perceived helpfulness, and report-writing capability. Conclusion: Generative AI adoption in physical therapy remains limited, constrained by knowledge gaps, insufficient training, and a substantial absence of institutional policy. Practitioners who use AI demonstrate appropriate oversight practices but lack formal guidance and professional development support. These findings highlight the need for targeted AI education, clear workplace policies, and profession-specific guidelines to support safe and effective integration of AI into physical therapy practice.
The Bilingual Heart: A Review of Cultural and Linguistic Influences on Emotions in Bilinguals
Elif Tutku Tunalı; Elena Nicoladis
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Bilinguals often report feeling differently depending on the language they are using, with their first language (L1) typically evoking stronger emotions than their foreign language (LX). In psychotherapy settings, LX use has been associated with reduced distress and may help bilinguals to discuss traumatic memories more comfortably. However, findings from behavioral and psychophysiological studies do not always align with these self-reports, and the conditions under which reduced emotionality emerges remain unclear. Although factors such as age of acquisition, language proficiency, and learning context have been linked to emotional attenuation in LX, no single explanation has consistently accounted for these effects across studies. Some researchers argue that culturally grounded emotion norms and display rules embedded within each language may also affect bilingual emotional experience. Overall, the literature reviewed highlights the combined influence of language and culture and suggests that future research should further examine their interaction in bilingual cognition and emotion.
Individual formidability uniformly predicts political violence across 30 countries
Henrikas Bartusevicius
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Conventional explanations of political violence emphasize complex political, economic, and cultural factors, often overlooking elemental individual characteristics. Recent studies suggest that individual physical strength—a basic physiological trait—predicts militant attitudes and intentions to engage in domestic political violence (e.g., participating in a protest expected to turn violent, retaliating against attacks on one’s group). We provide a large-scale cross-cultural test of this link, spanning nearly 15,000 participants from 30 countries across six world regions. Formidability positively predicts such violent intentions in every one of the 30 countries; 25 (83%) of the country-specific slopes reach individual significance, and what varies across nations is the slope’s magnitude, not its direction. This pattern is consistent with a panhuman psychological mechanism whose surface expression is modulated, but not extinguished, by local political and cultural conditions. Together with sex and age, individual formidability explains as much as 10% of variance in political violence outcomes.
Two kinds of real-world statistics in U.S. children’s books and a mechanism for early learning of racial categories
Catarina Vales; Molly Niehaus; Anna Fisher
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We expand on the broadly accepted view that children learn about racial categories from exposure to regularities in their environment by documenting two kinds of real-word structure that are likely to contribute to this learning. Across two studies, we document the frequency with which different racial groups are depicted in children’s books and the contexts surrounding the depiction of racial groups in children’s books. Characters from minoritized racial groups are not only numerically underrepresented in U.S. children’s books (Study 1), but there are also differences in the contextual themes associated with different racial groups (Study 2). Contemporary category learning accounts predict that such input would result in decreases in representational similarity across racial groups and it is thus likely to contribute to the emergence of racial categories – and potentially biases – in childhood. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of social learning and propose a mechanistic framework for increasing intergroup similarity in young children.
Men’s Experiences and Understandings of the Therapeutic Relationship in Psychotherapy for Depression: A Qualitative Systematic Review
Tsuki Gao; Lesley-Anne MacRae; Ananyaa Rodricks
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Psychotherapy is a primary evidence-based treatment for depression and is equally effective for men and women. However, men’s access remains lower and dropout rates are higher. Men’s engagement in psychotherapy appears to be shaped by factors beyond modality or specific interventions. The therapeutic relationship is a central component of psychotherapy and is consistently associated with treatment processes and outcomes across modalities, yet its conceptualisation remains ambiguous and men are underrepresented in this field. Existing qualitative studies often embed men’s relational experiences within mixed-gender samples or broader psychotherapy research, resulting in fragmented findings. This review therefore provides a systematic synthesis of qualitative evidence on men’s understandings and conceptualisations of the therapeutic relationship in psychotherapy for depression. A PRISMA-guided search across seven databases (PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, Cochrane, Web of Science) identified seven studies for inclusion. Thematic synthesis generated five analytic themes: a distinct type of relationship; collaboration and equality in therapy; skills and ability to tailor therapy; therapists’ ways of being and doing; and willingness and capacity to open up, with sub-themes capturing different dimensions of these factors. Findings indicate that men’s engagement in psychotherapy for depression is strongly shaped by relational processes rather than technique alone. Collaboration, transparency, therapist competence, and relational alignment supported trust and emotional disclosure, while disruptions and lack of confidence and trust weakened the bond. The therapeutic relationship emerged as an evolving process influenced by power dynamics and responsiveness, underscoring its central role in gender-sensitive psychotherapeutic practice.
Meta-analysis of the divided attention paradigm reveals trade-offs between perceptual and mnemonic processing during episodic memory retrieval
Thomas Matthew Biba; David Han; Louis J Moses; J. Benjamin Hutchinson
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How does attention influence episodic memory retrieval? Although influential theories emphasize the critical role of attention during encoding, its involvement in retrieval remains debated. Theoretical accounts of memory-attention interactions largely draw from experiments that utilize the divided attention paradigm. In these experiments, memory and perceptual task performance is compared when completed concurrently or separately, with a dual task performance decrement indicating cognitive interdependence. To clarify the role of attention in episodic retrieval, we conducted a meta-analysis of 64 studies comprising 214 independent experiments that examined the effects of divided attention at retrieval. Consistent with our primary pre-registered prediction, results indicated that divided attention at retrieval reliably impaired both memory and concurrent perceptual task performance. In line with three of four pre-registered secondary predictions, divided attention at retrieval produced larger memory decrements when retrieval relied more heavily on recollection than familiarity, and when perceptual and mnemonic content overlapped rather than differed. Divided attention also had a greater impact on perceptual task performance than on memory. However, working memory maintenance demands in the concurrent perceptual task did not moderate the effects of divided attention on retrieval. Surprisingly, in addition the overall moderating effects of retrieval process and content similarity, we observed reliable dual-task costs when familiarity was taxed and when content did not overlap - retrieval conditions not previously thought to demand attention. Together, these findings provide robust evidence that episodic retrieval depends on attentional resources, demonstrating a more fundamental role for attention in memory retrieval than previously appreciated.
Development of memory linking supports precise temporal inference
Owen W. Friend; Nicole Varga; Christine Coughlin; Alison Preston
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Learning to predict when events occur often requires inferring links between experiences. While children use knowledge of routines to retrospectively estimate event times, little is known about how structured temporal knowledge forms initially and develops. Here, a representative community sample aged 7–25 years (n=104) completed a memory task in which they could infer event times from temporal cues that varied across learning repetitions by linking and updating information across experiences. We found that while adults precisely located events in time through inference, younger participants’ temporal estimates were biased toward average times, particularly when temporal cues were more variable. These findings suggest that developmental improvements in linking and updating information across multiple experiences underlie age-related gains how children represent time.
Dopaminergic contributions to novel word learning
Peter Su; David Copland; Nadeeka Dissanayaka; Anthony Angwin
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Dopamine is crucial to the function of language, executive, reward, and memory networks putatively underlying word learning. The present study explored how levodopa impacts associative novel word learning in healthy adults. Using a placebo-controlled, between groups study design, we compared the effects of levodopa VS placebo on associative novel word learning in a group of healthy young adults (placebo n=18; levodopa n=17). Novel and familiar objects were paired with auditory novel words during 4 days of learning. Learning outcomes were assessed via recognition and recall tasks on each day, with delayed follow-up at 1 and 4 weeks after the final day of learning. Behavioural and cognitive measures were obtained before throughout to assess their influence on word learning. Participants receiving levodopa demonstrated higher overall recall and recognition accuracy during learning relative to those on placebo, with recognition accuracy also higher for the levodopa group at the delayed follow-up. No correlations were observed with behavioural or cognitive measures. While dopamine facilitates associative novel word learning, such benefits may weaken over time. Indices of sensitivity to reward or baseline executive function did not meaningfully predict novel word learning performance as indexed by our task. An explicit learning paradigm may elicit strong top-down motivation, which could in turn wash out these contributions within our task context. Interestingly, we also noted an increase in accuracy from Day 4 (last training day) to the first delayed follow-up at Week 1, for both recall and recognition across drug arms, despite the lack of any training in between.
The Time Traveler’s Regret: Are Our Decisions Truly Ethical or Just Outcome-Driven?
Korvin B. DĂ©ri
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Moral decision-making is a central point in psychology, yet the relationship between our ethical choices and the outcomes we expect remains underexplored. This study tested a novel method in which participants faced morally challenging dilemmas, received the consequences of their initial choices, and were then offered the opportunity to revise or maintain their decision. While hypothetical, the design simulated post-decision reflection and regret, offering insights into how satisfaction and surprise, two emotional responses tied to regret, affect moral flexibility. Satisfaction captured the emotional acceptance of the outcome, while surprise showed the degree to which the outcome violated initial expectations. Eighty-two participants completed six moral dilemmas using a time-travel-inspired structure. Binary logistic regression models showed that lower satisfaction consistently predicted decision change across all dilemmas (Exp(B) = 0.340-0.689), while surprise was significant in four of six (Exp(B) = 1.201-2.626). In contrast, moral identity, (trait-level predictor) was non-significant in all models. Qualitative analysis revealed reasoning based on principles in emotionally grounded dilemmas, but pragmatic or disengaged justifications in abstract scenarios. These findings suggest that moral decision change is less about fixed ethical values and more about emotional dissonance and the psychological need to justify or tolerate the consequences of one’s actions.
Sex Differences in the Clinical Correlates of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury in Adolescents. A Narrative Review
Giulia Suzzi
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Non-suicidal self-i‌njury, or NSSI as it is often called, is about the delibera‍te harming of one's own body tissue. Importantly, it is done without any intention to die. This behavior is quite common in adolescent psychiatry, in fact, it is one of the most prevalent things we see. Looking at samples from the general community, the numbers suggest that somewhere between 18% and 23% of ad‎olescents experience NSSI at some point in their lives. When we consider female adolescents, they engage in NSSI at a rate th‎at is roughly double their male counterparts in places like North America and Europe. However, this difference in rates completely disappears when you look at Asian populations. In those regions, the ratio of female to male occurrences ends up being very close to equal, around 1.00. This wide variation across different cultures really points to how much sociocultural factors play a role. These factors likely include things like how stigma affects males expressing their emotions, and how reporting norms differ. Such influences probably explain a big part of why we see this prevalence gap in some places but not o͏thers. B‌eyond just how common it is, there are also sex differences in the specific ways NS⁠SI is carried out. T⁠his includes the methods used, which parts of the body are ta͏rgeted, the psychological reasons behind it, other mental health conditions t‎hat might be present, and how much adverse childhood experiences factor in. For example, female adolescents tend to m͏ore often use methods like cutting or scratching, and they often target visible are‌as on their limbs. Th‍ey also frequently have internalizing conditions like depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. When asked, they usually say they enga‌ge in NSSI mainly to manage their emotions. Male adolescents, on the other hand, often use methods that are less visible, things like bu‌rning onese⁠lf or s͏elf-hitting. Their profiles for co-occurring psychiatric conditions are more varied, of͏ten including externalizing disorders such as ADHD and conduct disorder. Also, males more frequently r‎eport t‎hat social influence is a reason for t‍heir NSSI.
Functional Role and Semantic Structure Shape Word Memorability: Cue–Target Asymmetries in Cued Recall
Anuska Maity; Vishnu Sreekumar
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Memorability, the tendency for an item to be consistently remembered across individuals, is often treated as an intrinsic property of stimuli, reflecting fixed characteristics of items themselves. However, models of cue-based retrieval predict that memorability should also depend on the functional role an item plays during retrieval. Using a large cued-recall dataset in which each word served both as a cue and as a target, we tested this prediction directly. Cue memorability showed substantially greater cross-participant reliability than target memorability, indicating that the cognitive processes initiating retrieval are more consistent across individuals than those involved in recovering specific memory traces. To identify the sources of this dissociation, we modeled cue and target memorability using a broad set of psycholinguistic and semantic features. Number of senses, concreteness, and word frequency selectively supported cue effectiveness, whereas number of incoming associates and morphemic complexity predicted target retrievability. However, at the level of semantic categories, cue and target memorability converged almost perfectly, consistent with Aka et al. (2023). This result suggests that category-level structure captures stable conceptual regularities that shape memorability across retrieval roles. Together, these findings suggest that memorability reflects an interaction between semantic structure and retrieval processes, with distinct lexical and semantic properties supporting the effectiveness of items as cues versus their retrievability as targets.
Multisensory Integration and Pragmatic Processing in Schizophrenia: Evidence from the Rubber Hand Illusion
Chiara Battaglini; Michele Francesco d'Incalci; Luca Bischetti; Jacopo Sapienza; Agostoni Giulia; Rebecca Milanese; Federica Cuoco; Marco Spangaro; Francesca Martini; Margherita Bechi
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Pragmatic impairments are a core feature of schizophrenia, yet their underlying mechanisms remain only partially understood. Beyond deficits in cognition and social cognition, recent accounts suggest that alterations in multisensory integration and embodiment may contribute to communicative dysfunction. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that disturbances in multisensory integration are associated with pragmatic deficits in schizophrenia. Across two studies, individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders underwent a Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) paradigm to assess multisensory integration and bodily self-representation. In Study 1, pragmatic abilities were evaluated using APACS, a comprehensive battery assessing both expressive and receptive pragmatics. In Study 2, metaphor comprehension was specifically examined via the PMM task. Illusory experience was indexed through subjective measures (embodiment, disembodiment) and an objective index (proprioceptive drift). Results showed that patients exhibited a dysfunctional illusion experience. While subjective measures were not related to pragmatics, greater proprioceptive drift was consistently associated with poorer pragmatic abilities, in both production and comprehension, even when controlling for cognitive performance and symptom severity. In the metaphor task, both subjective and objective illusion susceptibility predicted difficulty with the mental dimension of metaphors. These findings suggest that low-level multisensory integration contributes to higher-order pragmatic abilities. We propose that an imbalance between sensory-based and integrative mechanisms may underlie both altered bodily self-representation and communicative impairments in schizophrenia, supporting accounts of a “disembodied self” coupled with a “hyper-symbolic” use of language.
The design, measurement, and analysis of longitudinal, corpus-based second language acquisition research: A systematic review
Minjin Kim; Kevin McManus
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Longitudinal, corpus-based second language acquisition (SLA) research has grown substantially in recent years, resulting in considerable richness and variety in study designs, analyses, and findings. Yet its design, measurement, and analysis practices have not been systematically assessed. To address this gap, this review synthesizes 118 longitudinal corpus-based SLA studies published between 1996 and 2025, identified through a systematic database search. Most studies relied on two to four observation points; written and same-genre data predominated, and task counterbalancing was rare; and analytical sophistication rose markedly over time, with mixed-effects models now the most common inferential approach. We identify five priorities for the field: aligning observation schedules with developmental trajectories, transparently reporting time-based parameters, designing tasks with clear rationale, matching analytic tools to learner-language data, and adopting longitudinal statistical models more widely. Together, these priorities offer a roadmap for studies capable of yielding cumulative, comparable evidence about L2 development over time.
Te Hinengaro Angitu: The Success Mindset
D D Allan; Evangeline M Rong
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The present study advances the literature on Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders) success by exploring the beliefs that highly-successful Māori hold about success, examining the influences underpinning these beliefs, and assessing whether they function as a success mindset. Kaupapa Māori-informed (Māori-centric approach) interviews were conducted with Māori (n = 10) who had demonstrated success in a range of fields. A constellation of beliefs emerged: He pānga te angitu (success is impact), He hononga te angitu (success is relational), and He anga whakamua te angitu (success is trajectory). These beliefs were forged by whānau (family) and whakapapa (genealogy), institutional encounters, mentorship, and self-authorship. Together they oriented participants’ goals, expectations, and attributions, thereby suggesting the presence of a success mindset: Te Hinengaro Angitu.
ggsem: A Parameter-Linked Workflow for Reproducible Visual Refinement and Comparison of Structural Models in R
Seung Hyun Min; Ling Gong
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Comparative visualization of structural equation and network models often requires manual coordination of layouts, aesthetics, and annotations across multiple independently generated diagrams. While statistical estimation workflows are often scriptable and version-controlled, comparative visual refinement is frequently performed through manual editing or disconnected plotting code. We introduce a parameter-linked visualization infrastructure, implemented in the R package ggsem, that centers visual interaction on statistical parameters rather than graphical primitives, supports interoperability with existing structural equation modeling (SEM) and network tools, and captures the full visual refinement sequence as structured, retraceable metadata. Using ggsem, we demonstrate how comparative visual refinement can be restored, regenerated, and reproduced as ggplot2 figures through three use cases: multi-group measurement invariance visualization, integration of scripted and interactive workflows for overlaid path diagrams, and side-by-side comparison of models estimated under different analytical paradigms. Documentation and step-by-step examples are available at https://smin95.github.io/ggsem.
Discussion and Disclosure of Suicidal Experiences in Recent Encounters with Mental Health Professionals
Jennifer Q. P. Nguyen; Glenn A Melvin; David John Hallford
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Objective: Many individuals who die by suicide have contact with healthcare services in the months preceding their death, making these interactions important opportunities for identification and support. As such, there is a need to better understand how individuals with suicidal thoughts and behaviours experience these recent clinical encounters with mental health professionals. Method: An online questionnaire assessed disclosure behaviours, barriers to disclosure, clinician responses, safety planning, and satisfaction during interactions with a mental health professional. Participants were Australian adults experiencing suicidal thoughts or behaviours who had interacted with a mental health professional in the past two weeks (N = 266; Mage = 32.9; range = 18-71 years). The sample was predominantly female and Caucasian. Results: This paper reports descriptive findings relating to participants’ recent interactions with mental health professionals. Most participants (67.9%) discussed suicidal thoughts and behaviours during the interaction, though many did not disclose fully or at all, and clinician enquiry was often indirect or absent. Safety planning and follow-up were also inconsistently implemented despite being valued by participants. Conclusions: Findings highlight missed opportunities for direct enquiry, safety planning, and follow-up, and underscore the importance of proactive and routine questioning to support disclosure and strengthen therapeutic care. Key words: suicide; suicidal ideation; suicidal behaviour; disclosure; non-disclosure
Understanding intergroup interactions with multi-level games: The past, present, and future
Qinyu Xiao; Robert Böhm
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Intergroup interactions often involve tensions both between groups and among members of the same group. Groups regularly compete with each other for scarce resources or relative status, but it may not be in each individual members’ best interest to help their groups compete. Similarly, even though intergroup cooperation may produce larger collective benefits, group members may prefer to cooperate just within their groups, if they ever decide to cooperate at all rather than pursuing self-interest. Capturing such multi-level tensions is crucial for understanding not only behaviours in intergroup interactions but also their cognitive and motivational underpinnings, as well as for devising solutions to mitigate destructive intergroup conflict and promote cooperation beyond group boundaries. Over the past few decades, a family of experimental game paradigms, which we call multi-level games, has been developed to study intergroup interactions that embed multi-level tensions. We review this proliferating literature, first documenting the origin of these games and then elaborating on how major game variants were developed to address important theoretical questions. We proceed to summarise the empirical literature where employing multi-level games illuminates the individual, situational, and structural determinants of intergroup behaviours, outline promising future directions, and address concerns about the use of these games. Apart from providing a comprehensive review of the state of the art, we also aim at making these games familiar to researchers whose research agenda may benefit from their use.
Digital Commons for Public Health: Social Media Language Models Outperform Surveys in Estimating Population Well-Being
Jonas Schöne; Shashanka Subrahmanya; Tiffany Hsu; Salvatore Giorgi; H. Andrew Schwartz; johannes Christopher Eichstaedt
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Measuring the subjective well-being of societies is important in its own right and as a determinant of health outcomes. Traditionally, self-report surveys such as Gallup’s daily poll have tracked well-being, but they are expensive and provide limited coverage of communities. Since 2010, research has shown that social media (e.g., Twitter/X) offers a cost-effective alternative. Yet, through ownership and policy changes, access to these “digital commons” is increasingly restricted. What are we losing without access for researchers? We document that well-being estimates derived from archival geolocated Twitter language likely yielded the most valid indicators of US population well-being available. We compare demographically post-stratified estimates for 1,208 US counties (~89% of the population) derived from 1.53 billion posts by 5.25 million users from 2009-2015 with Gallup estimates based on 1.9 million survey responses (2009-2016). Twitter-based estimates were more predictive of external health and economic indicators and met a wide variety of validity criteria, including a convergent correlation of r = .70 with Gallup, high test-retest stability, linguistic face validity, and generalizability across US cities, states, and to the UK. We further show that, even without Gallup data, Twitter/X data sufficed to measure well-being using an independent language model trained on N = 9,419 Twitter users, which again outperformed Gallup in predicting external variables. These findings establish that social media can capture population well-being more robustly and with better coverage than even the largest survey efforts, and that, like other public health datasets, researcher access to these data should be protected.
How human-like is LLM cognition?
Zak Hussain; Rui Mata; Dirk U. Wulff
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Large language models (LLMs) have led to renewed debate about whether artificial systems might possess human-like cognition. Although empirical evidence is growing quickly, it remains difficult to synthesize because studies vary in terms of which kinds of evidence they compare across humans and LLMs—design specifications, internal states, or behavior—and which kinds of inferences they draw. We address this challenge by organizing the Human-LLM comparison literature into broad evaluation categories and prototypical patterns of findings that either support or challenge LLM human-likeness. The resulting picture is one of jagged alignment, with human-likeness varying across dimensions rather than holding globally. We argue that studying these similarities and differences can clarify not only the functioning of artificial systems, but also the conceptual foundations of cognitive science.
Reward and surprise jointly shape long-term music memory
Brandon James Carone; Laura Ferreri; Pablo Ripolles
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Reward and surprise recruit dopaminergic systems that support memory formation, yet their combined contribution to declarative long-term memory remains poorly understood. We leveraged music as a naturally rewarding and statistically structured stimulus to test how subjective reward and model-derived surprise interact during encoding to promote long-term memory. Seventy-five participants listened to and rated unfamiliar classical musical excerpts in an in-person behavioral paradigm. Reward was indexed by subjective pleasure ratings, and surprise was quantified using a validated computational model able to capture musical predictability. Memory was assessed after 24 hours using recognition and recollection measures. Reward and surprise each enhanced recognition memory, and both effects remained significant when modeled jointly despite their positive association. However, the interaction between reward and surprise predicted the likelihood of providing a Remember or Know response rather than a Guess response. This suggests that their combined effect does not merely increase recognition, but enhances the subjective certainty of the memory trace. In other words, when an item is both rewarding and surprising, participants are less likely to rely on guessing and more likely to report either recollection of specific details or a strong sense of familiarity. Together, these findings suggest that subjective reward and model-derived surprise contribute in a graded and interactive manner to long-term memory for music: each facilitates recognition, but their convergence enhances the likelihood of a more confident form of memory expression. This interaction may help explain how new songs become rapidly memorable or “stick in our heads” even after a single exposure. More broadly, the results suggest that pleasurable and unexpected experiences are especially likely to be encoded as durable memories.
Bridging the Divide? Reducing Hostility Without Increasing Acceptance: A Commentary on Moritz et al. (2026)
Mathias Kauff; Julia C. Becker; Oliver Christ; Sarina J. SchÀfer
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In their manuscript entitled “Bridging the divide: Using metacognitive training to reduce hostility between the political left and right” published in Political Psychology, Moritz et al. (2026) apply metacognitive training (MCT), a well-established method from clinical psychology, to reduce hostility toward political outgroup members. The authors argue that presenting counterstereotypical information about the outgroup during MCT may help mitigate political polarization. In the present commentary, we do not provide a detailed methodological critique of the study. Some methodological limitations—such as the absence of preregistration, the lack of a control group, possible demand characteristics, and the absence of evidence for long-term effects—are already acknowledged by the authors themselves. Instead, our focus is on theoretical and conceptual issues that, in our view, remain central to evaluating the proposed intervention and its implications. A reply to our commentary by Steffen Moritz can be found here: https://clinical-neuropsychology.de/political_psychology/.
Visualizing Viruses: Exploring the relationship between children’s questions about and drawings of viruses
Sabina Li; Susan A. Gelman; David Menendez
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Children’s questions and drawings have been popular methods to explore what children currently know about a concept and what they would like to know. However, there is a surprising lack of research on the connection between the two. This project examined this connection using a naturalistic community sample: a set of activity sheets that children (N = 526) ages 4-14 completed in a museum exhibit on viruses, in which they were asked to draw a virus and provide one question they had about viruses. We coded features of the questions and drawings to better understand how children of different ages think about viruses. Our analyses show that children primarily asked about viral transmission, consequences for humans, and origins of viruses. Older children asked more causal questions and more questions about virus origins. Children tended to draw viruses as round and with spikes, and about a third of the children included anthropomorphic features like faces. We also found some relations between questions and drawings; children who drew a virus with a face were more likely to ask about the psychological, emotional, and moral qualities of viruses. These results replicate prior work on children’s question-asking with a larger sample, and contribute to our understanding of how children conceptualize viruses.
Discriminant Validity: Disentangling Health and Emotional Constructs from Language-Based Assessments
Scott Feltman; Adithya V Ganesan; Whitney R. Ringwald; Roman Kotov; Benjamin Luft; Ryan L. Boyd; Andy Schwartz; Oscar Nils Erik Kjell
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Language-based assessments of health have demonstrated validity in terms of convergence with self-report questionnaire scores, but recent work has shown they lack an important psychometric property: discriminant validity, the ability of the measure to distinguish the target construct from a related one. For example, a language-based general mental health assessment may accurately assess the degree of mental health, but it may also produce scores that correlate with general physical health well beyond theoretical expectations. Here, we propose and evaluate two methods for altering the standard loss function to directly penalize off-target correlations while retaining convergent validity. Evaluated across two clinical language datasets spanning physical and mental health, the augmentations substantially reduced off-target correlations with minimal loss in convergent validity (on-target correlations). Limiting loss in convergent validity to 0.005 Pearson correlation points, the loss function using Squared Cosine Similarity Discrimination significantly improved discriminant validity of language-based mental and physical health assessments (r = 0.454 → r = 0.322; p < 0.05); and fundamental psychopathology dimensions (r = 0.442 → 0.430; p < 0.05). These findings demonstrate that enforcing discriminant validity as a training objective is effective, moving language-based assessments closer to the specificity required for differential clinical use.
The valence of client and therapist language reflects symptom changes in messaging-based psychotherapy
Henna Vartiainen; Thomas Derrick Hull; Erik C Nook
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Psychopathology is often characterized by intense negative emotions. Understanding how these emotions are expressed through language can provide valuable insights on emotional processing and reveal linguistic patterns associated with mental health conditions. Sentiment, or the emotional tone of language, has been linked to affective states and wellbeing, suggesting it could serve as a marker of psychopathology and therapeutic progress. However, the versatility of different approaches to measuring sentiment makes it unclear which methods are best, and it is unclear whether language sentiment reflects symptoms or precedes them in longitudinal therapeutic settings. This study examined whether changes in client sentiment, therapist sentiment, or their divergence tracked clients' internalizing symptoms using a large dataset of text-based psychotherapeutic exchanges. We compared how well 13 commonly used sentiment analysis measures predicted internalizing symptoms in exploratory (N=3,729) and validation (N=2,500) datasets of messaging-based therapeutic conversations. Both client and therapist sentiment became more positive over time, and more positive sentiment preceded improving symptoms. Diverse sentiment measures mostly behaved similarly, although approaches that estimate word-level sentiment and treat positivity and negativity as separate constructs tended to yield more consistent results particularly within-subjects. These findings suggest that language sentiment can be a marker of internalizing symptoms and therapeutic progress, highlighting the potential of sentiment analysis as a tool for monitoring treatment outcomes.
Temporal Coupling Between Linguistic Arousal and Heart Rate Variability During Emotional Sharing
X. Jia; Alexandra S. Wormley; Kenneth Neil Reid; Martin Gevonden; Ethel Pruss; Zeng Zihao; Karen Holtmaat; Ethan; Lingyun Gao; Sander L. Koole
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When people talk about emotional experiences, do their bodies change in predictable ways? During social sharing of emotion, emotional arousal is expressed both physiologically and linguistically, yet it remains unclear how these two channels are synchronized or dynamically coupled over short time scales. This study examined how physiological arousal and linguistic markers of arousal prospectively predict one another during real-time emotional sharing conversations and whether this link is moderated by alexithymia. Two hundred and ninety-seven participants contributed 572 approximately 8-min emotion-sharing conversations with their romantic partner. Linguistic markers of arousal were extracted from time-stamped speech using a large-language model, and physiological regulation was indexed by heart-rate variability (HRV). Results showed higher linguistic arousal predicted lower HRV ten seconds later, and this negative lagged association was observed across alexithymia groups. In contrast, HRV did not show a uniform main effect on subsequent linguistic arousal. Instead, HRV negatively predicted subsequent linguistic arousal in the low-alexithymia group but positively predicted it in the high-alexithymia group. These findings suggest that emotionally intense verbal expression may be followed by a short-term reduction in physiological regulation and indicate that alexithymia may alter the translation of physiological regulatory signals into subsequent emotional language.
Improving Rigor in PTSD Clinical Research: Four Design Principles for Advancing Pharmacotherapy
Hermina Nedelescu; ERIC M PRAGER; Hadley C Bergstrom
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Efforts to develop novel pharmacological treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have yielded a wide range of potential targets. However, only two pharmacotherapies (sertraline and paroxetine) have received regulatory FDA approval. Why do pharmacological treatments that show promise in preclinical models fail in clinical trials? Beyond the inherent limitations of preclinical models, this gap may also reflect the intrinsic heterogeneity of the PTSD patient population and interactions among biological, behavioral, demographic, and trauma-related factors that impede the development of novel treatments. The purpose of this review is to identify factors in clinical research that, if addressed and harmonized across the community, may accelerate progress in finding new pharmacological treatments for PTSD. To address this, we integrated a structured analysis of clinical trial data (218 studies) with a conceptual review to identify participant-centered barriers associated with the diagnosis of PTSD, study design, and analytical factors that influence the interpretation of clinical research. We then provide four key actionable experimental recommendations that can be adopted to improve the potential for developing new, effective, and safe treatments for PTSD. The four actionable elements emphasize: (1) eligibility criteria, (2) intervention timing and administration, (3) study endpoints, and (4) sample size and attrition. By identifying these key areas that may limit success of PTSD research, well-coordinated clinical research strategies can be identified and prioritized to propel the field forward towards the validation of novel therapeutic treatments for those suffering from PTSD.
Children spontaneously compute scalar implicatures
Ebru Evcen; David Barner
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A large developmental literature finds that children often fail to compute scalar implicatures, accepting underinformative descriptions such as, “Some of the horses jumped” when all of them did, or, “The bear took a cup or a plate” when he took both. Here, we argue that past studies find such failures because they do not evaluate children’s spontaneous interpretation of utterances, but instead ask how they interpret language when provided proffered “worlds” that children would not consider otherwise. We show that when children are allowed the chance to act upon their own spontaneous interpretation of utterances, they compute scalar implicatures in an adult-like fashion. Specifically, we tested children in two conditions: a standard Truth Value Judgment (TVJ) condition, similar to past studies, and a novel, two-phase Act-Out+TVJ condition in which children first acted on the utterance by coloring pictures before judging a puppet's action. In the act-out task children almost never colored both disjuncts after hearing “or” (Experiment 1) and rarely colored all four objects after hearing “some” (Experiment 2). More importantly, after acting out these interpretations, children computed scalar implicatures in an adult-like fashion, and significantly more often than children in the TVJ-only condition. These findings suggest that preschoolers spontaneously access relevant alternative utterances and compute scalar implicatures when allowed to generate their own interpretations before evaluating experimenter-provided worlds, and that previous studies underestimate this ability by artificially proffering irrelevant worlds.
The Emergence of Multisensory Integration in the Prenatal Brain
Giulia D'Adamo; Andrea Dall'Asta; Mariarosaria Motta; Vittorio Gallese; Sara Iannantuoni; Piernicola D'Amario; Mariagrazia Capurso; Valentina Mora; Francesca Ferroni; Gabriele Saccone
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Multisensory integration is a fundamental principle of brain function, yet its prenatal origins remain largely unknown. Using Doppler ultrasonography in 58 uncomplicated singleton pregnancies (28–32 weeks of gestation), we examined fetal cerebrovascular responses to unimodal visual, unimodal vibrotactile, and bimodal visuo-vibrotactile stimulation across the anterior, middle, and posterior cerebral arteries. Visuo-vibrotactile stimulation did not elicit a uniform response: it selectively reduced pulsatility index in the PCA while increasing it in the ACA, with MCA responses remaining close to baseline. This anterior-posterior dissociation was confirmed by a significantly negative PCA-ACA shift index and reproduced by end-diastolic velocity changes with the expected opposite sign. Multisensory benchmark analyses revealed an artery-specific profile consistent with selective non-additive modulation rather than nonspecific paired-stimulation effects, while fetal heart rate remained stable across conditions. The convergence of hemodynamic measures and the absence of cardiac or baseline differences suggest a genuine cerebrovascular response rather than generalized arousal. These findings reveal that convergent sensory input can shape fetal cerebral hemodynamics in utero, identifying a rudimentary but spatially organized form of prenatal cross-modal sensitivity and suggesting that the foundations of multisensory integration begin to emerge before birth.
Cognitive offloading weakens the neural representation of to-be-remembered information
Chiara Scarampi; Chhavi Sachdeva; PEI-CHUN TSAI; Sam Gilbert
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People tend to forget information once they offload it to an external reminder such as a written note or computer file. However, the neural basis for this so-called “Google effect” or “digital amnesia” is unknown. We used fMRI to ask: A) to what extent does brain activity overlap between cognitive offloading and deliberate forgetting, and B) what is the neural fate of offloaded information? Participants viewed face or scene pictures, then received a cue either to A) remember them for a memory test, B) offload them, meaning that the test would come with a reminder, or C) forget them because there would be no test. Offload cues generated brain activity that closely resembled forget cues. Moreover, multivariate pattern analysis showed that the neural trace of to-be-remembered information persisted in the remember condition but faded until it was statistically absent in both the offload and forget conditions, which did not differ from each other. Therefore, when people offload memories into external technology, this has similar neural correlates to deliberate forgetting, leading to a weakened neural representation of to-be-remembered information. We argue that this may be an adaptive process that prioritises the most valuable information for limited-capacity neural systems.
Effectiveness of Reading Interventions on Word Recognition for Students with Intellectual Disability: A Systematic Review and IPD Meta-analysis of Single Case Experimental Designs
Lucija Batinovic; Jonna Hammarsten; Karin Nilsson; Marta Topor; Emil Holmer; chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti; Henrik Danielsson
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Background: Reading is an essential skill for participation in society, yet persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) struggle with acquiring functional reading abilities. Recent development in research has shown promising effects of reading interventions on reading. This systematic review and meta-analysis will focus on single-case experimental design (SCED) interventions aiming to enhance word recognition skills among children with ID, reflecting an emergent and important area of research in special education, given the challenges in recruiting large samples. The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of reading interventions with the primary aim of improving word recognition ability in children with ID. Inclusion Criteria: The review includes intervention studies aimed to improve word recognition abilities among primary school (k-9) students with ID. The interventions reviewed are categorized as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and other, and are included only if aimed explicitly at improving word recognition skills. Study Selection: We will search Scopus, Web of Science, APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles and Academic Search Complete, accompanied with the manual searches of journals and referenced studies. Two independent reviewers will conduct screening with conflicts resolved through discussion or a third reviewer. Data Collection: Data on demographics, study design characteristics, intervention details, and outcomes will be extracted manually. Outcome data for word recognition were extracted from visual representations using the juicR data extraction package. Synthesis: Data will be synthesized with a Bayesian individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis. This approach accommodates the expected small sample sizes in SCED research and allows modeling nuanced criteria of this design to evaluate intervention effectiveness and the explore of heterogeneity across studies.
The Hateful Eight (H8): An Efficient Multifaceted Approach to the Short Dark Tetrad (SD4)
Gregory D. Webster; Christian Blötner; Val Wongsomboon; Rebekah Rodriguez-Boerwinkle; Paul Joseph Silvia
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Using the 28 items of the Short Dark Tetrad (SD4; Paulhus et al., 2021), we developed a 16-item version with two items for each of eight facets called the Hateful Eight (H8). Across four studies of university and online samples (Ntotal=2,391), we used item response theory models and confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) to select the “best” SD4 items. CFAs supported both an eight-facet solution and hierarchical models in which the eight facets loaded onto their four respective Dark Tetrad traits, which in turn loaded onto a global Dark Tetrad factor. We labeled the eight facets as: deviousness, scheming (both assigned to Machiavellianism); leadership, exceptionalism (both assigned to narcissism); defiance, recklessness (both assigned to psychopathy); and violent voyeurism, verbal abuse (both assigned to sadism). We tested the H8’s convergent and discriminant validity with number of sexual partners, self-esteem, Big Five personality, adult attachment, and established measures of the Dark Tetrad traits.
AI alignment is a human problem
Konstantinos Voudouris; Xavier Roberts-Gaal; Marie Buhl; Geoffrey Irving; Christopher Summerfield
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The challenge of ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) systems behave in ways that humans prefer is known as the alignment problem. This problem is urgent because we are increasingly delegating consequential tasks to AI agents. The pace, scale, and opacity with which modern AI systems act makes supervising them a formidable challenge: they can solve expert-level problems but exhibit unintuitive failure modes, and remain unconstrained by the social norms and institutional structures that make delegation to human agents tolerably safe. We argue that AI alignment is, largely, a human problem - and that tools from the cognitive and social sciences have a major part to play in solving it. Human judgements are a critical component at every stage of the modern alignment training pipeline, from curating data and learning from our preferences, to auditing AI systems and overseeing them while they complete tasks for us. However, the cognitive and social properties of these judgements remain strikingly under-examined. The central challenge for alignment is to amplify the human supervisory signals on which alignment training depends, so that they remain reliable as AI systems produce ever more behaviour to monitor and increasingly operate beyond unaided human expertise. We argue that this requires a research programme focused on five bottlenecks in human supervision: biased and context-sensitive judgement, plural and contested values, limited attention and throughput, limited counterfactual reasoning, and expertise-limited verification.
Much of Politicians' Perceptual Error is Domain-General Processing of Proportions
Jack Lucas; Lior Sheffer; Christian Breunig
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Considerable research has documented large errors in politicians' perceptions of their constituents' characteristics and preferences. Despite many attempts, explanations of these pervasive errors using domain-specific factors, such as politicians' role perceptions, time in office, or institutional positions, have invariably failed. Here, we suggest that politicians' perceptual errors reflect a domain-general tendency to "hedge" perceptions toward a moderate prior, resulting in overestimation of small proportions and underestimation of large proportions. To measure this domain-general phenomenon, we combine all available recent studies of elite perceptual accuracy with novel surveys of sitting elected politicians in Canada, for a total of more than 70,000 perceptions from 12,860 politicians in seven countries. We find strong evidence that "midpoint hedging" explains a substantial fraction of the variation in politicians' perceptual errors. This tendency persists across studies, estimation tasks, countries, and issue domains. Our findings suggest that politicians are more likely to misperceive public opinion when it is most lopsided, meaning that policy responsiveness would tend to be undersupplied precisely when citizens demand it most.
Evidence for unconscious priming using a Bayesian single-subject approach
NicolĂĄs SĂĄnchez-Fuenzalida; Simon van Gaal; Zazie van den Hurk; Timo Stein; Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort
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Although many studies have claimed the existence of unconscious priming, a valid statistical procedure for substantiating such claims is often lacking. For instance, the absence of prime awareness is often erroneously inferred from non-significant p-values, and priming and awareness are typically tested by comparing the outcomes of two separate t-tests. In a classic study by Vorberg (2003), observers were slower to identify the direction of an arrow mask when it followed an arrow prime pointing in the opposite direction (priming effect), despite being unable to identify the direction of the arrow prime (prime awareness). Using that observation as a starting point, we address several methodological shortcomings that we identified in that study (as in many other studies in the field). To overcome these shortcomings, we implemented three critical changes. First, we employed a Bayesian methodological-statistical framework to test priming effects and prime awareness at the single-subject level over multiple experimental sessions. Second, participants underwent extensive training in the prime awareness task to ensure they understood and executed the task as intended. Third, we directly compared prime awareness and the priming effect. By using this approach, we show unconscious processing at short prime-mask stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in three out of six participants, replicating Vorberg et al. (2003). However, we also show that – unlike in the original study – unconscious priming was not consistently present across all SOAs, and awareness increased with increasing prime-mask SOA. Notably, priming effects were highly consistent across participants, whereas awareness showed substantial variability across participants.
Validation and Psychometric Evaluation of the German version of the Brief State Rumination Inventory (BSRI–D)
Marvin Sören Meiering; Jale Hasanzada; Simone Grimm; Sören Enge
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Rumination is a key cognitive process implicated in the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. The Brief State Rumination Inventory (BSRI; Marchetti et al., 2018) is a widely used eight-item measure for assessing momentary (state) rumination. Given the absence of a validated German adaptation, this study examined the psychometric properties of the German BSRI (BSRI-D) in a non-clinical German-speaking sample. A total of 335 participants completed an online survey that included the BSRI-D and several related constructs (e.g., trait rumination, depression, anxiety, stress, mindfulness). A subsample of 148 subjects additionally completed a laboratory Rumination Induction Task (RIT) with repeated BSRI-D assessments. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted to examine the factor structure, alongside analyses of reliability and validity. Results indicated that the BSRI-D replicated the original instrument’s one-factor structure, demonstrated high internal consistency, and showed significant associations with related constructs, confirming its reliability and validity. Moreover, the BSRI-D sensitively captured rumination fluctuations elicited by experimental manipulation, confirming its sensitivity to state changes. These findings establish the German adaptation of the BSRI as a psychometrically sound measure of state rumination in German-speaking populations, enhancing cross-cultural comparability and informing clinical applications. Further research should investigate the BSRI-D’s utility across broader populations.
A domain for social interaction in visual cortex
Violette Munin; CĂ©line Spriet; Liuba Papeo
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Social interaction is a fundamental human behavioral goal, yet its neural processing remains poorly understood. Using EEG and fMRI, we investigated how the brain perceives social interactions and how this process relates to the perception of social agents and their actions. Participants viewed videos depicting core social-event structures—two people acting face-to-face—and visually-matched stimuli showing the same individuals back-to-back. EEG results revealed remarkably early effect of social-event structure, emerging at 68 ms after stimulus onset, and driven by relational cues such as interpersonal distance and orientation. EEG-fMRI fusion localized these relational effects to visual cortex. fMRI further showed that activity evoked by social-event structures converged with neural responses to familiar social interactions, faces and bodies along a lateral occipitotemporal stream, where spatially interspersed yet functionally distinct neuronal populations encoded different aspects of social information. This lateral stream showed selective tuning for social information that was not observed in other major divisions of the visual cortex, such as the ventral or dorsal streams. Together, these results suggest a tripartite organization of the visual cortex comprising the ventral and dorsal streams, and a lateral stream gathering pathways with different functions, organized around the perception of social interactions.
Development and Validation of the Social Media Content and Engagement Scale (SMCE)
Matthias Maerevoet; Yannick Vander Zwalmen; Kristof Hoorelbeke; Mariek Magdalena Petra Vanden Abeele; Ernst H. W. Koster
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Research on social media use and mental health has increasingly emphasized that global usage metrics such as screentime obscure the heterogeneous nature of users’ online experiences. This study introduces and validates the Social Media Content and Engagement scale (SMCE), a formative self-report measure assessing four dimensions of social media use: (1) frequency of exposure; (2) engagement with content; (3) perceived emotional impact (with valence and intensity as separate dimensions), and (4) perceived algorithmic targeting, applied across six major content categories. A representative adult sample (UK-based) completed baseline measures (n = 573) and a one-month follow-up (n = 486). As expected for a formative measure, interaction dimensions contributed differentially across content types, confirming that each dimension captures unique, non-redundant information. Indicator collinearity was low, and test–retest reliability ranged from fair to good. Convergent and discriminant validity were supported through expected associations with affective well-being and emotional reactivity, with no associations observed with need for cognition. Structural analyses showed that mental well-being and influencer content were weakly but significantly associated with depression, anxiety and stress complaints. Emotional valence was associated with depressive symptoms and predicted anxiety and stress complaints over one month above baseline symptomatology. Emotional intensity showed small but consistent positive associations with depression, anxiety, and stress. Perceived algorithmic targeting was not significantly associated with mental health outcomes. Overall, findings demonstrate that the SMCE is a psychometrically robust tool for capturing content-specific social media experiences and provides a more nuanced alternative to traditional global usage metrics.
Verbal memory impairments predict social connection via anhedonia: a transdiagnostic, population-based study
Isabella Di Matteo; Katie M. Lavigne; Delphine Raucher-Chéné
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Background Anhedonia and episodic memory impairments are transdiagnostic features of mental illness, robustly linked to functional outcomes across diagnostic boundaries. Episodic memory supports the ability to simulate future events, including reward. Impairments in these systems may therefore contribute to motivational and pleasure negative symptoms such as anhedonia. Prior work in our group highlighted negative symptoms, including anhedonia, as mediators of the relation between episodic verbal memory and functional outcomes in psychosis. The current study tested whether a similar pathway linking verbal episodic memory, anhedonia, and social connection is evident in a population-based transdiagnostic sample. Methods Participants (N=8,575) were drawn from the UK Biobank; the sample included adults with and without lifetime psychiatric diagnosis, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Verbal episodic memory was assessed with the Paired Associate Learning task, anhedonia with a self-report item indexing frequency of little interest/pleasure, and social connection through self-reported frequency of family and friend visits. Mediation analyses tested the indirect effects of verbal memory on social connection through anhedonia. Moderated mediation analyses tested whether this indirect effect differed by group (patients vs. controls), sex, or broad symptom dimensions (internalizing, externalizing, psychosis). An alternative model tested verbal memory as the mediator between anhedonia and social connection. Results Anhedonia significantly mediated the association between verbal memory and social connection, though the indirect effect was small (a × b = 0.0024, 95% CI [0.0012, 0.0036], p < 0.001). No statistically significant moderation was observed by group, sex, or symptom dimensions. The alternative mediation through verbal memory was not significant. Conclusion These findings support a subtle population-level pathway linking episodic memory, anhedonia, and social connection across individuals with and without lifetime psychiatric diagnoses. Ultimately, highlighting anhedonia may act as a candidate symptom-level bridge between neurocognitive impairment and social disconnection within the multiscale architecture of dimensional psychopathology.
The chicken and the egg - a systematic review of the relationship between recreational drug use and mental health in the general population
Benjamin Clayden; Movin Abeywickrema; Maria Balaet
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Temporal relationships between the recreational use of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis with mental health challenges have been extensively reviewed. However, this is not the case for other widely consumed drugs. Between 7/6/23 and 3/12/23 we searched Web of Science, EMBASE, PsychINFO and MEDLINE databases for studies investigating temporal relationships between recreational drug use (RDU) and mental health (MH). From N=8,759 publications originally identified, we systematically reviewed 69 studies fulfilling four criteria; 1) studying the general population, 2) investigating cocaine, ketamine, psychedelics, opioids, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA/ecstasy) or amphetamines, 3) prospective/longitudinal designs measuring RDU and MH on at least two separate occasions, 4) measuring symptoms of either depression or anxiety. Studies were placed into seven outcome categories: RDU was followed by worse MH (N1), worse MH was followed by increased RDU (N2), RDU was followed by better MH (P1), better MH was followed by decreased RDU (P2), as well as bidirectional, mixed or no relationships seen. Whilst the most commonly identified relationships were N2 (N=16, 23.2%) or N1 (N=15, 21.7%) these were seen in under half of the studies included. We identified a number of contributing factors, including patterns of drug use, socioeconomic factors, definitions of MH and RDU employed, and direction of relationship tested. Our results reveal a nuanced picture, suggesting blanket statements on RDU-MH temporal relationships may be misleading. We discuss these factors and offer suggestions that future studies may incorporate to better understand the relationship between these domains.
The Bridge-or-Trap Model of Companion AI: When Emotional Support Connects or Substitutes.
Ho Nam Cheung
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AI companions are increasingly used for emotional support, yet their relational consequences appear sharply divergent. The same qualities that make these systems comforting, availability, nonjudgment, and low interpersonal risk, may help some users move toward human connection while drawing others away from it. This paper proposes the Bridge-or-Trap model to explain this divergence. The model argues that AI-mediated relief becomes bridge-oriented when it reduces the expected cost of approaching a real person and supports human-directed action, such as disclosure, repair, help-seeking, or re-entry into social settings. The same relief becomes trap-oriented when it remains contained within the AI relationship, preserving avoidance and reducing opportunities for corrective human experience. The model specifies five interacting constructs: anticipated interpersonal cost of human closeness, AI relational reinforcement, relational-orientation state, ecological protection and affordance, and adaptive relational resilience. It further proposes that repeated AI-contained relief may produce path-dependent substitution, with entry and exit thresholds that can be tested empirically. Drawing on attachment theory, social anxiety research, resilience theory, social ecology, social exchange theory, and emerging evidence on AI companionship, the model reframes the central question from whether AI companions help or harm to when emotional support becomes a bridge back to people and when it becomes a substitute for them. The paper identifies three decisive tests: target-specific transfer, viable-alternative boundaries, and asymmetric recovery from AI-contained substitution.
Covert attention dynamically shapes decision making
Amy Xiangjin Li; Benjamin Chan; Sofya Donets; Sage Boettcher; Laurence Hunt
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Decision-making is driven by where attention is allocated during choice. Humans can attend through both overt eye gaze as well as covertly, yet investigations of attention’s role in choice have been largely confined to overt eye movements. Here, we combine an attentional probe with value-based choice to directly measure how covert attention is allocated to peripheral options during decision-making. Results revealed that covert attention itself is dynamically shaped by decision-relevant factors, such as the decision relevance and value of peripheral options, and comes at the expense of what is overtly attended. Further, covert attention exerted downstream consequences for choice behavior, attenuating fixation-linked choice biases. By demonstrating that attentional influences on decision-making extend beyond eye gaze, our findings challenge current gaze-based accounts of choice, and motivate decision-making models that incorporate covert attentional mechanisms alongside overt attentional dynamics.
Trauma Work as Emotional Labor: A Process Model Linking Trauma Exposure to Worker Outcomes
Andrea Fischbach
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Trauma work — repeated task-related confrontation with traumatic events or their aversive details as a work-role requirement — is a recurring occupational hazard, yet work-specific mechanisms remain under-specified in dominant clinical models of posttraumatic stress. This conceptual development paper proposes theoretical relationships among trauma exposure, emotion regulation, resource dynamics, and emotional labor climate. The model differentiates extraordinary trauma events at work (DSM-5 A1/A2/A3) from ordinary task-related exposure (DSM-5 A4), with the latter affected by trauma dose (type, duration, density, intensity). Four interdependent mechanisms link exposure to trauma sequelae (PTSD, complex PTSD, burnout, and empathic distress): (1) autonomous stress responses — acute reactions to trauma exposure and the trauma sequelae that follow; (2) controlled processes — emotion regulation and self-regulation in response to the emotional labor demands of trauma work, moderating the exposure-to-sequelae paths; (3) cumulative resource dynamics — depletion through repeated demands and insufficient recovery (loss spiral), and motivation through experienced professionalism, work accomplishment, and engagement in meaningful work (gain spiral); and (4) emotional labor climate as cause of the cause — the policies, practices, and procedures that workers perceive and enact in everyday work, building resources and buffering exposure. The paper derives four testable propositions related to these mechanisms and identifies organizational leverage points that protect health and enable positive working experiences in trauma-exposed occupations.
Construction and Validation of the Breadwinner Strain Scale: A Short Measure of Role-Specific Provider Stress
Sveva Vitellozzi; Piero Ronzani; Lucia Savadori
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Providing financially for one’s family is not only an economic responsibility but also a social commitment, with potential psychological consequences. However, existing measures do not directly assess the stress associated with feeling responsible for others' financial security. Through two preregistered studies, we developed and validated the Breadwinner Strain Scale (BWSS), a short 4-item instrument designed to measure perceived stress related to the breadwinner role. Study 1 generated and evaluated an initial item pool reflecting four theoretical domains: financial pressure, gender expectations, psychological stress, and work-family conflict. In a U.S. sample of adult men with children, exploratory analyses confirmed a strong common dimension, and item selection yielded a concise 4-item scale with good internal consistency. Study 2 independently validated the BWSS in a new sample of U.S. men with children. The scale replicated its single-factor structure, demonstrated high reliability, and showed convergent validity with masculine gender role stress, perceived stress, financial strain, and work-family conflict. It also demonstrated concurrent validity with breadwinner-related behaviors and debt burden, known-group validity by provider status, and incremental validity in predicting breadwinner stress behaviors beyond related constructs. The BWSS offers a brief, theory-based tool for assessing breadwinner-specific stress.
Predictors of parental attitudes toward Frisian: A comparative study from Nordfriesland and FryslĂąn
Pavlina Heinzova; Suzanne Victoria Dekker; Jelske Dijkstra; Mirjam Vellinga; Ruth Kircher
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This study investigates predictors of parental attitudes toward Frisian in two minority language contexts: Nordfriesland in Germany (North Frisian) and Fryslñn in the Netherlands (West Frisian). Given the important role of parents’ attitudes in intergenerational language transmission, which is considered crucial for minority language maintenance and revitalization, the study examines what variables predict parental attitudes toward Frisian on the status and solidarity dimensions. The analyses draw on data from 654 parents of young children across both contexts, gathered with the Adapted Parental Attitudes Towards Languages Questionnaire. Multiple linear regressions test the effects of three hypothesized predictors: parents’ L1, self-reported Frisian proficiency, and location (controlling for age, gender, and education level). Results show self-reported proficiency as a robust predictor of attitudes toward Frisian in both contexts and for both attitudinal dimensions. Our findings thus highlight language proficiency as a key leverage point for minority language maintenance and revitalization. Specifically, the findings indicate that initiatives to enhance proficiency would most likely foster more positive attitudes toward Frisian in future parents, thereby effectively supporting the language’s intergenerational transmission.
Physiological Synchrony Predicts Reduced Reciprocity in Human Face-to-Face Interactions
Fabiola Diana; Julia Folz; Elio Sjak-Shie; Ruud Hortensius; Mariska Kret
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Across species, cooperative decisions are often asymmetric: one individual risks their own resources before knowing whether others will reciprocate. Such uncertainty is central to the evolution of trust and reciprocal exchanges. Physiological synchrony is frequently assumed to support cooperation, yet it remains unclear both how synchrony arises and how it functions in these asymmetric social interactions. We tested whether mutual visibility shapes physiological synchrony, and whether synchrony in turn predicts cooperative behaviour in repeated trust-reciprocity exchanges. Skin conductance synchrony was stronger and more temporally aligned when individuals interacted face-to-face, yet facial expressivity did not account for this effect. Contrary to the dominant perspective, higher synchrony predicted reduced reciprocity, and only when partners could see each other. Exploratory analyses suggested that this negative link depended on arousal, indicating that the social function of synchrony is shaped by both mutual visibility and the affective state of the individual involved. These findings show that physiological synchrony is not a uniformly prosocial mechanism but a context-dependent phenomenon that can undermine cooperation under certain conditions, offering insight into the mechanisms and the function of synchrony in shaping cooperative exchanges.
Sexual satisfaction, body image and life satisfaction in pregnant women
Martyna Pomierska; Katarzyna Alicja Milska-Musa
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Introduction: Pregnancy comes with many physical and mental changes, which can affect one’s sexual satisfaction, body image and general well-being. The aim of the study was to analyse these variables. Material and methods: The study was cross-sectional and conducted online among pregnant women (n = 111). It utilized a self-designed questionnaire and the following standardized questionnaire tools: Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Body Esteem Scale (BES) and a shortened version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life Test (WHOQOL-BREF). The statistical analysis was conducted using non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis tests and post-hoc Dunn tests with Bonferroni correction, as well as the Wilcoxon test. Results: The study showed that feelings concerning sexuality and body image change during pregnancy (p < 0.0001). In relation to the trimester, a statistically significant change in the importance of sexual activity occurs between the second and third trimester (p = 0.006). The study group presented a high level of life satisfaction –—the average being 24.14 ± 6.15, and quality of life — the average being 97.60 ± 15.79. Conclusions: Dynamic changes occurring during pregnancy influence women’s sexuality, which can be best observed between the second and third trimester. At the same time, the trimester of pregnancy does not influence the level of life satisfaction or body image, which appears to be less important for women during pregnancy than before.
Diverse behavioural-emotional profiles associated with self-reported social media addiction in adolescence
Georgia Turner; Edwin S. Dalmaijer; Duncan Astle; Amy Orben
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To address concerns about social media addiction, it is crucial to understand more about the young people who feel they are addicted. Here, in a preregistered study, we investigate the behavioural-emotional characteristics associated with self-reported social media addiction among UK adolescents (aged 16-18). We analyze the Millennium Cohort Study, a large, nationally-representative cohort dataset (n = 7,092), and find that almost half (47%) of adolescents report feeling addicted to social media. Compared to those who do not feel addicted, adolescents who feel addicted have higher extraversion and neuroticism, and lower self-reported self-control. Next, we explore behavioural-emotional heterogeneity within the group of adolescents who feel addicted. Employing a data-driven clustering method, we find three behavioural-emotional profiles associated with self-reported social media addiction. The first (representing 74% of those with self-reported addiction) is a ‘social’ profile, distinguished from others both with and without self-reported addiction by feelings of higher self-esteem and feeling safe and happy. The second (10% of those with self-reported addiction) is a ‘risk behaviour’ profile, with, compared with both those with and without self-reported addiction, more time spent on activities such as vaping, higher conduct problems and lower monitoring by parents. Finally, the third (16% of those with self-reported addiction) is a ‘low wellbeing’ profile, with higher depression and emotional difficulties, and lower self-esteem, than others both with and without self-reported addiction. Future research should disentangle the factors contributing to perceived addiction in each case, as well as investigating whether separate profiles respond differently to treatment approaches.
Validation of webcam-based eye-tracking in human sign- and goal-trackers
Marco Badioli; Craig Hedge; Sara Garofalo
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Recently, psychology has shifted from ignoring individual differences to using them to understand the variability in human behaviour. A key example is how people respond to cues that predict rewards. When exposed to reward-predictive signals, sign-trackers treat the cue itself as a motivational magnet, showing strong attraction and attentional bias toward it even when it is irrelevant to reward delivery. In contrast, goal-trackers treat the cue simply as a predictor, focusing their attention on the reward location. Translating this animal model to humans is challenging, but researchers have successfully developed tasks that use fixation times to the stimulus or reward location as an index of attentional bias. However, researchers still frequently rely on sample-dependent methods (like the median split), which risk misclassifying participants in small laboratory samples and contribute to inconsistent findings regarding behavioural correlates. To collect larger and more diverse samples, behavioural science is moving online. Remote webcam-based eye-tracking has emerged as a low-cost, scalable alternative to expensive laboratory hardware, but it has never been validated for reward-based associative learning studies and for classifying sign-trackers and goal-trackers behavioural phenotypes. To bridge this gap, this study validates a novel webcam-based Pavlovian conditioning task by comparing a professional laboratory eye-tracker with a webcam used both in the lab and in participants' unsupervised home environments. We evaluated cross-method and cross-environment stability across these three setups. At the group level, Bayesian analyses showed strong equivalence in average gaze indices, demonstrating that shifting the device or environment does not alter core cognitive processes or introduce systemic bias. At the individual level, Intraclass Correlation Coefficients showed moderate-to-good absolute agreement along the tracking continuum, closely matching standard temporal test-retest variations. Crucially, individual phenotypic classification via median split remained highly stable, with the vast majority of participants maintaining their ST or GT assignment across laboratory and remote home environments. These findings successfully validate remote, webcam-based eye-tracking as a reliable and stable protocol for classifying sign-trackers and goal-trackers behavioural phenotypes. By overcoming the physical and financial constraints of traditional laboratory hardware, this scalable online task provides a clear opportunity to recruit large-scale samples and investigate diverse or specialised populations in an ecological environment.
Frequency-Dependent Binaural Incoherence Detection Deficits in Healthy Older Adults: Implications for Central Auditory Screening
Yizhen Yang; Liang Li
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Background: Detecting the transient breaks in interaural correlation (BIC) is fundamental for parsing complex auditory scenes, yet how stimulus frequency influences this central binaural process in aging remains unclear. This study examined BIC duration thresholds in cognitively healthy older and young adults using wideband and narrowband noises. Methods: Sixty participants with clinically normal hearing (30 cognitively healthy older adults, MoCA ≄ 26; 30 young adults) completed BIC threshold measurements. A three down/one up adaptive staircase determined the minimum decorrelated segment duration needed to perceive a BIC in wideband noise (Experiment 1) and in narrowband noises centered at 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz (Experiment 2). Results: Older adults showed significantly longer BIC thresholds than young adults in wideband noise (Cohen’s d = 2.67). In the narrowband conditions, a significant Group × Frequency interaction emerged (p < .001); group differences grew with center frequency and were largest at 2000 Hz (d= 10.92). Marked inter individual variability among older adults was evident at 2000 Hz, where thresholds were marginally negatively correlated with MoCA scores (Spearman ρ = −.355, p= .054). Conclusions: Age related deficits in binaural temporal processing are frequency dependent and accompanied by heightened variability at higher frequencies. The BIC paradigm captures subclinical binaural impairment in older adults with normal audiograms. The marginal association between high frequency BIC performance and global cognition suggests that binaural processing measures may index the interplay between central auditory decline and cognitive aging, positioning the BIC task as a promising marker for early auditory cognitive dysfunction.
Beyond Arousal: Pupil Fluctuations, Neural Activity, and Behavior
Veera Ruuskanen; Sebastiaan Mathot
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Spontaneous fluctuations in pupil size are correlated with neural activity and behavior in many ways. This is generally attributed to a single underlying cause: arousal. This unitary account disregards other potentia lunderlying causes. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive framework of four mechanisms that jointly underlie the complex and context-dependent relationships between spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior. In addition to arousal, we consider optical effects, brightness constancy, and self-generated visual stimulation. Based on this framework, we argue that pupil fluctuations should be considered beyond arousal: as a functionally important, yet still poorly understood, component of visual processing.
Typical face and eye gaze in prematurely born preschoolers during face-to-face interactions
Rowena Van den Broeck; Laura Tibermont; Lisa Gistelinck; Niilo Valtakari; Bieke Bollen; Els Ortibus; Gunnar naulaers; Bart Boets; Roy S Hessels
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Preterm birth has been linked to atypical social development, with preterm individuals displaying atypical social gaze patterns of more frequent but shorter looks toward faces. We compared proportional looking times to the face and the eyes during face-to-face interactions in preterm (N = 45) and full-term (N = 29) five-year-olds, using a video-based eye-tracking set-up. Children participated in four interaction tasks, including silent looking at their mother, silent looking at a female stranger, and a positive and negative conversation with their mother. No group differences were found between preterm and full-term children in proportional dwell times to the face or the eyes, suggesting typical social orienting during face-to-face interactions. We observed a marginal effect of interaction partner, with children spending proportionately more time gazing at their mother’s face than at a stranger’s face. Typical social gaze may reflect a developmental catch-up in social orientation following initial delays in infancy. Alternatively, advances in neonatal medical care may have been successful in improving social functioning after preterm birth. These findings should be interpreted cautiously, given how context-dependent and individual gaze behavior is. Future longitudinal studies employing consistent methodological approaches are needed to investigate how social gaze develops over time following preterm birth.
Does Binding Equal Binding? A Comparative Review and Domain-General Bayesian Perspective
Marcel Raphael Schreiner; Kathrin Sadus; Elena Benini; Laura-Isabelle Klatt; Nicolas D. Lutz; Viola Mocke; Philipp Musfeld; Christina Ursula Pfeuffer; Andrea Kiesel
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Binding refers to the process of linking different pieces of information to form coherent representations. Original concepts of binding in perception were transferred to other domains assuming that bindings need to persist beyond perception to guide our thoughts and actions. Binding processes are thus fundamental to human cognition and studied in a variety of research domains. Yet, research on binding is largely fragmented across domains, lacking a coherent domain-general theoretical perspective. Here, we provide a concise, integrative review of binding theories in the domains of action control, working memory, and long-term memory, culminating in a domain-general perspective informed by Bayesian models of human cognition. We suggest that binding as studied in these domains relies on highly similar cognitive mechanisms and can be conceptualized as a Bayesian updating process serving the extraction of relations from uncertain sensory input. Thus, an increased integration and exchange between different research domains is warranted.
A Practical Guide to Self-Organising Maps in Psychological Research
Ido Shalev; Estherina Trachtenberg; Maria Barbara Jelen; William Benjamin Mills; Marc Bennett; Rebecca P. Lawson; Tim Dalgleish; Duncan Astle
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Identifying shared and distinct profiles, whether in symptom combinations, personality traits, or cognitive abilities, is essential for understanding psychological phenomena, yet doing so requires navigating interrelated theoretical, conceptual, and technical complexities. First, psychological phenomena typically exist along continuous spectra rather than discrete categories, complicating the characterisation of inherently heterogeneous constructs. Second, studying individual differences requires balancing population-level generalisation with person-level interpretability, which is critical for applied science. Third, psychological data often contain missing values, non-linear relationships, and high-dimensional patterns that violate standard statistical assumptions. Commonly used approaches for profile detection fail to address these complexities simultaneously, typically producing oversimplified or difficult-to-interpret results that obscure person-centred patterns. In contrast, Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) offer a powerful, visual, and intuitive solution that addresses these challenges. Despite growing interest, SOMs remain underutilised in psychology, potentially due to a lack of accessible tutorials and clear guidelines tailored to the field. This tutorial introduces SOMs to psychologists without technical backgrounds, emphasising practical implementation. We provide evidence-based guidance for key methodological decisions, accompanied by annotated R code. Using a dataset of depressive symptoms as an illustrative case, we present a complete workflow covering data preprocessing, map initialisation, parameter optimisation, and interpretation. We further discuss advanced SOM extensions relevant to psychological research and highlight key limitations of the method. By providing clear guidance, this tutorial facilitates the adoption of SOMs, advancing nuanced, person-centred analyses that preserve the complexity of psychological phenomena.
Art and Embodied Aesthetic Emotions
Joerg Fingerhut; Corinna KĂŒhnapfel
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In this chapter, we situate aesthetic emotions within the embodied-enactive framework of the mind. Building on central enactive accounts of art, Noë’s account of art as reorganizational practice and Gallagher’s account of the unaffordable in aesthetic experience, we examine the transformative potential of aesthetic engagement while highlighting a remaining challenge: these approaches leave comparatively underspecified the embodied and emotional processes through which artworks are explored, experienced, and evaluated. We propose aesthetic emotions to address this gap. Paradigmatic candidates for aesthetic emotions are being moved, interest, and wonder. We argue that such emotions structure the exploratory activities afforded by artworks through their distinctive embodied cognitive styles. Yet, aesthetic emotions also critically contribute to the evaluation of artworks as artworks, thereby providing a promising pathway to naturalize aesthetics in this respect. Exploration and evaluation are therefore closely intertwined in aesthetic engagement. By bringing recent empirical work on embodiment in aesthetics into dialogue with enactive theories of art, the chapter contributes to a critical (neuro-)aesthetics and to a better understanding of aesthetic emotions as an under-explored class of mental processes within philosophy of mind and 4E cognition.
Motivation to Ascend in Social Hierarchies Predicts Conspiratorial Thinking: A Longitudinal Study
Ana Guinote; Kiran Arabaghatta Basavaraj; Wei Luo; MaƂgorzata Kossowska
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Conspiracy theories are widespread in social media, particularly among individuals who feel disenfranchised. We propose that conspiracy mentality arises as symbolic power struggles among significance-seeking and power-motivated individuals, exposing the secret wrongdoings of powerful elites, accompanied by active social media use. A three-wave panel survey with national samples conducted in five European countries (N = 28,568) provided support for these hypotheses. RI-CLPM analyses suggest that the effects occurred at the between person level, with weak within person effects from quest for significance to power values. Quest for significance, power values, active social media use and conspiracy mentality were positively associated, and these relationships remained stable over time. This work suggests that conspiracy thinking is associated with social hierarchical motives accompanied by an active, influence seeking social media use.
Influences on Theoretical Orientation, Sources of Clinical Information, and Attitudes Toward Evidence: A Self-Report Survey of Psychotherapists in Argentina
Axel Emanuel Casas; MarĂ­a Agostina Gerbaudo; AgustĂ­n Sainz Ballesteros; Manuel Correa Freistav; Antonella Giordano Furchi; MatĂ­as Grinberg; RocĂ­o Manubens; Tomas Ariel D'Amelio; NicolĂĄs Marcelo Bruno
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This study examined Argentine psychotherapists' self-reported influences on theoretical orientation, sources of clinical information, and attitudes toward research evidence, the scientific method, and evidence-based practice. A total of 284 therapists completed an online survey, of whom 261 were retained for analysis after exclusions. Data were analysed using ANCOVAs, multinomial logistic regression, and cluster analyses. Across the full sample, therapists reported relying primarily on books, supervision, and clinical experience to inform their practice, whereas scientific literature and outcome measures were among the least consulted sources. Attitudes toward the scientific method and the reported use of research-informed sources varied systematically across theoretical orientations. Therapists identifying with cognitive-behavioural approaches showed greater alignment with research-informed practices than those identifying with other orientations, and these attitudes were also associated with age and weekly working hours. Cluster analyses identified four attitudinal profiles that captured this variability. Overall, the results suggest that, within this sample, research evidence played a limited role in therapists' reported clinical decision-making, with relevant variation linked to both theoretical orientation and career stage. Future studies should examine how training experiences shape engagement with research evidence across the diverse traditions that coexist in Argentine psychotherapy.
Tracking Two Distributions at Once? Evidence from Bilingual Speech Perception
Brian W. L. Wong; Arthur G. Samuel; Emily Myers; Efthymia C Kapnoula
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Speech perception involves substantial acoustic variability, requiring listeners to adapt to the statistical properties of speech cues. While previous studies have shown that listeners adjust their categorization of speech sounds based on the variability of acoustic cues, most evidence for this effect comes from monolingual contexts. It remains unclear whether bilingual listeners can track distributional statistics across two languages simultaneously. The present study examined distributional learning in bilingual speech perception using a Visual World Paradigm with eye-tracking. Two experiments tested whether bilingual listeners adjust their perception of the /b/–/p/ contrast based on the variance of voice onset time (VOT) distributions. Spanish–Basque bilinguals (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English bilinguals (Experiment 2) were exposed to narrow or wide VOT distributions in each language, under either the same-variance or mixed-variance condition across languages. Distributional learning was assessed using two measures: the slope of categorization functions based on mouse-click responses and the proportion of fixations to referents of phonological competitors. Across experiments and conditions, exposure to wider VOT distributions produced shallower categorization slopes. However, increased competitor fixations were mainly observed for Spanish–Basque bilinguals. Overall, the findings demonstrate that distributional learning extends to bilingual contexts but is modulated by language structure, language experience, and the measure used to index perception.
A Bully-to-Leader Developmental Shift in the Allocation of Epistemic Trust
Francesco Margoni; Elena Nava; Luca Surian
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From early toddlerhood, children distinguish between respect-based power exerted by a leader and fear-based power exerted by a bully. Here, we tested if and from what age children rely on this ability to allocate their epistemic trust. Children aged 1.5 to 10 years (n = 337) were presented with a leader-character and a bully-character who both used the same novel word (“zaffo”) to label each a different novel object. Next, children were asked to select the zaffo. Results revealed that toddlers trusted the bully-character (i.e., when asked to select the zaffo from a number of objects, they tended to pick up and pass the object labeled as zaffo by the bully-character). At 3 years the opposite tendency emerged (i.e., children tended to select the object previously labeled as zaffo by the leader-character) and it is not until the age of 8 years that children also displayed a clear distrust for bullies (i.e., only a handful of children selected the object labeled as zaffo by the bully-character). These results show that early in life learning is affected by the type of social power displayed by informants and that an adult-like tendency to selectively learn from respected leaders emerges gradually after an initial shift.
Does subjective intensity of stimulus-evoked emotional experience reflect emotional numbing in a non-clinical cohort with depersonalisation experiences?
AnikĂł Kusztor; Nirmitee Nitin Mulay; Naotsugu Tsuchiya
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Depersonalisation (DP) is often marked by damped emotional experiences. While some research investigated the physiological and neural correlates of emotional numbing in patients with DP disorder, the subjective experiential qualities of emotions such as the emotional intensity, evoked by external stimuli, remain largely unexplored in the general population exhibiting varying levels of DP severity. Previous studies were also limited in the diversity of emotional states assessed. To bridge these gaps, our study assessed DP experiences in a large online sample and investigated the relationship between the degree of emotional numbing in the DP symptoms and their intensity rating of their emotions elicited through short videos. Counter to our hypothesis, in our registered experiment, we identified a positive relationship between depersonalisation severity and emotional intensity ratings across 25 different emotion categories using a large sample (N=723) and diverse set of stimuli (500 videos). Exploratory analyses showed that the CDS-State item specifically targeting emotional numbness showed no effect in 24 of 25 emotion categories, and that the positive association between total CDS-State scores and intensity ratings was attenuated when task-related and task-unrelated thinking were included in the model. Together, these findings suggest that emotional numbing in depersonalisation may be better understood as an alteration in emotional appraisal or self-monitoring rather than a direct reduction in the intensity of emotional experience.
Collective and personal future thinking and future identities in wartime Ukraine
Marius Boeltzig; Clare Rathbone; Anton Kurapov; Ewa SmoƂka; Ricarda Ines Schubotz; Krystian Barzykowski; Scott Cole
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Understanding how people imagine their personal future and the future of their country is critical at this time of geopolitical instability. In this study, we examined collective and personal future thinking in a country-at-war, Ukraine (N = 377), and two comparator peacetime countries (Germany, N = 239; Poland, N = 207), examining emotional valence, agency, and temporal distance of future thoughts. Against predictions, collective futures sampled from Ukraine were significantly more optimistic than those from Germany and Poland. Collective and personal futures were also more aligned in Ukraine, with higher correlations between these two domains. Nevertheless, future thoughts across all countries showed a self-collective valence dissociation. “Merging” of personal and collective future thinking into an optimistic outlook in Ukraine is explained in terms of identity theory and cognitive dissonance. This study elucidates future thinking in national crises and counteracts previous assumptions in collective mental time travel research.
The Effect of Source Expertise on the Persuasiveness and Sharing of Health Information on Social Media: A Systematic Review
Benjamin Simmonds; Keith Ransom; Emily Mullins; Rachel Stephens
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People increasingly rely on social media for health information, despite substantial variability in information quality. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis examining whether people are sensitive to source expertise when evaluating and sharing online health claims, and if this depends on whether the source is an individual expert (e.g., a physician) or an expert group (e.g., a health organisation). Three searches across four databases identified 25 individual studies published across 22 papers. From these studies, we found that people were only marginally more persuaded by health experts than non-experts, and that this effect was not moderated by expert type (individual vs. group). However, we found tentative evidence that experts are more persuasive when accompanied by congruent credibility cues, but that expertise can backfire when these cues are incongruent. Evidence regarding people’s sensitivity to source expertise when sharing was mixed, reflecting heterogeneity in study designs. This review highlights several limitations in the current literature, indicating the need for further research that accounts for how both experts and non-experts are perceived in online health contexts. We discuss implications and propose several avenues for future research and potential interventions.
Supervision, Category Structure, and Selective Attention in Category Learning: A Comparative Approach
Hyungwook Yim; Leyre Castro; Jay I. Myung; Edward A. Wasserman; Vladimir Sloutsky
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We investigated the interactions between supervision, category structure, and selective attention in category learning. We compared human adults and pigeons in a category learning task, where we manipulated the category structure (dense vs. sparse) and the level of supervision by corrective feedback (low vs. high). Results showed a benefit of supervision across species, which was particularly strong in learning the sparse categories. Moreover, both species benefitted from category structures that had multiple category-relevant dimensions (i.e., dense categories). In addition, human adults, who have a more advanced ability to attend selectively, showed faster learning and better generalization overall. Finally, attention was optimized to the category-relevant dimension in the sparse category only in human adults. Subsequent computational simulation of the data indicated that these patterns were well explained by a parameter that controls the ability to flexibly switch attention to category-relevant dimensions.
(Dis)Connected: Youth and Parental Expectations of Australia’s Social Media Ban
Sharon Horwood; Marina Torjinski; Shelley Hemmings; Hannah Jarman
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Background: Recent legislative changes in Australia meant that from December 2025, young people under the age of 16 were banned from accessing specific social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat). Despite the considerable impact of this legislation, this is one of the first studies to explore of the perceptions and expectations of young people, and parents of young people, who are affected by the ban. Method: From June to August of 2025, 23 semi-structured online interviews of parents (n=11) and young people (n=12), including 8 dyads and 1 triad, aimed to capture the unique perspectives of the impending ban with respect to wellbeing, relationships, and the pragmatics of implementation. Themes and subthemes were derived via reflexive thematic analysis, and results were considered within the social change framework of Lewin’s Three-Step Change Management Model. Results: Participants reported a range of concerns, fears, doubts, hopes, and expectations with respect to the ban, most of which could be distilled into four main themes 1) There are holes in the bucket, 2) A necessary but challenging adjustment, 3) Balancing burden with support, and 4) Distancing of personal impact through social comparison. The themes and subthemes were able to be mapped reasonably well onto Step 1 and aspects of Step 2 of Lewin’s Change Management Model. Conclusions: Overall, the results demonstrate the complexity of effects that social media use can have on the lives of young people and within their family systems. A willingness to accept change as a means of longer-term betterment while still acknowledging the challenging nature of change indicated a maturity of viewpoint from young people, as well as empathy and understanding by parents. Learnings for implementation of similar legislation by governments are discussed.
Associations Between Infant Screen Exposure and Media Use at Age 8 Years: Longitudinal Study
Samantha Teague; Stephanie Aarsman; George Joseph Youssef; Danya McStein; Elizabeth Elliott; Steve Allsop; Richard Mattick; Lucinda Burns; Jake Najman; Sue Jacobs
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Background Excessive screen use in childhood is associated with adverse mental health and behavioural outcomes, yet whether early exposure predicts later use patterns is unclear. We examined associations between infant screen exposure and screen use, including social media, at age 8 years. Methods We analysed data from a pregnancy cohort in Sydney and Perth, Australia, following dyads (n = 598) from pregnancy to age 8 years. Mothers reported children’s daily screen time at age 1 (television, movies, gaming, internet) and age 8 (television/movies, social media, gaming/internet entertainment, educational content). Infant exposure (total, educational, entertainment) was categorised as none (reference), <1h, 1–<2h, and ≄2h/day. The primary outcome was total screen time at age 8 (<2h [reference], 2–<4h, ≄4h/day). Multinomial logistic regression estimated relative risk ratios (RRRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusting for sociodemographic and perinatal factors. Results At age 1, 81.6% of infants had screen exposure. At age 8, 73.8% exceeded 2h/day and 17.6% used social media. Infant exposure ≄2h/day (vs none) was associated with higher risk of 2–<4h/day (RRR 2.99; 95% CI 1.45–6.17) and ≄4h/day (RRR 5.66; 95% CI 2.44–13.10), with a dose–response pattern. Entertainment exposure at age 1 was associated with social media use at age 8 (RR 1.94; 95% CI 1.15–3.27). Conclusions Screen exposure in infancy is associated with substantially higher screen use in later childhood, including social media use. Interventions to limit screen exposure in the first year of life may help prevent excessive use and related harms.
Decoding Affect: A Computational Model of Affective Adaptation and Construction
Haijiao Cui; Liu-Fang Zhou
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Affective construction and adaptation are complementary processes through which affective value is generated and evolves over time. Although prior research has identified key determinants of these processes, including reference points, stimulus inherent value, attention, negativity bias, adaptation rate, and time, a unified framework that quantifies how these factors interact and jointly shape affect remains lacking, leaving important nonlinear affective phenomena insufficiently explained. We propose the Attention-Reference Interaction Adaptation (ARIA) framework, which formalizes affective valuation as an attention-gated dual-reference integration process that evaluates current sensory inputs relative to both prior experience and allostatic set-points. By specifying how value salience and negativity bias jointly govern attention allocation and adaptation rate, ARIA suggests that relativity and asymmetry (two foundational properties of affective valuation) arise from a shared attentional mechanism. Consequently, these properties are contingent, dynamically coupled, and conditionally reducible, rather than fixed, independent, and irreducible axioms as assumed in classical behavioral economic theories. Furthermore, we map ARIA's computational components onto reward and interoceptive prediction errors, capturing how external and internal discrepancies jointly drive the construction of affective experience. Through numerical simulations and an initial empirical test, we show that ARIA reproduces classic affective phenomena, such as exponential decay, affective after-reactions, and alliesthesia, while also accounting for anomalous patterns, including cases in which environmental improvements fail to elicit pleasure and conditions under which inherently positive stimuli adapt more slowly than negative ones. Ultimately, ARIA offers a tractable computational framework for explaining affective dynamics and generating testable predictions about well-being and environmental experience.
Prioritization of Perceptual Decisions
Daniel R. Little; Ruby Steinberg; Asha Bartlett; Luke Russell; Peizhao Xie; Ami Eidels
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Scheduling theory provides optimal policies for allocating limited resources to multiple tasks over time. However, little research has examined how cognitive mechanisms perform relative to these optimal policies. We introduce a novel experimental paradigm to study human scheduling decisions using a set of perceptual tasks (random dot kinematograms, RDKs) that vary in difficulty. Participants selected and completed RDKs one at a time, with the goal of completing as many as possible before a deadline. In Experiment 1, RDK difficulty was explicitly labeled. Participants showed near-optimal scheduling, selecting easier tasks first, especially under time pressure. In Experiment 2, difficulty had to be inferred from dynamic RDK displays. This resulted in less optimal scheduling, closer to random selection. In Experiment 3, for generality, we replicate Experiment 1 using a typing task, demonstrating that scheduling remains near optimal under a short deadline. We develop a cognitive model of scheduling based on the Plackett-Luce model of ranked preferences. The model captures key differences between experiments in terms of the strength parameters associated with each difficulty level. Our paradigm and modeling approach provide a foundation for studying human scheduling across a range of task types and goals. This work bridges theories of optimal scheduling with cognitive models of sequential decision making.
Reliability, bias, and computational cost of estimating the Bayes factor using bridge sampling and the Savage-Dickey density ratio
Klaus Oberauer; Philipp Musfeld; Frederik Aust
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Bayes factors often require numerical estimation due to the unavailability of closed-form solutions. In seven simulation studies, we explored the trade-offs between variance, bias, and computational cost of two easy-to-use and broadly applicable methods: bridge sampling and the Savage-Dickey density ratios, based on Gaussian, logspline, and spline-smoothed kernel density approximations of the posterior distribution. In generalized linear mixed effect models for normally and binomially distribute data, we explore the effects of the (1) number of MCMC samples from the posterior, (2) size of effects or magnitude of the Bayes factor, (3) number of participants, and (4) number of model parameters. Our findings suggest that, with enough MCMC samples, both methods yield reliable and accurate estimates across a wide range of conditions. However, with many model parameters bridge sampling becomes computationally expensive and can be unreliable. In contrast, the Savage-Dickey density ratio scales well, remaining computationally efficient and reliable, even with many model parameters. But Savage-Dickey density ratio requires careful consideration of posterior density estimation to mitigate bias while limiting variability of Bayes factor estimates. We provide practical recommendations to guide researchers in selecting the most suitable estimation method for their applications.
Perceptions of School Phone Restrictions: A Multi-Stakeholder Qualitative Study in Washington State
LucĂ­a Magis-Weinberg; Carly E Gray; Svenja Boetticher; Yonatan Porfirio Ambrosio Lomeli; Venus Rekow-Antoniuk
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Abstract Background This study examines the perspectives of students, teachers, and parents on the implementation of mobile phone restrictions in schools, policies increasingly adopted worldwide. While existing research sometimes suggests potential benefits, less attention has been given to how these policies are experienced by key stakeholders. By exploring the perceived advantages and disadvantages of school restriction policies from multiple viewpoints, this paper aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the implications of mobile phone restrictions in school settings. Methods This study was conducted with a large sample of middle and high school students (n = 1532), teachers (n = 124) and parents (n = 240) from four school districts (n = 6 middle schools, n = 7 high schools, n = 1 alternative K-12 school) in Washington State. Participants provided 3792 responses to open-ended survey questions exploring the “pros” and “cons” of phone restriction policies. Results Thematic analysis identified ten key themes across the three stakeholder groups: academic outcomes, student self-regulation and well-being, communication, policy enforcement, accessibility, entertainment, student relationships, teachers’ job satisfaction and efficacy, personal property concerns, and a perceived lack of advantages or disadvantages. Among students, the most prominent themes were (a) perceived academic benefits, (b) communication drawbacks, and (c) mixed perspectives on impacts to self-regulation and well-being. For teachers, the most frequently reported themes included (a) challenges with policy enforcement, (b) academic benefits, and (c) improved student social interaction. For parents, the dominant themes were (a) communication drawbacks, (b) student self-regulation and well-being benefits, and (c) academic benefits. Conclusion Overall, these findings highlight the complex and often mixed perceptions of phone restrictions across students, teachers, and parents. While academic benefits were consistently noted, concerns around communication, student well-being, and policy implementation reveal important trade-offs. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of these impacts, it is essential to capture the perspectives of all stakeholders. Incorporating these diverse viewpoints can support the development of more balanced, effective, and context-sensitive approaches to managing phone use in schools.
Non-Pharmacological Interventions for Severe Mental Illnesses in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LIMCs): A Systematic Review of Recent Evidence
Gojjam Limenih; Rosemary Lysaght; Regina Casey; Salina Rezene; Terry Krupa; Victoria Mutiso; David Ndetei; Arlene MacDougall
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Background: People with severe mental illness (SMI) are among the most marginalized groups globally, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where mental health services are scarce. Non-pharmacological interventions targeting improved social and economic participation are crucial for individuals with SMI, their families, and broader society. Methode: This systematic review examined non-pharmacological interventions for adults with SMI in LMICs from 2002 to December 2024. We searched PubMed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Scopus, and EMBASE following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, synthesizing findings narratively using JBI critical appraisal tools. Results: From 2,673 records, 67 studies met inclusion criteria (37 RCTs, 22 other quantitative designs, 8 qualitative studies) across 26 LMICs. Seven intervention categories emerged: supported employment (n=11), family-based interventions (n=18), community-based rehabilitation (n=15), psychosocial interventions (n=11), culturally adapted cognitive-behavioral therapy (n=3), social skills training (n=6), and peer-led interventions (n=5). Individual Placement and Support achieved higher employment rates (50-63%) than traditional vocational rehabilitation (33%), with approximately 50% retention at 6-24 months follow-up. Family psychoeducation demonstrated high effectiveness across contexts. Peer-led interventions showed dramatic clinical impact, with relapse rates of 2.2% versus 17.4% in controls. Community-based rehabilitation significantly reduced mental health-specific disability but did not address broader social determinants including food insecurity, malnutrition, or poverty, underscoring the need for integrated multi-sectoral approaches. Innovative adaptations included collaborative care models engaging traditional and faith healers. Cultural adaptation proved essential across all intervention types, while augmentation strategies targeting cognitive impairments did not enhance real-world functional outcomes. We also identified an emerging evidence base for peer-led/supported interventions and other interventions to support community participation of people with SMI. Conclusion(s): Non-pharmacological interventions demonstrate significant benefits in reducing symptoms, improving functioning and economic participation, and enhancing recovery and wellbeing across diverse LMIC contexts, with IPS, family psychoeducation, and peer-led models showing the strongest evidence. Realising their full potential requires cultural adaptation, multi-sectoral integration with social protection systems, and sustained implementation support. Key Words: Severe mental illness, non-pharmacological interventions, LMICS, community-based rehabilitation, supported employment, family interventions, peer support, recovery, psychosocial interventions.
Te Hinengaro Angitu: The Success Mindset
D D Allan; Evangeline M Rong
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The present study advances the literature on Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders) success by exploring the beliefs that highly-successful Māori hold about success, examining the influences underpinning these beliefs, and assessing whether they function as a success mindset. Kaupapa Māori-informed (Māori-centric approach) interviews were conducted with Māori (n = 10) who had demonstrated success in a range of fields. A constellation of beliefs emerged: He pānga te angitu (success is impact), He hononga te angitu (success is relational), and He anga whakamua te angitu (success is trajectory). These beliefs were forged by whānau (family) and whakapapa (genealogy), institutional encounters, mentorship, and self-authorship. Together they oriented participants’ goals, expectations, and attributions, thereby suggesting the presence of a success mindset: Te Hinengaro Angitu.
A formalization of the IdioNomo Framework for explanation and prediction in psychology: unifying idiographic and nomothetic approaches
Joshua Curtiss; Stephanie Noble
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Psychology is increasingly embracing idiographic (i.e., individual-specific) goals that extend beyond traditional nomothetic (i.e., group-level) investigation. An idiographic approach helps account for the substantial uniqueness of individuals and their trajectories relative to the group. The ability to predict individual-level mental states has significant potential for real-world impact, especially for personalized “precision medicine” prediction of disease trajectories and treatment outcomes. Many have looked to machine learning as a promising avenue to obtain individual-level insight, citing the ability to test predictions in unseen individuals. However, most machine learning models in psychology research remain largely nomothetic in nature, with models built from group- rather than individual-level information. Indeed, it is typically difficult—or even impossible—to obtain sufficient data for robust models from the individual alone. Many data modalities (e.g., neuroimaging) are too expensive or impractical to acquire intensive longitudinal measures, and sometimes individual-level data may be too noisy or have too much missing information to be useful. To augment individual-level data, and, in turn, understand the extent to which findings may generalize across individuals, “idionomo” approaches have emerged that bridge idiographic and nomothetic perspectives, where the advantages of one perspective address the disadvantages of the other. Yet we currently lack a comprehensive framework to more fully describe and motivate idionomo approaches. Here, we introduce a formal framework for guiding idionomo methodology development and applications for inference and prediction.
The global recurrence and variability of kinship terminology structure
Sam Passmore
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The extent to which kinship terminology varies between linguistic groups is a long-debated but unresolved social and linguistic puzzle. Contemporary research shows that a six-category typology is overly simplistic, but no alternatives have reached broad acceptance. This paper takes a data-driven solution to this problem. Using data from the release of Kinbank, a global database of 1,156 kinship terminology, I quantitatively review the global diversity of kinship terminology to derive a more granular typology of kinship terminology. In a two-part analysis, I show that kinship terminology structure is more diverse than is often assumed across three metrics. Firstly, more than six types are needed to represent the global diversity of kinship terminology. Secondly, typological categories are not equally variable. Some categories may contain identically structured terminology. Others may contain languages that only share a single feature. Finally, different subsets of kin (e.g. cousins vs grandparents) show different levels of variability. In the second part of the analysis, I explore the global distribution of the new typological categories, identifying globally and locally recurring structures. My analysis demonstrates how data can carve this semantic domain at its joints to identify observed clusters of diversity.
A formalization of the IdioNomo Framework for explanation and prediction in psychology: unifying idiographic and nomothetic approaches
Joshua Curtiss; Stephanie Noble
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Psychology is increasingly embracing idiographic (i.e., individual-specific) goals that extend beyond traditional nomothetic (i.e., group-level) investigation. An idiographic approach helps account for the substantial uniqueness of individuals and their trajectories relative to the group. The ability to predict individual-level mental states has significant potential for real-world impact, especially for personalized “precision medicine” prediction of disease trajectories and treatment outcomes. Many have looked to machine learning as a promising avenue to obtain individual-level insight, citing the ability to test predictions in unseen individuals. However, most machine learning models in psychology research remain largely nomothetic in nature, with models built from group- rather than individual-level information. Indeed, it is typically difficult—or even impossible—to obtain sufficient data for robust models from the individual alone. Many data modalities (e.g., neuroimaging) are too expensive or impractical to acquire intensive longitudinal measures, and sometimes individual-level data may be too noisy or have too much missing information to be useful. To augment individual-level data, and, in turn, understand the extent to which findings may generalize across individuals, “idionomo” approaches have emerged that bridge idiographic and nomothetic perspectives, where the advantages of one perspective address the disadvantages of the other. Yet we currently lack a comprehensive framework to more fully describe and motivate idionomo approaches. Here, we introduce a formal framework for guiding idionomo methodology development and applications for inference and prediction.
Prior information about another’s emotional state shapes the perceptual representation of their facial expressions
Igne Jasukaityte; Margaret Cecilia Jackson; Patric Bach
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A large body of evidence demonstrates that contextual information can shape emotional face expression evaluation. However, recent predictive processing accounts propose that prior information about how a person is feeling should impact not only how facial expressions are rated but also how they are perceptually represented. We tested this by presenting participants with an auditory statement indicating how a person is feeling (“I feel so happy/sad!”), followed by a dynamic facial morph that changed towards the expected or unexpected emotion. Participants then judged the final facial expression of the morph. We found that facial expressions were rated in line with the statement emotion, such that happy facial expressions were rated as happier following a happy cue compared to a sad cue (Experiment 1a) and congruent face and statement pairings were rated as more intense (Experiment 1b). When participants made a perceptual comparison between the final expression and a probe face (i.e., final morph expression that was more/less expressive), we robustly found that facial expressions were perceived as more expressive than they actually were (Experiments 2a, 2b), in line with previous literature. Crucially, we found that the extent of this overestimation depended on the congruence between the emotion of face and statement, leading to greater overestimation of congruent pairings, when sufficient time was provided to process the face emotion (Experiment 2b). Our findings, for the first time, show that prior information can affect not only explicit emotional inference but also shape perceptual representation of facial expressions, in line with predictive processing accounts.
Viewing Social Isolation as a Complex Dynamical System
Samuel J. Abplanalp; Joseph Salvatore Maimone; Michael F. Green
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Social isolation is a major public health concern linked to increased risk for both psychiatric and physical health conditions. Yet despite the potential consequences of social isolation, our understanding of its nature and how it emerges and evolves over time remains limited. We propose that social isolation should be understood and analyzed as a complex dynamical system. First, we introduce core principles of dynamical systems theory and describe how they can be applied to better understand social isolation. Second, we formalize a dynamical systems model using differential equations. Third, we present simulations showing how changes in system dynamics may increase or decrease the likelihood of individuals entering a socially isolated state. Finally, we offer an illustrative example of how intensive longitudinal data could be used to identify early warning signs of transitions between healthy and isolated states. Overall, this approach may ultimately help inform personalized interventions capable of detecting early warning signs of social isolation.
Between Discretion and Misconduct: Comparing Judges' and Laypeople's Perspectives on the Ethicality of Prosecutorial Behaviors
Stephanie Aurora CĂĄrdenas; Melanie B. Fessinger
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Research Summary We compared ratings provided by 355 judges and 372 laypeople on the ethicality of various prosecutorial behaviors and whether they should be investigated as possible misconduct. Most prosecutorial behaviors were sourced from exoneration cases and varied from highly egregious misconduct (e.g., manipulating exculpatory evidence) to more questionable in nature (e.g., opposing a defense expert witness on Frye grounds). Results showed that laypeople had generally stricter ethical standards—perceiving acts as more unethical (d = 0.36) and more worthy of investigation (21 of 27 acts; 77%) compared to judges. Notably, however, this varied based on individual acts. For some acts, specifically those with clearly established legal rules, judges had stricter ethical standards instead. Overall, our data showed wide variation in ethicality and investigation judgments across individuals, across respondent type, and across specific acts. Policy Implications Laypeople were more skeptical of prosecutorial discretion than judges—a skepticism that may be justified given that many of the behaviors stemmed from wrongful conviction cases. Yet, as experts, judges are in a better position to identify and report misconduct. This discrepancy between who perceives and who reports misconduct may partly explain why misconduct is seldom investigated or sanctioned. Laypeople, however, are not powerless to mitigate such injustices. As jurors, awareness of misconduct can protect them from being unduly influenced by improper prosecutorial tactics. As members of the court of public opinion, laypeople shape narratives about justice processes, apply pressure for institutional accountability, and can mobilize collective action when official outcomes clash with public values. Most critically, as voters, laypeople influence the platforms on which prosecutors run and who ultimately gets elected, which can help drive more ethical institutional norms within prosecutors’ offices. Our results highlight the challenges facing prosecutorial oversight and accountability, underscoring the roles that judges and laypeople can play in addressing them.
Reasoning about social relationships reduces class differences in tests of cognitive aptitude
Nicholas Fendinger; Andrea G. Dittmann; Eric Knowles
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Class differences in aptitude testing are often attributed to working-class deficiencies in a host of basic cognitive skills. The present research challenges this deficit narrative in the context of logical reasoning. We argue that reasoning tests often privilege abstract styles of reasoning as a "neutral" benchmark and provide a poor match to social-cognitive competencies promoted in working-class contexts. We evaluate this hypothesis in archival data from an international study of mathematical aptitude (N = 158,216), a pre-registered nationally-representative experiment on logical deduction (N = 781), and an integrative data analysis (IDA) combining data from Study 2 with three supplemental studies (N = 2,269). In Study 1, reasoning items higher in social-relational content (i.e., mentions of people) yielded smaller class gaps among eighth-grade students from 46 countries. Study 2 and the IDA experimentally replicate and extend these findings, demonstrating that reframing an abstract reasoning task to recruit social-cognitive skills reduces class-based performance differences among adults. Study 2 and the IDA also highlight that these effects cannot be explained by the mere inclusion of real-world content (e.g., money, food), but are most robustly produced by content invoking social relations. Our results support a cultural-psychological account of reasoning performance, highlight working-class strengths in social reasoning, and point to inclusive approaches to testing as a way to attenuate social-class gaps in aptitude testing performance.
Processes of embodied sense-making and integration in challenging experiences of advanced meditation – A reflexive thematic analysis of destabilization, rigidification, and social negotiation
Oliver Andersson Hugemark; Terje Sparby; Andrea Grabovac; Matthew Sacchet
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While meditation has been increasingly associated with challenging and adverse experiences, especially in more advanced and high-density practices, little is known about how advanced practitioners experience, make sense of, and integrate non-ordinary experiences that may disrupt their sense of self, reality, embodiment, and meaning. Building on recent advances in the scientific study of advanced meditation and work in cultural and phenomenological psychiatry, this first-of-its-kind study sought to better understand challenging experiences that advanced practitioners themselves understood in non-clinical terms as broader psychological, embodied, and meaning-making processes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 advanced meditators, the study used a semantically grounded, inductive approach to reflexive thematic analysis to identify shared patterns in how advanced meditators made sense of challenging experiences in the context of intense and altered experiential states and transformative shifts. The analysis developed three main themes: (1) Destabilization of self, body, and reality: when meditative experiences exceed integrative and regulatory capacity; (2) Inflated and constraining modes of engagement: when practice becomes rigidly organized; and (3) Breakdown and negotiation of social intelligibility: when meditation cannot be integrated into relationships. Across themes, advanced meditators made sense of challenging experiences not as arising solely from the intensity or non-ordinary nature of certain meditative states, stages, or transformations, but as emerging through dynamic, deeply embodied, and contextually shaped processes of sense-making and integration. These findings suggest that challenging experiences in advanced meditation may, in some cases, be better understood as relational and embodied processes shaped by interpretative and sociocultural dynamics, rather than always purely individual, intrapsychic, or pathological experiences, and that these meaningfully shape how meditators’ practice trajectories and broader lives unfold.
Loops All the Way Up: Recurrency as an Implementation-first Primitive for Consciousness
Zefan Zheng; Robert Chis-Ciure; Peter Thestrup Waade; Anna Eiserbeck; Jaan Aru; Thomas Andrillon; Bechir Jarraya; Lucia Melloni; Georg Northoff; Fernando Rosas
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Consciousness science is fragmented, and empirical investigations are confined within each theory of consciousness’ (TOC) framework. Proliferating ToCs accumulate anomalies without progress, operating orthogonally. The principle of recurrency – functional and architectural – offers a unifying, mechanistic scaffold for consciousness to arise. We show that all theories tacitly invoke feedback loops and can be re-expressed along a single axis of recursion. Four nested levels, viz., cellular, local inter-areal, global, and lateral, map onto state, phenomenal content, manipulative access, and experiential similarity, respectively, thus tying evolved anatomy to phenomenon. The traditional phenomenal-versus-access stand-off dissolves into a graded cascade wherein deeper recursion expands the set of reportable, behaviour-driving variables. Recurrence is favoured evolutionarily, and ontologically, rebutting feed-forward, “unfolding” objections, while brain-body loops ground selfhood, and complete action loops with the environment. Furthermore, clinically, targeting recurrent pathways promise new biomarkers, and alleviation, in disorders of consciousness (DoCs). The field urgently requires this conceptual unification that is biologically plausible, mechanistic, and empirically testable.
A Systematic Review of Empirical Intraverbal Research: 2021–2025
Jason Vladescu; Haleigh Conry; Lauren K. Schnell-Peskin
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Skinner’s conceptual analysis of verbal behavior has had a notable influence within the field of behavior analysis. Yet empirical verbal behavior research has historically focused on the mand and tact, with relatively less attention directed toward the intraverbal. Encouragingly, empirical and conceptual intraverbal work has been increasing over the last two decades. Most recently, a review of intraverbal research from 2015 through 2020 documented the continued growth of empirical intraverbal work. The current review replicated and extended this work by identifying and synthesizing empirical intraverbal studies published from 2021through 2025. We identified 50 articles containing 66 experiments. We coded each to provide an updated account of participants, training components, sources of control, research emphasis, outcomes, and publication trends. Findings indicated continued growth of intraverbal research, and most experiments established intraverbals under multiple control. The current review extended a prior review by providing information regarding the nature of procedural modifications and updating how outcomes were evaluated.
Testing causal mechanisms of transdiagnostic dissociation in 16-to-25-year-olds: A randomised multiple baseline experimental design series using brief targeted CBT.
Emma Černis; Milan Antonović; Gwynnevere Suter
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Dissociation is increasingly recognized as a transdiagnostic process implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety, depression, and psychosis. However, causal evidence for mechanisms underpinning dissociation remains scarce, particularly in youth. Nine NHS patients (aged 16 to 23) participated three multiple baseline single case experimental design (SCED) studies. Every participant received four sessions of individual CBT, with each SCED addressing a different hypothesised mechanism: cognitive appraisals of dissociation, perseverative thinking, and affect intolerance. Results indicated successful targeting of cognitive appraisals, and partial success in targeting perseverative thinking and affect intolerance. They support cognitive appraisals, and partially support affect intolerance, as causal mechanisms in youth transdiagnostic dissociation. Any causal effect of perseverative thinking was better accounted for by reduced cognitive appraisals in this SCED. Across participants, low phase stability of the target measures limited inference, but these findings advance a mechanistic understanding of youth dissociation and inform treatment development.
Better Memory for Discourse in an Auditory Modality for Heritage-Speaking Bilinguals: A Language-Dependent Modality Effect
Diana Uribe; Ana Isabel Schwartz
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Research on discourse processing has predominantly focused on text representations; however, constructing a discourse model often involves both written and spoken information. This study examined how modality and its match across episodes affect discourse updating in heritage Spanish English bilinguals. We proposed two non-exclusive hypotheses: (1) according to the encoding specificity principle, modality congruency across episodes will enhance discourse updating, and (2) for bilinguals, the proficiency across modalities in their two languages will have an impact on discourse updating. Highly proficient Spanish English bilinguals read and or listened to expository pair passages that described two fictitious science facts, one of which was repeated across passages and the other revised in the second passage. The modality of the passage pair was manipulated across four within-subject conditions (e.g., text-text, audio-audio, audio-text, text-audio). Participants completed four passages in English and four passages in Spanish. After each passage, participants completed a recall test followed by multiple-choice questions. Results indicate better performance on both recall and accuracy for revised facts when the information was presented auditorily in Spanish, regardless of language dominance. This finding highlights a language-dependent modality effect and can expand our understanding of discourse updating by considering different modalities and bilingual experiences.
An Object’s Motion, but not its Sound, Influences its Perceived Similarity to Other Object Shapes
Martina Andrea Seveso; Rebecca Hirst; Alan O'Dowd; Fiona Nora Newell
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The perceived similarity between object shapes can act as an organisation principle for categorisation: objects with similar shape features are more likely to be grouped together into a meaningful object category. However, objects can be represented based on multiple featural dimensions, including across modalities, rendering object categorisation a more complex process. Inter-item similarity may be determined by an integrated combination of cues or by each featural dimension separately. Here we investigated whether motion and sound influence inter-item similarity judgements of novel objects based on shape alone. In Experiment 1, we found that object shapes with similar motion patterns were perceived as more similar than shapes with mis-matched or no motion. However, the addition of (movement-correlated) sounds did not further influence perceived shape similarity. In Experiment 2 we used a Garner Interference task (i.e., shapes are classified based on one relevant dimension while ignoring an irrelevant one) to determine the nature of the influence of motion. The results indicated that object motion is integrated into the representation of object shape in memory. Our findings suggest that modality specific cues can be integrated into an object’s representation and have implications for understanding how novel object categories are formed from multisensory featural information.
Toward a Sequencing Framework for Teaching and Using Self- Enactable Behavior Change Techniques: A Conceptual Review and Proposed Approach
Alexandre Mazéas; Nikos Ntoumanis
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Objective: Self-enactable behavior change techniques (BCTs) may help individuals initiate and sustain health behavior change. However, existing taxonomies provide limited guidance on how such techniques should be selected, taught, combined, and sequenced over time. This perspective aimed to review previous approaches and to develop a conceptual framework for organizing and sequencing self-enactable BCTs for intervention design and participant learning. Methods: A critical conceptual review was conducted to identify published approaches to BCT grouping, temporal organization, prerequisites, and stage-specific sequencing. Literature identified through four databases was synthesized alongside the compendium of self-enactable BCTs to inform a five-step framework-development process. Results: The review showed that existing taxonomies and sequencing approaches provide useful classifications but limited guidance for progressive teaching and self-enactment. To address this gap, we proposed a framework comprising 108 self-enactable BCTs organized into nine clusters and 27 groups. We mapped prerequisite relations, classified techniques by their predominant prospective or reactive function, and sequenced their groups across the Model of Action Phases. Conclusion: Our framework provides a theory-informed structure for teaching and applying self-enactable BCTs. It is intended to guide intervention design and generate testable hypotheses about technique sequencing that need to be empirically explored in future studies.
From self-knowledge to life stories: The Me-self in episodic amnesia
Odysse Marie Davis; Lynette J. Tippett; R. Shayna Rosenbaum; Donna Rose Addis
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There is an indisputable relationship between autobiographical memory (AM) and the self. Yet debate remains over whether episodic and semantic AM differentially supports one’s mental representation of the past and present self, known as the Me-self. We examined this question by assessing two facets of the Me-self – self-knowledge and semantic continuity – in episodic amnesia, a condition marked by impaired episodic AM alongside relatively preserved semantic AM. Three individuals with varying degrees of episodic amnesia secondary to medial lobe damage (DG, 54 years; BL, 58 years; DA, 68 years) were compared with age-matched controls on two measures of self-knowledge (Twenty Statements Test, Head Injury Semantic Differential Scale), and several semantic continuity measures derived from the Life Story Interview. Results showed that some, but not all, aspects of the Me-self were affected in episodic amnesia. The ability to generate self-descriptive statements scaled with the severity of episodic impairment, whereas trait self-knowledge was only affected in one individual with more severe amnesia. Performance on the life story measures indicated that semantic continuity was not uniformly affected, with preserved usage of cultural life script events within life stories. The narrative staging of life stories was reduced in the two individuals with more severe episodic amnesia, whereas reductions in narrative coherence did not scale with the severity of episodic memory impairment. Overall, these findings align with theories positing that episodic autobiographical memory makes important contributions to self-knowledge, and extend this role to other aspects of the Me-self such as the narrative processes underlying semantic continuity.
Predicting Protest Frequency and Size from Collective Emotional Entropy
Daan Vandermeulen; Nitzan Attias; Amit Goldenberg; Eran Halperin
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Anticipating the frequency and size of protests remains one of the most formidable challenges in understanding collective human behavior. Psychological research has often addressed this challenge by examining how discrete emotional experiences motivate individuals to participate in collective action. Yet a society can feel highly emotional on average without people feeling the same thing. The average intensity of emotions tells us how strongly people feel on average, but not whether people are emotionally aligned. We argue that beyond the average emotional intensity within groups, a crucial predictor of protest size is collective emotional entropy, reflecting how aligned (low entropy) versus fragmented (high entropy) individuals within a society are across a range of societally relevant emotions (e.g., hate, empathy and guilt). We conducted an eight-month rolling cross-sectional survey of 11,713 Jewish Israelis in a period of large protest activity (2023-2025). Using daily distributions of eight discrete emotions, we estimated both average emotional intensity and collective emotional entropy and linked it to records of protest frequency and size. Analyses revealed that beyond the effect of individual emotions, lower entropy in the preceding days predicted both a greater number of daily protests and larger protest sizes, even when controlling for conflict intensity and other social–psychological indicators. Together, this suggests that collective action may depend not only on the emotions people feel, but on whether people come to feel in similar ways.
Cognitive Representations of Social Relationships and their Developmental Origins
Ashley J Thomas
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In the human mind, what is a social relationship, and what are the developmental origins of this representation? In this paper, I consider findings from infant psychology and propose that our representations of social relationships are intuitive theories built on core knowledge. I propose three central components of this intuitive theory. The purpose of the first component is to recognize whether a relationship exists, the purpose of the second is to characterize the relationship by categorizing it into a model (i.e., type, schema, concept) and to compute its strength (i.e., intensity, pull, or thickness), and the purpose of the third is to understand how to change relationships through explicit or implicit communication. I propose that infants possess core knowledge on which this intuitive theory is built. This paper focuses on evidence for core knowledge that supports the second component on which the intuitive theory hinges—characterizing relationships. Following Relational Models Theory (A. P. Fiske, 1991, 2004), I propose that humans recognize relationships that belong to three models: communal sharing (where people see themselves as one), authority ranking (where people see themselves as ranked), and equality matching (where people see themselves as separate and track reciprocity). A single relationship can be organized according to any of these models depending on the context, but relationships tend to use one governing model. I further propose that humans recognize a relationship’s strength which can be thought of as a continuous representation of obligations (the extent to which certain actions are expected and morally evaluated), and commitment (the likelihood that people will continue the relationship). In communal sharing relationships, this may be felt as attachment, in authority ranking relationships it may be felt as allegiance or loyalty, and in equality matching relationships it may be felt as trust. One hypothesis regarding strength is that the stronger a connection, the less interchangeable the people. These representations, and the assumption that others share them, allow us to form, maintain, and change social relationships throughout our lives by informing how we interpret and evaluate the actions of others and plan our own.
Critical Slowing Down of Societal Anger predicts Peaks of Social Movement Activity
Daan Vandermeulen; Eran Halperin; Amit Goldenberg
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Social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, which have a strong representation on social media, often display abrupt peaks in activity. These peaks are important because they mobilize large populations, but they are also very hard to predict and explain. The current project focused on collective dynamics of anger as a predictor of online peaks. Specifically, we examined whether delayed recovery in anger online in the days preceding activity peaks, termed critical slowing down, predicted the occurrence of peaks. We analyzed the full archive of #BlackLivesMatter tweets between 2015-2020 (N = ~60 million). Congruent with critical slowing down theory, we found that increased autocorrelation in anger but lowered emotional variance were associated with a greater likelihood of peaks. These results suggest that delayed emotional recovery paired with lowered temporal emotional volatility predicts consecutive peaks in activism. By integrating emotional dynamics with complex systems theory, this project opens new avenues for forecasting tipping points in collective behavior.
The Bridge-or-Trap Model of Companion AI: When Emotional Support Connects or Substitutes.
Ho Nam Cheung
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AI companions are increasingly used for emotional support, yet their relational consequences appear sharply divergent. The same qualities that make these systems comforting, availability, nonjudgment, and low interpersonal risk, may help some users move toward human connection while drawing others away from it. This paper proposes the Bridge-or-Trap model to explain this divergence. The model argues that AI-mediated relief becomes bridge-oriented when it reduces the expected cost of approaching a real person and supports human-directed action, such as disclosure, repair, help-seeking, or re-entry into social settings. The same relief becomes trap-oriented when it remains contained within the AI relationship, preserving avoidance and reducing opportunities for corrective human experience. The model specifies five interacting constructs: anticipated interpersonal cost of human closeness, AI relational reinforcement, relational-orientation state, ecological protection and affordance, and adaptive relational resilience. It further proposes that repeated AI-contained relief may produce path-dependent substitution, with entry and exit thresholds that can be tested empirically. Drawing on attachment theory, social anxiety research, resilience theory, social ecology, social exchange theory, and emerging evidence on AI companionship, the model reframes the central question from whether AI companions help or harm to when emotional support becomes a bridge back to people and when it becomes a substitute for them. The paper identifies three decisive tests: target-specific transfer, viable-alternative boundaries, and asymmetric recovery from AI-contained substitution.
Just the facts: How dialogues with AI reduce conspiracy beliefs
Thomas H Costello; Gordon Pennycook; David Gertler Rand
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Recent research shows that personalized dialogues with AI substantially reduce conspiracy beliefs. To identify the mechanisms driving this effect, we conducted two complementary experiments (total N = 2,348). Belief reduction effects proved robust across 7 of 8 variations, including when participants were told the AI aimed to change their minds or were asked to debate the AI; when the AI was prompted to offer factual information without otherwise seeking to persuade or to be concise in its exposition; and when the AI was restricted to a single static message (rather than a dialogue). The only condition that substantially undermined the effect was prompting the AI to persuade without presenting any facts. Content analyses of the AI's output paint a similar picture: When the AI relied more on facts and evidence, participants changed their minds more often. Furthermore, participants who were persuaded overwhelmingly cited the AI's factual arguments as the reason. These results suggest that AI-mediated dialogues are able to reduce conspiracy beliefs primarily because of their ability to supply belief-relevant facts and evidence that counter the conspiracy, rather than due to rhetorical, social, or source-based features of the interaction - consequently, humans might be similarly effective if they were able to produce the same quantity and quality of factual evidence as the AI.
Similarity and generalization as discounted integration over higher-order paths in semantic networks
Valerio Rubino; Manuela Piazza
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Similarity and generalization are often assumed to reflect distance in an underlying representational space. In semantic networks, however, distance can be defined by both shortest paths or by multiple indirect pathways. Previous research has shown that non-shortest, higher-order paths influence similarity judgements. Here, we extend these findings by re-analyzing a publicly available dataset to compare shortest-path models with models integrating over discounted higher-order paths. The latter better accounted for similarity judgements; error analyses indicate that this advantage arose from integrating multiple indirect paths rather than relying on shortest connections. These random-walk models implement the same core computation as the successor representation (SR), which has been proposed to support human generalization. Consistently, an SR-based model outperformed alternatives in accounting for inductive generalization judgements from the same dataset. These findings suggest that similarity and generalization are both shaped by higher-order connectivity between concepts.
Intergenerational influences of the cognitive and non-cognitive genetic components of educational attainment on externalising and internalising behaviour in childhood and adolescence.
José J. Morosoli; Elizabeth Orpwood; Tim Morris; Abigail ter Kuile; Andrea Allegrini; Jean-Baptiste Pingault
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Educational attainment is associated with mental health across development. What drives this association remains unclear, as it may reflect both genetic transmission and nongenetic intergenerational processes, which may operate differently for the cognitive and non-cognitive components of educational attainment. Using polygenic scores as proxies for the cognitive and non-cognitive components of educational attainment, we examined their developmental associations with early markers of mental health, i.e. externalising and internalising behaviour. We analysed data from 3,223 mother-father-child trios from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, applying a genetically informed design to distinguish genetic transmission (direct inheritance) from indirect genetic effects (non-transmitted parental genetic associations). For externalising behaviour, cognitive and non-cognitive components showed a nominally significant developmental trend: genetic transmission increased from early childhood (age 3) to adolescence (age 14), while indirect genetic effects were evident in early childhood but less consistent at later ages. In contrast, genetic influences on internalising behaviour were relatively stable across development, with small and overlapping indirect genetic effects for cognitive and non-cognitive components in early childhood and modest, overlapping genetic transmission in adolescence. Our results underscore the importance of considering both cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions in a developmentally informed framework to fully understand the role of education-related traits in the intergenerational transmission of mental health.
A unifying theory of aphantasia: Aphantasia as the inability to disengage from the external environment
Merlin Monzel; Reshanne R Reeder
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Aphantasia, the inability to voluntarily generate mental imagery, is typically explained as a failure to reactivate perceptual representations. Here, we propose an alternative framework: aphantasia as an impairment in disengaging from external perceptual processing. Drawing on recent computational, neurophysiological, and behavioral evidence, we argue that mental imagery depends not only on top-down sensory reinstatement, but critically, on the suppression of competing bottom-up sensory activity. Within this framework, imagery emerges when externally driven perceptual processing is attenuated, allowing internally generated representations to dominate conscious experience. We propose a unifying account in which the core deficit in aphantasia lies not simply in generating internal representations, but in disengaging from the external environment.
Can AI Predict What We Will Find? Evaluating Publicly Available LLMs for Forecasting Study Results in Economic Psychology
Tobias Wingen; Sophie Möller; Marvin Berner; Cheyenne Eßer; Marina Orifici; Bernhard Schubach; Angela Rachael Dorrough
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Recent large-scale investigations suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) can forecast study results in the social sciences with surprising accuracy. Such forecasts have strong potential to advance the social sciences; for example, they could be used for sample size planning, materials pretesting, or even to replace actual data collection. However, previous studies on AI forecasts largely relied on using highly specialized AI models or complex programming. Thus, a critical practical question remains: can publicly available off-the-shelf AI models, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, likewise achieve a high performance? To answer this question, we conducted a series of 26 studies, using thesis projects in our lab. All studies used the Dictator Game or the Taking Game (N = 7,393) to capture real incentivized behaviors. Prior to data collection, five different AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LeChat, and Perplexity) forecasted the expected effect sizes, which were then compared against the actual results. Across our studies, we observed that while the models predicted the direction of the observed effects better than random guessing, they significantly overestimated the actual effect sizes. Moreover, the correlation between predicted and observed effects was substantially smaller than reported in previous literature, similar to human forecasts, and often statistically non-significant. Overall, our findings suggest that standard, publicly available AI models do not currently constitute an effective tool for precise effect forecasting. Consequently, relying on such forecasts, for example, in power analyses or pretesting, is currently not a recommended method for the social sciences.
Confidently Neutral by Choice: Cognitive States of Neutrality in Auditory Perceptual Decisions
Luzie Kallfaß; Mara Wolter; Carla Ludig; Christoph Korn; Verena Wagner; Yulia Oganian
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In noisy environments, listeners may have good reason to remain undecided or neutral about what they have heard. Yet, forced-choice paradigms require categorical decisions even under uncertainty, thereby limiting insight into perceptual states under sensory ambiguity. It remains unclear whether neutral states reflect inattention, low confidence in categorical decisions, or a distinct perceptual state grounded in sensory information. In this study, we used sensory ambiguity to elicit and characterize perceptual ambiguity in a vowel discrimination task. Participants identified German minimal-pair target words, such as satt and Saat (“full”/”seed”), that were acoustically manipulated to range from low to high ambiguity. On each trial, participants either categorized the target as one of the two words, asked for repetition, indicating continuous information gathering, or settled on neutrality as the final decision outcome. Experiment 1 (n=36) revealed two distinct states of perceptual neutrality. Participants chose repetition and neutrality most frequently for ambiguous stimuli, showing that both decisions reflected the information content of the input. Moreover, participants frequently transitioned from being undecided to settling for neutrality as the response option, suggesting that evidence for neutrality was accumulated across stimulus repetitions. Experiment 2 (n=36) tested the effects of external ambiguity on neutral choices by embedding targets in speech-shaped noise. This led to broader response curves than in Experiment 1, showing that perceptual neutrality can be elicited by internally and externally driven ambiguity. Finally, Experiment 3 (n=38) assessed confidence alongside decisions, showing equally high confidence for neutral and categorical responses, with even higher confidence for neutral responses to ambiguous targets. In sum, we find that perceptual neutrality is not merely the absence of a categorical decision, but a structured and confidence-supported decision state. Distinguishing indecision and committed neutrality is therefore necessary for understanding how listeners perceive and decide under uncertainty.
Personality Traits and Philanthropy Across Time
Lina Hungerbuehler; Michael Dominik KrÀmer; Peter Haehner; Christopher James Hopwood; Wiebke Bleidorn
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Philanthropic behaviors such as volunteering and charitable giving promote both societal welfare and individual well-being. Prior research has established cross-sectional links between broad personality domains and these behaviors, but it remains unclear whether and how personality differences prospectively predict philanthropic engagement (selection effects) and whether such engagement may, in turn, shape personality development over time (socialization effects). Theory and preliminary evidence further suggest that differential links between narrower personality aspects and philanthropic behaviors may have been obscured at the domain level. Drawing on five-wave nationally representative data from Switzerland (N = 2,085 to 4,577), we extend prior research by testing prospective selection effects of personality traits on later philanthropic engagement and examining socialization effects of engagement on personality trajectories across broad personality domains and their narrower aspects. Results indicated that people with higher extraversion, agreeableness, openness/intellect, and lower neuroticism were more likely to engage in philanthropy over time, irrespective of their prior engagement, and that people who spent more time volunteering increased more in their extraversion compared to people who volunteered less. Within the agreeableness domain, associations with philanthropy were primarily driven by compassion rather than politeness, highlighting the incremental value of more fine-grained personality measures. We discuss these findings in the context of theories on dynamic transactions between personality and prosociality and outline limitations and avenues for future research.
The Origin of Musical Groove: A Probabilistic Updating Theory
Kai Ishida; Takahide Etani; Hiroshi Nittono
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Optimally complex rhythms elicit a stronger pleasurable urge to move—groove—than rhythms that are either overly simple or excessively complex. Why groove peaks at intermediate syncopation is uncertain, although two influential theories have addressed this question. The predictive coding of music (PCM) framework attributes groove to precision-weighted prediction error (PWPE), which drives internal predictive model updates. Conversely, neural resonance theory (NRT) explains groove in terms of how neural oscillations are entrained to rhythmic structures via mode-locking dynamics. Here, we demonstrate that these two models can be integrated by quantifying probabilistic updating measures (PUMs) in both models as the Kullback–Leibler divergence between successive probabilistic states. By analyzing groove ratings for identical melodies across independent experimental samples, we found that PUMs calculated based on PCM and NRT were both positively associated with groove ratings. Further analysis revealed that these PUMs shared a similar representational geometry of rhythm, which correlated significantly with the representational geometry of electroencephalographic spectral power during listening. Together, these findings suggest that groove is driven by probabilistic updating processes, thereby providing a unifying computational account that bridges predictive and dynamical models of rhythm perception.
Micro-valence is reflected in similarity judgments even under time pressure
InÚs Mentec; Mathilde Emma Chloé PAYET; Ivan Ivanovich Ivanchei; Axel Cleeremans
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The function of consciousness could be to enable subjects to value their experience and motivate action: everything that we do is ultimately driven by what we want to experience and what we want to avoid experiencing. Thus, every conscious experience should be—at least minimally so—valenced. Earlier findings showed that micro-valence (i.e., the valence associated with objects that are usually considered to be neutral) seems to play a role in the structure of the similarity space. Here, we ask whether this relationship between valence and similarity holds when we induce time pressure on similarity judgements. In other words: are similarity choices made under time pressure more, or less dependent on valence? To address this issue, we manipulated both presentation and response window durations in a similarity judgement task using micro-valenced stimuli. We observed that the correlations between micro-valence and subjective similarity evolve across different presentation and response window durations. More precisely, the higher the time pressure, the lower the correlation. Noteworthy, correlation was different from zero in every condition. These results suggest an important role of valence in subjective similarity judgments, even under high time pressure, which suggests valence is a core dimension of similarity space.
Integrating research and educational practice: Perspectives from directors of educational intervention companies
Astrid Bowen; Michael Thomas; Andrew Tolmie
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Enthusiasm for an evidence-informed approach towards educational interventions is currently hindered by difficulties integrating research findings into practice. To develop an understanding of current challenges for evidence integration, this qualitative study examined how commercial providers of educational interventions – increasingly involved in the development of practice – interact with and use research evidence in their intervention development and practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with an international sample of 14 directors of commercial educational intervention companies (50% female) from countries in Europe and North, Central and South America. Based on thematic analysis of interview data, this paper presents a) an overview of the perspectives of the directors on the role of research evidence in their work, and b) suggestions for improving evidence integration into educational intervention provision based on these. Company directors considered research to be important for responsible practice in education and that intervention providers typically conduct their own research for the dual purposes of evidencing and optimising impact. However, there is currently disincentive for commercial providers to engage with academic research because taking part in external evaluation of their own intervention is perceived as high-stakes. Evidence standards required by schools and different research funding bodies are inconsistent. Together, the result is that rigorous standards of evaluation are not perceived as being necessary. To facilitate engagement with research, intervention providers desire a client-centred and collaborative approach to research partnerships, and evaluation processes that are incremental, reducing reliance on high-stakes one-off research trials. We propose ways to improve evidence integration into educational intervention provision based on the perspectives of commercial education intervention providers, while placing them in the context of other stakeholders in the evidence-informed approach to education.
Personality predictors of negotiation performance: Evidence from repeated bargaining and expert forecasts
Yannik A. Escher; Hannes M. Petrowsky; Jared Curhan; Alice Lee; Peter Lucas Stoeckli; Hillary Anger Elfenbein; David D. Loschelder
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Negotiation is one of the most relevant processes within and across organizations to create joint surplus, bargain over allocating resources, and solve conflicts. Yet evidence on whether stable individual differences predict negotiation performance is dispersed across isolated traits, outcomes, and settings, leaving unclear which characteristics support individual versus joint outcomes. In a preregistered study, 238 experienced working professionals across 54 countries completed five rounds of multi-issue bargaining with randomly assigned counterparts and completed a battery of 29 validated individual-difference measures. Agentic, self-focused characteristics robustly increased individual surplus, whereas some affiliation- and vigilance-related tendencies were associated with lower individual surplus. In contrast, joint surplus and Pareto efficiency benefitted from honesty–humility and negotiation self-efficacy and were reduced by dark-triad and exploitation-focused tendencies. In a separate forecasting study, 37 personality researchers forecast trait–outcome effects, substantially overestimating effect sizes and often misjudging their direction. Finally, we derived a compact four-factor model—Confidence, Other-Focus, Self-Regulation, Exploitation-Focus—that predicted negotiation outcomes more accurately than expert forecasts. Together, these findings map a parsimonious personality architecture of negotiation performance, reveal systematic gaps between expert forecasts and observed effects, and inform organizational selection, assignment, and training for negotiations where both individual and joint outcomes matter.
Latent Profiles on the Intelligence and Development Scales – 2 and their Relationship with Classifications of Dyslexia and ADHD
Linda Visser; Selma Anne José Ruiter; Marieke Timmerman
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Objectives: The aim of the current study was to get insight in intelligence and development profiles and their relation with gender and dyslexia and ADHD classifications. Methods: We performed a latent profile analysis on IDS-2 data from 3,954 Dutch, German and Italian children (7 – 21 years). Results: The results showed five profiles differing in overall cognitive level. Three profiles were relatively balanced. One showed a clear strength in visual short-term memory. One showed below-average intelligence and executive functioning scores, but average scholastic skills; this profile had relatively more boys and ADHD classifications than the others. The profile with low-average scores, without specific strengths or weaknesses, had relatively high rates of classifications for both ADHD and dyslexia. Conclusion: The relation between the profiles and socioeconomic status highlights the importance of distinguishing between acquired academic competencies and innate cognitive capacities. More research is needed to evaluate the relation between specific cognitive functions and ADHD / dyslexia.
Development and Validation of the Sensitivity to Climate Injustice Scale
Lisa Marie Hempel; Mattis Geiger; Hellen Temme; Lena Lehrer; Caroline Surrey; Cornelia Betsch
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Beyond geophysical challenges, climate change imposes unequal risks and burdens across affected groups and is unequally caused by them, exacerbating social injustices. Psychological measures to assess climate justice beliefs are missing. We therefore developed the Sensitivity to Climate Injustice (SCI) Scale to capture individuals’ evaluations of climate-related disparities between groups. Across four studies with German-speaking samples (N1 = 1,084; N2 = 1,998, N3 = 1,092; N4 = 1,119), the eight-item scale was validated, assessing two correlated factors: cause (perceived contribution disparities) and suffer (perceived burden disparities). The SCI showed mostly expected relations with other traits in a nomological network. Sensitivity to climate injustice also demonstrated strong criterion validity: the two factors differentially predict readiness for climate action and climate-relevant behaviour. By providing a theory-derived, reliable, and valid measure, the SCI fills a crucial gap, enabling psychological research on sensitivity to inequality as a potential driver of climate action.
Behavioral Stability Across Participation Times in Online Experiments
Yefim Roth; Ori Plonsky
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Online participant platforms allow researchers to collect data at times that are difficult to cover in traditional laboratory studies, including late at night and on weekends. This flexibility raises an important methodological question: does participation timing meaningfully affect behavior? Prior work suggests that participant characteristics may vary across recruitment times, but little is known about whether such variation matters in repeated decisions from experience, where behavior unfolds over many trials and participants learn from feedback. We examine this question in three preregistered online studies (N = 1,328) using repeated clicking tasks with full feedback. Across all studies, participants completed 100 incentivized trials and were classified based on self-reported sleepiness. Study 1 used relatively simple repeated-choice problems, Study 2 examined long-shot problems involving rare but consequential outcomes, and Study 3 extended the analysis to more complex four-alternative problems. Across all three studies, we found little evidence that sleepy and not-sleepy participants differed meaningfully in expected-value maximization. This pattern held not only for the main performance measure, but also for learning over time and several additional process measures, and direct timing-based analyses using day/night and weekday/weekend classifications led to the same conclusion. By contrast, some demographic differences between groups were fairly consistent across studies, suggesting that participation timing affects sample composition more than core repeated-choice behavior. These findings conceptually replicate and extend prior work on time-of-day and day-of-week effects in online samples. More broadly, they suggest that repeated decisions-from-experience tasks are remarkably robust to variation in participation timing and self-reported sleepiness.
The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: A Systematic Review
Anna Castiglione; Anna Aretha Sach; Benjamin Abera; Disa Sauter; Nils Jostmann; Cameron Brick
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To prevent climate collapse, people need to engage in collective action at a massive scale, and social science can help explain the processes of mobilization. Over the past fifteen years, research on collective climate action has expanded substantially, yet the evidence remains fragmented. In this systematic review, we integrate and critically assess research examining the psychological factors associated with collective climate action. We identify affective processes, awareness, personal identity, self-efficacy, and collective efficacy as particularly robust associates of action: each has been extensively studied, and consistent evidence links them to action. In contrast, collective identity, social norms, and attitudes are widely studied but have mixed findings, particularly in experimental research. Factors related to social change including injunctive beliefs, theories of change, and cognitive alternatives remain understudied. Additionally, most studies share key limitations, including few experimental designs and objective behavioural measures, and the conflation of distinct forms of climate action. No existing theory of collective action integrates the most robust factors we identified. Based on the results, we recommend that researchers (1) further test key psychological factors central to dominant theories of collective climate action using more rigorous causal approaches; (2) further investigate understudied factors, particularly those related to perceptions of social change; and (3) develop a more comprehensive theory of collective climate action.
A pilot randomized controlled trial of a brief stress belief intervention: Effects on stress beliefs, perceived stress, affect, and somatic symptoms
Johannes Andreas Christoph Laferton; Susanne Fischer
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Objective Stress beliefs have been linked to affective and somatic health outcomes, yet evidence on whether brief stress belief interventions improve downstream stress-related functioning remains mixed. This pilot randomized controlled trial examined whether a brief video-based multi-component stress beliefs intervention (OPTI-Stress Video Video) changes stress beliefs and improves perceived stress, affect, and somatic symptoms over a two-week period. Methods Ninety-five university students were randomized to OPTI-Stress Video or a waitlist control group. OPTI-Stress Video Video was a 9.5-minute online video combining psychoeducation and a guided imagination exercise to promote more balanced and adaptive stress beliefs. Stress beliefs, perceived stress, positive and negative affect, and somatic symptoms were assessed at baseline and two weeks later Results Compared with the waitlist control group, participants receiving OPTI-Stress Video Video reported lower negative stress beliefs, b = -2.98, SE = 0.78, p < .001, d = -0.68, and higher positive stress beliefs, b = 1.19, SE = 0.52, p = .027, d = 0.39, at follow-up. No significant effects emerged for controllability beliefs, perceived stress, positive affect, negative affect, or somatic symptoms. Exploratory moderation analyses indicated that baseline perceived stress moderated effects on positive affect, with less favorable effects among participants with higher baseline stress Conclusions A brief video-based multi-component intervention successfully changed negative and positive stress beliefs, but these changes did not translate into short-term improvements in perceived stress, affect, or somatic symptoms. Future studies should examine whether more intensive, repeated, or context-sensitive interventions are needed for changes in stress beliefs to produce downstream affective and somatic benefits.
How often do we blank? A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of mind blanking report rates during experience-sampling
Paradeisios Alexandros Boulakis; Agustina AragĂłn-Daud; David Stawarczyk; Athena Demertzi
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Occasionally, during the stream of thought, people report experiencing no mental content or being unable to access any content, a mental state termed mind-blanking (MB). While MB appears to be a ubiquitous component of our mental lives, there is currently no systematic characterisation of how often MB occurs and under what conditions. The present preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine how often MB is reported in experience-sampling studies. Our search strategy yielded a sample of 59 studies, probing mental reports for more than 8500 participants. Using Bayesian linear modelling, we estimated the meta-analytic MB report rate at 10% of total experience sampling. We did not find any evidence for an effect of experience-sampling parameters on MB report rates. However, we identified that low arousal was associated with higher MB report frequency. Additionally, and contrary to the established literature, ADHD MB rates did not differ from our normative, baseline MB rate. Finally, using our meta-analytically derived posterior estimate, we simulated synthetic experience-sampling studies to determine appropriate sample sizes. In doing so, we provide heuristic sample-size recommendations to ensure high statistical power in prospective investigations. We recommend that prospective experience-sampling studies include 35 participants and 50 probes per participant, which should provide over 95% power to detect medium-sized effects. Overall, the present meta-analysis suggests that MB is fundamentally an infrequent mental state, yet its inclusion in experience-sampling paradigms provides accuracy and granularity into the full scope of mental states during spontaneous thinking.
The #chatsafe Youth Participation Model: evaluating participatory workshops involving young people in the design of suicide prevention initiatives
Louise La Sala; Elise Carrotte; Charlie Cooper; Michelle Lamblin; Ellie Brown; Jo Robinson
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Background: #chatsafe is a program aiming to empower young people to communicate safely on social media about self-harm and suicide. This study aimed to assess the feasibility, acceptability, safety, and impact associated with attending a #chatsafe participatory workshop, using the #chatsafe Youth Participation Model. The workshops aimed to educate young people on safe communication practices and gather their insights to inform new #chatsafe social media intervention content. Methods: Quantitative data were collected in a pre- and post-workshop survey using bespoke items measuring perceived feasibility, acceptability, and safety of the workshops, and self-efficacy in communicating online about suicide. Qualitative data were collected during the workshop (via participant feedback, field notes, audio recordings, and facilitator debriefing notes) and in open-text responses in the post-workshop survey. Results: Nine workshops were held with 107 participants (Mage = 19.7 years, SD = 2.7 years). Two thirds (64.5%) reported lifetime suicidal thoughts. Eighty-seven (81.3%) completed both the pre- and post-workshop survey. Feedback was positive, with 94.3% of participants reporting satisfaction with the workshop, 96.5% reported enjoying the workshop, and no adverse events were recorded. There was a significant increase in self-efficacy when communicating online about suicide following participation in a #chatsafe workshop, z = -5.99, p < .001. Workshop insights informed two national Australian #chatsafe Instagram campaigns, that reached 950,000 young people and 818,000 young people respectively. Conclusions: The #chatsafe workshops were highly feasible, acceptable, safe, and led to young people feeling better equipped to communicate safely online about suicide. To further encourage the involvement of young people in the design of suicide prevention, mental health, and similar initiatives, a #chatsafe Youth Participation Toolkit is publicly available for other researchers and outlines the steps taken to plan, conduct, and translate the outcomes of such workshops.
Moral Preferences for Avoiding Non-Lethal Human Injury over Property Damage in Autonomous Vehicle Accidents
Kiichi INARIMORI; Yuri Tanaka; Takashi Hikasa; Tsutomu Sawai
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Given the rapid development of autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies, recent studies, such as the Moral Machine Experiment, have examined people’s moral judgments in trolley-style dilemmas, where AVs must choose between unavoidable outcomes, often involving whether to change course to save a greater number of lives. However, fatal injuries represent only a subset of harms caused by traffic agents; most traffic accidents are non-fatal or involve only property damage. The present study focuses on trade-offs between human harm and property damage, examining whether the principle of the priority of human over property (PPHP)—reflected in some ethical and legal guidelines—is consistently supported by the public. Across a series of online experiments, we investigated whether people’s path preferences in scenarios where an AV must choose between avoiding human harm and avoiding property damage align with PPHP. We manipulated several factors, including the severity of harm to the pedestrian, the value of the property, the observer’s perspective (first-person vs. third-person), the gender of the potential victim, and whether the passenger would bear legal liability. The results indicate that participants are more likely to prioritize avoiding property damage when the expected harm to humans is relatively low compared to the value of the property. This tendency is amplified when passengers are held legally liable and among participants with more utilitarian moral attitudes. These findings suggest that AV behavior strictly guided by PPHP is not always supported by lay moral judgments.
Exploratory Validation of the Black Female Athlete Anxiety Scale
Luka Ojemaye; Joyce Olushola Ogunrinde; Billy Hawkins; Micheal Cottingham; Jie Zhang
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Black female collegiate athletes (BFCAs) navigate a distinct set of stressors at the intersection of race, gender, and athletic participation that may contribute to elevated levels of anxiety. Although awareness of mental health concerns among collegiate athletes has increased, existing anxiety assessment tools often lack sensitivity to the intersectional experiences shaping the lives of BFCAs. Consequently, these instruments may fail to capture the culturally specific stressors that influence anxiety within this population. The present study addressed this gap by conducting a preliminary validation of the Black Female Athlete Anxiety Scale (BFAAS), a culturally responsive instrument designed to assess anxiety-inducing stressors experienced by BFCAs. A total of 116 NCAA Division I BFCAs completed the newly developed 21-item Black Female Athlete Anxiety Scale (BFAAS). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to examine the instrument’s underlying factor structure. Results identified a three-factor model, with factors labeled Navigating Marginalization, Performance Pressure, and Athletic Time Constraints. Additional analyses, including analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t tests, were conducted to explore group-level differences in anxiety-related stressors within the sample. Internal consistency estimates demonstrated strong reliability across factors (Cronbach’s α > .80). These findings provided preliminary evidence supporting the BFAAS as a reliable and culturally responsive measure of anxiety-inducing stressors among BFCAs. The scale offers practical utility for improving mental health assessment in collegiate sport contexts and may inform culturally responsive interventions, practitioner training, and policy initiatives aimed at supporting the anxiety and well-being of BFCAs.
An Effect of Violating Independence Assumption between parameters in Analyses for the Estimation of Mean, Correlation, and Linear regression Using Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling
Ani Gumruyan; Tadamasa Sawada
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In an empirical behavioral study, data are often collected from multiple subjects, and each subject is tested in multiple trials to study the population of the subjects. Each subject is often represented as a single variable (e.g. the mean) estimated from the data and the estimated variables of the individual subjects are usually analyzed. Using Bayesian statistical modeling, this hierarchical process of the data collection can be represented in a model with taking more variables of the subject. However, this additional complexity of the model can bias the result of the analysis using the model when there is an unexpected systematic relationship between the variables. In the present study, simulation experiments were conducted to test these biases in the estimation of population means, correlations, and linear regressions using Bayesian statistical modeling when there are systematic relationships between the means and the within-subject variances of the individual subjects. We also tested how the biases affect the model evaluation.
Dismantling the Mechanism of VR Self-Compassion Training: A Two-Session Controlled Trial with Active Controls
Hongfeng Xia; Sarah Coundouris; Thomas C. Elliott; Nilufar Baghaei; Lena K L Oestreich; Lachlan Greig; Julie Henry; James N. Kirby
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Objectives. While prior research suggests that self-compassion training delivered via virtual reality (VR) is effective, it is limited by the absence of appropriate control conditions. Using a two-session, randomised controlled trial (RCT) design, this study compared a conventional VR self-compassion training paradigm to two active control conditions: a non-VR, computer-based self-compassion training, and a VR intervention that replaced the self-to-self component with a generic third-party interaction (VR Generic). Method. Eighty-nine participants completed the training. Primary (self-compassion, self-criticism) and secondary (depression, anxiety, stress) outcomes were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Exploratory analyses examined virtual embodiment (agency, ownership, self-location) as a mechanism of change. Results. No significant group differences emerged for anxiety, stress, or self-compassion. However, distinct efficacy patterns emerged for specific symptoms. For depression, the externally focused VR Generic condition demonstrated a preliminary advantage for symptom reduction compared to the computer control. Conversely, for self-criticism, the self-focused VR Self-Compassion training was significantly more effective than both controls. Both VR conditions induced higher agency than the computer control, but only the self-focused VR condition increased body ownership. This heightened embodiment, however, did not universally translate into superior wellbeing benefits across all domains. Conclusions. The findings suggest that specific VR formats may be better suited for targeting distinct psychological symptoms. While externally focused VR shows promise for alleviating depressive symptoms, the embodied “self-to-self” simulation appears critical for dismantling self-criticism. Rather than acting as a universally superior intervention, VR embodiment may offer a targeted approach tailored to specific symptom presentations.
Who benefits the most: Motivation, anxiety, and working memory moderate L2 multimodal narrative intervention outcomes
Ting Yao; Joan C. Mora; Pilar Prieto
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Narrative interventions have been shown to improve learners’ second language (L2) oral narrative skills, but it remains unclear for whom they are most effective. This study employed a multivariable approach to examine whether individual differences in motivation, willingness to communicate (WTC), second language speaking anxiety (SLSA), foreign language enjoyment (FLE), working memory (WM), and L2 proficiency moderate the effects of a MultiModal Narrative (MMN) intervention. Participants were 133 secondary school students from eight classes randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. Over two weeks, the intervention classes completed six MMN sessions, while the control classes followed regular English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instruction. Narrative retells were assessed pre- and post-intervention for narrative discourse and sentence complexity. Results showed that motivation was the strongest moderator across both narrative outcomes, with higher-motivated learners benefiting more. SLSA and WM moderated the effects on narrative discourse only, with lower-SLSA and lower-WM-capacity learners benefitting more from the intervention than from regular EFL instruction. In contrast, WTC, FLE, and L2 proficiency did not show moderating effects. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of incorporating motivational, affective, and cognitive support into intervention design and implementation.
Visual performance in head-mounted displays: Movement-dependent costs of video passthrough and mixed reality
Joshua James Liddy; C. Dane Napoli; John Murray; Jackson Ciccarello; Richard van Emmerik; Michael Busa
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System specifications for head-mounted displays (HMDs) do not guarantee effective human performance, particularly during locomotion, which places greater demands on gaze stabilization. We examined how video passthrough and mixed reality (MR) affect visual performance during standing, walking, and jogging. Eighteen participants completed a Landolt-C orientation task under natural viewing, passthrough, and MR on a Varjo XR-3. We used hierarchical Bayesian modeling to analyze detection, discrimination, and response time. Both HMD viewing modes degraded visual performance relative to natural viewing, with decrements amplifying during movement. Passthrough required stimuli up to 2.6× larger for reliable detection and 3.5× larger for accurate discrimination, and slowed responses by up to 83%. MR produced larger deficits, requiring stimuli up to 6.0× larger for detection and 4.1× larger for discrimination, and slowing responses by up to 128%. HMDs must therefore be evaluated under intended use conditions, as static benchmarks do not capture movement-dependent costs.
Pausing to Reflect During News Consumption Counteracts Negativity Biases in Memory
Alyssa Hannah Sinclair; Abigail Hsiung; Rachael Wright; Shabnam Hakimi; R. Alison Adcock
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News sources often emphasize negative information, which can harm mood, memory, and mental health. Here, in a study of information seeking and memory conducted during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested an intervention to counter these harms. Participants (N=260) completed a naturalistic information-seeking task, exploring articles in a virtual Newsroom. In the Reflection condition, participants were prompted to pause and reflect on how information made them feel, whereas participants in the No-Reflection condition browsed uninterrupted. On a subsequent memory test, No-Reflection participants were biased to remember negative information and forget positive information, especially when information was surprising or participants were in a negative mood. Crucially, our reflection intervention reduced this negativity bias in memory. Reflection participants showed better memory for positive information, especially if surprising. Overall, we found that a simple intervention—pausing to reflect while reading news—restored balance between positive and negative information in memory.
From Allostatic Load to Burnout: HPA Axis Dysregulation and the Invisibility of Aging in the Autism Spectrum – An Integrative Review
Jorgeane da Mota Trindade de Oliveira; Giovanna Castilho Davatz; Denise Aparecida Passarelli; Julio C. de Rose
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The increase in diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in adulthood and old age contrasts with the invisibility of these populations in neuroendocrine research. The continuous effort of social adaptation generates a severe allostatic load, impacting the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, whose stress level can be measured via salivary cortisol. To synthesize the available scientific knowledge on the evaluation of salivary cortisol in adults and older adults with ASD. This is an integrative review guided by the PRISMA protocol. Data sources included VHL, Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases (up to December 2024). The quality of the studies was assessed using the MMAT tool. Seven empirical studies were included (n=166). The findings indicate chronic dysregulation of the HPA axis in adult autism, marked by strong anticipatory stress in social evaluations as well as sleep impairments. The continuous wear and tear results in axis burnout and conditions of daytime hypocortisolism. However, technology-mediated interventions (robots and virtual reality) proved to be effective in reducing this reactivity due to the predictability of the environment. Methodologically, a profound lack of standardization was observed in sample collections and laboratory assays. Critical demographic biases were also identified: the samples are limited to young adults (up to 44 years old), predominantly white men (78%), and with preserved IQ. Salivary cortisol highlights the high biological cost of the autistic experience. Clinical advancement in the area requires laboratory standardization and the systematic inclusion of older adults, women, racial minorities, and individuals with higher support needs. Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder; Salivary Cortisol; HPA Axis; Aging; Physiological Stress.
Emotional memories are transmitted from parents to teens
Sagarika Devarayapuram Ramakrishnan; Yuanjie Ritz Liu; Vanessa Wang; Alexandra O. Cohen
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Emotional memories persist within individuals and over generations. Past research has examined functions of parent-child memory sharing, but little work has assessed how the emotional qualities of memories are transmitted from parent to child and whether emotion transmission relates to memory content transmission. An understanding of how emotional memories are transmitted may be particularly important during adolescence, a developmental period marked by heightened sensitivity to emotional information, increasing independence from caregivers, and the emergence of mental health symptoms. The current study investigated the intergenerational transmission of parents’ autobiographical emotional memories to their teen offspring in healthy dyads using behavioral measures and natural language processing tools. We found that emotional valence and arousal linked to parents’ memories are transmitted from parent to teen. Greater parent-teen agreement in valence ratings was associated with greater parent-teen overlap in both subjective vividness ratings and objective memory content of individual memories. Subjective memory transmission was modestly related to lower mental health symptoms in teens after accounting for parent symptoms. These findings demonstrate that parents’ emotional memories are transmitted to their teens and provide preliminary evidence that autobiographical emotional memory transmission from parents could be a protective factor for mental health in adolescence.
Developmental Language Disorder at Further and Higher Education: An audit of student support pages and perspectives from adults with DLD and educational professionals
Hannah Hobson; Hannah Ryan; Jana Aldawoud; Amanda Jayne Hickey
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Background & Aims: Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts 7% of children and is considered a lifelong condition, yet there is little research in how well DLD is understood in the context of further and higher education settings. Methods: In the present paper, we conducted an audit of UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) student support webpages to examine mentions of DLD, interviewed 11 professionals working in the HE/FE settings about their knowledge of DLD and how they believed DLD could impact students’ experiences, and interviewed two adults with DLD about their college and university experiences. Results: None of the 403 institutions’ webpages reviewed directly mentioned Developmental Language Disorder on their student facing support pages, and less than 0.5% mentioned difficulties that could describe a young person with DLD. Professionals interviewed were largely unaware of DLD, but felt the typical profile of a student with DLD would likely have implications for their learning and student experience. The adults with DLD reported significant impacts of their language needs on their educational experiences, including not only their attainment but also their mental health and wellbeing. Conclusions: Together, our findings highlight that knowledge of DLD is largely absent from UK universities and colleges, despite its significant impact on students’ experiences. Implications: In addition to increasing awareness and understanding of DLD in the HE/FE sectors, more work is urgently needed to improve diagnostic pathways for adults with DLD in order for them to access the support they are entitled to. Future work should also explore the success of Universal Design for Learning approaches for adults with DLD.
On Why Meta-dâ€Č May Not Go the Distance: Confidence Distance as a Calibration-Based Measure of Metacognition
Domenic Groh
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Meta-d' is widely used to quantify metacognitive sensitivity, but its interpretation depends on assumptions inherited from signal detection theory, including Gaussian evidence distributions and a unidimensional latent evidence axis. These assumptions are not guaranteed in many behavioral paradigms. The present paper examines how violations of these assumptions affect meta-d' and introduces Confidence Distance as a simple calibration-error measure of metacognitive confidence. Confidence Distance is defined as the mean absolute distance between trial-wise confidence and objective correctness, after mapping confidence ratings onto the unit interval. Across simulation studies, non-normal evidence distributions distorted meta-d'/d' even when metacognitive monitoring was ideal. Contrary to previous work, these distortions were not limited to underestimation, as heavy-tailed and light-tailed evidence inflated meta-d'/ d', whereas skewed evidence reduced it. Confidence Distance, by contrast, remained comparatively stable across distributional forms and increased monotonically when metacognitive noise was added. These findings suggest that meta-d' is likely to conflate metacognitive performance with distributional misspecification in applied research contexts, where its assumptions of Gaussian evidence and a unidimensional latent evidence axis are rarely guaranteed. Confidence Distance therefore offers a transparent and assumption-light index of confidence-accuracy calibration.
Reflexiones en torno a las emociones, el amor y la conciencia como proceso evolutivo de la supervivencia
Carlos Fernando Pantoja-Muñoz
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In society, it is fundamental to highlight the emergence of emotions in individuals, as they constitute an inherent part of human life. Therefore, romantic love operates as a complex emotion encompassing a diverse spectrum of psychological phenomena, ranging from desire, attachment, and intimacy to loyalty and commitment. In this framework, romantic love both in its initial and long-term phases is directly linked to dopamine-rich mesolimbic reward systems. Consequently, this critical review analyzes scientific literature across databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, Dialnet, and Redalyc to generate theoretical insights regarding love and its underlying structural dynamics. Finally, empirical evidence confirms that the human brain operates as a complex organ where interconnected macro-structural networks modulate attachment patterns and romantic relationships through a multi-system neurochemical regulation. Neuroimaging data demonstrates that falling in love floods the brain with massive dopamine surges while simultaneously inhibiting or silencing the neural networks responsible for critical judgment and social evaluation (BabkovĂĄ & RepiskĂĄ, 2025; Bode et al., 2026). Keywords: Emotions, love, relational dynamics, consciousness and society.
Autism, ADHD, and a Neurodevelopmental Spectrum in Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)
Alyssa Brooke Sasia; Quanfa He; Scott Feltman; Noa Schisterman; Hannah Singer; Catherine Lord; Brittany Travers; Roman Kotov; James Janford Li
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Autism frequently co-occurs with other mental health conditions, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) accounts for co-occurrence among mental health conditions by characterizing them using higher-order dimensions, instead of discrete categories. Yet, autism and related neurodevelopmental features are largely missing from HiTOP. We investigated factor analytic models of autism alongside broad psychopathology using Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge, which included autistic youths with sufficient data in preschool (ages 2-5; n=613), childhood (ages 6-11; n=2,703), and adolescence (ages 12-17; n=1,424). A neurodevelopmental spectrum distinct from other HiTOP spectra was identified, with narrower factors representing behavioral rigidity, executive dysregulation, motor, and social communication. The factor structure was consistent across groups, except executive dysregulation was not observed in preschool. Notably, ADHD items did not join the neurodevelopmental spectrum in preschool, loading on externalizing. Findings support inclusion of a neurodevelopmental spectrum in HiTOP. Scientific and clinical implications are discussed.
Embodied or virtually represented: Navigating the embodiment debate in human-robot interaction
Connor Esterwood; Xin Ye; Ruijia Guan; Lionel P. Robert
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The validity of virtually represented robots in HRI experiments depends on when, where, and for whom it matters.
Analyses of Naturalistic MEG Data using Multivariate Temporal Response Function Modeling: Findings from Time and Time-Frequency Investigations with Disambiguation and Memory Retrieval Metrics derived from a Transformer Language Model
Donald Dunagan
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Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used to probe cortical activity with millisecond-level temporal resolution. In the domains of psycho- and neurolinguistics, MEG data is classically analyzed in an event-related fashion following the presentation of carefully designed stimuli of different experimental conditions. While sentence comprehension is rarely given a second thought during our day-to-day lives, investigating such a phenomenon: 1) in a naturalistic manner; while 2) performing neuroimaging, involves particular technical methodology. This paper describes in detail the multivariate temporal response function modeling approach to analyzing naturalistic — e.g., in response to an audio storybook — MEG data from multiple different perspective including: 1) sensor vs. source space; 2) model comparison vs. analyzing individual predictor beta coefficients; 3) time domain vs. time-frequency domain; and 4) spatio-temporal cluster-based permutation testing vs. threshold-free cluster enhancement. Further, it does so focusing on word-by-word annotation metrics for two topical, well-established types of cognitive demand during sentence processing: 1) disambiguation — calculated as surprisal; and 2) memory retrieval — calculated as normalized attention entropy (NAE), both derived from GPT-2. While surprisal, NAE, and their interaction all pattern similarly in the time domain — correlating with bilateral temporal and temporoparietal activity ∌400–600 ms — in the time-frequency domain, surprisal and NAE are associated with a decrease in beta band power in the left superior temporal gyrus ∌600 ms, while their interaction is associated with an increase in theta band power in the left superior temporal gyrus ∌500 ms. These results affirm that surprisal indexes disambiguation during incremental sentence processing. More interesting, however, is the temporal overlap of effects for NAE and surprisal in the time domain, combined with the finding that NAE correlates with beta rather than theta band power. This paints a picture in which NAE — at least as derived as an aggregate metric over all final layer attention heads from GPT-2 — fails to index the hypothesized memory retrieval.
Learning to carve nature at its joints: the development of hierarchical event structures in perception and action
Tom Northrop; Andrew Tolmie; Sam Wass
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Adults have a semantically discretised, event-based perception of reality – such that events and goals are both hierarchically structured and have a beginning, middle and end. Here, we consider how we first develop the ability to parse reality hierarchically - as we learn, to use Plato’s phrase, to ‘carve nature at its joints’. Central to this process is the ability to make predictions on hierarchical timescales. We consider two aspects of predictability: first, the child’s passive capacity to use predictability to inform how they passively observe things as they happen; and second, children’s active capacity to generate predictable sequences of behaviour. We highlight two themes that are, we argue, common across both passive observation and active behaviour. First, flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) predictability initially increases over development – as shown for example by increases in perseveration – before decreasing as hierarchical predictability (i.e. nested, multi-level goals) increase. Second, for both observing and acting, learnt regularities in low-level environmental data (e.g., movement, contrast, over fine-grained timescales) feed into our internal predictions of higher-order events (e.g., goals, over more coarse-grained timescales).
Chimpanzees and Human Children Explore Unchosen Options
Hanna Schleihauf; Lou Marie Haux; Nika Ghavamizadeh; Julia Fischer; Jan Engelmann; Esther Herrmann
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Post-decisional information search is a behavioral indicator of epistemic curiosity, the intrinsic desire to acquire knowledge for its own sake. Under certain conditions, post-decisional information search can also reveal counterfactual curiosity—the drive to understand what might have occurred had a different choice been made. In two preregistered studies, we investigated whether chimpanzees and human children (a) engage in post-decisional information search, reflecting epistemic curiosity, and (b) whether their search increases under conditions reflecting counterfactual curiosity (when they had control over their decision or when the outcome of their choice was unfavorable). In Study 1, chimpanzees and children chose between two boxes containing hidden rewards and were then given the opportunity to peek into the unchosen box. Both chimpanzees and 4-to-5-year-old children engaged in post-decisional information search, with children's search increasing with age. Children also showed increased search following negative outcomes. In Study 2, participants chose between two accessible boxes while a third was inaccessible. After their choice, both chimpanzees and children preferred to peek into the remaining box that had been accessible to them. These findings provide the first comparative evidence that chimpanzees and children exhibit epistemic curiosity and, at least to some extent, counterfactual curiosity.
Is Limiting Social Media Use Feasible for Young Adults? A 4-Study Replication Failure of a Screen Time Reduction Intervention
Abigail Bradley; Yulia Gmiro; Alysha Stoakes; Zoe Meloff; Syed Jafar Hasan; Amy Heaslip; Andrea Howard
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Concerns about the impact of social media on young adult mental health persists despite weak and inconclusive empirical evidence. This study aimed to replicate a highly-cited study showing improved well-being after limiting time on social media (Hunt et al., 2018). Contrary to the original findings, instructing young adults to limit social media use to 30 or 60 minutes a day did not enhance well-being compared to those using it as usual. Three studies tested sources of heterogeneity in study instructions (e.g., limiting social media to real-life acquaintances) and individual differences (online anonymity; student status), with no evidence of impact on well-being over three weeks. A key problem was low adherence to time limits. A fourth study added daily reminders but close to 95% of participants still failed to adhere to social media time limits. The practicality of social media time limits as an intervention to enhance well-being is discussed.
Antagonism and Social Signaling: A Study of Coaxing under Cooperation Incentives
Timothy Allen; Michael N. Hallquist; Alison Schreiber; Laura Taglioni; Beatrice Langer; Alexandre Dombrovski
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Cooperation is generally viewed as prosocial, yet sometimes it can be used to benefit an individual at others’ expense. To understand the behavioral dynamics and dispositional roots of this phenomenon, we designed a multi-round modified trust game that allowed participants (trustees) to coax investors by sending cost-free cooperation signals that do not improve immediate payoffs but that plausibly encourage future investments. In both the original Prolific online sample of adults (n = 253) and a second, pre-registered replication sample (n = 488), participants selectively increased cooperative signaling when the cost to themselves was low and the influence on the investor, high. Exploitativeness, a facet of antagonism, positively predicted coaxing in Sample 1 and the combined sample, whereas callousness and aggression showed weaker, negative associations. Thus, cost- and outcome-sensitive cooperation may reflect an instrumental form of social behavior through which exploitative individuals use cooperative signals to shape others’ future choices.
The Illusion of Routine Knowledge: Time-Specific Expectations Weakly Predict Actual Behavior
Stephanie Aurora CĂĄrdenas; Rosalba Linares
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Metacognitive models suggest people often report as memories not only what they retrieve, but what seems plausible. Routine knowledge may inform plausibility judgments and help people reconstruct routine-consistent past events. But how often is the past routine? We examined prospective beliefs about time-specific routines, whether those beliefs matched reality, and whether people relied on them when reporting past behavior. We analyzed student and community samples (N = 207) from unreported longitudinal data (CĂĄrdenas et al., 2020). We compared 18,736 expected routines with 3,510 experience-sampled behaviors and 725 retrospective reports. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, participants expected routine events during 93% of waking-hour periods, but expectations fully matched behavior only 15% of the time and did not reliably predict alibi accuracy. Exploratory mediation showed that when expectations were wrong, expected typicality predicted lower recall accuracy through reliance on inaccurate routines. Routine knowledge may therefore provide a tempting but misleading basis for recall.
Integrated Cross-race Contact Scale
Christopher Mellinger; Balbir Singh; Joshua Correll
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Over the past 30 years, researchers have developed and used various face-valid questionnaires to measure cross-race contact. Many of these scales conceptualize contact differently, and few have been subjected to thorough psychometric evaluation. The present research combined items from frequently used scales and several new items in an effort to develop a more comprehensive, multi-faceted measure. With the aid of an exploratory factor analysis (Study 1), we developed a scale that measures overall contact but also allows for distinct factors including individuated contact, intimate contact, friendships, and casual social contact. We conducted confirmatory (Studies 2a, 2b, 2c) factor analyses providing evidence of psychometric validity. A test of predictive validity (Study 3) suggests that the scale is related to deficits in cross-race face recognition, congruent with theory.
Network Accuracy Across Levels of Analysis Using Stochastic Block Models
Alexander P. Christensen; Jeongwon Choi
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Researchers apply network psychometric methods across many levels of analysis—from understanding causal pathways (edges) and variable importance (centrality) to uncovering dimensionality (community) and group differences (network similarity). The validity of inferences at each level depends on the accuracy of network estimation methods, yet simulation studies have focused almost exclusively on edge recovery using data generating mechanisms that lack known community structures. In this large-scale simulation study, we evaluated four network estimation methods (EBICglasso variants, ggmModSelect, GGMncv, GGMnonreg) across four levels of analysis using Stochastic Block Models with empirically-informed edge weight distributions derived from 293 empirical networks in psychology. For most levels, large samples (≄ 1,000) were necessary for adequate recovery, echoing concerns about sufficient evidence for inferences drawn by many published studies. The EBICglasso variants outperformed the other methods in smaller samples (≀ 1,000) and dichotomous data, though, these conditions demonstrated inadequate recovery across methods (including EBICglasso). Most methods achieved adequate accuracy in larger samples (≄ 2,500) and continuous data. Centrality accuracy varied substantially: network loadings were reliably recovered across all conditions whereas bridge strength was unreliable even under ideal conditions. For node and bridge strength, we recommend reporting raw values rather than rankings, as rank-order recovery required substantially larger samples. We also established interpretation benchmarks for network similarity metrics (sF and Jensen-Shannon Similarity) and found community detection to be robust except under challenging conditions (small samples and dichotomous data). Collectively, these findings provide concrete, level-specific guidance for method and measure selection based on sample size and data categories.
“How Do You Feel?” Direct Valence Measurement Enables the Detection of Affect Shift Dynamics as Powerful Predictors of Psychological Well-Being
Carmen Goicoechea; Pandelis Perakakis
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Valence is central to affective experience yet remains poorly operationalized in emotion science. Most research infers valence by categorizing discrete emotions as positive or negative, which may conflate distinct aspects of emotional experience. On the other hand, direct bipolar valence measurement—asking individuals "How do you feel?" on a continuum from negative to positive—allows participants to integrate contextual complexity into their affective reports. Critically, this approach also enables the detection and quantification of transitions between positive and negative affective states, opening new possibilities for studying affect dynamics. We tested whether metrics quantifying these directional transitions predict psychological well-being more effectively than traditional intensity-based measures. Across three ecological momentary assessment datasets with 345 participants and over 30,000 assessments, the positive to negative affect shift ratio—quantifying the propensity to transition from positive to negative affect—showed stronger predictive associations with well-being outcomes than means and standard deviations derived from the same valence scale. This pattern persisted across LASSO regression, hierarchical regression, and relative importance analyses, and remained robust even with only 3 daily assessments. These findings demonstrate that direct valence measurement offers both theoretical advantages by respecting participant-integrated experience and empirical advantages by enabling more predictive dynamics metrics, while remaining practical for clinical applications.
Predicting Memberships from Memory.
Luigi Grisoni
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Neural representations are mappings between target variables and patterns of neural activity. A challenge is to specify what the brain represents, how representational content is selected, and which constraints guide neural dynamics. Predictive processing has provided a powerful framework in different cognitive domains in terms of generative models and error signalling. However, its breadth also leaves open important questions about the content, level, and scope of predictions. Here, Hypotheses of Membership (HoM) as a complementary framework for constraining representational interpretation is introduced. HoM treats the relevant hidden structure not primarily as object-level causes, but as relational laws that specify how primitives belong to larger configurations. On this view, representations are structured membership relations among features, functions, and context-dependent sets. Prediction emerges when learned membership relations make some continuations, features, or representational states more admissible than others. This perspective helps clarify why predictive activity may be selective and level-contingent rather than necessarily involving a uniform top-down cascade across all levels. HoM offers a way to reinterpret neural signals, in terms of formation, refinement, and resolution of membership structures. Overall, HoM links neural representation, memory, and prediction, and reframes prediction as the dynamic organisation of primitives into context-sensitive structures of belonging.
Perturbing postural stability affects acoustic properties but not fluency of adult speech production during face-to-face interaction
Mingtong Li; Jiahao Yang; Susanne Fuchs; Suzanne Aussems
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Physical constraints, particularly those that challenge postural stability and control, may measurably influence speech production. This experimental study investigated how increased postural stability demands affect adults’ speech production during an interactive word-guessing game. One hundred and eighteen adults (59 pairs) played a game of Taboo while standing either on a stable surface (the ground) or an unstable surface (a wobble board), with the latter increasing demands on postural stability. Participants alternated between the roles of clue-giver and guesser; analyses focused exclusively on speech produced by clue-givers, who were instructed to describe target words (e.g., coffee) while avoiding five conceptually related Taboo words (e.g., latte, drink, morning, beans, caffeine). Acoustic analyses revealed that when clue-givers described target words to guessers while standing on an unstable surface, they produced speech with higher fundamental frequency (f0) and higher amplitude envelope, compared to the stable surface. In contrast, analyses of fluency measures, which included speech rate, pause duration, pause frequency, and filler particle frequency, showed no notable differences between conditions. Perturbing postural stability thus affects the acoustics but not the fluency of speech production.
Learning to carve nature at its joints: the development of hierarchical event structures in perception and action
Tom Northrop; Andrew Tolmie; Sam Wass
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Adults have a semantically discretised, event-based perception of reality – such that events and goals are both hierarchically structured and have a beginning, middle and end. Here, we consider how we first develop the ability to parse reality hierarchically - as we learn, to use Plato’s phrase, to ‘carve nature at its joints’. Central to this process is the ability to make predictions on hierarchical timescales. We consider two aspects of predictability: first, the child’s passive capacity to use predictability to inform how they passively observe things as they happen; and second, children’s active capacity to generate predictable sequences of behaviour. We highlight two themes that are, we argue, common across both passive observation and active behaviour. First, flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) predictability initially increases over development – as shown for example by increases in perseveration – before decreasing as hierarchical predictability (i.e. nested, multi-level goals) increase. Second, for both observing and acting, learnt regularities in low-level environmental data (e.g., movement, contrast, over fine-grained timescales) feed into our internal predictions of higher-order events (e.g., goals, over more coarse-grained timescales).
Imputing Partial Meta-Analytic Correlation Matrices: A Calibrated Bayesian Framework for Stage-2 Structural Equation Modeling
Hadi Fariborzi; Piers Steel
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Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) allows researchers to test theoretical models against accumulated correlational evidence, yet Stage-2 SEM requires a complete positive-definite pooled correlation matrix that primary studies rarely provide. Existing approaches to missing meta-analytic correlations often yield single filled values, restrict uncertainty handling to a specific estimation framework, or depend on assumptions that can miscalibrate inference under realistic matrix structures. We introduce MICA, Matrix Imputation with Calibrated Anchors, a Bayesian framework for completing partial meta-analytic correlation matrices while preserving positive definiteness and reporting cell-level uncertainty. MICA combines anchor-regression diagnostics, deterministic positive-definite initialization, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling on a Cholesky-factored correlation matrix, LKJ priors, regression-bound priors for missing cells, and per-cell triage that separates reportable credible intervals from flagged point estimates. Across 1,695 simulated matrices and five updated real meta-analytic matrices, MICA improves imputed-cell RMSE relative to deterministic and naive baselines when observed correlations contain meaningful heterogeneity, while identifying near-homogeneous matrices where pairwise mean remains competitive. Real-data calibration analyses show that interval reliability varies by cell and matrix structure, motivating decision rules based on observed correlation heterogeneity and bimodality. A Stage-2 demonstration on an updated procrastination matrix shows that MICA enables otherwise infeasible path models, changes conclusions relative to deterministic filling, and identifies paths limited by imputation uncertainty. MICA provides a portable, positive-definite, uncertainty-aware imputation framework, implemented in the open-source R package MICA, and helps researchers avoid overconfident Stage-2 inferences when theoretical claims depend on only partially observed correlations. Code, data, and reproducibility materials are available at https://osf.io/4563t/?view_only=8604a34413a04f01ba4985063e07a699.
Cognitive Control and Internal Strategies in Aging
Coline Grégoire; Lina Guerrero; Laurence Taconnat
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Control processes can be considered a cognitive resource that supports efficient memory functioning. They are primarily involved in the strategic aspects of memory. In the present study, we aimed to examine the role of both control processes and strategy use in the memory performance of older adults. More specifically, we sought to determine whether the influence of control processes on memory performance is better explained by a mediation or a moderation model involving strategy use. To precisely determine whether this relationship is better explained by a mediator or a moderator model, we used the precision and robustness of Bayesian process modeling to better understand these effects. We tested over 92 participants with cognitive control tasks (Stroop, 2-back), a metamemory questionnaire (MIA), and an episodic recall task. Bayesian analyses indicated that the mediation model provided the best fit to explain the contribution of internal strategy use to the relationship between control processes and memory performance. These findings suggest that control strategy use constitutes a key functional component linking cognitive control to memory outcomes. Overall, the results highlight the importance of cognitive control in supporting effective memory strategy use and suggest that interventions targeting cognitive control may help improve memory performance in aging populations.
“It’s like they can only see the front cover of me”. A qualitative investigation into the experiences of camouflaging by children with Developmental Language Disorder.
Hannah Hobson; Kate Kempton; Bailey House; Michelle St Clair
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Background: Previous research on camouflaging in Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) indicates children and young people may adopt behaviours to minimise the visibility of their language difficulties. However first-hand accounts of camouflaging in DLD are absent from the research. Aims: This project aimed to explore the experiences of children with DLD with regards to camouflaging. Methods & Procedures: Seven children with DLD conducted semi-structured interviews, exploring what camouflaging behaviours they did, and how they felt about camouflaging. Outcomes & Results: Via thematic analysis, three themes were derived; “Why people don’t see me”, “I don’t want my DLD to be seen”, and “Being seen versus being understood”. Our results highlight the varied presentation of camouflaging behaviours, and that not all young people feel they camouflage their DLD. Camouflaging was itself motivated by shame, but it also led to other negative emotions including guilt. Our interviews highlighted a gap between being seen with DLD and having one’s DLD understood, bringing into focus the lack of safety young people with DLD feel disclosing their condition or letting their language differences show. Conclusions & Implications: This work suggests that improving meaningful knowledge and understanding of DLD will be the best strategy for creating environments in which young people with DLD do not feel the need to camouflage their needs.
Linking Stress to Games: Predicting Korean Adolescents’ Gaming Behaviors from Different Sources of Stress
Shinyi Kang; Tobias Dienlin
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The relationship between gaming and stress has been examined, but little is known regarding how different types of gaming behavior are predicted by specific sources of stress. Using 2021 cross-sectional survey data from 5,104 South Korean adolescents, this study examines whether gaming frequency is explained by different stress sources than problematic gaming, specifically parent-related, friend-related, and academic stress, and whether these associations vary by sex. Findings from structural equation modeling revealed nuanced dynamics between the two gaming behaviors and three sources of stress. Gaming frequency was positively associated with parents-related stress, not related to friends-related stress, and negatively explained by academic stress. In contrast, problematic gaming was positively predicted by both parents-related stress and friends-related stress, and by academic stress for male adolescents only. These findings underscore the need for a layered, multifaceted approach to research and intervention on gaming.
The Reading Brain from Womb to Classroom: Typical and Atypical Development and Implications for a Preventative Education Model
Nadine Gaab; Ted Turesky
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Learning to read is a process and milestone with far‑reaching implications for education, vocation, and health. Most models and empirical studies of reading development, however, focus on school entry and often limit potential influences to children’s oral language and print-based skills. In contrast, a smaller corpus of behavioral, genetic, environmental, and neuroimaging research strongly suggests that reading development begins far earlier, in utero. This article first reviews major theoretical frameworks of reading development and synthesizes studies demonstrating that lower-order oral language and cognitive skills necessary for higher-order reading skills (e.g., reading comprehension) begin emerging during the perinatal period. It then characterizes the development of the “reading brain,” starting with regions involved in proficient reading and proceeding to neuroimaging work suggesting that the perinatal brain may already be equipped with a neural scaffold that supports reading development. Although brain scans are not suitable for identifying individual children at risk, they can inform accurate developmental, multifactorial models of reading that, in turn, can better guide preventive educational practices.
Questionable prospective effects between meaning in life and ostracism: A comment on Zhang et al. (2026)
Kimmo Sorjonen; Bo Melin; Marika Melin
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Recently, Zhang et al. concluded decreasing prospective effects between meaning in life and ostracism based on findings from the cross-lagged panel model (CLPM). However, it is well known that effects in the CLPM may be spurious. Here, we fitted alternative models to data and found discrepant decreasing, increasing, and null effects of meaning in life on subsequent change in ostracism, and vice versa, depending on the analyzed model. Hence, we conclude that the findings by Zhang et al. may have been spurious and their conclusions premature. It is important to bear in mind that correlations, including cross-lagged effects, may be spurious in order not to overinterpret findings. We recommend, in line with multiverse methodology, researchers to fit alternative models to data and to base conclusions on an aggregation of findings.
Examining the Relations Between Self-Construal, Culture, and Cognitive Dissonance Using the Induced-Compliance Paradigm
Tim Figureau; Daniel Priolo; Willem W. A. Sleegers; Kenneth G DeMarree; Omid Ghasemi; AmĂ©lie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe; Maxime Mauduy; Asil Ali Özdoğru; Robert M Ross; BjĂžrn SĂŠtrevik
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Cognitive dissonance, traditionally conceptualized as a fundamental psychological process involving discomfort from inconsistent cognitions, may vary across cultures. These variations could be attributed to self-construal, or how individuals define themselves in relation to others. While previous cross-cultural research has predominantly used the free-choice paradigm, significant concerns have been raised regarding its procedural validity and the robustness of its findings. To address this issue, this registered report presents secondary analyses of a large-scale international dataset. We investigated the moderating role of cultural variables on dissonance effects within the induced-compliance paradigm across 18 countries (N = 3,804). We hypothesised that dissonance effects would be stronger for participants with higher individual-level self-construal scores (H1), in more individualistic countries (H2), and in countries with higher country-level self-construal scores (H3). Our results did not support these hypotheses, suggesting that cultural moderation may not generalize to the induced-compliance paradigm. We discuss the necessity of reassessing the procedure's reliability and clarifying the theoretical role of choice.
Individual variability reveals multiple cognitive routes to abstract concept learning
Weiyi Li; Xiaoqing Li; Gangyi Feng
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Why do some learners acquire new abstract concepts more successfully than others? We tested whether individual differences in abstract concept learning are best explained by domain-general cognitive ability or by specific learning systems. Adults learned scientific concepts from literal or figurative explanations in an eye-tracking study. Learning outcomes were assessed immediately and after a delay; drift-diffusion modeling was used to estimate efficiency in concept retrieval. Participants also completed a cognitive battery. General cognitive ability predicted learning across instructional formats and test stages. Declarative learning supported immediate performance following literal explanations, whereas both declarative and procedural learning showed instruction-dependent associations with the post-test decision threshold following figurative instruction. These abilities also moderated how online activation of figurative-related and prior-knowledge cues translated into later concept-retrieval performance. These findings show that abstract concept learning reflects multiple cognitive routes, and instructional effectiveness depends on the match between learner profile, instruction format, and learning route.
A review on school-based interventions for mental health impacts of climate change
Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor; Cybele Dey; Dean Kelly; Calita Murray; Chloe Watfern; Teaghan Hogg
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Climate change threatens the mental health of school children. School-based programs may help protect or improve students’ mental health in the face of these challenges. Using a combination of Indigenous and Western methodologies, we conducted a scoping review of the best available evidence on schools-based programs that address the mental health impacts of climate change. We found no evidence that such programs cause adverse mental health or other harmful outcomes; studies reported either no significant change or improvement in mental health outcomes. Programs associated with improved mental health outcomes included those that connected students to land, skies and waterways (Country), incorporated time in nature under the guidance of First Nations’ Elders or teachers, were delivered over longer periods of time (months to years), and embedded First Nations’ cultural knowledge throughout. Training and support for teachers emerged as a priority for strengthening program delivery and effectiveness. Further research is needed to identify the most effective program types and quantify their impacts. Overall, school-based programs show promise as a scalable approach to support students’ mental health in the face of climate change, and a pilot study co-designed with First Nations’ knowledge bearers is a crucial next step.
Cross-cultural similarities in music-evoked emotions: evidence for a common three-factor structure
Anastasios Mavrolampados; Deniz Duman; Iballa Burunat; Martin Hartmann; Margarida Baltazar; Petri Toiviainen; Nerdinga Snape; Pedro Neto; Adele Simon; Ruijiao Dai
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Music is a powerful elicitor of emotions, yet existing research overwhelmingly depends on samples from few Western countries and cross-cultural studies are rare. This study investigated cross-cultural similarities in music-evoked emotions and conducted a large-scale online data collection in 11 languages and 13 countries: Argentina, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US. The 2155 participants reported the emotions experienced in relation to a self-selected piece of personally meaningful music. To ensure cross-linguistic semantic equivalence, emotion terms were translated and evaluated using systematic procedures. Reliability analyses revealed 33 emotions with high cross-linguistic consistency. These terms were used to construct a general model of music-evoked emotions based on balanced subsamples (N = 840), to equalise each country’s contribution. Results showed a preference for positive experiences, although some negatively valenced emotions such as sadness, pain, and vulnerability were also present. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a shared three-factor solution which could be broadly interpreted in terms of valence and arousal. Comparisons between this general model and country-specific models showed high similarity, indicating that the identified structure generalised well across cultures. Findings suggest that music-evoked emotional experiences share common underlying patterns across cultures, while also remaining sensitive to cultural variation. The study has important methodological implications for the applicability of certain emotion terms and models cross-culturally. It provides a set of validated emotion translations and a resulting model, which are valuable contributions to ongoing efforts for developing robust measurement methods in music and emotion research.
Sociodemographic and individual risk factors for traumatic brain injury in UK Biobank (N=500,035)
Abdulaziz Alabdulsalam; Sarah West; Laura Lyall; Claire Hastie; Jordan Canning; Katie Robertson; Rona J. Strawbridge; Simon R. Cox; Jonathan Evans; William Stewart
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Importance: Much research investigates sequelae arising from traumatic brain injury (TBI), however few studies investigate risk factors for TBI in the first instance. This could have implications for representativeness, risk mitigation and prevention. Objectives: Test for associations between multiple sociodemographic and individual difference variables, and their interaction with sex, on risk of subsequent incident TBI. Design, setting and participants: General population prospective cohort, UK Biobank. Main outcomes and measures: Baseline lifestyle, cognitive, personality and sociodemographic variables versus risk of later TBI, ascertained via ICD-10 codes. We used Cox regressions, and tested 11 predictors individually, then adjusted for baseline age and sex, then combined in one multivariable model. Results: After exclusions, 5764/500,035 (1.15%) participants recorded a TBI over median 14 years follow-up. Most predictors were individually associated with increased risk of TBI in expected directions. The largest associations were for male sex (versus female; hazard ratio [HR] = 1.56, 95% confidence intervals [CIs] = 1.48-1.65) and self-reported ‘risk-taker’ status (HR = 1.28, 95 CIs = 1.21-1.36). These remained significant in multivariable regressions. There was significant interaction between educational attainment and sex, where degree possession (versus not) was protective in males only (HR = 0.76, 95% CIs = 0.70-0.82, all P <0.001). Conclusion and relevance: Prominent risk factors for TBI include male sex and identifying as a ‘risk-taker’. Higher educational attainment was protective in males. Studies comparing TBI cases versus controls routinely underestimate premorbid group differences. These findings represent targetable opportunities for public health intervention.
Case alignment shapes speech production: Evidence from simultaneous Basque-Spanish bilinguals
Pavlina Heinzova; Manuel Carreiras; Simona Mancini
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Verbs with a greater number of arguments (transitives vs. intransitives) or non-canonical argument mapping (unaccusatives vs. unergatives) incur greater processing costs (Thompson & Meltzer-Asscher, 2014). Basque—an ergative-absolutive language—assigns ergative case to subjects of unergative and transitive but not unaccusative verbs. As Basque case marking differs from Spanish—a nominative-accusative language where subjects receive nominative case—we hypothesised that the two languages would impose different processing demands for these verb groups. Forty neurotypical simultaneous Basque–Spanish bilinguals were tested on unergative, unaccusative, and transitive verbs through tasks targeting lexical, sentence, and connected-speech production. In line with our predictions, Spanish unaccusatives showed higher lexical-level processing costs, while transitives incurred more sentence-level errors, reflecting the influence of argument mapping and number. Basque unergatives elicited elevated sentence-level speech onset latencies, implying that ergative case marking in unergative verbs increases their sentence-processing cost. These findings demonstrate that case alignment shapes argument-structure processing.
Mental Health Across the Care Continuum: A Review and Technology-Powered Reference Standard
Matthew J Vowels; Hank Capps; Kathryn Erickson-Ridout; Laura Marika Vowels; Ish Bhalla; Carol Alter; Philip D. Harvey; Charles Nemeroff
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Background: Mental health systems globally face persistent structural failures in identification, assessment, treatment access, continuity of care, and evidence integration. Most individuals requiring care are never identified or are identified years after disorder onset, while diagnostic accuracy and treatment pathways remain inconsistent across settings. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence and digital mental health technologies are rapidly proliferating without standardized governance, validation, interoperability, or evidence-traceability frameworks. Objective: To propose a vendor-neutral integrated mental health assessment infrastructure specification defining the core capabilities technology-enabled mental health systems should support across the continuum of care. Methods: This work synthesizes evidence and operational requirements across 21 symptom and disorder domains, including depression, anxiety, psychotic-spectrum disorders, suicidality, substance use, eating disorders, neurodevelopmental conditions, and interpersonal functioning. The review additionally evaluates 17 assessment strategies across more than 30 implementation and validity dimensions, treatment pathways, reimbursement structures, and 16 care settings spanning primary care, specialty psychiatry, emergency medicine, inpatient care, telehealth, and correctional systems. Results: We define a reference standard for integrated mental health assessment systems encompassing: (1) structured multi-domain assessment with dynamically administered questionnaires; (2) longitudinal measurement-based reassessment and symptom tracking; (3) real-time risk detection and safety escalation; (4) evidence-based clinical decision support with transparent and traceable evidence sources; (5) navigation of care delivery and continuity across transitions; (6) Electronic Health Record interoperability with auditability; and (7) a governed evidence layer supporting continuous re-validation of instruments, guidelines, and predictive systems using real-world deployment data. The proposed framework integrates digital self-report, structured assessment, clinical guidance, and workflow-aware implementation while addressing constraints relating to scalability, patient safety, reimbursement, operational logistics, and clinical validity. Conclusions: A standardized, interoperable infrastructure for mental health assessment may improve systematic identification, clinical decision-making, continuity of care, and deployment governance for digital and AI-enabled systems. The proposed specification provides a scalable foundation for integrating evidence-based assessment and measurement-based care across heterogeneous clinical environments while enabling continuous evaluation and updating of the underlying evidence base.
Leveraging Agency for Climate Change Mitigation
Charlotte Anna Kukowski; Kristian Steensen Nielsen; Swen J. KĂŒhne; Clover Hogan; Sander van der Linden; Lorraine Whitmarsh; Grit Zwingenberger; Felix Creutzig; Kimberly Nicholas
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Climate discourse often pits individual behaviour against systemic change, reinforcing a false binary that obscures key leverage points for mitigation. This Comment introduces the agency frame (a-frame), a strategic framework that reconceptualizes behaviour as embedded in, and constitutive of, systems. Rather than focusing narrowly on consumer actions or relying solely on structural interventions, the a-frame highlights how individuals, acting within roles such as citizen, professional, investor, consumer, and role model, can influence institutions, norms, and infrastructure. We propose three priorities for behaviourally informed intervention design: (1) map behaviour by social role and institutional leverage; (2) prioritize high-impact, high-agency behaviours; and (3) map and expand agency by targeting those with the greatest influence and increasing agency for those who are constrained. This approach equips behavioural researchers and policymakers with a practical, equity-informed lens to design more impactful, context-sensitive interventions, clarifying how role-based agency can serve as a bridge between individual action and structural transformation.
Conceptualising Environ-Mental Health: A Socio-Ecological Framework for Mental Health and Wellbeing Amidst Climate Change - Protocol for Framework Development using a Multi-Scoping Umbrella Review
Sunny N Nguyen; Hasini Gunasiri; Yan Zhang; Samantha Julia Legaspi Eala; Emma Lawrance; Neerja Singh; Jana Menssink; Rebecca Patrick; Caroline X. Gao
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Objective: The objective of this framework development process is to conceptualise how individual, relational, and environmental interactions related to climate change mechanistically influence population mental health. Introduction: The psychological toll of climate change on human populations, especially younger generations, manifests through a broad spectrum of interconnected and mechanistically complex emotional, cognitive, physiological, and behavioural responses. Environ-Mental Health is a strengths-based framework that conceptualises mental health not merely as an individual psychological state, but as a socially and environmentally embedded capacity to flourish and feel connected, resilient and empowered through positive relationships with nature and community. Methods: The framework development methodology will define potential domains informed by existing literature, epidemiological studies, and 4L experience. A multi-scoping umbrella review will then be conducted to further explore, conceptualise and refine these domains. Guided by the Participants, Concept, and Context (PCC framework), the multi-scoping review of reviews will include English-language secondary reviews of academic literature that explore mental health and wellbeing, climate change, and one of the five domains: Self-Efficacy and Behavioural Responses, Climate Emotions, Connection to Nature, Arts & Creative Expression, and Resilience. Non-secondary articles that are not peer-reviewed are excluded. The review will search ProQuest, OVID, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCOHost and Annual Reviews. Reflexive thematic analyses will be conducted using NVivo. The multi-scoping review of reviews will yield five domain-specific frameworks and one meta-framework exploring how climate-related mental health is influenced by people's relationships and interactions with their surrounding environment – with attention drawn to young people.
Evaluation in early visual processing – evidence from deep neural networks
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanchei; InĂšs Mentec; Axel Cleeremans
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An important question in affective science is whether valence assignment, i.e., evaluating a perceived object as positive or negative, occurs after perception or whether it is intrinsic to it. Recent theories propose that valence assignment, or simply evaluation, may be embedded within conscious perception. To test this idea, we combined deep neural network (DNN) modeling with representational similarity analysis (RSA) to identify which levels of visual processing contribute to valence assignment. To measure valence, we used a “Birthday” task in which participants selected or rejected one of three emotionally neutral everyday objects (e.g., cups, lamps) as a birthday gift. We presented the task under varying instructions: no additional instruction, utility-based, aesthetic-based, and under time pressure (choice deadline of 0.8 s from the stimulus onset). Perceived valence distances between objects were captured as representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) and compared with DNN activation distances across layers. Across conditions, valence distances correlated with differences in the first DNN layer, reflecting low-level visual processing. However, this relationship could not be explained by individual features such as contrast or luminance, implying a more integrative perceptual basis. When choices involved objects from distinct categories, valence judgments primarily reflected perceived utility, yet aesthetic instructions biased them toward similar visual computations. These findings indicate that valence assignment is partially built into perceptual processing, with higher-level task demands flexibly shaping its expression. This supports a view of conscious perception as inherently valenced, yet context sensitive.
Multi-SimPsychometrican: Using LLMs Supplement Achievement Test Items based on Wright Map to Improve Measurement Precision
Peida Zhan
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to create educational content and assessment materials. However, it is still unclear whether they can use psychometric evidence to improve an existing test, rather than only generate new items. This proof-of-concept study examined whether Multi-SimPsychometrican, a multi-agent LLM workflow, could use a Wright map to supplement achievement test items and improve measurement precision. Four agents worked in sequence. The Item-Generation-Agent created an initial multiple-choice test on linear equations in one variable. The Response-Generation-Agent simulated responses from virtual students. The Data-Analysis-Agent fitted an item response theory (IRT) model and produced item difficulties, ability estimates, a Wright map, and test information. The Item-Supplementary-Agent then generated new items for the difficulty gap shown in the Wright map. The results showed that the workflow identified the underrepresented difficulty range and generated items that filled this gap. After adding the supplementary items, test information increased and the conditional standard error of measurement decreased, especially at ability levels that were poorly covered by the initial test. These findings suggest that LLMs can be used as psychometrically guided item-generation assistants when they are embedded in a multi-agent workflow that includes IRT analysis and Wright map feedback.
Mental health outcomes in young adolescents born preterm reveal the need for earlier screening
Emilia Greif; Frederike Schröpfer; Jekaterina Dudko; Leonie Göbel; Rabea KĂŒhl; Katharina Roese; Michael Lipp; Jonas Obleser; Wolfgang Göpel; Stefan Borgwardt
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Early adolescence marks a critical period for the onset of psychiatric symptoms, with 50% of mental disorders emerging before age 18. Recent evidence points to individuals being born preterm and/or with low birth weight (henceforth, PTB) having an increased risk of developing mental disorders in adolescence. Surprisingly, existing early detection and intervention strategies in adolescence are not tailored to PTB needs and profiles. The previous use of several disorder- specific instruments complicates unified, efficient screening. Thus, here we characterised mental health profiles of 10–14-year-old PTB adolescents while testing the applicability of the widely used Diagnostic System for mental disorders for children and adolescents – III (DISYPS– III). We collected data on the frequency of experiencing mental health challenges from 225 young adolescents (M=12.03 years) from the longitudinal German Neonatal Network (GNN) who were born very preterm and/or light (M=28.03 weeks, M=999.62 g) using the DISYPS–III screening questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis replicated the DISYPS–III’ factorial structure and internal consistency for 10-14-year-old PTB adolescents. Overall, PTB adolescents reported significantly more mental health challenges than the DISYPS–III community norm sample. Results also replicated specific findings of mental health challenges from other PTB cohorts and countries, such as a higher number of comorbidities in adolescents diagnosed with ADD than ADHD. These findings of an elevated psychological burden suggest a need for structured PTB screening of long-term mental health outcomes in adolescence that include 10-year-old PTB individuals; with the DISYPS–III being a suitable screening instrument.
Empirically derived cut-scores for the Organisational Health Improvement Questionnaire-Core (OHIQ-Core): A split-sample validation study in a UK working population
Jason Spendelow
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Objective. Brief organisational psychological health tools are used with increasing frequency to facilitate staff wellbeing decision making but often lack empirically derived decision thresholds. The current study derived and cross-validated cut-scores for the Organisational Health Improvement Questionnaire-Core (OHIQ-Core) against WHO-5 wellbeing thresholds in a UK working population. Methods. The study sample consisted of 1,543 working adults pooled across two independent validation samples (S1, n = 504; S2, n = 1,039). Cut points for the OHIQ-Core Total, Organisational Support, and Work Design scales were derived in S1 by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis against WHO-5 reduced wellbeing (≀ 50) and significant wellbeing risk (≀ 28). Next, four cut-point optimisation methods were compared (Youden index, closest-to-top-left, fixed sensitivity 80%, fixed specificity 80%). Youden cut-points derived in S1 were applied to the S2 sample, with cross-sample AUC stability evaluated using DeLong’s method. Results. OHIQ-Core total discriminated reduced wellbeing (AUC = .79 in derivation, .79 in validation), with no detectable AUC difference between samples (DeLong p > .50 across all predictor-outcome combinations). Recommended Youden cut-points were OHIQ-Core total ≀ 39/56; Organisational Support ≀ 27/40 (severity ≀ 25/40); Work Design ≀ 12/16. Organisational Support discriminated wellbeing risk more strongly than Work Design (AUC .79 vs .72). Pooled UK flagging prevalence at the OHIQ-Core total cut-point was 38.6%, highest in Education and Healthcare and lowest in IT/Telecoms. Conclusions. The OHIQ-Core yielded good, cross-sample-stable discrimination of wellbeing risk. The derived cut-scores can inform organisational decision-making on wellbeing resource allocation, with the differential discrimination pattern providing guidance on the appropriate focus for intervention.
Effect of face inversion on inhibition processes in people with Down syndrome
María Sotillo Mendez; Raquel Baeza; Elena Palomino; José M. López-Frutos
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Introduction. Interference processes affect working memory (WM) functioning, especially when the maintenance load increases. Furthermore, the type of stimulus processed also modulates performance, with better performance observed for faces compared to non-social stimuli and inverted faces. Thus, the face inversion effect (FIE) creates greater difficulties in recognition tasks. However, populations with intellectual disabilities show a reduced or absent FIE. The main objective of this study is to analyze how facial stimulus position, interference level, and maintenance load affect performance in a WM task in people with Down syndrome (DS). Method. Participants included 36 individuals with DS and 36 individuals with neurotypical development (ND), matched by age, gender and hand dominance. A delayed visual recognition experimental task was administered, combining maintenance load (low/high), interference (no interference/with interference), and facial position (upright/inverted). Results. The DS group showed lower performance than the ND group across all conditions. Main effects of load, interference and position were observed, with better performance in low-load, no-interference and upright position conditions. The ND group exhibited a FIE, whereas the DS group did not show a stable pattern of this effect. Conclusions. The findings evidence atypical facial processing in people with DS. Furthermore, they suggest differences between groups in interference management and cognitive resources when facing distinct demands of load and facial processing.
Investigating the Perceived Unpredictability of Artificial Intelligence: The Role of Temperature and Pre-Prompting
Oliver Lack; William Xiang Quan Ngiam; Carolyn Semmler
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With the growing prevalence of systems that use generative models, understanding how humans perceive these systems is of utmost importance. AI systems are widely characterised as “unpredictable,” potentially eroding user trust, safety, and reliable adoption. Developers routinely tune the temperature hyperparameter of foundation models to manage this risk. It is unclear how the temperature hyperparameter and pre-prompt influence the unpredictability of Foundation Models (FM). This study examined human-AI interactions within a novel experimental context. 141 participants were randomly assigned to varying temperature or pre-prompted conditions across OpenAI and Anthropic models to complete a Wordgame Task using a generalisable AI interface. Results revealed that temperature robustly modulates objective metrics related to unpredictability, such as perplexity and information entropy of output. Contrary to pre-registered hypotheses, human-rated unpredictability was not influenced by temperature. However, manipulating pre-prompt settings yielded strong, convergent relationships between both human-rated unpredictability and other unpredictability metrics across models. Post-hoc generation of FM unpredictability ratings captured statistical regularities with human ratings but revealed more nuanced mapping to the objective predictability of interaction output. Overall, backend prompt engineering is an effective method for shaping human perceptions of AI predictability, not temperature.
Concerning harm/benefit ratio of escitalopram for pediatric generalized anxiety disorder. A critical viewpoint on the evidence and approval process
Martin Plöderl; Mark Horowitz; Florian Naudet; John Warren; Joanna Moncrieff
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In this commentary we review the recent approval of escitalopram for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in children and adolescents. We critically discuss the FDA approval document and the approval trial. In the approval trial, efficacy was not clinically meaningful, statistical significance uncertain, and there were significantly more adverse events with escitalopram than with placebo. Relative to placebo, children and adolescents exposed to escitalopram were more likely to become suicidal than to experience a clinically relevant improvement in anxiety. Overall, the harm/benefit ratio seems problematic for escitalopram for pediatric GAD.
Friendship Accuracy Varies with Emotional Normativity and Predicts Social Wellbeing
Helen Schmidt; Emma Moughan; Emily B. Falk; Chelsea Helion
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Social connection is important for physical and mental health across the lifespan. Friendships are a critical source of social connection that rely on effective interpersonal support. Emotion categories (e.g., happiness, disgust) serve to efficiently communicate internal states to others, but how does individual variation in these conceptual representations impact social connectivity? In a longitudinal social network sample of first-year university students, we investigated whether representing emotions more similarly to others predicts friendship accuracy, a foundation for forging social connection and effectively recruiting social support. We also explore relationships between friendship accuracy and markers of physical and mental wellbeing. We found that emotional normativity was predictive of friendship accuracy over time, which in turn was associated with social network centrality, reduced anxiety, and higher resting heart rate variability, a marker of reduced stress. Taken together, emotional normativity may play an important role in social connection and wellbeing, particularly during early adulthood.
What can meditative experience tell us about affective valence? A computational perspective on the determinants of affect
Shawn Prest
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Understanding affective valence is essential to the fostering of well-being since positive and negative experiences shape our quality of life. One promising approach is to use computational frameworks of perception and action, which seek to formalise the mechanisms underlying valenced experience. Within one such framework, active inference, valence is canonically treated as a consequence of changes in expected uncertainty. This casts valence as a consequence of how effective we believe we are at anticipating phenomena. However, during meditative practice, positive affect is associated with an experiential move into not knowing. If positive valence tracks decreasing uncertainty, then increasing uncertainty should feel worse, yet meditators report the opposite. This suggests that valence may not only depend on changes in uncertainty, and that a more comprehensive account is needed. Buddhism and its meditative practices have long been focused on valence in terms of reducing, and even possibly eliminating, suffering. They seek to achieve this through letting go of the desire to know, claiming that this can feel better than acting on that desire. In this paper I explore what deep and transformative meditative experience can tell us about the computational underpinnings of our valenced experience. I argue this reveals that the complexity of inferential processing plays a key role in determining affect, both during contemplative practice and as a sustained consequence of it. I then introduce a dual-determinant account of valence, in which uncertainty reduction and instantiated model complexity jointly determine experienced valence. This serves to broaden our understanding of valence beyond the current uncertainty-based story.
Intra-Minority Solidarity among Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic
Aeroelay Chyei Vinluan; Megan Elaine Burns; Michael W. Kraus
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian sentiment rose dramatically, and Asian Americans experienced increased levels of discrimination. Simultaneously, many Asian Americans attended Black Lives Matter rallies alongside Black Americans. Our present research examines the relationship between Asian Americans’ discrimination experiences and solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across three studies, we find evidence that Asian Americans who reported more (versus less) discrimination experiences during the height of the pandemic were more likely to report greater linked fate perceptions with Black Americans and participated in more activities advocating for racial equity for all racially minoritized groups. Discrimination experiences also predicted Asian Americans’ engagement in their communities. These findings support an understanding of solidarity between Asian and Black Americans through shared stigma experiences.
Traces of the Other – Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism
Andrew Robert Gallimore; Niffe Hermansson; Donald D. Hoffman
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Encounters with apparently autonomous and intelligent non-human entities are a striking and recurrent feature of high-dose N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experi-ences. Such encounters are typically interpreted as complex hallucinations derived from internally generated brain activity, although many features of the DMT state remain a challenge to explain within the standard neuroscientific paradigm. Here, we explore an alternative hypothesis grounded in the conscious realism framework, in which reality consists of interacting conscious agents and perception functions as a species-specific interface rather than a veridical representation of an objective world. Crucially, the space of conscious agents we can normally perceive and interact with represents only a thin slice of the agent network that comprises the totality of reality and is partly determined by representational limits set by the qualia kernel that gov-erns transitions between experiential states. We propose that DMT induces a profound perturbation of our perceptual interface, expanding the accessible region of experience space and allowing consciousness to reach regions with entirely different dynamical regimes under the qualia kernel. Under such conditions, normally imperceptible agents may influence experience, leaving per-ceptible “traces” in its dynamics that can be rendered as stable, coherent, and mean-ingful structure and experienced as the abundantly populated, inordinately complex alternate worlds typical of the DMT state. This framework enables us to distinguish between internally generated hallucinations and experiences exhibiting structured, stable, and causally efficacious dynamics consistent with interactions with normally imperceptible conscious agents. Rather than asserting the reality of DMT entities, we draw on the phenomenology of the DMT state, models of psychedelic brain dynamics, and the formalism of con-scious agent theory to derive testable predictions and propose experimental para-digms to assess whether DMT experiences can be constrained by external variables or exhibit non-trivial intersubjective correlations. The outcome of such experiments may have profound implications for our understanding of perception, consciousness, and the structure of reality.
The Reading Brain from Womb to Classroom: Typical and Atypical Development and Implications for a Preventative Education Model
Nadine Gaab; Ted Turesky
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Learning to read is a process and milestone with far‑reaching implications for education, vocation, and health. Most models and empirical studies of reading development, however, focus on school entry and often limit potential influences to children’s oral language and print-based skills. In contrast, a smaller corpus of behavioral, genetic, environmental, and neuroimaging research strongly suggests that reading development begins far earlier, in utero. This article first reviews major theoretical frameworks of reading development and synthesizes studies demonstrating that lower-order oral language and cognitive skills necessary for higher-order reading skills (e.g., reading comprehension) begin emerging during the perinatal period. It then characterizes the development of the “reading brain,” starting with regions involved in proficient reading and proceeding to neuroimaging work suggesting that the perinatal brain may already be equipped with a neural scaffold that supports reading development. Although brain scans are not suitable for identifying individual children at risk, they can inform accurate developmental, multifactorial models of reading that, in turn, can better guide preventive educational practices.
Working with numbers and letters: Stimulus domain shapes the structure and academic relevance of executive functions
Alexa D. Mogan; Kruttika G. Bhat; Nathan TT Lau; Amelia Murray; Eric D. Wilkey
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Individual differences in executive functions (EFs) are associated with academic achievement across development, but basic questions remain about its underlying structure and context-dependent nature. In this study, we investigated whether EF tasks’ stimulus type (numerical vs. lexical) affects the structure of EF and its relation to math and reading. A representative sample of 732 U.S. adults completed a battery of six EF tasks (working memory, inhibition, and shifting with lexical and numerical stimulus versions), as well as math and domain-specific control tasks. Our findings indicated that stimulus domain impacts the structure of EF and that aligning the cognitive context of EF measurement (i.e., measuring domain-specific EF) greatly increases the amount of variance explained by EF for both math and word recognition performance. These findings may impact researcher considerations of EF measurement, how we frame EF training, and the relation between EF and specific learning disorders.
Analytical Sampling Variances for Per-Person Estimators of Conditional Standard Errors of Measurement in Generalizability Theory
René Gempp
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Brennan (1998) introduced four per-person estimators of the conditional error variance for the univariate, single-facet, persons-by-items crossed generalizability-theory design: one for the absolute case ( ˆ𝜎2(Δ𝑝)) and three for the relative case ( ˆ𝜎2(𝛿𝑝)), distinguished by their handling of the finitesample correction and the within-person item-difficulty by residual covariance. While these point estimators have been available for more than two decades, closed-form expressions for their sampling variances have not been published. This working paper derives exact closed-form sampling variances for all four estimators under the assumption that the person-by-item residuals are conditionally Gaussian given the observed item-mean structure. Each estimator is shown to be a linear combination of two random quantities, the per-person sample variance over items 𝑠2𝑝 and the per-person sample covariance with sample-centered item difficulties 𝑐𝑝; the closed-form variances follow from the joint sampling distribution of (𝑠2𝑝, 𝑐𝑝) under the model. The resulting expressions are constant across persons and depend only on the number of items đŒ, the sum of squared sample-centered item difficulties, the ANOVA estimate of the residual variance component 𝜎2 (𝑝𝑖), and, for the full estimator, the number of persons 𝐮. These formulas are implemented as the default analytical option in the Stata package gtcsem and the R package csemGT. The derivations extend the recent Psychometrika tutorial of Pfadt et al. (2026) to the generalizability-theoretic estimators that the tutorial omits, and respond directly to the call of van der Ark (2026) for an analytical characterization of CSEM sampling variability. A companion simulation study examining the finite-sample coverage of the resulting confidence intervals under Gaussian and non-Gaussian data-generating mechanisms is forthcoming in version 2.
Personality Trait Levels and Similarity as Predictors of Daily Interactions and Relationship Satisfaction in Romantic Couples: A Dyadic Daily Diary
Melania Prandi; Manon A. van Scheppingen; Gabriel Olaru
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Romantic relationships shape individuals’ daily experiences and well-being, yet most research on personality and relationship functioning has focused on global satisfaction rather than everyday interactions. This study examines how Big Five personality traits predict daily positive and negative interactions, as well as relationship satisfaction, in 250 romantic couples (157 with daily data; Mage = 27.51) across a 14-day diary design. Using Actor–Partner Interdependence Models (APIMs), we tested actor, partner, and similarity effects based on both self- and partner-reports. Across models, lower neuroticism and higher agreeableness were consistently associated with more positive interactions, fewer negative interactions, and greater relationship satisfaction for both partners. Conscientiousness and openness showed smaller but meaningful associations with daily interactions, whereas extraversion showed limited effects in self-reports. Notably, when partner-reports were used, partner effects emerged for all traits and were substantially stronger than actor effects, suggesting that perceived partner personality plays a central role in shaping relationship experiences. In contrast, actual and perceived similarity showed little consistent association with outcomes. By integrating dyadic effects, multiple personality perspectives, and ecologically valid daily measures, this study provides a nuanced account of how personality—and especially the perception of a partner’s personality—shapes the lived experience of romantic relationships.
Deception Is Ugly: Linking Aesthetic Judgment to Perceived Manipulation in Dark Patterns
Hauke Sandhaus; Doris Rhomberg
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Dark patterns are manipulative interface designs that exploit cognitive biases. We surveyed 126 social media users who evaluated mockups of 15 dark patterns across six strategic categories, using an adapted User Experience Questionnaire with four autonomy-focused items (pressuring, addictive, covert, deceptive). Deception co-occurred strongly with negative aesthetic judgments (r = 0.93): users rated deceptive interfaces as unattractive, whereas pressure, addictiveness, and covertness showed weaker associations. Within strategic categories, Interface Interference (r = 0.77) and Social Engineering (r = 0.72) items cohered, indicating that several categories from existing taxonomies correspond to coherent user experiences. These exploratory results are consistent with users holding tacit awareness that becomes articulable when vocabulary is provided, with the four autonomy items functioning as distinct perceptual dimensions. They point to ethics-focused UX measurement scales as a direction for capturing unethical influence alongside pragmatic and hedonic constructs.
Charting Age-Related Change in the Architecture of Fluid Cognition
Camille Phaneuf-Hadd; Taylor Heffer; Patrick Mair; Leah Somerville
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While fluid cognition (FC) demonstrates marked development from childhood to adulthood, less is known about the pace of nonlinear improvements in FC processes, whether FC maturation converges across processes, and how FC architecture varies with age. Participants (N = 1,049, 8-21 years, 50.52% female, 7.05% Asian, 0.29% American Indian/Alaska Native, 12.96% Black or African American, 0.19% Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 61.11% White, 15.82% mixed race) completed FC tasks indexing inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, processing speed, episodic memory, and working memory. Performance in all processes increased during childhood and early adolescence and grouped into Cognitive Control and Memory sub-architectures. Although this organization appeared in childhood, Cognitive Control and Memory became more distinct with age.
Testosterone and cortisol distributions reveal men's relationship status: Evidence from a study with daily hormone sampling
James Roney; Tikal Catena; Adar B Eisenbruch; Rachel Grillot; Dario Maestripieri
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Prior studies support men in romantic relationships having lower testosterone and cortisol concentrations than single men. Such studies have generally collected only 1-2 hormone samples per participant, which has left unknown how hormone values are distributed within individuals and whether differences in such distributions can be used to accurately classify men by their relationship status. We collected daily measures of testosterone and cortisol across 31 days from each of 41 young men (N = 1143 observations). Signal detection analyses demonstrated good discrimination of relationship status from subject-mean hormone concentrations. Furthermore, the daily sampling revealed a novel pattern: partnered men almost never experienced high testosterone or high cortisol days. Additional analyses supported replication of prior findings showing positive associations between sociosexual desires and testosterone concentrations among partnered men. These findings are consistent with theoretical models that propose hormonal mediation of tradeoffs between men’s mating effort and investment in committed relationships.
Intrinsic memorability and evoked feelings shape visual memories over time
Cheyenne Wakeland-Hart; Mariam Aly
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Visual long-term memories are shaped by a variety of factors – some internal to the viewer, others related to the external stimulus and environment. Studies of memory have identified and separately characterized many of these factors, including the viewer’s attentional state during learning, the intrinsic memorability of the image and the feelings it evokes, and the passage of time. What has remained unclear is how much these factors contribute to memory, and how they individually and interactively predict memory when they are jointly considered. To address these questions, we conducted a large study (n=492) of long-term visual memory. Stimuli were sourced from the VAMOS dataset, which contains memorability, valence, and arousal scores for hundreds of natural scene images. Individuals first encoded scene images, with their response times used as an index of their attentional state prior to image onset. Either immediately or after an overnight delay, they took a recognition memory test, and finally rated the feelings evoked by each image on the dimensions of valence and arousal. Model comparisons showed that VAMOS memorability scores were the strongest predictors of recognition memory. Attentional state at encoding did not improve predictions of subsequent memory. Memorability derived from an immediate test robustly predicted memory at both immediate and delayed tests. Arousal modulated the effect of memorability, and valence modulated the effect of delay on recognition memory. Together, our results shed light into the differential contributions of internal and external factors to individual memory, and highlight a particularly important role for image memorability.
Intrinsic memorability and evoked feelings shape visual memories over time
Cheyenne Wakeland-Hart; Mariam Aly
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Visual long-term memories are shaped by a variety of factors – some internal to the viewer, others related to the external stimulus and environment. Studies of memory have identified and separately characterized many of these factors, including the viewer’s attentional state during learning, the intrinsic memorability of the image and the feelings it evokes, and the passage of time. What has remained unclear is how much these factors contribute to memory, and how they individually and interactively predict memory when they are jointly considered. To address these questions, we conducted a large study (n=492) of long-term visual memory. Stimuli were sourced from the VAMOS dataset, which contains memorability, valence, and arousal scores for hundreds of natural scene images. Individuals first encoded scene images, with their response times used as an index of their attentional state prior to image onset. Either immediately or after an overnight delay, they took a recognition memory test, and finally rated the feelings evoked by each image on the dimensions of valence and arousal. Model comparisons showed that VAMOS memorability scores were the strongest predictors of recognition memory. Attentional state at encoding did not improve predictions of subsequent memory. Memorability derived from an immediate test robustly predicted memory at both immediate and delayed tests. Arousal modulated the effect of memorability, and valence modulated the effect of delay on recognition memory. Together, our results shed light into the differential contributions of internal and external factors to individual memory, and highlight a particularly important role for image memorability.
Development of the Short Musical Affect Recognition Test (SMART)
Anastasios Mavrolampados; Margarida Baltazar; Tuomas Eerola; Suvi Saarikallio; Martin Hartmann; Petri Toiviainen
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Despite a growing interest in musical emotion recognition, few attempts have been made to measure the underlying ability. Existing tests rely on musically constrained audio excerpts, with concerns for ecological validity. To address this, we constructed an adaptive musical emotion recognition ability (ERA) test, the first in the field that uses naturalistic music stimuli. Instrumental film music excerpts (544 binary forced-choice items) represented five discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness and tenderness). Participants (N = 243) listened to excerpts and selected the emotion expressed in the music from two options. From their responses, an adaptive algorithm calculated participant ability and selected the next trial. The test took approximately 5 minutes to complete and has 20 trials. Results showed test sensitivity for a wide ability range. Simulations assessed the adaptive algorithm performance and revealed a near-perfect correlation between simulated and estimated ability. For construct validity, participants (N = 186) completed the test alongside other batteries. There was a moderate positive correlation with vocal ERA, small positive correlation with musical skills and facial ERA, a small negative correlation with alexithymia, and no correlation with musical training. No ceiling or floor effects were observed. This work introduces a short and robust test for measuring musical ERA. It is open-access, has good reliability, and is sensitive to a broad ability range, making it suitable for assessing groups with various ability levels.
Large language models accurately identify decision reasons in verbal reports
Kamil FuƂawka; Ralph Hertwig; Dirk U. Wulff
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Understanding the reasons behind human choices under risk is a central goal of the decision sciences, yet traditional methods relying on behavioral data are limited by strict invariance assumptions. Here, we introduce a scalable method using large language models (LLMs) to analyze verbal reports and identify the articulated reasons for choices between monetary lotteries. We show that a validated LLM accurately identifies predefined decision reasons in participants' free-text reports, aligning with their actual choices in over 92\% of trials. Our analysis reveals that reason usage varies systematically and is driven more by the choice problem's structure than by individual differences. A predictive model based on these problem-specific reason profiles outperforms prospect theory in out-of-sample prediction. This work demonstrates that verbal reports are a rich data source and that LLMs can unlock their potential, challenging foundational invariance assumptions and paving the way for more context-aware models of human decision-making.
Predicting moral elevation responses in a clinical sample with psychological distress: Identifying potential factors for optimizing elevation elicitation
Adam P McGuire; Xrystyan Lascano; A Solomon Kurz
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Moral elevation is a positive, state-level emotion described as feeling inspired, touched, or moved after witnessing someone perform a remarkable act of virtue. Eliciting moral elevation with videos featuring moral exemplars has shown a range of benefits and it may serve as a novel therapeutic tool for psychological distress. However, previous research is restricted to studying elevation elicitation with a few, select video stimuli and our understanding of predictors for subsequent responses is limited, particularly in clinical populations. Therefore, our ability to effectively apply elevation elicitation as a therapeutic tool is limited. This study aimed to address this gap by examining elevation responses to ten new videos among participants with significant anxiety, depressive, or PTSD symptoms. Using multilevel item response theory models, results indicated a series of trait predictors had a medium-to-strong positive association with elevation intensity. Furthermore, fit comparisons suggested the model with PTSD as the focal predictor performed the best at describing elevation responses regarding intensity, item score distribution, and variability of responses between videos and participants. Overall, these results advance our understanding of how elevation is experienced in a clinical population, which has important implications for future efforts to effectively implement elevation as an alternative approach to facilitate mental health recovery.
Genetics in human behavior (disorders): Concepts, misconceptions, and a resistance-based path to translation
Michael Vanyukov
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Background: Genetic research in behavioral/psychiatric conditions, including substance use/addiction, has not produced the practical translation promised at its outset. Two decades after an argument that genetic resources should be prioritized for disorders viewed as less environmentally tractable, neither the disorders identified for high priority under that logic nor those identified as lower priority have seen meaningful translation from genetic findings to prevention or treatment, and the substance use problem in particular has grown. Method: This think piece examines the conceptual foundations of genetic research in behavior — the genetics of complex traits, the liability-threshold model, and the literature on the application of genetic results — with particular attention to the treatment of complex multifactorial conditions through the simple-trait paradigm. It then draws on an alternative paradigm centered on the resistance aspect of liability. Results: Several persistent misconceptions can be identified, including the conflation of functional and variational causality, the misapplication of the simple-trait paradigm to complex traits, the reification of arbitrarily dichotomized continuous liabilities as discrete disease entities. Polygenic risk scores account for trivial proportions of variance in addiction phenotypes. Resistance — the opposite pole of liability, distinct from resilience and protective factors — is continuously distributed and measurable through reversed sampling and quantitative liability indices, and it captures factors the risk paradigm cannot. Conclusions: Reorienting research from risk to resistance offers a methodologically tractable route to actionable findings in addiction and other complex behavioral conditions, locating genetics within a framework where its findings have a clearer route to use.
Structured variation in daily life experience within and across individuals
Philip Deming; Zulqarnain Khan; Katie Hoemann; Lily Marino; ƞerife Leman Runyun; Zoe Kross; Yiyang Gao; Liz Cory; Catherine Nielson; Mallory J Feldman
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Human experience varies across contexts and individuals. Yet, psychological studies typically seek to constrain rather than discover structured variation. Here we leverage a powerful alternative approach to examine variability in emotional experience by sampling multimodally from individuals across a variety of contexts throughout their daily life and employing unsupervised machine learning to discover reliable, person-specific, multimodal patterns of experience. Healthy adults (N=97) completed 14 days of biologically-triggered experience sampling. Participants wore mobile cardiac monitors for 8 hours/day and reported their current valence, arousal, primary activity (e.g., relaxing), social context (e.g., alone), and emotional experience (via free report) when prompted. Prompts were initiated whenever a sustained change in cardiac activity (i.e., interbeat interval) was detected in the absence of gross bodily movements (and twice randomly each day). From each event (10,755 total, M=110.9 events/person), we extracted cardiovascular, postural, affective, and contextual features, which were submitted to integrative clustering to derive reliable patterns for each individual. Integrative clustering identified 313 multimodal patterns (M=3.2 patterns/person). The number of multimodal patterns varied across people, as did, to varying extents, their nature. The features that best distinguished patterns from one another also varied by person. Critically, all participants mapped many emotion labels to a single multimodal pattern, and a single emotion label to many patterns (i.e., a many-to-many mapping). Our comprehensive approach has broad utility for discovering structured variation in emotional experience ‘in the wild’ and provides further evidence that emotions are diverse populations of instances constructed by a perceiver in context.
Complexity is a unified cognitive kind
Tal Boger; Chaz Firestone
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Any information-processing system must deal with the complexity of its input. Yet, complexity arises in many forms: An image may be complex, a melody may be complex, and so too for linguistic or mathematical expressions. Are these disparate forms of complexity ‘unified’ in the mind, such that cognition represents a common quantity shared across qualitatively different types of information? Here, 11 experiments (N=1500) reveal domain-general representation of complexity. First, a reward-transfer task revealed that outcomes associated with complexity generalize across diverse stimulus classes, including shapes, dot-arrays, melodies, letter-strings, mathematical expressions, and tactile forms. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that such transfer occurs automatically (intruding on task-irrelevant judgments) and underwrites individual differences in higher-level judgments across domains; for example, participants who find simple shapes aesthetically pleasing also find simple melodies pleasing. These results implicate a capacity for type-independent representation of information density, consistent with a shared representational language across cognitive domains.
Mapping the landscape of behavioral reinforcement learning research
Anna Isabel Thoma; Florian Bolenz; Kevin Tiede; Yujia Yang; Stefano Palminteri; Ralph Hertwig; Dirk U. Wulff
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As global research output increases, maintaining a comprehensive overview becomes challenging, particularly in high-volume research fields spanning multiple disciplines and research traditions. Behavioral reinforcement learning---an influential approach to understanding how people learn from interactions with the environment---is one such field. What characterizes this research landscape, and how is it interconnected? Here, we introduce a novel bibliometric approach---combining computational semantics, large language models, and clustering methods---to explore article clusters within behavioral reinforcement learning. Our analysis provides a comprehensive map of the field, highlighting broad lines of behavioral and neuroscientific research and documenting a wide array of interdisciplinary topics. We characterize research clusters by frequent research topics and methods, key journals, and publication timeline. Moreover, we examine the relationships between clusters and visualize the distribution of research topics and methods across the landscape. Finally, we discuss implications for facilitating scientific exchange and present an online tool for exploring the landscape.
From Traits to Daily Experiences: An Adaptation of the Selflessness/Self-centeredness Inventory to Day-level Assessment
Lucas David; Nicolas Pellerin; Michaël Dambrun
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Conceptualized as distinct psychological functionings respectively linked to authentic-durable and fluctuating happiness, selflessness and self-centeredness have recently been the subject of instrument development to evaluate their manifestations at the trait-level. Along the lines of this work, the goal of the current research was to adapt the psychometric instrument at the day-level: the Selflessness/Self-centeredness Inventory – Day-level (SSI-D). Consistent with the trait-version, both exploratory analysis (Study 1, N = 853) and confirmatory analysis (Study 2, N = 265) indicated that the SSI-D measured seven factors organized into two latent variables (i.e. selflessness divided into four components, self-centeredness divided into three dimensions). Correlational analysis (Study 3, N = 1409) provided initial evidence that day-level selflessness and self-centeredness can be differentiated psychometrically and showed theoretically meaningful patterns of association with mental health, interpersonal health, and pro-environmental outcomes. Invariance analyses were satisfactory, and preliminary validity evidence was generally consistent with theoretical expectations, although further validation using more comprehensive and jointly administered criterion measures is needed.
Cultural engagement as an emerging health-promoting behaviour for depression in later life: Evidence from six ageing cohorts
Hei Wan Mak; Taiji Noguchi; Naoki Kondo; Daisy Fancourt
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Epidemiological studies suggest cultural engagement may be related to the risk and management of depressive symptoms, but studies have largely focused on data from the US and Europe, providing an inherent Western bias. Here, we extended this by analysing six ageing cohorts from England, the United States (US) and Germany, as well as South Korea, Japan, and Brazil. We used OLS, fixed-effects and Arellano-Bond models to examine socio-economic determinants of cultural engagement, and cross-sectional, longitudinal and temporal associations with depressive symptoms. Cultural engagement levels varied across countries: highest in England and Germany, and lowest in Japan and Brazil. Higher education consistently predicted greater engagement, although the educational gradient differed within countries over time. Cross-sectionally, engagement was associated with fewer depressive symptoms in all countries, except the US, with some attenuation after confounder adjustment. Longitudinally, transitioning into engagement was associated with reductions in symptoms in England, Germany, Korea, and the US, but not Japan. England (but not Korea or the US) additionally showed evidence that engagement predicted later reductions in symptoms. This cross-country study adds to the evidence linking cultural engagement and lower levels of depressive symptoms. However, our findings also indicate unequal participation rates within and between countries and suggest that the potential mental health benefits are not distributed equitably.
Pausing to Reflect During News Consumption Counteracts Negativity Biases in Memory
Alyssa Hannah Sinclair; Abigail Hsiung; Rachael Wright; Shabnam Hakimi; R. Alison Adcock
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News sources often emphasize negative information, which can harm mood, memory, and mental health. Here, in a study of information seeking and memory conducted during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested an intervention to counter these harms. Participants (N=260) completed a naturalistic information-seeking task, exploring articles in a virtual Newsroom. In the Reflection condition, participants were prompted to pause and reflect on how information made them feel, whereas participants in the No-Reflection condition browsed uninterrupted. On a subsequent memory test, No-Reflection participants were biased to remember negative information and forget positive information, especially when information was surprising or participants were in a negative mood. Crucially, our reflection intervention reduced this negativity bias in memory. Reflection participants showed better memory for positive information, especially if surprising. Overall, we found that a simple intervention—pausing to reflect while reading news—restored balance between positive and negative information in memory.
Model Checking for Vector Autoregressive Models
Jonas M B Haslbeck; Joran Jongerling; Björn S. Siepe; Sacha Epskamp; Lourens Waldorp
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Time series have become pervasive in psychological science, and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models are now among the most popular tools for studying within-person dynamics in such data. However, researchers rarely check systematically how well a VAR model fits their data. This is problematic because model misfit can lead both to incorrect interpretations of model parameters and to missed structure in the data that would be theoretically interesting. We provide a tutorial that explains the theory behind model checking, discusses the most common types of VAR model misspecification in psychological time series, and introduces diagnostics for detecting them using plots and simulations. In addition, we provide code to extract predictions and residuals from popular software packages, along with the new R-package VARcheck, which allows researchers to create extensive diagnostic plots with only a few lines of code. We then apply these tools to assess the fit of a multilevel VAR model estimated on a typical empirical dataset of emotion measurements from 179 people over three weeks. We conclude by discussing three complementary ways in which model checking can advance psychological science using time series.
Status and the self: Socioeconomic inequality in core beliefs
Niklas Schulte; Matthias Ziegler; Patrick Mussel
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In popular discourse, voices repeatedly claim that personal success is largely a matter of mindset. In psychological science, such claims correspond to self-related core beliefs—generalized self-representations. Yet the absence of a comprehensive framework has prevented systematic study of their links to socioeconomic inequality. Building on the CorBel model—an integrative taxonomy of 97 belief nuances derived via natural language processing—we analyzed two preregistered, SES-representative national samples (Germany: N = 435, UK: N = 266). Across countries, positive beliefs (e.g., competence, autonomy, trust) were associated with higher SES, whereas negative beliefs (e.g., insecurity, unworthiness, pessimism) were linked to lower SES. These associations replicated across SES indicators (education, income, wealth) and explained up to 20% of variance in SES outcomes. This study provides the first systematic mapping of how socioeconomic inequalities are mirrored in individuals’ innermost psychological constitution, identifying beliefs as potential targets for interventions with societal and policy relevance.
Lollipop Charts Exhibit the Bar-Tip Limit Error: Evidence Against the Container-Based Account
Daniel Reimann; Jeremy Bennet Wilmer
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Bar charts depicting averages are common in science, education, industry, and the public sector. A common problem, however, is the "bar-tip limit error," where viewers mistakenly treat the top of a bar as an upper bound of the data rather than the center of the distribution. This error is often attributed to a container metaphor account, where the bar is perceived as a physical container for data values. In the present study, we test this account by investigating whether the error can also occur in lollipop charts, which lack the container-like appearance of bars. Using a within-subjects design, participants evaluated average test scores of two groups depicted in bar and lollipop charts by estimating the highest individual score achieved for each group. Results show that the bar-tip limit error occurs in lollipop charts at a prevalence comparable to that of bar charts. These findings suggest that the error is not driven by a container metaphor but may instead stem from an "ink-is-data" account.
The Paradox of Informational Regulation of Anxiety During the War in Ukraine: An Infodemiological Test of Phantom Anxiety Theory
Marcin Florkowski
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This article develops phantom anxiety theory (PAT), according to which the human anxiety system includes not only responses to current or anticipated threats, but also a tonic, endogenous component of vigilance. PAT leads to a counterintuitive prediction: a decrease in the level of real environmental threats does not necessarily produce a proportional decrease in anxiety, and relative interest in the category of anxiety may be greater where threat is more indirect, informational, and anticipated than where it is direct and tangible. This prediction was tested by using Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, as a natural quasi-experiment. Google Trends data were treated as an indicator of collective attention and labeling practices. After the invasion, there was a strong nationwide increase in interest in Topic “Anxiety” and a rapid reorganization of the front–rear gradient: the largest relative increase occurred in regions farther from military operations rather than in those most directly threatened (TV ≈ 0.25; ρ ≈ −0.54). This pattern emerged immediately after the invasion, persisted across subsequent time windows, and was not observed for numerous control and comparison topics. The findings suggest that a purely reactive model of anxiety does not fully capture the operating principles of the human anxiety system. Alarm arousal may persist despite objective safety and only secondarily organize itself around available objects, helping to explain why a reduction in real threats does not necessarily lead to a proportional decrease in anxiety.
Can We Measure Gendered Inflation? A Methodological Framework for a Household Provisioning Price Index Using India’s CPI 2024 Series
Krishnashis Das; Amrit Chatterjee
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Standard Consumer Price Indices treat the household as a single economic agent, ignoring which member manages each expenditure category. This paper proposes and demonstrates a methodology for constructing a Household Provisioning Price Index for Women (W-CPI) that weights categories by management responsibility rather than physical consumption, and applies it to India’s newly released CPI 2024 series.
Mental health of preadolescents in western Ukraine: feasibility and acceptability of a school-based psychosocial intervention during war
Oleksander Avramchuk; Olha Germanovych; Olha Ivanenko; Olga Uralova; Marina Lisenberg; Olena Mukha; Yuliya Stadnytska; Richard Davidson; Perla Kaliman
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Background: Children living in conflict zones experience high levels of psychological distress. Schools can provide an accessible setting for support, yet evidence on the effectiveness of school-based interventions in active war contexts remains limited. Objectives: To evaluate children’s well-being and internal coping resources during the war in Ukraine and to examine the feasibility of a school-based program designed to enhance psychological well-being in preadolescents. Participants and setting: The study involved 81 children aged 10–12 years from schools in Lviv, Ukraine. Methods: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), PTSD symptoms, quality of life, self-compassion, and mindfulness traits were assessed using standard questionnaires and validated psychometric scales. The intervention program, delivered at school, focused on mindfulness, self-compassion, social connection, sense of purpose, and trauma processing. Acceptability and perceived impact were evaluated post-intervention among children, families, and school staff. Results: 42% of children reported four or more ACEs. 39.5% of children exceeded the clinical cutoff for probable PTSD on the CRIES-8 scale, with differences observed between boys and girls. Higher levels of self-compassion and mindfulness were associated with lower PTSD symptoms. Children, families, and school staff reported improvements in children’s well-being, emotion regulation, and social functioning after the intervention. Conclusions: Self-compassion and mindfulness training may serve as protective factors against PTSD. Our findings provide encouraging preliminary evidence supporting the potential of a school-based intervention to promote children’s psychological well-being in an ongoing war setting. Future studies with larger samples, control groups, and objective measures will help strengthen the generalizability of these findings.
The Development of Modal Cognition
Eleonore Neufeld
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Recent years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the question of how our ability to think not only about what’s actual, but also about what’s possible, necessary, or impossible, develops. The field has been remarkably productive, generating a rapid accumulation of often conflicting results and theoretical proposals that can be difficult to keep track of. This chapter brings together empirical findings and current theoretical perspectives on modal development in a systematic and critical narrative. It is intended both as an entry point for readers new to the topic and as a resource for researchers already working in the area, by clarifying the overall state of the research program, the evidential and theoretical status of the main hypotheses, as well as unresolved issues and promising directions for future work.
Does It Take Two to Exploit? A Cross-Cultural Validation of the Organizational Exploitation Scale Across 11 Countries
Ryunosuke Takagi; Anna Dalla Rosa; Sabine Bergner; Islam Borinca; Jiyoung Park; Silvia Miranda Amorim; Daan Fris; Juliana Barreiros Porto; Balazs Aczel; Mohsen Akbari
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In contemporary work contexts, organizational exploitation increasingly takes subtle and socially legitimized forms. While existing tools primarily focus on measuring workers’ subjective perceptions of feeling exploited, the organizational practices that drive exploitation are often overlooked. This study introduces a new measure, the Organizational Exploitation Scale, capturing two interrelated dimensions: organizational attempts to exploit and vulnerability to exploitation. Using a cross-cultural sample of workers from 11 countries (N = 3,881), the scale shows evidence of reliability for measuring exploitation across varied cultural contexts. The findings support approximate measurement invariance and demonstrate external validity, with both subscales showing consistent positive associations with working excessively. The Austrian sample, characterized by severe floor effects, is interpreted as a potential institutional boundary condition consistent with regulatory suppression of exploitative practices. Profile contrasts showed that working excessively was highest when organizational attempts to exploit and vulnerability to exploitation were concurrently high, although the distinctiveness of this joint-high pattern varied across countries. By locating exploitation at the intersection of organizational demands and workers’ constrained capacity to refuse, the Organizational Exploitation Scale provides a cross-culturally usable tool for diagnosing when extra work becomes an ethically problematic form of labor extraction.
Access Operations Reshape the Cognitive Structure of Working Memory
Simar Moussaoui; Adam Frost; Matthias Niemeier
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Observable working-memory (WM) performance reflects multiple sources of error, including systematic distortions, unsystematic variability, and failures of item selection. Previous work using transsaccadic paradigms has identified separable dimensions of spatial WM error, but most paradigms provide limited access to retrieval and item-selection processes during recall. To address this limitation, the present study used a retrieval procedure requiring iterative selection among candidate memory items prior to spatial report, permitting direct measurement of item-selection error alongside traditional spatial error metrics. This design additionally allowed assessment of whether previously identified dimensions of WM error generalize across spatial and nonspatial representational domains. Neurotypical adults and individuals with ADHD completed colour and verbal WM tasks under fixational and transsaccadic conditions. We quantified systematic distortion, unsystematic variability, and item-selection error, and examined their covariance structure using principal component analysis (PCA). Unlike previous paradigms emphasizing direct spatial report, the present task yielded a single dominant component integrating spatial error and item-selection measures across verbal and colour conditions, whereas secondary components showed little cognitive relevance. Component scores were reliably disrupted by saccades but did not differ as a function of saccade direction or ADHD diagnosis. These findings suggest that the observable organization of WM performance depends partly on the retrieval and selection processes engaged during recall. Taken together, the results indicate that the latent structure of WM performance may be more context-sensitive and less domain-specific than previously assumed.
The role of encoding processes in the temporal compression of negative events in episodic memory
Charline Colson; Arnaud D'Argembeau
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Episodic memory allows individuals to mentally reconstruct past experiences in a temporally compressed form, such that remembering typically unfolds faster than the original event. This compression is not uniform: recent evidence indicates that negative events are remembered with less temporal compression than neutral ones, suggesting enhanced preservation of event unfolding. The present study investigated the role of encoding processes in this emotional memory advantage. In Experiment 1, we used a divided-attention manipulation to test whether the availability of attentional resources at encoding modulates the effect of emotion on temporal compression. Divided attention reduced overall memory quality—elevating compression rates and reducing detail and dynamism—but did not alter the emotional memory advantage. Experiment 2 examined whether negative emotion influences event segmentation. Results showed that emotion and event segmentation exerted independent effects on temporal compression. Experiment 3 collected online descriptions of unfolding events as a proxy for the amount and type of information attended to during encoding. Results showed that participants attended to comparable amounts of information during negative and neutral events. However, similarity analyses revealed that the correspondence between online descriptions and memory narratives from Experiment 1 decreased for neutral videos encoded under divided attention, whereas it remained stable for negative videos. Together, these findings indicate that negative events produce richer and less compressed memory representations through mechanisms that operate beyond attentional allocation and event segmentation, potentially involving rapid replay or early consolidation processes at event offset.
Tending the Spiritual Workshops: Development, Evaluation, and Autoethnographic Assessment of Lessons Learned
Roman Palitsky; Caroline Peacock; Paul Gillis-Smith; Jeffrey Breau; Gosia Sklodowska
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There is a need to provide training in spiritually, existentially, religiously, and theologically (SERT) responsive psychedelic care. We developed a brief training workshop entitled "Tending the Spiritual", focused on SERT-responsive care for psychedelics, which would be consistent with a continuing education model. This supplementary training format was identified as an optimal approach in formative research. This manuscript presents a program evaluation and lessons learned from the development and execution of the “Tending the Spiritual” workshops, and provides an account of the workshops’ creation, implementation, and evaluation by the faculty who developed and conducted it. The workshops demonstrated acceptability and feasibility, and were well-received by attendees from two different contexts of psychedelic care practice. They were deemed suitable for further scaling and adaptation to a variety of pedagogical contexts.
Perspective taking predicts acute psychiatric treatment trajectories
Elizabeth Foley; Juliet L Bockhorst; Courtney Beard; Chloe Hudson
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Objective: Although perspective taking is a well-established transdiagnostic feature of psychopathology, less is known about its role in treatment outcomes. The present study examined whether perspective taking frequency upon admission to a partial hospitalization program (PHP) predicted internalizing symptom change throughout treatment. We hypothesized that those who consider others’ perspectives more frequently at admission would experience greater reductions in symptoms of anxiety and depression over the course of treatment. Method: We sampled 515 adult patients receiving treatment in a two-week group therapy partial hospitalization program, with patients meeting criteria for varying mood, anxiety, and personality disorders. Patients completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), and the Perspective Taking subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI-PT) to assess anxiety, depression, and perspective taking frequency, respectively. The GAD-7 and PHQ-9 were administered daily, with IRI-PT scores obtained at admission. Results: Consistent with hypotheses, more frequent perspective taking at baseline predicted greater reductions in anxiety symptoms throughout treatment. Inconsistent with hypotheses, baseline perspective taking did not predict changes in depressive symptoms. More frequent perspective taking also predicted lower overall depression and anxiety symptoms. Conclusions: Results suggest that perspective taking is not only an indicator of psychopathology but is also implicated in anxiety treatment responsiveness.
Extending the Scientific Study of Advanced Meditation Across Contemplative Traditions to Sufism within Islam: A Comparison Case of Self-Attenuation including Theravāda Buddhism and Tibetan Dzogchen
Asiya Gul; Sebastian Ehmann; Catherine Prueitt; Terje Sparby; Matthew Sacchet
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Abstract Understanding how the sense of self can be attenuated or reconfigured without loss of consciousness remains a central challenge in contemporary consciousness science. We propose a multidimensional framework of graded self-attenuation, in which the self is conceptualized as a dynamic configuration of distributed neural processes. Within this framework, contemplative practice attenuates egoic self-features while preserving awareness across multiple, partially dissociable pathways. In Theravāda-derived practices, attenuation involves a progressive reduction in the salience and complexity of experiential content. In contrast, Dzogchen reconfigure subject-object structure, preserving perceptual and affective content while altering its organization. We introduce Islamic Sufism as a complementary pathway emphasizing reorganization of affective salience and motivation through rhythmic devotional remembrance (dhikr). We propose a mechanistic pathway in which rhythmic repetition may engage delta-theta neural entrainment, with downstream effects on large-scale network stability, self-referential processing, and affect regulation. Within this framework, fanāʟ is interpreted as a transient transition marked by profound attenuation of self-related processing, while baqāʟ reflects its stabilization in ongoing experience. Across these pathways, we link phenomenological changes to reconfigurations of large-scale brain dynamics, including altered interactions among default mode, salience, and frontoparietal control networks, as well as changes in oscillatory coordination. We distinguish these processes from extended cessation, in which experience is temporarily absent despite preserved neural complexity. This framework provides a mechanistic account of self-transformation and generates testable predictions, expanding the scope of advanced meditation and consciousness research and their relevance for mental health.
Tuned by Experience: Auditory statistical regularities shape attentional prioritization across pitch and timbre
Jason A Davis; Douglas A Addleman; Kevin Ortego; Viola S. Störmer
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Listeners navigate complex acoustic environments by selectively attending to relevant sounds amid competing noise. This capacity is classically attributed to top-down goals and bottom-up salience, but recent work implicates a third influence: selection history, whereby incidental exposure to statistical regularities shapes attentional prioritization. We investigated how incidental experience of selecting specific acoustic features influences attentional prioritization across different levels of auditory processing. Participants listened to two concurrently presented sounds to detect a target that contained a brief temporal gap. Unbeknownst to the participants, during a learning phase, one sound was more likely to contain the target gap; in a subsequent testing phase all sounds were equally likely to be the target. Experiment 1 used pure tones of varying pitches, and Experiment 2 used instrument chords (piano, trumpet, guitar). Across both experiments, participants responded faster to high-probability targets during learning, indicating facilitated attentional selection based on the statistical regularities across different levels of acoustic representations. This response time advantage persisted robustly throughout the unbiased testing phase for Experiment 1, but less so for Experiment 2, suggesting that the persistence of experience-driven auditory attention may depend on the complexity of the learned feature. Overall, our findings parallel selection-history effects observed in vision, providing evidence that similar influences of incidental experience on attentional priors exist across sensory modalities.
Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation, Tolerability, and the Alpha / Theta EEG Ratio: A Controlled Pilot Study Relevant to Emotion Regulation
Seyedeh Zeinab Molaeizadeh; Aitor Aritzeta Galan
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Background: Emotional dysregulation is a transdiagnostic feature of anxiety and depressive disorders, sustained by altered cortical oscillatory dynamics that pharmacological treatments do not directly target. The Alpha/Theta ratio (8–12 Hz / 4–7 Hz) indexes emotion regulation, reflecting parasympathetic dominance. Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) engages this axis, yet studies linking stimulation intensity to both tolerability and EEG effects remain limited. Methods: In this controlled pilot study, ten healthy female adults (21.1 ± 1.8 years) were randomized to tVNS (n = 5) or waitlist control (n = 5). The tVNS group completed eight 30-minute left tragus sessions over four weeks (20 Hz, 200 ÎŒs, 11–25 mA, individually titrated). Resting-state EEG at Cz derived Alpha/Theta and Theta/Beta ratios. Adverse events were systematically monitored, and False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction was applied across exploratory comparisons. Results: Protocol completion was 100% across 40 sessions. Adverse events were predominantly mild (92.3% Grade 1), with a 2.9-fold lower incidence at ≀20 mA. The tVNS group showed a 25.8% increase in Alpha/Theta ratio (d = 1.47, p = .042 uncorrected); controls remained stable. Theta/Beta also increased (d = 1.18, p = .062). Stimulation intensity correlated positively with Alpha/Theta change (rₛ = 0.60), suggesting a possible dose-response. Findings did not survive FDR correction and are exploratory. Conclusion: tVNS was feasible and well-tolerated at ≀20 mA, with preliminary evidence of intensity-related neurophysiological effects on an EEG biomarker of emotion regulation. The effect sizes provide a quantitative basis for powering sham-controlled trials that optimize stimulation intensity in clinical emotional dysregulation.
Impact of Gain and Nonloss Framing in Mental Health Self-Care: Investigating Regulatory Focus and Perceived Risk of Worsening Mental Health as Moderators
Siu Kit Yeung; Winnie W. S. Mak; Han Zhao; Chun Ming Lee
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Background While studies have employed message framing techniques to encourage mental health behaviors (Yeung et al., 2026a), research regarding trait-level characteristics and perceived risks as moderators may facilitate message tailoring. This study investigated the impact of gain and nonloss framing for self-care. Methods 385 participants recruited from the social media and university mass email were randomly assigned to gain-framing (emphasizing benefits of self-care), nonloss-framing (highlighted distress prevented through self-care), and control conditions (information not related to self-care). They completed items on regulatory focus and perceived risks of worsening in mental health as potential individual moderators. Outcome variables include intentions, uptake and engagement of self-care, particularly mindfulness practices, with both immediate measures and one-week follow-up measures. ANCOVAs and regressions were conducted. Results Results indicated gain-framing advantage in enhancing self-care intentions compared to nonloss-framing and control conditions, with tentative evidence that participants in the nonloss-framing condition played mindfulness audio for longer duration compared to participants in the control condition. For people with lower perceived risks, gain-framing led to higher self-care intentions than both control and nonloss-framing messages, but no evidence of moderation with other dependent variables was found. Results also showed no support for moderation by regulatory focus, which are inconsistent with the literature on regulatory focus-framing interaction effect in physical health contexts. Conclusions Given lack of significant effects, our findings do not support applying tailored framing based on regulatory focus for encouraging mental health self-care. Studies using field studies, longitudinal designs, and/or well-powered studies for detecting very small effects, are needed to investigate whether gain-framing has advantages with actual self-care behaviors over longer periods. Keywords: Mental health self-care, Message Framing, Mindfulness, Perceived risks, Regulatory focus
Model Checking for Vector Autoregressive Models
Jonas M B Haslbeck; Joran Jongerling; Björn S. Siepe; Sacha Epskamp; Lourens Waldorp
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Time series have become pervasive in psychological science, and Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models are now among the most popular tools for studying within-person dynamics in such data. However, researchers rarely check systematically how well a VAR model fits their data. This is problematic because model misfit can lead both to incorrect interpretations of model parameters and to missed structure in the data that would be theoretically interesting. We provide a tutorial that explains the theory behind model checking, discusses the most common types of VAR model misspecification in psychological time series, and introduces diagnostics for detecting them using plots and simulations. In addition, we provide code to extract predictions and residuals from popular software packages, along with the new R-package VARcheck, which allows researchers to create extensive diagnostic plots with only a few lines of code. We then apply these tools to assess the fit of a multilevel VAR model estimated on a typical empirical dataset of emotion measurements from 179 people over three weeks. We conclude by discussing three complementary ways in which model checking can advance psychological science using time series.
Same construct, different rulers? scaling mismatches between subjective and objective measures in sport and exercise science
Wanja Wolff
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Self-report measures tend to be bounded and self-referenced, meaning responses are implicitly normalized to individual capacity. Many objective measures are not. When such structurally different scales are correlated, the observed relationship is attenuated. This occurs not because the constructs diverge, but because the rulers are built differently. In this commentary, I argue that the bounded nature of self-report measures needs to be more explicitly acknowledged to avoid structural scaling mismatches. Addressing this can increase validity of conclusions about instrument validity and construct separability.
Between-session Chasing via Session Wager and Duration in Online eCasino Gambling
Nilosmita Banerjee; Xavier Noël; Zhang Chen
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Chasing refers to the continuation or intensification of gambling following losses (loss-chasing) and/or wins (win-chasing). It is a multifaceted construct and may be expressed via changes in session wager (total amount wagered) and session duration (number of rounds played) following wins and losses in previous sessions. However, field-based evidence on between-session chasing via these markers remains limited. Using a large-scale eCasino dataset (11,156 gamblers; ~170 million bets), we conducted pre-registered analyses to examine how session wager and duration varied as a function of prior session outcome (win/loss), outcome magnitude, gambling product (dice game, multi-line slots, blackjack and roulette) and gambler’s involvement level (high/low). Gamblers wagered more and played longer following a winning session than a losing session. Both session wager and duration increased as prior session outcome magnitude (losses and wins) increased, indicating both loss-chasing and win-chasing, consistent with the break-even and house money effects. Furthermore, gambling products and gamblers’ involvement level resulted in distinct patterns of session wager and duration, suggesting that both product features and the characteristics of gamblers may impact between-session chasing via these facets. These findings highlight the value of session wager and duration as behavioral markers of between-session chasing in real-world gambling contexts.
Exploring Public Perceptions of Social Media: A Preregistered Mixed-Methods Study
Evelyn Alice Halliday Murray; Michael Larkin; Daniel Shaw; Charlotte Rebecca Pennington
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Background: Cyberpsychology research has focused extensively on the potential impacts of social media on mental health and wellbeing. However, less is known about which platforms the public identify as “social media” and the extent to which they endorse associated positive and negative impacts. In this preregistered mixed methods study, we explored perceptions towards social media in a large sample representative of the U.K. public. Methods: Participants (n = 968, 484 adolescents) completed an online survey that asked them to identify which platforms they identified as being a “social media”, rate their level of endorsement with 68 positive and negative research-informed characteristics, and their understanding of, and agreement with, common definitions. Ninety-five participants also provided open-ended responses to questions that asked how social media had impacted themselves or others. Findings: Perceptions of which online platforms constitute “social media” varied, despite these aligning with scholarly definitions. Across age groups, participants strongly endorsed that social media is addictive, spreads misinformation, and is time-consuming, as well as being accessible and easy to use, entertaining, and updates people on local issues and news. Overall, they endorsed more negative than positive characteristics. Reflexive thematic analysis highlighted three themes of “Beyond the screen”, “Negative online behaviour” and “Removal of blame/accountability” for adults, and “Mental health concerns”, “Finding connection and support” and “Productivity concerns” for adolescents. Discussion: Understanding how the public perceives social media can inform research best practice (e.g., tailored definitions) and public policy (e.g., debates around age-restricted social media/bans).
The Road Ahead: How the Future of Learning is Shaped Through Individual Differences
Martin Daumiller; Elisabeth Bauer; Samuel Greiff; Michael Sailer
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The future of learning is often framed through technological change. Here, we show that these developments do not replace, but emphasize, long-standing questions in educational psychology, concerning why learners benefit differently from the same opportunities, how learning en-vironments should respond to heterogeneity, and how education can support this. Introducing our Special Issue, we synthesize 28 contributions and propose a systems roadmap for future learning through individual differences, organized around eight interrelated themes: condition-al learning systems, personalization architectures, cognitive foundations, AI ecologies, equity mechanisms, methodological infrastructure, flourishing trajectories, and governance and guard-rails. At its core, the roadmap positions learning as conditional on configurations of learner characteristics, cognitive and motivational mechanisms, developmental histories, and contex-tual affordances. The surrounding layers specify how systems can respond, what forms of sup-port are plausible, how AI accelerates both alignment and misalignment, and how equity, flour-ishing, valid inference, and governance define responsible future learning systems.
Structure before content. Testing the Psychogeometric Hypothesis of Personality
Gabriele Limonta; Giulio Costantini
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The psycholexical hypothesis has long provided the main framework for studying personality structure through the analysis of descriptors and questionnaire items, namely the content of personality judgments. Here, we introduce the Psychogeometric Hypothesis of Personality, which proposes a complementary entry point for studying personality structure without immediately imposing predefined descriptive content. This approach treats perceived interpersonal similarity as a basis for recovering the latent organization of personality. In this first operationalization of the idea, we examined whether personality similarity judgments reveal a systematic latent structure and to what extent this structure aligns with established models of personality. A total of 204 Italian-speaking participants each listed 15 well-known adults plus themselves, rated all 120 pairwise personality similarities, and completed personality questionnaires providing self- and informant reports. Judge-specific dissimilarity matrices were analyzed through ordinal non-metric multidimensional scaling, with dimensionality selected through stress criteria and permutation testing. Similarity ratings were further modeled using linear mixed-effects models. Results supported a median five-dimensional solution, indicating that personality similarity judgments contain systematic geometric structure beyond chance. Big Five and Honesty-Humility traits predicted similarity beyond demographics, with Honesty-Humility showing incremental explanatory value beyond the Big Five. These findings provide initial support for a psychogeometric approach to personality structure and showcase a pipeline for exploring the latent dimensions that individuals spontaneously use to organize personality-related information. At the same time, established trait models captured only a limited portion of psychogeometric variance, suggesting that similarity-based approaches may reveal aspects of personality organization that are only partially represented in conventional descriptor-based models. Overall, this study opens a complementary route for investigating personality structure from the geometry of interpersonal similarity judgments.
Alpha Oscillations Reflect Curiosity During Information-Seeking
Hanna Julku; Sebastian Österman; Caitlin Dawson; Kaisa Elovaara; Jaana Simola
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Curiosity is a fundamental driver of information-seeking, but its electrophysiological correlates are poorly understood. To investigate how curiosity and information quality affected neural activity during information-seeking, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) while participants collected information in a multi-armed bandit task. Participants (N=60) read statements of varying scientific quality to decide their stance on health-related topics. After reading each statement, participants rated their state curiosity level, the usefulness and clarity of the statements, and their confidence of the usefulness rating. We also measured participants’ trait curiosity (N=53) with a questionnaire and asked whether they had searched for more information about the topics after the experiment. The EEG analyses included a cluster-based permutation analysis (N=60), which indicated two clusters where alpha power differed between information quality categories: frontal and parietal. Then, by using generalized linear mixed effects modeling (N=53), we tested whether information quality, trait and state curiosity, other statement related ratings, and thinking about or searching for more information about the topics after the laboratory experiment predicted alpha power in these clusters. A decrease in frontal alpha power was associated with an increase in state curiosity and deprivation sensitivity dimension of trait curiosity. A decrease in parietal alpha was related to an increase in deprivation sensitivity and searching for more information about the topics. These results show that lower alpha power reflects higher curiosity and the strength of cognitive engagement during information-seeking.
Modeling Individual Differences in Working Memory: Subject-Level Parameter Recovery within the Memory Measurement Model Framework (MÂł)
Jan; Gidon T. Frischkorn; Klaus Oberauer; Simon B. Schaefer; Anna-Lena Schubert
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The memory measurement model (M3) is a flexible modeling framework designed to measure parameters associated with different processes in working memory. It assumes that memory representations receive different levels of activation at retrieval, which arise from the sum of the strengths of item and binding memory. Transforming the activation of representations in different response categories into their respective recall probabilities then allows to estimate the contributions of different memory processes to working memory performance. So far, parameter recovery was reported only for group-level parameters of the M3 . In contrast to experimental research, individual differences research focuses on variation in subject parameters. Adequate recovery of individual subject parameters is a requirement for valid measurement of these parameters. To address this gap, we ran a parameter recovery simulation to assess subject-level parameter recovery dependent on different experimental design choices. Our Bayesian hierarchical M3 implementation recovers subject parameters acceptably to very well, as demonstrated both through simulations and empirical parameter recovery using a complex span dataset. Based on the results, we recommend that researchers should ensure that participants select not-presented lures (i.e., items not in the memory set) at least sometimes (≄ 2%) and collect a minimum of 200 retrieval responses per subject (40 trials at set size 5). When these conditions are met, the simple and complex span models specified in the M3 framework exhibit robust parameter recovery and well calibrated posteriors, as well as satisfactory reliability. In contrast, M3 parameters modeling free-time effects such as extended encoding and removal processes could not be recovered with sufficient precision and showed miscalibrated posteriors and poor reliability. These challenges primarily arose from the substantial amount of data required to achieve sufficiently precise parameter estimates.
Trauma Work as Emotional Labor: An Integrative Process Model
Andrea Fischbach
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Trauma work — repeated task-related confrontation with traumatic events or their aversive details as a core role requirement — is a recurring occupational hazard, yet work-specific mechanisms are under-specified in dominant clinical models of posttraumatic stress. Building on a recent multidisciplinary review of work-related psychological trauma (Stackhouse, 2025), this conceptual synthesis develops an integrative process model that adds work-specific mechanisms — emotional labor demands, work design, and an emotional labor climate framework — that the existing literature does not yet specify. The model differentiates extraordinary work-related trauma events at the workplace (DSM-5 A1/A2/A3) from ordinary job-specific exposure (DSM-5 A4), with the latter calibrated by trauma dose — task characteristics such as duration, density, and intensity. The model proposes four interdependent mechanisms linking exposure to trauma sequelae (PTSD, complex PTSD, burnout, and empathic distress): (1) autonomous stress responses to traumatic events; (2) controlled emotion regulation and emotional-labor processes that moderate the exposure-to-sequelae paths; (3) cumulative resource dynamics — depletion through repeated demands and insufficient recovery (loss spiral), and motivation through experienced professionalism, work accomplishment, and engagement in meaningful work (gain spiral); and (4) emotional labor climate as cause of the cause — organizational policies, practices, and procedures that determine whether resources can be built and exposure can be calibrated. The paper identifies leverage points for organizational intervention and derives testable propositions for empirical work in trauma-exposed occupations.
We don't care how much you sweat: An epistemic framework for behavioral and brain science laboratory infrastructure
Wanja Wolff; Sebastian Gluth; Johannes Keyser
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For decades, behavioral and brain research has advanced by isolating single variables or brain regions to study behavior and performance. However, it has become increasingly clear that reductionist methods struggle to capture the complex, dynamic, and context-dependent nature of human behavior. Developments in data analysis and artificial intelligence now enable unprecedented insights into com-plex datasets. Yet, while different strands of reform literatures have advanced how we theorize, measure, and analyze, the infrastructural conditions under which data are generated - the laboratory - have received comparatively little conceptual attention. Here, devices are often siloed, proprietary, or limited to aggregated outputs, thereby constraining the questions that can be addressed. In this paper, we offer an epistemic framework for reasoning about laboratory infrastructure at the scale of the whole laboratory - understood not as a collection of individual instruments but as an integrated infrastructure in which multiple hardware systems co-exist, communicate, and jointly support the questions a research group can ask. Conceptually, we think of measurements in three epistemic layers: the surface layer (raw numeric outputs), the proxy layer (physiological or behavioral subsystems), and the target layer (emergent phenomena or constructs such as working memory capacity, arousal or effort). These layers are epistemic in that they describe how meaning is inferred from signals and the type of losses and mismatches that can occur at or between them. We derive from these layers a practical rating scheme across seven infrastructure properties: signal digitization, signal fidelity, tem-poral alignment, real-time access, interoperability, transparency, and flexibility. Researchers can use these to evaluate and optimize their laboratory across modalities. Our framework complements exist-ing modality-specific standards and community-developed integration tools by providing a shared decision logic at the scale of the lab as a whole.
Kinematic encoding of the speed-accuracy trade-off in approach/avoidance decisions when facing social threats
Rocco Mennella; Julie Grezes; Matteo Sequestro; Morgan Beaurenaut
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Perceiving social threats, especially expressions of anger, increases the speed of both action selection and execution. However, it remains unclear how individuals balance speed with achieving desirable outcomes, such as threat avoidance, under these conditions. To investigate this trade-off between decision’s speed and accuracy, we examined the kinematics of finger-reaching movements using a "go-before-you-know" paradigm. Participants chose between two empty outer chairs in a waiting room. Two central chairs were occupied by either two individuals with neutral expressions or one neutral individual and one threatening individual. The threatening individual expressed anger or fear at one of four intensity levels. The results showed that social threats generally invigorated action decision, as high-threat trials elicited faster movements, which correlated with more direct trajectories compared to neutral trials. However, when participants chose to avoid angry individuals, the most frequent response, movements followed more central trajectories, compared to when they approached angry individuals. These findings suggest that while social threats generally invigorate action selection and execution, the accumulation of evidence for the decision can be temporarily prolonged to enhance the likelihood of a favorable outcome, such as threat avoidance. We propose integrating these results with recent models of action decisions under perceived urgency to advance understanding of threat-related decision-making.
Childhood complex trauma and social thinning in adolescence: evidence from a prospective cohort study
Ritika Chokhani; Praveetha Patalay; Essi Viding; Talya Greene; Eamon McCrory
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Background: Exposure to complex trauma may influence how children develop their social relationships and increase risk for social thinning: an impoverishment in objective and subjective aspects of their social functioning and environment (here termed “social architecture”). Methods: In this prospective observational study using data from the Millennium Cohort Study of 7058 children born in the United Kingdom, we used mixed-effects models to test whether complex trauma exposure measured at ages 5 and 7 (trauma N = 2024; control N = 5034) was associated with (a) impoverishment in social architecture (six preregistered outcomes) and (b) poor mental health (two preregistered outcomes) across ages 11, 14 and 17. Results: Averaging over available time-points, the trauma-exposed group reported less positive feelings about friends (COR: 0.75), lower perceived social support (COR: 0.75), lower participation in social activities (b = -0.47) and higher emotional (b = 0.34) and conduct (b = 0.44) symptoms compared with the control group. Contrary to our hypothesis, adolescents with complex trauma exposure had a greater increase in spending time with friends between ages 11-17 than the control group, yet reported reduced positive feelings about friends and social support. Conclusions: Adolescents with experience of complex trauma in childhood show a pattern of social thinning and poorer mental health. While this group of young people spent increasing time with friends, they subjectively felt more disconnected from them, highlighting the importance of capturing mechanisms underlying relationship quality to better understand the long-term impact of early interpersonal adversity on social functioning and mental health.
Too Imprecise and Too Inconsistent? Challenges for Media Psychology and Effects Theorizing – and Possible Solutions
Daniel Possler; Adrian Meier
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The replication crisis has revealed shortcomings in theorizing, yet its implications for communication science remain underexplored. Focusing on media psychology and effects, we diagnose two core problems in the field’s theory development—imprecision and inconsistency. These arise from both general challenges of theorizing about human behavior and psychology and seven field-specific obstacles, including high media stimulus variability, rapid technological change, and dependence on public discourse. We argue that, together, these challenges thwart our ability to achieve robust and replicable theories. To overcome them, we integrate advances in theory construction methodology and introduce communication researchers to the derivation chain, a framework to construct stronger theories. We discuss how each field-specific challenge can be addressed by re-focusing efforts onto key steps of the derivation chain. We believe that by building on this approach, the field can reach higher conceptual precision, theoretical coherence, and cumulative knowledge gains about media psychology and effects.
Age of Acquisition for English Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs): Estimates from a Large Language Model Fine-tuned by Crowdsourced Human Ratings
Clarence Green; Anthony Pak Hin KONG; Marc Brysbaert
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Age of acquisition (AoA) is a widely used variable that estimates when a lexical item is first understood. Existing English AoA norms have been highly influential in psycholinguistics, education, language acquisition, speech-language pathology, and natural language processing, but have focused primarily on single words. Little information is availed for multi-word expressions (MWEs), despite their central role in language use, vocabulary acquisition, representation and processing. The current study contributes AoA estimates for 80,586 English MWEs using a large language model, GPT-4.1-mini, fine-tuned on newly collected crowdsourced human ratings. Ratings were obtained from 96 US-based native English speakers via Prolific, yielding 47,163 ratings for ~3,999 MWEs. After reliability screening, 3,667 BLUP-adjusted means were used for LLM fine-tuning and validation. Fine-tuning substantially improved alignment with hold-out human ratings. The standard GPT-4.1-mini output correlated with human estimates at r = .67, whereas the model fine-tuned on 3,000 items reached r = .85. A final model trained on all reliable crowdsourced estimates was estimated AoAs for the full MWE list. Results showed relationships with existing psycholinguistic variables aligned with those for single-word AoAs, including that earlier-acquired MWEs tended to be more familiar, useful, and frequent. The estimates exhibited predictive validity against test-based student vocabulary data and explained additional variance beyond frequency, utility, and familiarity. These findings indicate that fine-tuned LLMs can provide useful large-scale AoA estimates for MWEs when grounded in human ratings. The new resource is available via OSF (https://tinyurl.com/3e828fj8) and an interactive webpage has been developed for users: https://cgg-projects.github.io/MWEs/.
Impossibility and Logical Contradictions Can Enhance the Perceived Value of Fictional Theological Propositions
Takuetsu Yajima; Eisuke Niida; Yo Nakawake
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Supernatural concepts are often thought to gain cultural attraction by violating intuitive expectations in limited ways, but many theological doctrines also involve logical contradictions or impossibilities. It remains unclear how such formal violations influence people’s evaluations of religious propositions. In the present study, 96 Japanese adults rated 20 fictional theological propositions on dimensions related to perceived value, including importance, profundity, interestingness, sacredness, and shareability. Those propositions were rated for impossibility and logical contradiction. A composite positive-evaluation score was derived from items rating perceived value and analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. The result shows higher impossibility and higher logical contradiction predict higher positive evaluations of the propositions. These findings suggest that impossible and contradictory theological content can be positively evaluated.
Feelings and defensive actions are dissociated under naturalistic threat
Lukas Kornemann; Olivier de Vries; Yonatan Hutabarat; Ulises Daniel Serratos Hernandez; Dominik R Bach
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Feelings are fundamental to everyday life and are central to clinical conditions such as anxiety disorders, but their adaptive function remains poorly understood. Here, we test two competing accounts: one holds that feelings drive immediate actions, for example fear causes escape, while the other proposes that feelings and actions arise from largely independent processes. Using freely moving virtual reality, participants navigated naturalistic threat scenarios while their actions, environment, and feelings were tracked. Across two experiments totalling 20,000 feeling reports, feelings and actions were largely dissociated. Actions tracked the immediate environment, whereas feelings were strongly predicted by feelings in preceding epochs. Environmental variables influenced feelings and actions differently, and direct interdependencies were consistent with a modulatory rather than generative role for feelings in action control. Rather than causing actions, feelings and actions may be parallel outputs of partly separate systems, challenging emotion-as-cause theories with implications for aetiological models of anxiety disorders.
Predicting Multilevel Growth Trajectories Using a Random-Effect Diagnostic Classification Model
Kazuhiro Yamaguchi; Haruhiko Mitsunaga; Shun Saso; Yuri Uesaka
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Learning diagnosis is essential for effective education, with formative assessments shown to significantly enhance academic performance. Diagnostic classification models have been developed to assess students' learning status and provide remedial instruction. However, the impact of mastery or non-mastery of specific attributes on long-term learning development remains uncertain. If certain non-mastered attributes hinder the growth of mathematical ability, early intervention becomes essential. In this study, we developed a random-effects diagnostic classification for a multilevel growth curve (RDC–MGC) model to identify the specific effects of attribute mastery on individual-level mathematics ability growth. The simulation studies showed that the Bayesian estimation procedure provided appropriate parameter recovery and coverage probabilities, whereas ignoring the multilevel structure resulted in biased parameter estimates. The model was applied to arithmetic test data from second- to sixth-grade elementary school students. Diagnosis was conducted in the second grade, and the effects of mastery on mathematics ability growth from the third to sixth grades were assessed. The results showed that attribute mastery in second grade was associated with both the intercept and slope of individual ability growth, suggesting the potential importance of early-stage diagnostic information for understanding later mathematical development. Potential extensions of the proposed RDC–MGC model are also discussed.

SocArxiv

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Perceived Intergenerational Mobility in Czechia and Uruguay. An Unexpected Event During Survey Design Study
Maik Hamjediers; Patrick PrÀg; Alexi Gugushvili
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Can large-scale geopolitical shocks causally reshape how individuals perceive their intergenerational mobility? War unsettles everyday life through security fears, policy uncertainty, inflation, and energy shocks---factors that can recalibrate the benchmarks people use when comparing their lives to their parents'. We address this question by examining the immediate impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on mobility perceptions using a quasi-experimental design. Leveraging World Values Survey fieldwork occurring in Czechia and Uruguay around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we compare respondents interviewed immediately before and after February~24, 2022 within an unexpected event during survey design. Using the quasi-random interview dates around the invasion, we find consistent null effects across multiple specifications---including bandwidth sensitivity analyses, logit models, robust bias-corrected estimates, demographic controls, and placebo tests. The invasion produced no discernible immediate impact on either upward or downward mobility perceptions in either country, despite Czechia's geographic proximity and historical ties to the region. These findings complement prior correlational evidence showing associations between war concerns and mobility beliefs one year after the invasion, suggesting that such effects may unfold gradually rather than instantaneously, or that correlational patterns reflect selection into worry rather than immediate causal impacts. By establishing a causal upper bound on the immediate effect of invasion exposure on mobility perceptions, our findings constrain the plausible magnitude of causal effects in a literature built primarily on observational evidence.
Intersectional Inequalities in Educational Attainment – Cohort Trends in West Germany, 1970-2008
Jascha DrÀger; Tom Hartl
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Despite the educational expansion, educational attainment still depends strongly on factors beyond individual’s control, such as social origin, gender, and migration background. Although these different social categories likely intersect to produce compounded forms of disadvantage, most existing research has studied these factors in isolation. This study describes trends in intersectional inequalities of educational opportunity by the combinations of social origin by combinations of social origin, gender, and migration background for the birth cohorts 1970-2008 in West Germany using data of the Socio-Economic Panel. We use two complementary quantitative approaches to evaluate intersectional inequalities: the “multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy” approach and Conditional Inference Forests. The results show that intersectional inequalities remained remarkably stable across cohorts. Social origin is the dominant social category: no combination of gender and migration background compensates for disadvantaged parental education. Intersectional interaction effects account for only a limited share of between-stratum differences and are not stable across cohorts. The Conditional Inference Forests further show that detailed measures of social origin are more informative for describing inequalities in Gymnasium attendance than highly specific intersectional groupings.
Beyond tradition: Successful career paths to full professorship
Jasmin M. Kizilirmak; Lisa-Marie Steinkampf; Sandra Buchholz; Jessica Ordemann
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German academia has faced a multitude of changes over the last two decades, including new alternative academic pathways to a professorship based on the Anglo-Saxon science system, such as junior or tenure track professorship. Our study investigates the patterns of academic career trajectories to a professorship that have emerged due to these changes. It looks deeper into the relationship between those patterns and determinants of academic success, such as previous career choices, scientific productivity and the chosen scientific field. Using data from the prof*panel (N=660) – a survey of recently appointed full professors in Germany – and sequence-cluster analysis, we find four academic career clusters, three of which are beyond the traditional pathway of Endurance Careers: Efficient Careers, Unconventional Careers and International Careers indicating an institutional change within German academia. Cluster affiliation is mainly related to time-to-tenure, habilitation (second thesis), working abroad and the field of the professorship. Our findings suggest that traditional career paths still play a major role, although the influence of internationalization and novel academic career steps, like junior and tenure-track positions, is growing. Furthermore, less conventional career paths, attract a higher proportion of women and are characterized by international mobility and more diverse professional experiences. The insights of our study underscore the ongoing changes in the landscape of academic careers and highlight both persistent challenges and new opportunities for aspiring professors.
The association between university attendance and mental health trajectories in young adults with low and high autistic traits: Evidence from the ALSPAC population cohort
Tom George Osborn; Rob Saunders; William Mandy; Peter Fonagy
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Background Attending university may be associated with increases in reported mental health symptoms in young adults. The role autistic traits (ATs) play in this association remains unclear—despite those with high ATs facing heightened risk of co-occurring mental health problems. We aimed to compare depression symptom trajectories from ages 16 to 25 in young adults who did and did not attend university in the early 2010s, and by low and high ATs. Method Longitudinal data were drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children population-based cohort. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Short Mood and Feeling Questionnaire. University attendance was derived from start, end and graduation dates. Autistic traits were assessed using the Social and Communication Difficulties Checklist. Mixed-effects growth curve models were applied to estimate depression trajectories. Results The primary analysis included 3,563 individuals. Mean depression scores were lower among university attendees before entry compared to non-attendees. Scores increased over time in both groups, with no evidence that university attendance predicted differential increases. Depression scores were substantially higher before university in individuals with high ATs compared to individuals with low ATs. Those with high ATs who attended university showed marginal decreases in scores, whereas non-attendees saw increases over time. Sensitivity analyses supported primary findings, except when university attendance was defined by graduation at ages 24 and 25. Conclusions Young adults with high ATs show higher depression scores than the general population. University attendance appears to have population- and context- dependent associations with depression trajectories.
Exclusion by inclusion: How beyond-binary respondents are erased from survey research
Leonie C Steckermeier; Alba MarĂ­a Kugelmeier LĂłpez; Stephanie Hess
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This paper illustrates how the inclusion of non-binary gender measures in large-scale surveys can inadvertently lead to the exclusion of the very populations they aim to represent. Recent international and EU efforts to integrate more inclusive sex and gender measures in surveys aim to improve data collection for evidence-based policymaking. While best practices in operationalization, reporting, and data protection have received substantial attention, the potential risks of making sex/gender minorities identifiable in survey data remain largely overlooked. Based on examples from three established surveys in political and social science research—the European Social Survey, the International Social Survey Programme, and the Eurobarometer—we show that more inclusive gender measures can render beyond-binary respondents vulnerable to exclusion, due to questionnaire design, data protection practices, and methodological challenges arising from their small numbers. We conclude with recommendations for questionnaire design and routing, data collection and documentation, and the analytical treatment of beyond-binary respondents, aimed at helping researchers avoid the unintended exclusion of sex/gender minorities.
How accurate are survey-based estimates of adult mortality? Benchmarking sibling and network methods against vital records in 27 Brazilian cities
Betsy Alafoginis; Dennis Feehan; Matthew Salganik
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High-quality vital statistics are common in wealthy countries but inadequate in many low- and middle-income countries. This gap hinders efforts to monitor, understand, and improve public health. In this study, we assess the accuracy of survey-based methods for estimating adult mortality rates by age and sex at moderate sample sizes (~1,000 respondents). We compare two approaches---the network and sibling methods---in parallel studies in 27 Brazilian cities. Unlike prior work, our design lets us benchmark both methods' estimates against reference estimates from near-complete vital records. We find that for most age-sex groups, the network method is more accurate, driven by its lower sample-to-sample variability. However, for young men, the sibling method is more accurate, because the network method has a large positive bias. Our results guide researchers seeking to use these methods as they currently exist and suggest clear directions for improvement.
A Meta-perspective on Reproducibility and Replication Rates
Rolando Villaseñor; Heinrich H Nax
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Large-scale replication projects have become central to debates about reproducibility in the social and behavioral sciences and related fields. In one of the most recent replication projects (Tyner et al. 2026), 274 positive results from 164 published papers between 2009 and 2018 were subjected to replication attempts. Depending on the criterion applied to evaluate replication success, between 28.6% and 74.8% of results replicated successfully. A key conclusion of this project was that the conditions that accept or reject replicability need further investigation. Building on that insight, the present study takes a meta-perspective on reproducibility by examining replication projects themselves. In particular, it focuses on how the choice of replication criterion may shape the conclusions that are reported. Two widely used criteria are the p-value-based replication criterion (PVRC), which assesses whether an originally significant effect remains statistically significant in the same direction in the replication, and the confidence-interval-based replication criterion (CIRC), which assesses whether the confidence intervals of the original and replication studies overlap. Using a sample of 31 replication projects across psychology, behavioral and social sciences, psychiatry, and behavioral ecology, this study shows substantial heterogeneity in reported replication rates both across projects and within projects depending on the criterion applied. Meta-analytic evidence suggests no overall time trend toward improved replicability and no robust association of replication rates with field, authorship patterns, or journal impact. At the same time, funnel-plot patterns indicate that reported CIRC estimates may be selectively biased toward more extreme values. These findings raise the possibility of publication bias and reporting in favor of “extreme results” operating not only in original studies, but also in the meta-literature on replication itself.
Treatment Effects on Within-Group and Between-Group Inequality: A Causal Variance Decomposition Approach.
Benjamin Rosche
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Rising inequality has been linked to growing disparities within and between economic strata. Yet, existing approaches to analyzing inequality often disregard within-group inequality and are limited in addressing causal questions about why inequality is changing. This paper introduces a causal approach to examining how treatment variables impact within-group, between-group, and total inequality. The method permits both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. With longitudinal analyses, researchers can disentangle compositional changes (level of pre-treatment inequality, distribution of treatment across groups) from behavioral changes (changing treatment effects). Moreover, researchers can analyze changes relative to a timepoint (e.g., 1980) or relative to a counterfactual scenario (e.g., a counterfactual distribution of treatment). I demonstrate the utility of the approach by analyzing the changing effect of motherhood on women's earnings and its consequences for women's earnings inequality between 1980 and 2025. The results show that motherhood decreases women's earnings inequality because it reduces inequality within economic strata.
Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump
Musa al-Gharbi
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As it became clear that Donald Trump had a real base of political support, even as analysts consistently underestimated his electoral prospects, they grew increasingly fascinated with the question of who was supporting him (and why). However, researchers also tend to hold strong negative opinions about Trump. Consequently, they have approached this research with uncharitable priors about the kind of person who would support him and what they would be motivated by. Research design and data analysis often seem to be oriented towards reinforcing those assumptions. This essay highlights the epistemological consequences of these tendencies through a series of case studies featuring prominent and influential works that purport to explain the role of race and racism in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It demonstrates that quality control systems, which should catch major errors, seem to be failing in systematic ways as a result of shared priors and commitments between authors, reviewers and editors – which are also held in common with the journalists and scholars citing and amplifying this work – leading to misinformation cascades. Of course, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, prejudicial study design, and failure to address confounds are not limited to questions about Trump – however they seem to be particularly pronounced in this case due to the relative homogeneity and intensity of scholars’ views about this topic as compared to other social phenomena. “Trump studies,” therefore, provides fertile ground for exploring how social research can go awry – and the consequences of these failures -- particularly with respect to work on contentious and politically-charged topics.
Whose Knowledge Governs? Incumbent Actors, Transformative Networks, and the Politics of Knowledge in Indonesia's Sustainable Palm Oil Policy
Faris Salman
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Indonesia's Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification scheme has evolved across three regulatory iterations since 2011, yet certification coverage sits at only 39.8\% of 16.38 million hectares as of 2025, despite legal mandates in force across the study period. Existing research explains the structural features of ISPO's path dependency but leaves the actor-knowledge mechanism that drove selective reform underspecified. This paper asks how knowledge origins shaped the content and trajectory of ISPO policy formation across two morphogenetic junctures (2013--2016 and 2018--2020). We trace ISPO consultation records, policy documents, NGO position papers, and interviews with key actors, identifying two competing knowledge architectures. An incumbent architecture, controlled by the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), GAPKI, and state research bodies, encoded path-dependent lock-in in the 2011 baseline. A transformative knowledge challenge, led by WWF Indonesia, KEHATI Foundation, Sawit Watch, TFT/Earthworm Foundation, and WRI Indonesia, introduced alternative evidence through international credibility channels. We apply the morphogenetic cycle to ISPO's three-iteration trajectory, identifying two temporal windows through which transformative knowledge was selectively incorporated. Each window required the same combination: external pressure that the government could not answer with its own knowledge resources, accumulated transformative knowledge credibility, and a government judgment that market costs of inaction exceeded the political costs of partial reform. The findings develop a mid-range theory of knowledge politics for sustainability governance. Knowledge origin shapes whose interests are encoded in a governance outcome. The network position of transformative actors conditions whether their knowledge reaches those critical moments when structural change becomes possible. A core limitations of this research is that interview evidence derives from civil society actors, government-side perspectives are inferred from documentary and accountability sources, and smallholder and community knowledge is analyzed as mediated through NGO representation, not from direct community interviews.
Design Philosophy after the Technology Turn: A Promethean Reflection for Design Education
Fernando Secomandi
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This is a slightly copyedited version of the talk presented at the Delft University of Technology Library on May 29, 2026, for the launch of the book Design Philosophy after the Technology Turn (Bloomsbury, 2026), edited by Fernando Secomandi and Peter-Paul Verbeek.
Attacked, Harassed, Intimidated: A Narrative Review of Research and Action on Public Backlash Against Scientists in the Netherlands and Beyond
Niels G. Mede
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Public backlash against scientists, encompassing attacks, harassment, intimidation, hate, and threats from members of the public, has become a recurring feature of scientific work in the Netherlands and beyond. Despite growing attention and importance, the evidence base is scattered, terminology is used inconsistently, and responses are fragmented across institutions and countries. This report synthesizes the international academic literature in the form of a narrative review. It maps the conceptual vocabulary and summarizes empirical evidence on the prevalence of backlash (30–45% of academics; 50–80% of media-exposed scientists), its forms, drivers, gendered and racialized patterns, psychological and behavioral consequences, and individual and institutional responses, including a comparison with journalism and parliamentary politics. It reviews countermeasures in the Netherlands and internationally. Finally, it discusses limitations of the current support landscape, identifies lessons from adjacent professions, and proposes approaches for future research. A comprehensive appendix lists current initiatives and resources available to scientists, communicators, and institutions.
Cross-Scale Fractal Coherence: Hierarchical Multifractal Analysis of Urban Form and Environmental Stress in Four U.S. Megacities
Omid Mansourihanis; Xuantong Wang
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Urban morphology has traditionally been studied through single-layer Euclidean descriptors, yet the cross-scale architecture of cities — how parcels, buildings, and blocks cohere hierarchically — remains poorly quantified. This paper develops a hierarchical fractal framework that simultaneously characterizes self-similarity, multifractality, and cross-scale coherence at three nested morphological scales. Using a 2020 geodatabase of 134,863 census blocks across four U.S. megacities (New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles) containing 7.3 million parcel polygons and 4.4 million building footprints, we compute box-counting fractal dimensions, gliding-box lacunarity, and the multifractal spectrum f(α) at block, parcel, and building scales. We introduce three novel indices — the Multifractal Heterogeneity Score (MHS), the Fractal Harmony Index (FHI), and Cross-Scale Consistency (CSC) — to operationalize hierarchical coherence. Pooled and city-stratified models reveal that hierarchical-fractal descriptors explain up to 78% of crash risk variance and 70% of PM2.5 variance, with threshold non-linearities consistent with the Edge-of-Chaos hypothesis. City-specific analyses expose a Simpson’s paradox masked in pooled correlations and demonstrate that effective morphological interventions must be city-tailored. The findings argue for a shift from single-layer Euclidean planning to complexity-informed design anchored in cross-scale fractal balance.
The Peacekeeping Dilemma: Understanding the Challenges of UN Peacekeeping in Modern Conflicts
William George Nomikos; Ipek Ece Sener; Rob Williams
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An abundance of evidence demonstrates that United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) enhance the prospects for peace in conflict and post-conflict settings. Yet existing work also suggests that peacekeeping succeeds at some tasks while failing at others—often within the same mission. We argue that UN peacekeepers cannot eliminate all forms of violence because actions that reduce one type of violence create conditions that contribute to an increase in another type—a phenomenon we call the peacekeeping dilemma. Two countervailing mechanisms generate this dilemma: a deterrence mechanism, through which peacekeepers raise the costs of violence for non-state actors, and a collaboration mechanism, through which the UN's reliance on host-government consent facilitates government violence against civilians. We test this framework using a geographic regression discontinuity design around the border of Mali and Burkina Faso, where the UN mission MINUSMA operated from 2013 until its forced withdrawal in 2023. We find that UN peacekeeping reduces conflict between non-state rebel groups and communal violence between civilians, but not violence between governments and rebels. More troubling, we find evidence that UN peacekeeping increases government violence against civilians.
Butterfly Blocks at the Edge of Chaos: Conditional Morphological Regimes for Reducing Urban Stress
Omid Mansourihanis; Xuantong Wang
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Urban planning has long been caught between the metaphors of control and chaos. Complexity science offers a third path: cities thrive at the Edge of Chaos — the productive boundary between rigid order and dissolving disorder. Yet operationalizing this concept has been limited by the assumption that it requires longitudinal data unavailable to most cities. This paper demonstrates that a single-year geospatial snapshot is sufficient. Using 134,863 census blocks across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, we develop six Morphological Chaos Proxies derived from standard parcel and building-footprint data. These proxies decompose into two orthogonal axes — Disorder and Intensity — revealing a clear conditional signature: the optimal level of morphological disorder for minimizing traffic and crash stress varies systematically with intensity. In sparse settings, higher disorder reduces stress; in dense settings, moderate order performs better. Per-city Random Forest models expose markedly different stress drivers across metros, undermining the assumption of uniform national policy. The framework identifies approximately 600 Butterfly Blocks (top 1% per city) — locations where small, low-cost morphological adjustments are predicted to yield disproportionately large reductions in stress. These findings reframe resilience planning around adaptive capacity and provide a tractable, jurisdictionally portable diagnostic using existing municipal geodatabases.
Situational Vulnerability in Research: Risk Assessment, Informed Consent, and IRB Protections in University Contexts
Allison A. Lavington
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Ethical oversight in research involving human participants is typically grounded in established procedural frameworks. However, university research environments present contextual dynamics that warrant further consideration. In these settings, participation is embedded within institutional structures—such as course-credit systems and faculty authority—that shape how students engage with research, raising questions about whether procedural safeguards adequately protect participants even when Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols are followed. This article examines how IRB practices and federal regulations (45 C.F.R. §46) address context-dependent vulnerability within university research environments. Drawing on research ethics and decision-making scholarship, it conceptualizes situational vulnerability as context-dependent constraints on participants’ capacity for autonomous decision-making arising through interactions among participant characteristics, research design, and institutional context. The analysis distinguishes formal consent from substantive autonomy and argues that current procedural ethics frameworks remain limited in their ability to identify and respond to forms of vulnerability that emerge dynamically during participation, rather than existing as fixed or stable categories. The article proposes a context-sensitive extension of procedural ethics incorporating ongoing consent, dynamic safeguards, and real-time responsiveness to participant experience in university research settings.
Tenure, Texture, and Response: A Sentence-Level Computational Typology of Presidential Press-Conference Rhetoric, 1945–2025
Jonathan Hoover
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This paper presents a sentence-level computational typology of U.S. presidential news-conference rhetoric, built from 1.55 million sentences covering fourteen administrations from 1945 to 2025. I score each sentence against nine theoretically derived rhetorical constructs using OpenAI text-embedding-3-large against a locked anchor set, with independent validation from two large-language-model raters (Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6; per-construct Cohen's Îș .71 to 1.00). Latent profile analysis recovers eight interpretable rhetorical types, from Affirmative warmth to Grim confrontation. Hierarchical clustering of the fourteen administrations groups presidents by era rather than party. Trump's first and second terms emerge as a singular cluster at K = 3 across three linkage methods; Truman appears as a secondary rhetorical singleton at K = 4 under Ward.D2 linkage, reflecting a press-conference style heavy on humor and defensiveness. Within-administration analyses reveal a generic tenure effect: every president drifts away from Hopeful warning and toward Defensive deflection over the arc of their term, in a manner consistent with cumulative-stress and depressive-realism accounts and not appreciably driven by approval change or midterm electoral outcomes. A complementary analysis of reporter–president rhetorical coupling reveals systematic between-president variation in how reactive presidential rhetoric is to reporter framing. Psychometric validation establishes that the nine constructs are empirically discriminable but largely orthogonal, with two strong bipolar pairs (Optimism ↔ Defensiveness, Fear ↔ Humility) cutting across the originally proposed cluster structure.
Linked Lives in Adolescence: School Peers and First Co-resident Union Formation
Zuzana Zilincikova; Clara H. Mulder; Marjolijn Das; Marijtje A.J. van Duijn
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Using Dutch register data from the System of Social Statistical Datasets, we examine how school peers’ partnership formation relates to individual transitions to co-resident unions—either cohabitation or marriage—among 123,212 third-grade secondary school students followed from 2011 to 2016. We estimate discrete-time event history models that account for peer clustering through random effects. The results demonstrate that transitions to a first co-resident partnership during adolescence and early adulthood are associated with the partnership behaviour of school peers. Co-resident partnership formation clusters within school peer groups, and this association is strongest while adolescents remain embedded in the secondary school environment. The observed association is driven primarily by male peers’ behaviour and male individuals, with no association found for female peer behaviour or cross-gender peer effects. These findings support the life-course concept of linked lives and extend the peer influence literature beyond risk behaviours and fertility to a central family formation transition.
The Tennis Parent Trap: A Simulation Analysis of Investment Timing in Youth Tennis
Rebeca Crichton-Amaya
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In competitive youth tennis, a critical question often goes unasked: when does parental investment matter most? This study applies the economic principles of Cunha and Heckman’s (2007) skill formation model to a simulation of 10,000 virtual players tracked across three developmental stages: Foundation (ages 8–10), Development (ages 11–14), and Elite (ages 15–18). The simulation operationalises self-productivity, dynamic complementarity, and sensitive periods, while treating the model as hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory. The headline result is that the cumulative path of investment, not innate ability, dominates final skill: investment variables alone explain roughly 63% of outcome variance, whereas initial ability alone explains only about 7%. Investment effects also rise across stages, with Elite-stage spending the strongest single predictor. Consistent with the central hypothesis, late-weighted strategies (mean final skill 41.7) outperform early-weighted strategies (40.7) among resource-constrained families, with balanced intermediate (41.2) and consistently-high highest overall (43.8). A sensitivity analysis confirmed this late-weighted advantage is robust across eleven alternative specifications, including equalised lifetime budgets. These patterns suggest that, for budget-constrained families, when to invest may matter nearly as much as how much—though simulation-based inference requires caution in generalisation.
Online Remembrance of the Beirut Port Explosion: Justice, State Failure, and Digital Memory on X and Reddit
Mohamed Soufan
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Around the five-year mark after the August 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion killed more than 218 people and destroyed large areas of the city, no individual had been convicted in connection with the disaster. This study examines how the explosion is remembered in Lebanon-centered online discourse, asking which memory frames dominate and whether they remain consistent across platforms and languages. The analysis draws on 7,191 records from X (formerly Twitter) and the r/Lebanon subreddit, collected between August 2024 and May 2026 and covering Arabic and English posts and comments. Using LLM-assisted frame classification validated through manual review, the study identifies six memory frames. It finds that unresolved justice and state failure together account for 71.7% of the corpus, while personal grief accounts for 11.8%, a ratio of approximately 6:1. This pattern holds across both platforms and both language groups. The findings suggest that, under conditions of sustained institutional impunity, online memory may function less as retrospective mourning than as a continuing accountability mechanism: distributed, persistent, and politically active. In the Beirut case, digital memory has not settled into commemoration. It remains oriented toward an unresolved demand for reckoning. The study contributes to research on collective memory, disaster remembrance, digital platforms, and accountability in contexts where institutional closure has not been achieved.
The Republican geographic advantage in congressional elections has largely disappeared by 2024
Christopher T. Kenny
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Where voters live shapes partisan control of Congress, independently of how district lines are drawn. Political scientists have long argued that Democratic voters concentrate in cities while Republican voters spread more efficiently across suburbs and rural areas, giving Republicans an advantage in redistricting. I show that this geographic advantage has steadily declined. I build a national panel of precinct-level presidential returns from 2008 to 2024, standardized to small, fixed geographic units within each state, and estimate how many House seats Democrats would win under a large sample of nonpartisan congressional redistricting simulations. Under these simulations in a tied national election, the 2008 electorate produces about 203 Democratic seats and the 2024 electorate produces a near-even House. Standard measures of partisan bias in elections similarly show a reduced Republican advantage. However, this decline in geographic partisan advantage does not make the House more competitive. The current distribution of voters by party would produce a fair House absent gerrymandering
Extreme Temperatures and Educational Inequality: The Protective Role of Family and School Socioeconomic Resources
Maria Rubio-Cabañez
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This study examines the intersection of extreme temperatures and socioeconomic status (SES) in shaping disparities in children's academic performance. As climate change accelerates, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, disproportionately affecting populations from lower SES backgrounds who are more vulnerable to environmental stressors. Existing research suggests that extreme temperatures negatively impact academic performance, but little is known about how these impacts differ across socioeconomic groups or whether family or school contexts provide more effective protection. This study addresses these gaps by investigating how SES at two institutional levels moderates the relationship between exposure to extreme temperatures and children's test scores. Using data from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INVALSI) linked with daily temperature records from the E-OBS gridded dataset, I analyze over 2.5 million students across five grade levels from 2013 to 2022. By exploiting within-individual-municipality variation over time through two-way fixed effects models, I estimate how exposure to extreme temperatures in the year prior to the test affects academic performance and how SES at the family and school levels moderates these effects. Results reveal that extreme temperatures significantly reduce test scores, with these effects varying systematically by socioeconomic status. When examining both dimensions simultaneously, family resources and school SES composition both emerge as significant moderators, each providing independent protection of similar magnitude. This study advances understanding of the stratifying effects of climate change on education and provides evidence that targeted interventions at the household and school levels may offer effective protection for disadvantaged students.
Social Capital Activation and Co Production in Post Poverty Rural Governance: Five Innovations in an Aging Chinese County
Yi Duan
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How can a resource constrained rural county activate latent social capital to sustain governance under conditions of advanced aging and out migration? This paper examines Shangyou County, a mountainous, formerly poverty designated county in Jiangxi Province, China, where between 2022 and 2025 local authorities developed five interlocking governance innovations: the consolidation of fragmented grid systems, the mobilization of elder councils for dispute mediation, the creation of county wide social psychological services, the repurposing of cultural centers as tourism infrastructure, and the synchronization of employment support with community corrections. Drawing on sociological theories of social capital, co production, and active aging, the paper argues that these innovations share a common logic: the deliberate conversion of existing but un activated relational resources into structured governance partnerships. The analysis identifies four mechanisms—organizational consolidation, social capital activation, vertical mandate leveraging, and sequential scaling—that enable this conversion. The case demonstrates that even in counties where fiscal capacity is severely limited and the population is demographically skewed toward the elderly, sustainable governance innovation is possible when local institutions recognize and mobilize the social authority embedded in community networks.
How Strong Is the Evidence for Peaceful Resistance? Not Very.
Charles Crabtree; John B. Holbein
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Are peaceful social movements really more effective than violent ones? Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works argues that nonviolent resistance consistently outperforms violent resistance in achieving democratic outcomes. This conclusion has had enormous influence among academics, political actors, the media, and on-the-ground activists. We find that some results were misreported in ways that make the data appear to support civil resistance when they do not. Moreover, we find that the results are not robust to modest and reasonable changes in model specification, that they are sensitive to omitted variable bias, and that they rely on instrumental variable models with implausible assumptions that yield unstable estimates. Taken together, our replication and extension suggest that the available cross-national evidence provides no clear basis for the claim that nonviolent campaigns are substantially more effective than violent ones. This is not evidence that nonviolence backfires; it is evidence that the strong, unconditional advantage reported in Why Civil Resistance Works is not supported by the data. Our findings underscore the need for methodological re-examinations of foundational works.
When Resources Are Not the Problem: Administrative Coordination Failure and Repair in China's Free Congenital Heart Disease Intervention Programme
Yi Duan
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Fully funded social programmes frequently fail to reach intended beneficiaries. Drawing on a single-case embedded study of China's National Free Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) Intervention Programme in a rural county (2016–2021), this article examines how governance architecture failures—rather than resource scarcity—produced a severe last-mile delivery gap and how a low-cost administrative innovation repaired it. A 2019 audit identified 67 confirmed or suspected CHD cases accumulated over three years without programme enrolment. Four interacting failure mechanisms were identified: absent programme ownership, information fragmentation across four administrative systems, incentive misalignment at the front line, and clinical awareness deficits among village health workers. A three-component intervention—a patient-linked coordination ledger, a cross-departmental joint action mechanism, and an incentivised identification campaign—raised estimated identification rates from approximately 40 per cent to 85 per cent, increased surgical completions from five to 89, and compressed median case-to-surgery lag from over 52 weeks to approximately 11 weeks within 18 months, at a total coordination cost of approximately USD 3,300. The analysis contributes to social policy implementation theory by integrating street-level bureaucracy and multi-level governance frameworks to explain how coordination architecture shapes welfare delivery outcomes. Five design principles are derived for programmes confronting analogous last-mile gaps in decentralised governance systems.
Synergy drives collective performance in networks
Ketika Garg; Cody James Moser; Hannah Dromiack; Zara Anwarzai; Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
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The influence of network structure on collective problem-solving is a central focus in collective intelligence. However, the causal mechanisms linking structure to collective outcomes remain unexplored. To explore these, we utilize an agent-based model, the Potions Task, which operationalizes problem-solving as a combinatorial process suited to information-theoretic analysis. We examine information-based metrics at the level of agent pairs across networks, analyzing variation over time to determine how they predict problem-solving across network structures. We measure redundancy (or conversely, synergy) of solutions discovered by agents with respect to the network's global knowledge. Building on findings that small-world networks support efficient problem-solving, our results uncover the underlying mechanism by which high-performing networks achieve efficiency, namely by balancing local redundancy with long-range synergy. Furthermore, we find that synergy consistently predicts group performance, including in network structures typically considered inefficient at complex tasks. Synergy in information processing, measured at both local and global levels, therefore mediates the effects of structure and can override them entirely, suggesting that information-processing synergy, rather than network structure itself, is the primary driver of group performance. By formalizing a causal framework for information processing in collectives, our study provides a mechanistic account of collective problem-solving beyond network structure alone.
Approaching Bilingual and Multilingual Perspectives on Language Learning and Teaching in Saudi Arabia
Louis Sharpe
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This paper examines bilingual and multilingual approaches to English language teaching in the context of Saudi Arabia, with particular reference to the author's working context in an international school. Drawing on the framework of the multilingual turn, the paper explores pedagogical approaches including translanguaging, Community Language Learning (CLL), Language Awareness (LA), Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and English as an International Language (EIL). The ideological dimensions of multilingualism — including issues of identity, linguistic imperialism, and cultural preservation — are foregrounded throughout. A lesson plan designed around EIL and translanguaging through CLL is presented and critically evaluated. The paper concludes by advocating for more ethically attuned, locally-sensitive TESOL pedagogy in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, and calls for further comparative research into Islamic ethics and identity within TESOL education.
“The one big challenge is definitely measurement!”: Commensuration of wellbeing and financial returns in social investment programs for people in vulnerable positions
Ditte Andersen; Sarah Wadmann
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This article explores the micropolitics of measurement in social investment programs. Such programs represent an economization of social problems as they wed social returns, like increased wellbeing, with financial returns, like reduced public expenses. While social investments have been explored as political projects, the local practices of measurement they rely on remain scarcely studied. Based on a case study in Denmark, a social investment frontrunner, we first investigate how the idea of social investment was translated into a manifest model with repayment schemes seeking to quantify and make wellbeing commensurable with cost reductions. Building on observations and interviews with professionals in a social investment program for families in vulnerable positions, we then explore how they navigate inherent tensions of measurement. Contributing to the sociology of quantification, we outline three strategies used to handle such tensions: Measure modification to realign measurement with desired outcomes; Epistemic flexibility to enable the co-existence of diverging purposes of measurements; Temporal protraction to allow for time lag in measurement. The study illustrates how distinctions between conceptualization, measurement and use of numbers fade in practice when conventions are unsettled and practitioners assume an entrepreneurial ethos to make things work.
When is it ethical to recruit a PhD student? Critical reflections on the ethics of doctoral recruitment in the neoliberalised academy
Julie Spray
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In a neoliberalised higher education, faculty are often pressured and incentivised to recruit and supervise PhD students. While the ethics of doctoral supervision are well studied, less attention has focused on how prospective supervisors might navigate ethical concerns before a student begins. Yet research indicates many factors impacting doctoral student wellbeing and success lie beyond individual supervisors, including the institutional ethics of care, neocolonial dynamics, the distribution of responsibility, economic and housing support, and the departmental community and learning ecologies. Using an autoethnographic approach and drawing conceptually from my own field, the anthropology of childhood, I synthesise and cross-reference these issues with my own doctoral experiences to explore the question: when is it ethical to take on a PhD student?
Convergence and continuity of time use for housework and childcare in German couples, 1991–2022
Florian Schulz
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This study provides a comprehensive descriptive account of trends in the gendered division of unpaid labor in Germany over three decades, drawing on all four waves of the German Time Use Study (1991/1992, 2001/2002, 2012/2013, and 2022). Using a sample of coupled women and men aged 25–64, the analysis reports trends in total, core, and occasional housework time for weekdays and weekends separately, assesses key determinants, decomposes changes into compositional and behavioral components, and compares trends in West and East Germany. The overall picture is one of substantial but incomplete gender convergence. Women’s total weekday housework time declined by about 35 percent, from 237 to 153 minutes per day, while men’s remained largely stable in aggregate. Beneath the aggregate, two divergent trends are at work: men’s core housework time more than doubled on weekdays, while their occasional housework time declined. The gender ratio in core housework fell from 6.88 to 2.49, which translates into a reduction of more than 60 percent. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses show that the majority of the change on both sides remains unexplained by compositional shifts, pointing to normative and behavioral change as the primary driver, particularly for men. The West-East comparison reveals a second convergence alongside the gender convergence: regional differences have largely dissolved by 2022. For the parent subsample, childcare time increased markedly for both mothers and fathers, with fathers' time more than doubling, and these increases are almost entirely unexplained by compositional change, making childcare the most normatively dynamic domain in the study.
Pagpopokpok at Pangangabit: Language, Media, and the Structural Pathologization of Female Survival in the Philippines
Benjamin Abalos Lorenzana
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Across many cultures, morality and the feminine exist within a strict dichotomy of good and bad, wherein sexual conduct exhibited by women—such as sex work and infidelity—are cast in a significantly harsher light than when performed by men. This manifests as the Heterosexual Sexual Double Standard (SDS). As synthesized by Endendijk et al. (2020) in their landmark meta-analysis, "He is a Stud, She is a Slut!" empirical data confirms the continued global persistence of this traditional double standard. Specifically, frequent sexual activity in men is socially expected, and evaluated positively, whereas identical behaviors in women are met with stringent restrictions and negative moral evaluations like "slut-shaming." While behavioral frequency is a critical factor—with females making up an estimated 80% of sex work providers globally (McKeever, 2025), and young married women aged 18 to 29 slightly outpacing men in infidelity at 11% versus 10% (Wang, 2018)—major structural disparities remain unaddressed. Chief among these "elephants in the room" is that men are the primary drivers of these behaviors: they constitute the overwhelming majority of consumers in the sex work, with 11% of men reporting ever having paid for sex compared to less than 1% of women (McKeever, 2025), and they are statistically more likely to cheat across almost all older demographics (Wang, 2018). Grounded in these disparities, this paper explores how these global double standards manifest locally; while Philippine society and mainstream media cast the pokpok (sex worker) and the kabit (mistress) as agents of moral decay, an intersectional analysis reveals that their positions are deeply dictated by structural poverty and reinforced by a patriarchal religious framework that disproportionately punishes women while absolving men.
Multimodal Misinformation: How Climate Obstruction Is Constructed on TikTok
Victoria Vallström
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This article examines how conspiratorial climate claims are multimodally constructed and emotionally mobilized on TikTok, advancing understanding of multimodal climate misinformation in short-form audiovisual content. Despite the growing prominence of audiovisual and conspiratorial climate misinformation, research has largely focused on text- based analyses and mainstream platforms, overlooking how meaning, affect, and attention are organized through multimodal communication on visual-first, sound-on platforms. Addressing this gap, the study asks: What thematic patterns emerge from a large corpus of TikTok videos on climate and weather modification? How are conspiratorial climate narratives constructed through the integration of visual, sonic, and textual cues, and how do these narratives mobilize emotional engagement? Methodologically, the study employs a mixed-methods design that combines computational multimodal topic modeling of 7,658 TikTok videos with theory-informed qualitative multimodal framing analysis of 27 topics (1,220 posts). Drawing on framing theory, social semiotics, and the sociology of emotions, the analysis shows how conspiratorial meaning is assembled distributively across posts and modes. Findings identify a distinct variant of climate conspiracy that affirms climate change as real, human-caused, and urgent, while reframing its cause as covert technological intervention by powerful actors. These narratives fall outside established climate misinformation typologies, often reliant on isolated, text-based signals. Conspiratorial framing mobilizes an oscillation between fear and epistemic emotions such as curiosity, redirecting attention from the climate crisis toward sustained conspiratorial investigation. The study further demonstrates how multimodal misinformation on TikTok can function as a form of climate obstruction by reshaping emotional orientation and diverting engagement away from climate action.
Strategic Recovery and Institutional Resilience in Digital Asset Exchanges: The Indodax Case Study and the S3-Resilience Model
Sutarno Sarba
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This study examines institutional resilience and strategic recovery dynamics of Indodax following a cyber security incident in September 2024. The research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the recovery process using the S3-Resilience Model framework, focusing on the interplay between operational speed, financial solvency, and public sentiment. This study employs a descriptive-analytical mixed-method case study approach, integrating both qualitative and quantitative data. Data were gathered from reconstructed market events, publicly accessible blockchain records, and official institutional disclosures. The analysis was conducted by applying the S3-Resilience Model conceptual framework, integrating three main pillars: Speed, Solvency, and Sentiment. Quantitative metrics such as the Crisis Shock Coverage Ratio (CSCR) and V-Shaped Recovery patterns in trading activity were used to validate the resilience indicators. The findings reveal a high degree of systemic resilience, evidenced by service restoration within 80 hours, significantly below the industry average. Transparency was maintained through the publication of Proof of Reserve amounting to Rp11.5 trillion with a CSCR of 34x. Market response remained positive, indicated by net positive fund inflows and a swift return to normal trading volumes. The Indodax case demonstrates that institutional resilience in digital asset exchanges depends on a balanced integration of technical readiness and transparent financial accountability. The study concludes that the S3-Resilience Model is a viable framework for managing systemic risks and maintaining market trust during high-impact cyber crises.
Analysis of the Social System in Post-Capitalist Society
摹拇
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The ability to enhance productivity is pivotal in determining the success of a social system. Beyond scientific and technological advancements, productivity primarily hinges on workers' production enthusiasm and labor quality, the scale of production within each unit, and the pattern of resource allocation. Under given productive forces, the scale of production per unit is determined by the rate of exploitation imposed by owners upon laborers. As productive forces advance, new production models emerge. To boost productivity, the rate of exploitation diminishes, elevating the political and social standing of the populace, thereby giving rise to new social formations. Undifferentiated human labor constitutes the origin of goods value, while interest and capital gains represent the outcome of value distribution. Goods prices in the market are primarily determined by supply, with the labor value of goods serving as the equilibrium point of supply—thus constituting the market's equilibrium price. The labor theory of value can explain the Equity Risk Premium Puzzle. The higher the automation level of enterprises, the lower the value of goods, and in the long run, the lower the profits of enterprises. After the highly developed productive forces in capitalist society, the vast majority of industries will become low-profit public infrastructure services, making it difficult for private entities to continue operating. Public ownership will replace private ownership. The future social structure will be a “communist society” characterized by public ownership and distribution according to need as the mainstay, supplemented by private ownership and distribution according to work under a free-market economy. In the historical development toward communist society, there exists no so-called transitional stage of socialist society. In this communist society the state will persist, giving rise to a united human government where selfless dedication becomes the socially advocated moral standard. Under current productive forces, public ownership impedes both productive and economic development. Marxism is mistaken about the reasons and timing for the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. Contemporary society faces issues such as welfare systems, nationalization, unified currencies, and China's economic and political structures.
Navigating the National Principle: Romanian Communities Under Ottoman and Habsburg Imperial Rule
Gheoghe Calin Goina
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This paper offers a comparative analysis of the national question in two of Central and Eastern Europe's great multinational empires — the Ottoman and the Habsburg — during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through two case studies focusing on the Romanian populations of Wallachia and Moldova under Ottoman suzerainty, and of Transylvania under Habsburg rule, it examines how interactions between local elites and imperial centers shaped the trajectory of national movements. Rejecting culturalist or economic determinist explanations, the paper argues that national-oriented political mobilization was neither inevitable nor the product of pre-existing structural conditions. Rather, it was the outcome of contingent political dynamics — failed institutional consolidations, inconsistent state policies, and the strategic responses of local actors to shifting imperial constraints. The state, treated here as an autonomous agent, emerges as the decisive variable in explaining the divergent paths taken by national movements across the two imperial contexts.
Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Tunisia: Analyzing Environmental Pressures and Adaptation ChallengesThrough Multi-Decadal Data (1960–2025)
bochra hadj kilani
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Tunisia, a semi-arid Mediterranean country, faces increasing climate-related pressures linked to water scarcity, agricultural instability, rapid urbanization, and limited environmental adaptation. Despite growing concern over climate vulnerability in North Africa, integrated long-term assessments of the relationship between environmental stress and sustainable development remain limited. This study analyzes multi-decadal trends from 1960 to 2025 using 15 standardized indicators from World Bank Open Data covering water resources, agriculture, energy transition, urbanization, coastal exposure, and environmental protection. The analysis combines descriptive trend evaluation with OLS regression, Mann–Kendall tests, and Sen’s slope estimation to identify major structural changes across sectors. The results reveal four major trends. First, freshwater withdrawals increased dramatically, reaching over 90% of internal renewable resources by 2022, placing Tunisia among the world’s most water-stressed countries. Second, agricultural systems remain highly vulnerable, characterized by declining arable land and strong cereal-yield volatility linked to rainfall variability. Third, rapid urbanization has concentrated population and infrastructure in low-elevation coastal zones exposed to sea-level rise and storm surges. Fourth, adaptation efforts remain insufficient, with limited renewable-electricity deployment and protected-area coverage remaining below international targets. The findings highlight a growing “climate–development nexus” in which resource depletion, environmental vulnerability, and slow adaptation interact through reinforcing pressures. The study identifies urgent priorities for integrated water governance, renewable-energy expansion, coastal-risk management, and ecosystem protection, directly supporting SDGs 6, 11, 13, and 15. More broadly, the Tunisian case provides an instructive framework for understanding climate-development challenges across semi-arid Mediterranean and MENA countries.
Nudging Civility on Online Social Networks with Large Language Models
François t'Serstevens; Corinna Oschatz; Abdul.Sittar; Damian Trilling; Alenka Guček
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Online social networks have become a central arena for political and social discourse, yet interactions on these platforms are frequently characterized by hostile interactions. While disagreement is a normal and required feature of democratic debate, research suggests that disrespectful communication discourages users from engaging in political discussions and may negatively affect both participants and the broader audience exposed to such interactions. In response, previous interventions have attempted to improve online discourse through behavioral nudges and interface design changes, though their effectiveness has often been limited. This study examines whether AI-mediated paraphrasing interventions can reduce uncivil expression while preserving substantive disagreement in online political discussions. Using an experimental setting that simulates social media interactions, we analyse how AI-generated paraphrases influence the tone of conversations and assess their effects not only on the direct participants of a debate but also on external observers who encounter these exchanges. The findings provide insights into the potential of AI-assisted communication tools to foster healthier online discourse.
No time to lose? Partnership becomes less of a prerequisite to childbearing with age
Cristina Suero; Eva Beaujouan
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In a context of later fertility, individuals often delay childbearing until certain conditions, such as partnership stability, are met. However, the fecundity decline and social norms associated to age may impose limits on how long individuals can postpone parenthood in pursuit of these prerequisites. Older women may experience greater pressure to have children within a limited timeframe, which may lead to childbearing within less-tested partnerships or even outside a partnership. To explore these dynamics, we use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EUSILC), pooling data from multiple countries for the years 2004 to 2022. We examine: (1) the likelihood of having a child among women who have recently entered a co-residential partnership, by age; (2) the likelihood of dissolving a co-residential partnership shortly after childbirth, by age; and (3) the likelihood of having a child while not in a partnership, by age. We also assess variation in these patterns in countries clustered by fertility level and timing. Our results show that women who form a co-residential partnership at ages 35-39 are substantially more likely to have a child soon after entering the relationship than younger women. Moreover, among those who have a first child during the observation window, the likelihood of giving birth without a co-resident partner increases sharply with age and is particularly high among women aged 40-45. These findings suggest that older women exhibit greater flexibility regarding partnership circumstances when pursuing motherhood, especially in societies where childbearing is most commonly postponed.
Aportes sociolĂłgicos en el diĂĄlogo interdisciplinario sobre la mĂșsica
Sonia MarĂ­a Ruiz-Cejudo
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La vida social se construye, entre otros aspectos, por una atmĂłsfera sonora que adquiere forma con base en contextos culturales especĂ­ficos. Dentro de ella, para muchos grupos humanos la actividad musical ha resultado ser un elemento incluso ritual y que puede llegar a constituir discursivamente sus identidades; para otras, por el contrario, la propia nociĂłn de mĂșsica –y las implicaciones que Ă©sta tiene– para designar muchas de sus prĂĄcticas sonoras no existe. ÂżCĂłmo se posiciona la sociologĂ­a frente a esta dualidad de percepciones sobre “sonido humanamente organizado”? Âżcon quĂ© herramientas cuenta un sociĂłlogo para poder indagar y problematizar el fenĂłmeno? El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar elementos que ayuden a responder dichas interrogantes, exponiendo dos posturas epistemolĂłgicas propias de la sociologĂ­a a partir de las que pueden construirse puentes de discusiĂłn con la etnomusicologĂ­a y otras disciplinas, y propiciar diversos acercamientos en torno a la mĂșsica.
What is Americanness? Polarization and Consensus in Cultural Logics of the American Creed
Keitaro Okura; Sakeef M. Karim
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Conventional wisdom suggests that political polarization has fractured the boundaries of U.S. national membership. Employing a novel empirical strategy that applies latent class modeling to conjoint data, we find evidence that both supports and complicates this narrative. On one hand, we identify five cultural logics of Americanness, three of which exhibit strong partisan alignment and represent sharply divergent conceptions of national belonging. On the other hand, we find that a majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, subscribe to hybrid conceptions of Americanness that incorporate both civic-oriented norms and ethnocultural criteria. We further find that attributes such as a college education and a multigenerational family history in the U.S. are associated with greater Americanness across all five cultural logics. These findings reveal substantial cross-partisan consensus on the contours of authentic national belonging, even within a fragmented media landscape that systematically exposes partisans to divergent information environments. One implication of our findings is that contemporary partisan conflict over what it means to be American reflects not only competing understandings of Americanness, but also contestation over who legitimately adheres to the national creed.
Infrastructure as Rural Development Catalyst: Evaluating the Millennium Challenge Corporation Nepal Compact, 2017–2026
Avyash Shiwakoti
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This paper evaluates the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Nepal Compact as a case study in infrastructure-led rural development. It tracks the project from the author's original 2021 arguments through contested ratification in February 2022 to active deployment as of May 2026. Drawing on MCA-Nepal project data, parliamentary records, and field reports, the study assesses whether the predicted rural development multipliers—rural hydro evacuation, land compensation capital injection, local employment, and improved market connectivity—have materialised. The evidence substantially validates the core 2021 thesis, while counterpart funding escalation and right-of-way disputes remain the main implementation challenges. The paper offers targeted policy recommendations to maximise rural spillover effects before the August 2028 completion deadline. JEL CLASSIFICATION: F35, O18, H54, O53, Q48
Reinforcing Inequality: Within Family Division of Transfers and Bequests
Adriana Reyes; Thelonious Lyle Goerz
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Intergenerational transfers are a key mechanism through which families reproduce or mitigate inequality. While prior research highlights the unequal and needs-based nature of inter vivos transfers, bequests are often viewed as more normatively equal. This study examines whether bequests function as a corrective to earlier disparities or reinforce inequalities within families. Using family fixed effects models and data from the Health and Retirement Study, we find that children who receive more inter vivos transfers are also more likely to receive a bequest and a larger bequest. We find no moderating role of education, while children who do not own a home are more likely to receive a bequest. These patterns suggest that bequests may reinforce rather than offset prior inequalities. Findings have implications for understanding the reproduction of advantage and for policies aimed at reducing wealth inequality across generations.
Global Crisis or Overblown Problem? Three Tools to Clarify Contentious Issues in Misinformation Research
Pietro Leonardo Nickl; Mubashir Sultan; Caedyn Stinson; Friederike Stock; Ralph Hertwig; Anastasia Kozyreva
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Alongside the rapid expansion of misinformation research, a line of academic arguments has emerged questioning its relevance and legitimacy. We dissect three key issues shaping the current debate: the prevalence of misinformation, its causal role, and the legitimacy of misinformation research. To bring more clarity to these contentious issues, we introduce three conceptual tools—the (Mis)information Funnel, the (Mis)information System, and the (Mis)information Lens, and use them to demonstrate how to move research on misinformation forward and systematically map future research directions. Our analysis shows that there are fewer genuine disagreements in this field than it seems at first glance, and that those that persist do not invalidate misinformation research. Different positions on each issue imply different directions, both for future misinformation research and policy making. Our analysis is, therefore, relevant not only for misinformation researchers, but also for practitioners and the general public.
An Instrumental Variables Approach for More Robust Emotion Experiments
Amanda Weiss; Ekin Dursun
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Many experiments purport to identify the effects of emotions on outcomes like voting, support for authoritarians, and polarization. We ask how and when experimentalists can actually identify these effects. Using causal graphs, cast these experiments as instrumental variable designs: Researchers field emotion manipulation instruments, but seek to attribute the effects of the instrument to the effects of the emotion. We deploy the instrumental variable design framework to highlight implicit assumptions in emotions experiments--including instrument relevance and an implicit exclusion restriction. We then test {empirically} which standard instruments strongly manipulate target emotions (ensuring instrument relevance) while minimally affecting non-target emotions (maintaining the exclusion restriction). Across three experiments (N=6,890), we study vignettes, autobiographical emotional memory tasks (AEMTs), images, and more as instruments for anger, gratitude, fear, and political emotions. We find that vignettes generally maximize instrument strength and minimize violations of the exclusion restriction---despite the greater popularity of AEMTs. Finally, in a causal forest analysis of treatment effect heterogeneity, we also find that positive pre-treatment attitudes toward research may moderate instrument effectiveness.
Policy, Procedure, and Public Trust in the Bureaucracy
Alexander Love; Alexander Sahn
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Bureaucracies derive their legitimacy from a perception of impartiality, but in polarized societies preferences over outcomes may trump faith in procedure. We study citizens’ evaluations of the policymaking process as a joint function of individual beliefs that bureaucratic procedure was followed and preferences over outcomes. We recontacted and surveyed individuals who recently commented on rules proposed by American federal agencies; in the survey, we embedded two experiments in which individually tailored treatments successfully manipulated beliefs about procedural thoroughness and knowledge of policy outcomes. We find no effects of procedural knowledge but a strong polarizing effect of outcome knowledge: commenters whose preferred outcome was congruent (incongruent) with the agency's action symmetrically increased (decreased) their perceptions of rule legitimacy, attitudes toward notice-and-comment, and agency trust. These findings cast doubt on a major purported benefit of an otherwise costly administrative practice.
From assessment to action: Linking biodiversity assessments and place-based conservation to support transformative change.
Carlos Carroll; Asena Goren; Thomas Hoctor; Reed Noss; Michael G. O'Brien; Lindsay Dreiss; Daniel J Rohlf
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Scientific biodiversity assessments are challenged by the need to examine systemic drivers of change while maintaining support in a polarized political climate. Recent US national policy shifts that have reduced federal support for scientific assessments underscore the necessity of a broad-based, resilient, and scalable assessment framework with sustained engagement of conservation practitioners from academia, non-governmental organizations, and subnational governments. Such an information ecosystem would integrate spatial data relevant to practitioners from national to regional extents with case studies of place-based strategies and mechanisms for framing local successes within national objectives. The recent response by US climate scientists defending scientific integrity in the face of political polarization provides a relevant model for enhancing collaboration across national science academies, scientific societies, and ad hoc groups of experts. Subnational initiatives such as the Florida Wildlife Corridor and Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy provide examples of ambitious, science-informed conservation assessments developed and implemented with both governmental and public support. Engaging a diversity of participants and ensuring greater salience across scales are complementary elements of an integrated approach to strengthening the effectiveness of assessments. Sustaining non-governmental capacity for engagement with the assessment process requires improved models of collaboration, altered academic reward structures, and diverse sources of funding. Improved integration of national-scale data in subnational assessments can strengthen existing models, including state and provincial biodiversity strategies, and support the synthesis of currently fragmented spatial data on biodiversity distribution, threats, and conservation priorities. Stronger linkages between narrative assessments and spatial data, between spatial data and place-based action, and between public engagement with the assessment process and local conservation initiatives can ensure a diverse, resilient support system for biodiversity data development, synthesis, and application that produces actionable and scalable knowledge to support place-based conservation.
Social complexity promotes cooperation and functional integration in large-scale societies
NA; Peter Turchin; Marcus John Hamilton; José Lobo
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How do large-scale human societies maintain functional integration? Over the last 12,000 years, polities grew over six orders of magnitude in population, far exceeding the scale at which the interpersonal mechanisms that promote cooperation in small-scale societies can operate. Here we test the hypothesis that cooperation and functional integration in large-scale societies is promoted by social (and, specifically, institutional) complexity. We model large-scale societies as territorial social networks subject to energetic, cognitive, and competitive constraints. We demonstrate that agricultural intensification generates increasing population density, raising the per capita rate of social interaction beyond what small-scale mechanisms can sustain and requiring institutional rules to substitute for interpersonal knowledge. The model predicts that territory and social complexity scale with polity population with exponents of 5/6 and 1/6. Tests against data describing hundreds of polities spanning the Holocene support these predictions, providing quantitative evidence that social complexity is a central integrative mechanism enabling large-scale human cooperation.
Who Refers to Science? Understanding the Salience of Scientific Evidence in Parliamentary Debates
Daniel Wiesner
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Effective politics relies on the availability and use of factual information. However, while theoretical and normative discussions often stress the importance of evidence-based politics, empirical studies of how often and under what conditions politicians refer to scientific evidence remain limited. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing references to scientific evidence in one important political arena: parliamentary debates. Our dataset covers 30,000 speeches delivered in the main legislative chambers across six European democracies (Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and the United Kingdom) from 2018 to 2021. Using large language models (LLMs), we identify two key features in each speech: (1) the use of scientific evidence, and (2) the primary policy issue discussed. We then apply multi-level logistic regression models to evaluate which factors are associated with higher or lower likelihoods of references to scientific evidence. We distinguish between three sets of predictors: (a) macro-level country variables, (b) meso-level party and issue factors, and (c) micro-level speaker characteristics. Findings suggest that institutional roles, policy contexts, and organizational routines are more decisive for evidence use in politics than national context or ideology. The findings are discussed in light of potential measures to facilitate evidence use in political processes.
Governance in the Age of AI Leadership: From Advisory Systems to Organizational Authority
Alexander Huseby
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The question of whether artificial intelligence can occupy the role of Chief Executive Officer has shifted from theoretical provocation to live experiment. In October 2025, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna formally elected SKAI — an AI system — as an independent board director with claimed voting rights, though the legal enforceability of that authority remains disputed under Kazakh law. Researchers at the Wharton Mack Institute and INSEAD’s Center for Corporate Governance have begun formally comparing AI and human boards on governance criteria. The Dataiku Global AI Confessions Report (Harris Poll, March 2025), surveying over 500 CEOs across the US, UK, France, and Germany, found that 94% believe AI could offer equal or better counsel than at least one of their current board members. This paper examines what these developments mean: what AI can do in an executive capacity, where it demonstrably cannot, and what governance architecture is required if organizations are to move from AI-assisted leadership to AI-principal leadership responsibly. Drawing on principal-agent theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976), organizational legitimacy theory (Suchman, 1995), and institutional governance frameworks (Ostrom, 1990), it introduces a six-level AI Authority Maturity Model and proposes governance as a form of strategic infrastructure rather than a compliance cost. Keywords: AI leadership, corporate governance, autonomous AI agents, AI accountability, principal-agent theory, organizational legitimacy, CEO decision-making, agentic AI, AI ethics, governance maturity
Implied Authenticity Effect? The Impact of Explicit Labels on AI-Generated Content
Fabian Pawelczyk; Drew Dimmery; Pu Yan
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This study investigates how labeling AI-generated content (AIGC) influences users’ perceptions of authenticity in social media environments. Motivated by emerging global regulations mandating the disclosure of AI-generated media, we designed a pre-registered survey experiment to test two main questions: (1) Do AI labels reduce the perceived authenticity of AI-generated images? (2) Does exposure to labeled content affect perceived authenticity in unlabeled images (a potential spillover effect)? The pre-analysis plan and materials are available on OSF (see link below). We conducted a survey experiment with a German sample (N = 877) in which participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a control group without labels, a process-based label group (“AI-generated”), or a harm-based label group (“Misleading”). Participants viewed twelve Instagram-style posts, six of which contained AI-generated or AI-altered content. Perceived authenticity was measured by asking whether the depicted events actually occurred. Our results show that both labeling strategies significantly reduced perceived authenticity of AI-generated images, with average reductions of about 0.27 standard deviations. We also find evidence of an implied authenticity effect: exposure to labeled content slightly increased perceived authenticity in unlabeled images (about one-fifth the size of the direct labeling effect). Exploratory analyses indicate that internet skills and age are associated with perceived authenticity differences. By embedding labels in Instagram-style posts, our study increases ecological validity compared to earlier work focused on headlines or generic stimuli. Situated in Germany, a frontrunner in digital platform regulation, the findings provide rare non-U.S. evidence on AI labeling and contribute directly to ongoing policy debates.
Cohort Profile of the INVEST Genetically Informed Full Population Register: Linked Finnish register data, polygenic scores, data opportunities and limitations, and guidance for responsible use in health and social research
INVEST Flagship; Henrik Dobewall; Outi Sirniö; Charles Ng’iendo; Katri KantojĂ€rvi; Maria Vaalavuo
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We profile the genetically informed part of the INVEST research flagship’s full population register (e17), a Finnish linked data infrastructure that combines rich administrative social and health registers with polygenic scores (PGSs) derived from population health surveys conducted by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). The working paper has three aims. First, it describes the scope and content of the data linkage, including its register modules, the genotyped sample, and sibling-based analytic extensions. Second, it documents the construction of the available PGSs in a format aligned with the Polygenic Risk Score Reporting Statement (Wand et al., 2021, Nature, 591, 211–219). Third, it reviews the data opportunities and limitations and offers guidance for the responsible use of genetically informed designs in health and social research. The INVEST project exploits longitudinal health data, including diagnoses based on the ICD-10 classification recorded in public specialized health care, together with administrative records on social, demographic and economic characteristics of the individuals. With particular attention to dyadic and intergenerational research designs, we highlight the mental health information available across Finnish registers. The genetic component is based on THL’s health surveys, including FINRISK 1992-2012, Health 2000/2011, and FinHealth 2017, and currently includes 39,570 individuals. The paper also outlines weighting strategies developed to partially correct for volunteer bias in the genotyped subsample and describes how partially genotyped sibling designs can be utilized for within-family analyses. In sum, the combined genetically informed register data provide a valuable cohort for sociogenomic research in Finland while also illustrating why careful interpretation and transparent reporting are essential whenever PGSs are used.
50 Years of Collaboration, Author Networks, and Gender Relations: A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis of Board Game Authorship from 1975 to 2025
Johannes Blumenberg
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This study examines gender relations and co-authorship networks in board game design from 1975 to 2025, based on an aggregated BGG dataset (132,062 games; 59,389 designers). Since around 2020, the proportion of female designers has stabilized at 9–10%. Women collaborate significantly more frequently with other women and, on average, work in smaller teams, indicating different network patterns. Bipartite network analyses and linear regression models reveal that higher betweenness centrality, larger teams (with diminishing marginal returns), and greater complexity are associated with higher BGG ratings. In contrast, newcomer teams tend to receive lower ratings. A higher proportion of women in a team is correlated with lower ratings; this relationship has intensified over time and persists even when controlling for complexity. Cohort analyses of the overall network point to a shift in central actors over the decades. Overall, the study underscores the importance of networks in board game authorship and highlights persistent structural inequalities.
Trust Me, I Cite Science: How Political Communication Drawing on Science Affects Message Credibility and Communicator Trustworthiness
Daniel Wiesner; Jakob-Moritz Eberl; Andrea Wiesner; Sophie Lecheler
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The interplay between science and politics is increasingly complex and contentious, especially in times of crises and polarized public debates. Although calls to "follow the science" are often invoked in political discourse, science’s role in politics is rarely straightforward, and it is frequently used strategically beyond its informational function. This study examines how science-related political communication influences perceived message credibility and communicator trustworthiness, integrating insights from science communication and political communication research. We empirically test hypotheses across three conceptual dimensions. First, we evaluate the effects of source credibility by comparing communicators (scientists vs. politicians) and their respective uses of evidence. Second, we analyze the impact of different rhetorical strategies employed to communicate the political decision-making process, like highlighting evidence-determined justifications, reasoned processes, or populist appeals. Third, we investigate how science-populist attitudes and pre-existing issue-attitudes moderate these effects. Results of a pre-registered factorial survey experiment (N = 552) show that source credibility and the choice of evidence are primary drivers of perceived credibility and trustworthiness. In contrast, rhetorical strategies related to decision-making processes have no significant effect. Notably, science-populist attitudes strongly influence which epistemic authorities respondents consider legitimate bases for political decisions. These findings reveal tensions at the science-politics nexus between the strategic effectiveness of constructing epistemic authority and the normative democratic demand for political accountability. The study contributes novel empirical insights into how communicative strategies shape trust in science-related political communication, offering implications for safeguarding trust in science and improving the credibility and trustworthiness of political communication in polarized environments.
Time Matters: Rethinking Temporal Dynamics in Criminology
Amy Nivette; Manuel Eisner
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Time is a foundational yet underspecified concept in criminological theory and research. While developmental and life course criminology is explicitly concerned with temporal processes, including the onset, duration, and desistance of criminal behaviour, the precise specification of time in theory and empirical research remains largely implicit. This paper critically examines how time is conceptualized and modelled in criminology, with particular attention to the gap between the temporal assumptions embedded in theory and the designs and methods used to test them. We argue that this underspecification has important consequences for both scientific understanding and practical application, including the design and evaluation of interventions where questions of dosage, timing, and the duration of effects are central. We demonstrate that theoretical and empirical decisions about temporal processes are often driven by convenience or convention rather than explicit reasoning, and that commonly held assumptions about the stability of key constructs over time rest on an insufficient empirical foundation. To address these limitations, we make a case for more formally specifying causal temporal assumptions, integrating measures across micro- and macro-time scales, and adopting research designs, such as ambulatory assessment, experience sampling, and burst designs, capable of capturing how short-term experiences translate into longer-term behavioural change. Greater transparency about temporal assumptions and their empirical basis will strengthen causal inference and improve the design and evaluation of criminological interventions.
Social Media Influencer Marketing and Consumer Buying Behaviour: Evidence from Female Undergraduates in Nigeria
ijeoma ibeh
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This study examines the influence of social media influencer marketing campaigns on consumer buying behaviour among female undergraduates at the University of Lagos, with specific focus on Viva detergent. Grounded in Source Credibility Theory and Social Exchange Theory, the study employs a quantitative survey design with 372 respondents drawn from across all faculties, achieving a 94.2% response rate. Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis were conducted using SPSS v22. Results indicate high awareness of Viva's celebrity influencer partnerships, with Adesua Etomi and Nancy Isime most prominently recalled. Instagram and YouTube emerged as the dominant exposure platforms. Exposure to influencer content positively impacted brand attitudes (mean = 3.67–4.37) and purchase intent (mean = 3.88–4.27). A significant positive correlation was found between perceived influencer credibility and purchase intention (r = 0.71, p < .01). These findings validate influencer marketing as an effective strategy for reaching youth consumer segments in the Nigerian context, and contribute empirical evidence from an underrepresented emerging-market perspective.
When Anticorruption Pays off: Voter Support for Anticorruption Efforts in Latin America
Gustavo Guajardo
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While anticorruption appeals are commonly employed by politicians to win votes, the effectiveness of such appeals varies considerably. When do voters reward politicians for anticorruption action? Drawing on two original survey experiments in Colombia and Mexico, this study finds evidence of voters relying on contextual features to evaluate politicians proposing anticorruption policies. The findings underscore how, while voters always value anticorruption action compared to inaction, evaluations are higher in the absence of a recent corruption scandal and when proposed by an opposition politician. While respondents generally prefer punitive policies, the effect was only significant in Colombia. Remarkably, the preference for punitive policies is shown to be conditional on incumbency for both countries---incumbent party politicians benefit from punitive proposals, while opposition politicians do not. These findings offer new insights into how voters evaluate anticorruption appeals, showing how appeals can boost electoral outcomes, regardless of whether politicians intend to follow through.
Gender Voice Gap in Teaching Professionals - A Comparative Analysis of Vocal Nodules
Aninda Paul Antor; Hritu Raj Deb; Anika Tasnim; Muhtasim Tousif; Sydil Muttakin Hossain; Rajon Sarkar
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Background: Teachers are a high-risk occupational group for voice disorders due to sustained vocal demand and suboptimal classroom acoustics. This study quantified symptom burden, sex differences, and key correlates of clinically diagnosed nodules and suspected voice disorder among teachers. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of teachers (N=300; 52% male) measured voice symptoms (Likert items), two binary outcomes (doctor-diagnosed nodules; suspected voice disorder), and five indices (Symptom Index, Vocal Load, Environmental Support, Misuse Risk, Impact on Quality of LifeQoL). Internal consistency of indices was acceptable to excellent (Cronbach’s α=0.72-0.93). Multivariable logistic regression with robust side effects assessed associations with outcomes; predictive discrimination was evaluated using area under the curve(AUC). Results: Overall prevalence of key symptoms was high (loud/strained voice 74.7%, voice fatigue 68.0%, throat pain 58.7%, hoarseness 56.7%). Females reported higher symptom prevalence across multiple indicators, yet males had higher diagnosed nodules (45.8% vs 26.9%) and suspected voice disorder (56.9% vs 39.7%). In adjusted models, being male (adjusted Odds Ratio aOR=2.59; 95% CI 1.23–5.45) and higher Vocal Load (adjusted Odds Ratio aOR=3.79 per unit; 95% CI 1.86–7.73) were associated with diagnosed nodules; the model showed good discrimination (Area Under the Curve AUC=0.85). For suspected voice disorder, male sex (adjusted Odds Ratio aOR=3.40; 95% CI 1.46–7.94), Vocal Load (adjusted Odds Ratio aOR=3.48; 95% CI 1.53–7.95), and Misuse Risk (adjusted Odds Ratio aOR=2.48; 95% CI 1.04–5.95) were significant predictors. Index correlations supported convergent validity: Symptom Index correlated with Vocal Load (r=0.55) and Impact on Quality of LifeQoL (r=0.68), and inversely with Environmental Support (r=-0.33) (all p<0.001). Conclusion: Female teachers experienced substantial voice-health burden, with Vocal Load consistently linked to both clinical and suspected outcomes. Findings support multi-level prevention focusing on workload-sensitive voice use, early screening, and classroom-level acoustic supports.
Algorithmic Reality as a Psychological Ecology: Epistemic Destabilization, Significance Threat, and Regressive Meaning Making in Digital Environments
Mitchell Sanders
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Human belief formation serves not only epistemic functions but also regulatory ones, helping individuals manage uncertainty, identity coherence, and affective distress (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Kunda, 1990). Contemporary digital environments increasingly mediate these processes through algorithmically curated information streams optimized for engagement rather than epistemic coherence (Praiser, 2011; Gillespie, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). This paper argues that such environments function as psychological ecologies that systematically destabilize epistemic conditions while amplifying motivational and affective pressures toward belief rigidity. Within these ecologies, epistemic destabilization is converted to motivational urgency, and rigid belief adoption functions as a regulatory solution rather than as an epistemic failure. Drawing on cognitive psychology, moral psychology, and clinical science, the paper advances an amplification model in which chronic uncertainty, narrative saturation, moral salience, and algorithmic reinforcement interact with individual differences in curiosity, intolerance of uncertainty, and identity stability (Kruglanski, 2004; Carleton, 2016; Baird et al., 2012). Under such conditions, belief adoption serves a regulatory function by restoring coherence, significance, and moral orientation, even when epistemic accuracy is compromised. Algorithmic reinforcement dynamics such as repetition, attentional salience, processing fluency, and identity affirming feedback further consolidate these beliefs, increasing resistance to correction and revision (Hasher et al., 1977; Dechene et al., 2010; Pennycook & Rand, 2019). The framework calls on Significance Quest Theory to explain why epistemic destabilization becomes motivationally urgent for some individuals, highlighting how algorithmic environments can both generate significance threat and supply readily available restoration pathways grounded in moralization, oppositional identity, and narrative certainty (Haidt, 2001; Kruglanski et al., 2014, 2022). These pathways may provide a subjective sense of autonomy while simultaneously constraining reflective agency, creating self reinforcing regulatory loops. Importantly, this work does not claim that digital environments directly cause psychopathology. Instead, it adopts an amplification perspective in which algorithmic contexts intensify latent vulnerabilities ranging from normative cognitive biases to belief rigidity and subclinical disturbance (Bentall et al., 2001; Vorontsova et al., 2013). By conceptualizing algorithmic media as psychological ecologies, this paper offers a unifying theoretical account linking digital reinforcement structures to belief rigidity, identity fixation, and epistemic closure. The framework delineates scope conditions, specifies underlying psychological mechanisms, and generates testable claims, providing a coherent basis for future empirical research and clinically informed preventative reflection.
Mobility measurement and network structure shape mortality inequalities in epidemic simulations
Jordan D. Klein
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Digital trace mobility data are now widely used to infer infectious contacts and parameterize transmission dynamics within epidemiological simulations. However, mobility is not a single observable quantity and may be operationalized in mathematically distinct ways that exhibit different patterns of socioeconomic stratification. Using a metapopulation model applied to COVID-19 in Brazil, we examine how alternative operationalizations of mobility magnitude and network structure affect inferred epidemic mortality inequality dynamics. Specifically, we compare mobility measures based on the number of spatial units visited versus the probability of remaining within a spatial unit, as well as static versus dynamic mobility network formulations derived from multiple data sources, while holding remaining model inputs constant. Across model specifications, socioeconomic inequalities in mortality ultimately emerge, but their apparent timing differs systematically depending on how mobility is represented within the model. Simulations parameterized using mobility measures based on the number of spatial units visited and static mobility networks produced earlier emergence of mortality inequalities than simulations parameterized using stay-put probability measures and dynamic mobility networks. These differences arise because alternative mobility measures capture distinct socially stratified dimensions of mobility and dynamic mobility networks contracted and became more localized and assortative during the early pandemic period. These findings demonstrate that mobility operationalization constitutes a substantively consequential modeling choice capable of altering inferred epidemic inequality trajectories even under otherwise equivalent epidemiological conditions. More broadly, these results demonstrate that representational assumptions embedded within epidemiological models can shape inferred epidemic inequalities, bearing consequences for equity in infectious disease research and response.
Đ”ĐžŃŃ‚Ń€ĐžĐ±ŃƒŃ‚ĐžĐČĐœŃ‹Đč ĐŒĐŸĐŽ ĐłŃ€Đ°Đ¶ĐŽĐ°ĐœŃĐșĐŸĐłĐŸ ĐżĐŸĐ»Ń ĐšĐ°Đ·Đ°Ń…ŃŃ‚Đ°ĐœĐ°: ĐżŃƒĐ±Đ»ĐžŃ‡ĐœĐŸ-ŃĐ»Đ”ĐŽĐŸĐČая Đ°ĐœĐ°Ń‚ĐŸĐŒĐžŃ, ŃĐŸĐ±Ń‹Ń‚ĐžĐčĐœŃ‹Đ” ĐłŃ€Đ°ĐŒĐŒĐ°Ń‚ĐžĐșĐž Đž Đ°ŃĐžĐŒĐŒĐ”Ń‚Ń€ĐžŃ ĐŒĐŸŃŃ‚ĐŸĐČых фрДĐčĐŒĐŸĐČ
Nikolay Sudnikov
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This article describes the distributive mode of Kazakhstan’s civic field through publicly observable digital traces. Unlike the institutional mode, where the primary unit of observation is the registered organization, the distributive mode becomes visible through individual, pseudonymous, hybrid and collectively anonymous platform actors, and through their activation in bounded public events. The article’s central claim is that the distributive mode is neither an anti-institutional residue, nor a horizontally coordinated network, nor a single architecture of mobilization. In the current corpus it is best understood as a six-layer public-trace anatomy: actor infrastructure, event grammars, doxa-trace candidates, bridge-frame asymmetry, platform-archive opacity and frame-translation bridges. The empirical corpus includes a T1-T9 actor registry of 469 public actors and platform units, a T6-T9 distributive-focus subset of 200 actors, 8 event maps, 121 event traces, 80 actor-event role rows, 59 coordination or public-action traces, 68 doxa traces and 42 candidate repost/citation traces. After several archive passes, robust direct repost edges remain zero. The article therefore does not reconstruct a repost graph and does not claim an influence network. Its strongest evidence lies instead in repeated event grammars: advocacy/legal relay, mutual-aid logistics, urban document-audit, eco-heritage common-good, regulated policy debate, infrastructure accountability, education-access fairness and weak-bridge petitioning. The doxa layer is treated only as event-activated candidates, seeds and shared bridge frames; strong field-doxa claims remain zero. The article’s main theoretical contribution is the concept of bridge-frame asymmetry. Distributed grievances become publicly portable and institutionally legible when they are translated into legal, procedural, expert, media, documentary, formal-response or logistical registers. This does not make the distributive mode secondary or dependent. It shows that public civic force in the distributive mode is often produced through asymmetric translation across unequal registers of legibility. Negative evidence is central to this argument: the graph that does not build, the field-doxa that is not claimed, the archive gaps that are not converted into absence of activity, and the safety gates that prevent exposure are all part of the substantive result.
The Distributive Mode of Kazakhstan’s Civic Field: Public-Trace Anatomy, Event Grammars and Bridge-Frame Asymmetry
Nikolay Sudnikov
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This article describes the distributive mode of Kazakhstan’s civic field through publicly observable digital traces. Unlike the institutional mode, where the primary unit of observation is the registered organization, the distributive mode becomes visible through individual, pseudonymous, hybrid and collectively anonymous platform actors, and through their activation in bounded public events. The article’s central claim is that the distributive mode is neither an anti-institutional residue, nor a horizontally coordinated network, nor a single architecture of mobilization. In the current corpus it is best understood as a six-layer public-trace anatomy: actor infrastructure, event grammars, doxa-trace candidates, bridge-frame asymmetry, platform-archive opacity and frame-translation bridges. The empirical corpus includes a T1-T9 actor registry of 469 public actors and platform units, a T6-T9 distributive-focus subset of 200 actors, 8 event maps, 121 event traces, 80 actor-event role rows, 59 coordination or public-action traces, 68 doxa traces and 42 candidate repost/citation traces. After several archive passes, robust direct repost edges remain zero. The article therefore does not reconstruct a repost graph and does not claim an influence network. Its strongest evidence lies instead in repeated event grammars: advocacy/legal relay, mutual-aid logistics, urban document-audit, eco-heritage common-good, regulated policy debate, infrastructure accountability, education-access fairness and weak-bridge petitioning. The doxa layer is treated only as event-activated candidates, seeds and shared bridge frames; strong field-doxa claims remain zero. The article’s main theoretical contribution is the concept of bridge-frame asymmetry. Distributed grievances become publicly portable and institutionally legible when they are translated into legal, procedural, expert, media, documentary, formal-response or logistical registers. This does not make the distributive mode secondary or dependent. It shows that public civic force in the distributive mode is often produced through asymmetric translation across unequal registers of legibility. Negative evidence is central to this argument: the graph that does not build, the field-doxa that is not claimed, the archive gaps that are not converted into absence of activity, and the safety gates that prevent exposure are all part of the substantive result.
Technocratic Capture: Reflexive Values and the Governance of AI Harm
Shuja Shakir
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When fairness becomes a metric, accountability an audit, and transparency a disclosure form, something happens to the values themselves. This paper describes this as technocratic capture: the transformation of reflexive, contested political values into administratively manageable forms in AI governance. By analysing 36 papers spanning STS, ethics, law, governance, and system design, this paper argues that contemporary AI harm scholarship approaches this dynamic without fully theorising it. This literature documents harms, governance failures, epistemic asymmetries, and institutional contradictions with sophistication, yet remains oriented toward architectural critique rather than the dynamics through which governance systems stabilise values and absorb critique. The paper identifies three conditions that reproduce this absence. First, critical analytical capacity is unevenly distributed across disciplines, concentrating structural critique in fields with weaker authority in AI governance. Second, critical concepts entering governance frameworks are transformed into operational procedures, audit systems, and metrics that preserve institutional legitimacy while narrowing the interpretive openness. Third, disciplinary asymmetry often subjects critical social science to the epistemic conventions of data science and AI, constraining the analytical space for reflexive critique. The argument is not that AI governance ignores political values but that governance transforms those values by operationalising them. Technocratic capture does not appear as a failure external to governance systems but as a condition produced within them. The question is no longer whether critique enters AI governance but what happens to critique once it does.
Americans Favor Predistributive Over Redistributive Economic Policies
David Broska; Jonne Kamphorst; Robb Willer
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Redistributive policies designed to reduce economic inequality through taxes and transfers (e.g., safety-net benefits funded by progressive taxation) receive less support in the U.S. than in many Western democracies. Recent work suggests Americans may be more receptive to “predistributive” policies, which seek to reduce economic inequality before taxes and transfers (e.g., minimum-wage increases). Yet existing evidence leaves open whether this support gap characterizes contemporary Americans overall, and whether it persists when the same policy proposals are described in predistributive versus redistributive terms, with their core provisions held constant. Across 31 nationally representative U.S. survey waves fielded from 2015 to 2024 (total N=384,248), we find greater support for policies classified as predistributive than redistributive. We then fielded a preregistered experiment with a national U.S. sample (N=1,009), randomly varying whether otherwise identical policy proposals were described as increasing earnings for people lower in the income distribution, shifting resources from higher- to lower-income individuals, or presented only with the brief policy description given in all conditions. Support was higher under predistributive than redistributive descriptions. Comparison with the control condition clarifies this difference: predistributive descriptions received support comparable to control, whereas redistributive descriptions received lower support. Exploratory analyses suggest perceived respect for hard work and deservingness of beneficiaries were associated with the support gap. Together, these results suggest Americans prefer policies that reduce inequality by influencing earnings more than through taxes and transfers.
Diagnosing the Social Deficit in Computational Social Science: A Pilot Audit of Epistemic Drift
Shuja Shakir
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Computational Social Science (CSS) is frequently portrayed as offering the potential for enhanced engagement with social theory and reflexivity in conjunction with computational methods. Nevertheless, systematic tools for evaluating this integration remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Distribution Quantification Framework (DQF), a quantitative diagnostic tool designed to assess epistemic balance in CSS research at the abstract level. We illustrate the application of the DQF through a two-layer audit of forty articles, which combines abstract-level scoring with systematic qualitative full-text verification. This methodology investigates how social commitments are articulated, as captured by abstract-level computational–interpretive scoring. Within this pilot corpus, we identify patterns indicative of a potential social deficit: articles with higher α-scores exhibit greater divergence between the abstract and full text, whereas abstracts referencing critical traditions (e.g., Science and Technology Studies) demonstrate closer alignment. A preliminary citation analysis corroborates these patterns. Rather than making claims applicable to the entire field, this study presents the DQF as a proof-of-concept diagnostic tool. It demonstrates a method for identifying epistemic misalignment within a defined scope, with the potential for assessing reflexive practice and supporting comparative audits in larger samples.
Elecciones 2025. Sexto Informe C22-CEP, el agotamiento de la seguridad
Aldo Mascareño; Fabian Belmar; Juan Rozas; Pablo A. Henríquez
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Este sexto informe de la serie C22-CEP sobre las elecciones presidenciales 2025 analiza las visualizaciones y emociones de seis candidatos de cara a las elecciones del 16 de noviembre de 2025: Jeannette Jara, Franco Parisi, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, Evelyn Matthei, JosĂ© Antonio Kast y Johannes Kaiser. El anĂĄlisis se basa en un corpus de 901.112 palabras (distribuidas entre 15.160 publicaciones) obtenidas de Facebook e Instagram entre el 1 de agosto y el 30 de septiembre de 2025 y procesadas mediante tĂ©cnicas de minerĂ­a de texto y anĂĄlisis de frecuencias lĂ©xicas. Nuestro argumento en este informe es que el tema de seguridad ha agotado su novedad. Este agotamiento de la seguridad como tema de campaña no implica que ya no sea relevante, sino que no produce nueva informaciĂłn para los pĂșblicos. Los resultados muestran que el agotamiento de la seguridad tiene varios efectos: 1) un surgimiento disperso de otras propuestas temĂĄticas en algunos casos asociadas a los programas; 2) un aumento de polĂ©micas entre candidatos; 3) un descenso de la primacĂ­a que Kast tenĂ­a en la derecha hace algunos meses; y 4) la predominancia del enojo como emociĂłn central en los candidatos. La comunicaciĂłn polĂ­tica transitĂł desde una configuraciĂłn centrada exclusivamente en confrontaciones entre candidatos hacia una que incorpora propuestas programĂĄticas. Los debates presidenciales y la publicaciĂłn de programas electorales en septiembre forzaron este desplazamiento temĂĄtico, especialmente visible en Matthei, Kaiser y Jara. El artĂ­culo concluye que la extensiĂłn del perĂ­odo de campaña dificulta cualquier capacidad de generar informaciĂłn innovadora de manera constante. De ahĂ­ el agotamiento de la seguridad como tema, asĂ­ como el incremento de polĂ©micas irrelevantes y la dispersiĂłn temĂĄtica en la comunicaciĂłn polĂ­tica en torno a los candidatos.
Elecciones 2025. Quinto Informe C22-CEP, programas presidenciales
Fabian Belmar; Aldo Mascareño; Juan Rozas; Pablo A. Henríquez
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Este quinto informe de la serie C22-CEP sobre las elecciones presidenciales 2025 analiza los programas de siete candidatos de cara a las elecciones del 16 de noviembre de 2025: Eduardo Artés, Jeannette Jara, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, Franco Parisi, Evelyn Matthei, José Antonio Kast y Johannes Kaiser. El anålisis se basa en un corpus de 221.582 palabras procesadas mediante técnicas de minería de texto, anålisis de frecuencias léxicas, modelamiento de tópicos y técnicas de reducción dimensional. El estudio busca identificar las estructuras léxico-semånticas subyacentes, convergencias y divergencias programåticas, así como las orientaciones doctrinarias que caracterizan las propuestas. El hallazgo principal revela que el contenido programåtico de los candidatos muestra una estructura predominantemente gerencial-compromisoria, es decir, orientada por medidas técnicas para establecer compromisos institucionales sectoriales. Esta convergencia hacia un vocabulario técnico-administrativo se observa especialmente en Jara, Mayne-Nicholls y Matthei, mientras que Kast oscila entre el lenguaje gerencial y propuestas de mayor profundidad estructural. Por su parte, Artés, Parisi y Kaiser presentan vocabularios libertarios con énfasis en reformas estructurales de largo plazo. El anålisis de similitud y componentes principales revela una paradoja significativa en la configuración del sistema político chileno. Los candidatos de izquierda (Artés y Jara) presentan la menor convergencia léxica en el corpus, inferior incluso a sus similitudes con candidatos de derecha. En contraste, el bloque de derecha muestra alta cohesión discursiva, con Matthei y Kast compartiendo un 59% de similitud en sus vocabularios. El anålisis de ideal points sugiere un desplazamiento del centro de atracción político hacia la centroderecha, espacio donde convergen Matthei, Kast y, mås alejado, Mayne-Nicholls por su proyecto de restauración del consenso de la transición democråtica, mientras Jara ocupa una posición aislada en el cuadrante progresista-técnico. Este grupo configura lo que denominamos un centro excéntrico o multipolar, flanqueado por las posiciones extremas de Artés y Kaiser, quienes, ademås, ocupan la mayor distancia léxica en el sistema. El artículo concluye que los patrones identificados revelan que el sistema político chileno actual se estructura menos en torno a un eje ideológico lineal izquierda-derecha y mås como un espacio donde la radicalidad discursiva se opone a un centro excéntrico dominado por el lenguaje gerencial-compromisorio.
Muerte en el Monumental: gestiĂłn simbĂłlica de crisis y violencia organizada
Fabian Belmar; Aldo Mascareño; Juan Rozas; Pablo Henríquez
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El 10 de abril de 2025, dos jĂłvenes de 12 y 18 años fallecieron en las inmediaciones del Estadio Monumental durante una 'avalancha' organizada y convocada previamente en redes sociales para ingresar al partido contra el equipo brasileño de Fortaleza. La intervenciĂłn policial habrĂ­a provocado que las vĂ­ctimas quedaran atrapadas bajo una reja en uno de los accesos del estadio. A travĂ©s del anĂĄlisis de 5.585 publicaciones de redes sociales (Facebook e Instagram) procesadas con mĂ©todos computacionales (redes, comunidades discursivas, modelamiento de tĂłpicos), examinamos cĂłmo este evento reconfigurĂł el discurso pĂșblico y las respuestas gubernamentales sobre la seguridad en estadios y sus inmediaciones. Argumentamos que el acontecimiento constituye el inicio de un nuevo ciclo de crisis-reforma-fracaso que conceptualizamos como gestiĂłn simbĂłlica de crisis, esto es, una reacciĂłn comunicativa inicial seguida de anuncios de reforma y una progresiva diluciĂłn operativa que no alcanza a intervenir en el mecanismo de producciĂłn de la violencia en los estadios. Este es un doble movimiento circular en el que en una direcciĂłn fluye la disposiciĂłn de las barras bravas al enfrentamiento fĂ­sico y uso de la violencia para distintas finalidades, y en el otro fluye la disposiciĂłn de agentes deportivos e institucionales al financiamiento y la provisiĂłn de espacios de menor control para que estos grupos operen. Los principales resultados muestran la presencia de seis comunidades discursivas diferenciadas que compiten por la hegemonĂ­a narrativa del evento. El anĂĄlisis revela un patrĂłn de disrupciĂłn-normalizaciĂłn, caracterizado por un peak inicial del discurso sobre el incidente que se atenĂșa en diez dĂ­as, seguido de una rĂĄpida recuperaciĂłn e incluso fortalecimiento de las narrativas histĂłrico-institucionales que funcionan como formas de absorciĂłn del evento crĂ­tico. A esto lo denominamos desplazamiento discursivo: el concepto de 'barras bravas' queda sistemĂĄticamente ausente del discurso pĂșblico postragedia. Esta omisiĂłn permite proteger la continuidad del mecanismo que conduce al evento crĂ­tico y ocultar las relaciones que lo producen. El artĂ­culo concluye que la gestiĂłn simbĂłlica de crisis opera como tecnologĂ­a de normalizaciĂłn que sostiene la reproducciĂłn de las condiciones estructurales de violencia, convirtiendo cada evento crĂ­tico en una oportunidad perdida para la intervenciĂłn de polĂ­tica pĂșblica.
Elecciones 2025. Cuarto Informe C22-CEP, autorreferencia polĂ­tica
Aldo Mascareño; Fabian Belmar; Juan Rozas; Pablo A. Henríquez
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El 29 de junio se realizaron las primarias presidenciales de la izquierda. Jeannette Jara fue elegida la candidata presidencial de los sectores de izquierda. En la derecha se mantienen los tres candidatos conocidos (Kaiser, Kast, Matthei) e ingresa ahora Franco Parisi del PDG. Otros candidatos aĂșn consiguen firmas o no han sido ratificados por Servel. En ese marco se ha dado inicio a la fase que culminarĂĄ en la primera vuelta presidencial del 16 de noviembre. Por medio de tĂ©cnicas digitales y estadĂ­sticas, en este Cuarto Informe C22-CEP sobre las elecciones 2025 observamos a los candidatos mencionados en sus redes sociales (Instagram y Facebook) para analizar sus visualizaciones, las emociones que generan y los temas que abordan. Nuestro argumento es que, en julio, aĂșn sin claridad de los programas presidenciales, se incrementa la autorreferencia polĂ­tica producto de la necesidad de diferenciaciĂłn de la derecha, la organizaciĂłn del comando de Jara y el posicionamiento de Franco Parisi. Este incremento de la autorreferencia polĂ­tica conduce a una comunicaciĂłn clausurada frente a los pĂșblicos de la polĂ­tica, que pone Ă©nfasis en la confrontaciĂłn y desplaza las propuestas programĂĄticas en las que se da respuesta a preocupaciones generales y particulares de la ciudadanĂ­a. Los resultados indican que la emociĂłn de enojo concentra temĂĄticamente la autorreferencia polĂ­tica y desplaza propuestas programĂĄticas dirigidas a los pĂșblicos de la polĂ­tica. Esta concentraciĂłn autorreferencial de la comunicaciĂłn polĂ­tica se expresa en: a) una dinĂĄmica comunicacional de etiquetamiento ideolĂłgico; b) dependencia de la comunicaciĂłn de mĂ©tricas y rankings aportados por encuestas; y c) una posposiciĂłn o renuncia a propuestas programĂĄticas que abran la comunicaciĂłn a la ciudadanĂ­a. El artĂ­culo concluye que una comunicaciĂłn polĂ­tica instalada en la modalidad de negaciĂłn del adversario conduce a una polarizaciĂłn centrĂ­fuga de las posiciones. Esto puede cambiar con la presentaciĂłn de programas polĂ­ticos sustantivos, pero la prĂłxima incorporaciĂłn de nuevos candidatos seguramente reactivarĂĄ la dinĂĄmica de polarizaciĂłn centrĂ­fuga de la campaña presidencial en tĂ©rminos de identidad, redundancia y carĂĄcter inercial de la comunicaciĂłn polĂ­tica.
Elecciones 2025. Tercer Informe C22-CEP, primarias junio
Aldo Mascareño; Juan Rozas; Fabian Belmar; Pablo A. Henríquez
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El 29 de junio se realizaron las primarias presidenciales de la izquierda. Jeannette Jara obtuvo 60,2%, Carolina TohĂĄ 28,1%, Gonzalo Winter 9,0% y Jaime Mulet 2,7%. Con ello, Jeannette Jara es la representante de la izquierda para las elecciones presidenciales del 16 de noviembre de 2025. Por medio de tĂ©cnicas digitales y estadĂ­sticas, en este Tercer Informe C22-CEP sobre las elecciones 2025 observamos los resultados de estas elecciones primarias y sus efectos para el escenario polĂ­tico general. Analizamos tambiĂ©n el comportamiento de la comunicaciĂłn en redes sociales (Instagram y Facebook) en torno a los siete principales candidatos presidenciales durante el mes de junio 2025. Ellos son Johannes Kaiser, JosĂ© Antonio Kast, Evelyn Matthei, Gonzalo Winter, Jeannette Jara, Carolina TohĂĄ y Jaime Mulet. Exploramos sus visualizaciones y la comunicaciĂłn de sentimientos y emociones en torno a ellos. Los resultados generales indican que, en primarias, la izquierda redujo su capacidad de movilizaciĂłn entre 2021 y 2025. Lo mismo acontece con el Frente Amplio, el que baja de 1 millĂłn de votos en las primarias de 2021 (Gabriel Boric) a 124 mil en 2025 (Gonzalo Winter). Jeannette Jara, con 826 mil votos, obtuvo un mejor rendimiento electoral en comunas de la zona poniente de Santiago con mayores niveles de pobreza, lo que muestra un voto asociado a componentes socioeconĂłmicos para esta candidata. Esto no se reproduce a nivel nacional excluyendo la RM. En sentimientos y emociones, Jara logrĂł un rendimiento mejor que el de TohĂĄ, su rango de diferenciaciĂłn es menor y los sentimientos positivos, asĂ­ como la emociĂłn de alegrĂ­a, son los mĂĄs altos entre todos los candidatos. Esto evidencia una fortaleza de la candidata: su cercanĂ­a y capacidad de conexiĂłn emocional con los pĂșblicos; en redes, su trasfondo polĂ­tico comunista es su desventaja. El Informe concluye que el triunfo de Jeannette Jara en las primarias de izquierda debe ser observado con cautela. La cantidad de votantes que convocĂł la izquierda es menor que la que movilizĂł en las primarias de 2021. Si esto se compara con la convocatoria de la Nueva MayorĂ­a en 2013, el descenso en el rendimiento de la izquierda en elecciones primarias es mĂĄs agudo. El triunfo de Jara no se explica tanto por un alto rendimiento del comunismo, sino por la debilidad de la socialdemocracia representada por TohĂĄ.
De la reconciliaciĂłn a la seguridad: la ampliaciĂłn semĂĄntica de la democracia en los discursos inaugurales de Chile (1990-2026)
Fabian Belmar; Aldo Mascareño; Juan Rozas; Andrés Araya
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Este artículo analiza los nueve discursos inaugurales (‘discursos de balcón’) pronunciados por los presidentes de Chile desde 1990 hasta la actualidad cuando se asoman al balcón de La Moneda por primera vez. Mediante técnicas de análisis computacional de texto, el estudio examina las direcciones semánticas e ideológicas de los discursos.   Sobre esta base, argumentamos que los ‘discursos de balcón’ ilustran el tránsito desde una comprensión pura de la democracia liberal como oposición al autoritarismo dictatorial en 1990 a un orden posdemocrático que apela a recursos políticos y motivacionales de tipo autoritario e identitario para construir legitimación política y formar programas de acción.   Los resultados muestran una transición desde un discurso simbólico centrado en la reconciliación, como el de Aylwin en 1990, hacia marcos crecientemente programáticos orientados a la seguridad pública (Piñera II y especialmente Kast). Los encuadres semánticos evolucionan del trauma dictatorial (Aylwin) a la seguridad como macrocategoría (Kast).   El índice RILE (Right-Left Index) híbrido posiciona a los gobiernos de manera consistente con la clasificación experta: Boric y Bachelet II en el extremo izquierdo, la Concertación histórica en el centro, y Kast en el extremo derecho. Un análisis semántico complementario muestra que palabras como seguridad, libertad y democracia adquieren significados ideológicamente opuestos según el enunciante. Sin embargo, también muestra un hallazgo sustantivo: la disputa política contemporánea no opera por diferenciación léxica, sino por resignificación: las mismas palabras nombran proyectos opuestos (e.g., justicia, seguridad, democracia, entre otros): Boric y Kast, los presidentes ideológicamente más distantes, comparten el mayor vocabulario del corpus.   Por último, el discurso se ha desplazado de ser un acto simbólico puro hacia el anuncio programático. Aylwin (1990) pronuncia un discurso enteramente abstracto, mientras Bachelet II (2014) invierte esa proporción con vocabulario concreto referido a programas e instituciones. Los discursos recientes combinan ambos registros, pero el ritual republicano ya no es solo ritual —una evolución que se aprecia en sus distintos momentos en el análisis de entidades discursivas.   El artículo concluye que los discursos reflejan la búsqueda de la semántica democrática por responder a la fragmentación identitaria, al debilitamiento de los mecanismos clásicos de integración política y a la presión por restablecer el orden público.   Publicado originalmente como Punto de Referencia del Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), grupo C22.
Elecciones 2025. SĂ©ptimo Informe C22-CEP, el nuevo ciclo polĂ­tico
Fabian Belmar; Aldo Mascareño; Juan Rozas; Pablo A. Henríquez
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Las elecciones presidenciales y parlamentarias de noviembre y diciembre 2025 constituyen el inicio de un nuevo ciclo polĂ­tico. No se trata solo del triunfo claro de Kast en segunda vuelta, sino del espectro amplio de opciones que se abrieron en la primera vuelta presidencial especialmente en la derecha, con Kast, Matthei, Kaiser, y con Parisi en un eje polĂ­tico que no responde a las distinciones clĂĄsicas de la polĂ­tica chilena. Por medio del anĂĄlisis de datos electorales, este sĂ©ptimo y Ășltimo informe del proceso electoral chileno de 2025 busca extraer las principales implicancias de tal proceso para el ciclo polĂ­tico que se inaugura. Una de esas implicancias se relaciona con los votos nulos y blancos, ademĂĄs de la poblaciĂłn que regularmente no vota, y que alcanza al 15%. Esta poblaciĂłn es la fuente del elector indiferente, cuya oscilaciĂłn polĂ­tica ha caracterizado el reciente ciclo polĂ­tico desde el estallido social en adelante. El no cumplimiento de las tareas del gobierno de emergencia de Kast puede conducir a este elector a abandonar tempranamente el apoyo al gobierno. Asimismo, la contundencia del triunfo de Kast produce altas expectativas cuya administraciĂłn debe ser distribuida entre los miembros de una coaliciĂłn de gobierno para obtener un mayor respaldo tĂ©cnico y polĂ­tico en la consecuciĂłn de las tareas respectivas. Por otro lado, es preciso tener en consideraciĂłn la alta votaciĂłn de Parisi en el norte de Chile y en la zona centro-sur. Ella refleja un nuevo actor social (la clase media emergente) que dista mucho del ideal de universalidad de la clase media tradicional. Por otro lado, los patrones territoriales y socioeconĂłmicos de votaciĂłn de Kast muestran que la acciĂłn del gobierno debiera avanzar paralelamente en sus tres tareas centrales: control de la delincuencia y el crimen organizado, control de la inmigraciĂłn y la reactivaciĂłn econĂłmica. De otro modo, la crĂ­tica en una zona escalarĂĄ a una crĂ­tica generalizada al gobierno y a la pĂ©rdida de su apoyo electoral, a pesar de la situaciĂłn favorable del Partido Republicano en el Congreso y de las transferencias que obtuvo en segunda vuelta de los votantes de Parisi, Matthei y Kaiser. El artĂ­culo concluye que las elecciones presidenciales 2025 muestran una votaciĂłn abundante para el gobierno electo, sin embargo, la base de desafecciĂłn polĂ­tica es amplia, lo que representa un desafĂ­o al ciclo polĂ­tico prĂłximo.
Pedigree, Brokerage, and the Two Infrastructures of the Korean Classical Vocal Recital, 2016-2025
Joonhyung Bae
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How does a classical vocal scene hold itself together? Performers are bound to one another two ways at once, by a visible web of who performs with whom and by a partly hidden lineage of where they trained. These two infrastructures of the same field are rarely measured together, so we do not yet know how they relate. We align both on a single corpus to ask whether collaboration and pedigree are coupled, and where they fail to align. Using KoVox, a relational corpus of a decade of Korean classical vocal recitals assembled from the national performing-arts registry, we extract academic pedigree from nearly all performer profiles via a benchmark-validated language-model pipeline, encode it at four institutional resolutions, and align it with the program-item co-performance network. The scene exhibits a bilateral architecture. Removing a small cadre of pianist-accompanists collapses the collaboration network's connected core, while singers almost never meet on stage without one of them. Performers who trained at the same individual conservatory are roughly 2.67 times more likely to share a stage than chance predicts, an effect concentrated at the institution rather than country or region and robust across four nulls of increasing strictness. The joint pattern is a descriptive account of how a recital-centric classical vocal scene holds itself together, through fine-grained institutional co-affiliation stitched by structurally critical broker accompanists. Findings are scope-conditioned on the Seoul-centric mainstream recital subset that KoVox documents.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) versus corporate social advocacy (CSA): Conceptual boundaries, distinct roots, and growing convergence revealed by topic modeling and word embedding
Jiacheng Huang; Bree Hurst; Luke W. Capizzo; Alvin Zhou
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Public relations scholarship has produced substantial work on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social advocacy (CSA), yet whether the two constructs remain conceptually distinct or are converging remains unresolved. In this study, we provide the first large-scale computational comparison of CSR and CSA across 4128 full-text articles published between 2004 and 2024 in six major public relations journals, using structural topic modeling and word embedding. Our analyses show that CSA is semantically distinguished from CSR by its closer alignment with political terms, but is not simply reducible to political CSR. Linguistically, CSR and CSA have converged since 2020, yet they draw on largely distinct bodies of literature, with little citation overlap, suggesting the convergence is more terminological than conceptual. Topic affinity analysis further reveals that CSR and CSA exhibit different forms of “habitual mind”: CSR scholarship has developed broadly dispersed topical attachments across the field, whereas CSA scholarship clusters around a narrower set of recurring partners. To support transparency and future inquiry, we open-source PR-Embed, an interactive platform for exploring the full topic and semantic space of the corpus. We argue that maintaining definitional clarity is essential to preserve each concept’s theoretical and practical value as their boundaries continue to converge.
What is Americanness? Polarization and Consensus in Cultural Logics of the American Creed
Keitaro Okura; Sakeef M. Karim
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Conventional wisdom suggests that political polarization has fractured the boundaries of U.S. national membership. Employing a novel empirical strategy that applies latent class modeling to conjoint data, we find evidence that both supports and complicates this narrative. On one hand, we identify five cultural logics of Americanness, three of which exhibit strong partisan alignment and represent sharply divergent conceptions of national belonging. On the other hand, we find that a majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, subscribe to hybrid conceptions of Americanness that incorporate both civic-oriented norms and ethnocultural criteria. We further find that attributes such as a college education and a multigenerational family history in the U.S. are associated with greater Americanness across all five cultural logics. These findings reveal substantial cross-partisan consensus on the contours of authentic national belonging, even within a fragmented media landscape that systematically exposes partisans to divergent information environments. One implication of our findings is that contemporary partisan conflict over what it means to be American reflects not only competing understandings of Americanness, but also contestation over who legitimately adheres to the national creed.
A Methodological Guide on Using Large Language Models for Text Annotation in the Social Sciences and Humanities with Python and R
Qixiang Fang; Javier Garcia-Bernardo; Erik-Jan van Kesteren
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Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool for social science and humanities (SSH) researchers who work with text. One particularly valuable application is automating text annotation, a traditionally time-consuming step in preparing data for empirical analysis. Yet many SSH researchers face two challenges: getting started with LLMs and understanding how to address their limitations. Practically, the rapid pace of model development can make LLMs seem inaccessible or intimidating, while even experienced users may overlook how annotation errors can bias downstream statistical analyses (e.g., regression estimates and $p$-values), even when annotation accuracy appears high. This paper provides a comprehensive, step-by-step methodological guide for using LLMs for text annotation in SSH research, with clear Python and R code snippets. We cover (1) how LLMs work and what they can and cannot do; (2) how to identify an LLM-suitable research project and establish minimum data and computational requirements; (3) how to design prompts and run annotation tasks; (4) how to evaluate annotation quality and iteratively refine prompts without overfitting; (5) how to integrate LLM annotations into downstream statistical analyses while accounting for annotation error; and (6) how to manage cost, efficiency, and reproducibility when scaling up annotation. Throughout, we provide clear and intuitive methodological reasoning, concrete examples, code snippets, and best-practice guidance to help researchers confidently and transparently incorporate LLM-based annotation into their scientific workflows.
Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and the Politics of Anti-Technology
Jan Zilinsky; Thomas Zeitzoff
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The growth of new digital technology, in particular new forms of communication and artificial intelligence, has raised questions about technology's role in society. Critics argue that it has increased hate speech, polarized the electorate, reduced deliberation, and coarsened the discourse. Others have emphasized the democratizing potential of tools facilitating collective action and enabling broader exchange of ideas. To better understand citizens' general orientation towards technology, we develop a new anti-technology scale and test it on two diverse samples of Americans. Our scale measures three distinct areas of anti-technology attitudes: 1) attitudes towards social media, 2) attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and 3) concerns about modernity. We show that these areas form a general latent anti-technology orientation. We then show that this general anti-tech orientation predicts attitudes towards technology policies and support for contentious actions against tech companies. Finally, we use a pairwise comparison experiment to understand which pro- and anti-AI arguments are most persuasive.
Political identity drives choice of large language models—even when accuracy is incentivized
Michael Heseltine; Christopher A. Bail; Petter Törnberg; Michelle Schimmel; Christopher Barrie
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Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has focused heavily on bias in model outputs, but less is known about how users’ own political identities shape which AI systems they use. Because of the unprecedented growth of this new technology, the choices users make between competing systems may soon begin to shape the information environment more broadly. We address this question with a two-stage online experiment (N = 1,884). Participants first evaluated outputs from four AI models that varied in ideological tone. They were then offered financial incentives to answer a question about politics accurately. We experimentally varied whether models were identified by real-world brand names (e.g. Claude or Grok) or neutral labels—and whether participants were initially exposed to political or nonpolitical content. Participants quickly developed preferences for AI systems that aligned with their political identities, and these preferences were stronger when models carried recognizable brand names. In the second stage, 71% persisted with their previously preferred model despite incentives for correctness. These findings show that users do not treat AI systems as neutral tools. Instead, they select between them in ways that reflect political identity, suggesting that as the information ecosystem fragments, competitive pressures may push AI systems to differentiate themselves along political lines.
Why the Left Stopped Building Social Housing
Martin VinĂŠs Larsen; Andreas Wiedemann
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Rising housing costs have renewed calls for social housing across Europe. Why have social democratic parties that once championed social housing stopped building, even when in power? Using a regression discontinuity design and four decades of data on local elections and housing permits, we show that Social Democratic control increased social housing construction in the 1980s. This effect weakened through the 1990s and has since disappeared. Ideological shifts, fiscal constraints, and declining legislative influence cannot explain this pattern. Instead, we argue that compositional changes among social housing residents weakened the coalition that once sustained public housing, reducing left-wing parties' electoral incentives to provide it. Registry and election data show that social housing residents, compared to left-wing electorates, have become more socio-economically marginalized. This depressed Social Democratic support in high-social-housing precincts and eliminated electoral rewards for construction. Our findings show how beneficiary composition can erode the political foundations of welfare provision.
Attacked, Harassed, Intimidated: A Narrative Review of Research and Action on Public Backlash Against Scientists in the Netherlands and Beyond
Niels G. Mede
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Public backlash against scientists, encompassing attacks, harassment, intimidation, hate, and threats from members of the public, has become a recurring feature of scientific work in the Netherlands and beyond. Despite growing attention and importance, the evidence base is scattered, terminology is used inconsistently, and responses are fragmented across institutions and countries. This report synthesizes the international academic literature in the form of a narrative review. It maps the conceptual vocabulary and summarizes empirical evidence on the prevalence of backlash (30–45% of academics; 50–80% of media-exposed scientists), its forms, drivers, gendered and racialized patterns, psychological and behavioral consequences, and individual and institutional responses, including a comparison with journalism and parliamentary politics. It reviews countermeasures in the Netherlands and internationally. Finally, it discusses limitations of the current support landscape, identifies lessons from adjacent professions, and proposes approaches for future research. A comprehensive appendix lists current initiatives and resources available to scientists, communicators, and institutions.
Navigating the fragmented landscape of online scholarly communication: a taxonomy of communication patterns
Jacopo Ambrosj; Frédérique Bordignon
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Online Scholarly Communication (SC) is a vast and fragmented landscape difficult to navigate. Traditional core activities of SC, such as registration, certification, archiving, and awareness, have not lost their importance but have changed and been distributed across actors and venues. To bring clarity, we have developed a taxonomy of communication patterns of online venues for SC, i.e. the different ways in which online venues contribute to the core activities of SC for the units of SC they deal with. In this article, we present the taxonomy built on a corpus of 465 venues, and offer examples to illustrate its intended uses and analytical potential. Our taxonomy is a research tool to map the complex reality of SC. When combined with other methods such as analysis of discourse and economic models, it can produce sophisticated analysis of online SC.
Using ISO Standards and Maturity Models to Assess Smart City Transformation
Panos FITSILIS
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Smart city assessment is often shaped by fragmented rankings, heterogeneous indicator systems, and limited attention to how cities improve over time. This paper examines how international smart city standards and maturity models can be brought together to support a more coherent assessment approach for smart, sustainable, and resilient urban development. Drawing on a qualitative, narrative review methodology, the study analyses smart city evaluation frameworks, the ISO 371xx standards, and the logic of maturity-based assessment. The analysis shows that ISO standards offer a shared language for comparability, transparency, interoperability, and evidence-based governance. Standards such as ISO 37120, ISO 37122, and ISO 37123 define common indicators for sustainability, smartness, and resilience. Maturity models add a complementary perspective by helping cities assess capabilities, structure their development over time, and embed continuous improvement. The paper argues that a standards-based maturity approach can help municipalities move beyond static benchmarking and towards more systematic, accountable, and adaptive smart city transformation. These are promising directions, but the harder work - testing this approach with actual municipalities, in messy governance realities - remains ahead.
Parental separation in childhood and development of political party identification in young adulthood
Lena Wagner
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Party identification is widely recognised as a pillar of democratic stability and a driver of political participation rooted in family socialisation. Although parental separation has become increasingly common across Europe, little is known about its implications for political socialisation. This study examines how parental separation during childhood (ages 0-15) affects the probability of identifying with any political party across the developmental trajectory of young adulthood (ages 18-25) by estimating logistic mixed-effects growth models on longitudinal mother-child dyadic data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (years 2001-2024; N = 2,770). Growing up with a partisan mother emerges as the strongest predictor of party identification, while maternal education exerts an independent effect and parental separation shows a modest negative association. Effects are largely confined to initial levels at age 18, pointing to early and persistent stratification. Going beyond average effects, results indicate that separation weakens mother-child transmission, particularly following early-childhood separation, while having little impact among offspring of apartisan mothers. Additional analyses suggest that weakened transmission cannot be explained by father absence alone but may reflect complex post-separation family dynamics.
Situated Epistemologies: Knowledge Integration in Scenario-Based Exercises for Pandemic Science Advice
Charlotte Nina Maria Waltz; Pearl A. Dykstra
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Recently, calls for interdisciplinary science advice have intensified, yet many approaches to knowledge integration overlook the epistemic politics that shape whose knowledge counts, when, and on what terms. This paper reconceptualises integrated science advice as a situated epistemic practice, drawing on feminist and STS scholarship on situated knowledges, epistemic justice, and boundary work. We examine how advisory practices reproduce and, at times, reconfigure epistemic hierarchies.. Empirically, we analyse a multi-session, scenario-based pandemic exercise conducted in the Netherlands in 2025, in which biomedical, social, behavioural, and humanities scholars collaboratively produced advice for a fictional virus outbreak. Through participant observation across three phases of an evolving crisis, we trace how different forms of knowledge are enabled or constrained. Our analysis shows that the integration of knowledges is temporally ordered. Shifts in knowledge integration underscore that epistemic hierarchies are not static but are continuously enacted through temporal, affective, and institutional arrangements. By foregrounding temporality and situatedness, this paper contributes to debates on situated epistemologies and epistemic justice by showing how advisory infrastructures can organise the co-presence of diverse standpoints. We argue that achieving more just forms of knowledge integration requires reconfiguring the temporal and institutional conditions under which different knowledges can become ‘actionable’.
A golden era for open-ended questions? Using LLMs for text classification tasks
Ansgar Hudde; Shannon Taflinger
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Open-text questions in quantitative surveys can yield rich information from large samples, but analysing and coding these data using qualitative text analysis is resource-intensive. Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising tool for scaling up such analyses, reducing time and financial costs. In this paper, we compare the coding accuracy of LLMs with that of student assistants, defining accuracy as agreement with a researcher-coded benchmark dataset. We assess performance on a semi-complex coding task: coding approximately 1,400 open-ended text responses from young US Americans about dating across party-political lines. A researcher-designed coding scheme, developed through thematic qualitative text analysis of the open-text responses, was applied by LLMs and student assistants. We evaluate models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, with and without access to training data. The most advanced models outperform student assistants, and performance further increases with training data, highlighting LLMs’ capability to code open-text responses. Whereas previous research has mainly focused on social media texts, comparatively simple and surface-level coding tasks, and a technically oriented audience, we contribute to the literature by studying a particularly promising use case of open-ended survey responses and by providing practical recommendations to applied social scientists.
MAVIC - A Multimodal, content-Agnostic and scalable Video protocol for Interpretable feature Compositions for the analysis of online video diets
David Wegmann; Marcus Olesen; Anja Bechmann
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Online videos are central to social platforms and contemporary media consumption. Yet social science lacks scalable methods to analyze large numbers of videos without prior knowledge of their content, limiting our ability to study platform usage patterns. To address this gap, we present a novel computational method: MAVIC, a Multimodal, content-Agnostic and scalable Video protocol for Interpretable feature Compositions. MAVIC positions any video along 271 human-interpretable visual, audio, and linguistic features and clusters them bottom-up by their feature profiles. Unlike transfer learning or multimodal large language model approaches that rely on opaque embeddings, MAVIC produces traceable, and auditable representations, enabling quantification of similarity between videos and distinction along explicit dimensions of content rather than metadata. We demonstrate MAVIC on 20,180 videos randomly selected from watch histories donated by an approximated representative sample of 1,009 Danish YouTube users. The protocol identifies 52 feature-composition clusters that partially overlap with YouTube genres. When linked with viewer demographics and ideologies, these clusters reveal systematic differences in appeal across population groups. MAVIC thus provides a tool to monitor video platforms and to clarify which kinds of content resonate with which audiences.
Strategic Complementarities and Coordination Failures in Urban Active Transport: Game-Theoretic Evidence from 33,054 Chicago Census Blocks
Omid Mansourihanis; Xuantong Wang
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Why do some urban neighborhoods walk while others drive, even when their physical environments appear similar? This study demonstrates that travel mode choice is fundamentally a coordination problem rather than an infrastructure capacity problem. Using a game-theoretic framework calibrated directly from observed commute behavior across all 33,054 census blocks in Chicago, we show that neighbors’ walking behavior exerts a dominant influence on individual mode choice—outweighing the combined effects of density, safety, land use, and accessibility. We estimate utility functions via maximum likelihood logistic regression on American Community Survey data and solve for Nash equilibria at the block level. Results reveal that 93.5% of blocks are in transitional (off-equilibrium) states: approximately 31% exhibit walk-favored structural conditions but remain suppressed by coordination failures, representing high-leverage intervention targets, while 63% are transitioning toward automobile lock-in. Spatial analysis exposes stark environmental injustice—walkable hotspots cluster in the wealthy North Side and downtown, while car-dependent coldspots dominate the South and West sides. These findings establish that walking spreads as a social contagion through strategic complementarities, and that concentrated interventions achieving critical mass generate substantially higher returns than dispersed investments. The study provides a validated, spatially explicit framework for identifying tipping points and targeting active transport policies to maximize modal shift and advance environmental equity.
AI and Moral Education: Opportunities and Challenges Examined from Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Hyemin Han
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New developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology poses both novel opportunities and threats to education in general. Given their importance in students’ flourishing, moral and character education could not be exceptions. In the current special section, AI and Moral Education, six individual articles contributed by authors from various fields, including but not limited to, moral philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy, critically examined AI’s potential benefits and threats in moral education.
Americans Favor Predistributive Over Redistributive Economic Policies
David Broska; Jonne Kamphorst; Robb Willer
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Redistributive policies designed to reduce economic inequality through taxes and transfers (e.g., safety-net benefits funded by progressive taxation) receive less support in the U.S. than in many Western democracies. Recent work suggests Americans may be more receptive to “predistributive” policies, which seek to reduce economic inequality before taxes and transfers (e.g., minimum-wage increases). Yet existing evidence leaves open whether this support gap characterizes contemporary Americans overall, and whether it persists when the same policy proposals are described in predistributive versus redistributive terms, with their core provisions held constant. Across 31 nationally representative U.S. survey waves fielded from 2015 to 2024 (total N=384,248), we find greater support for policies classified as predistributive than redistributive. We then fielded a preregistered experiment with a national U.S. sample (N=1,009), randomly varying whether otherwise identical policy proposals were described as increasing earnings for people lower in the income distribution, shifting resources from higher- to lower-income individuals, or presented only with the brief policy description given in all conditions. Support was higher under predistributive than redistributive descriptions. Comparison with the control condition clarifies this difference: predistributive descriptions received support comparable to control, whereas redistributive descriptions received lower support. Exploratory analyses suggest perceived respect for hard work and deservingness of beneficiaries were associated with the support gap. Together, these results suggest Americans prefer policies that reduce inequality by influencing earnings more than through taxes and transfers.
Federal Public Lands in Crisis: Procedural Grievance, Resentment, and Delegitimization
Elliott Finn; Patrick Hunnicutt; B. Kal Munis; Erika Wolters
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In this chapter -- forthcoming in the edited volume, "Federalism in a Divided America" -- we first trace the development of public lands agencies and policies over time, ending with a review of the Trump administration’s current efforts to dismantle them. Second, we draw on various survey data to describe contemporary public opinion towards public lands and their management in the U.S. Our analyses reveal how resentful rural Americans are among the sharpest critics of the public lands management status quo. Thus, we propose a theoretical framework for explaining why rural resentment underpins opposition to public lands management in the third section of this chapter. Our framework stresses the importance of procedural grievances linked to the development of public land agencies and policies. To conclude, we offer a series of recommendations for improving the governance of our federal public lands by re-centering “place” in policy development and administration.
Situational Vulnerability in Education Research: Risk Assessment, Informed Consent, and IRB Protections in University Contexts
Allison A. Lavington
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Ethical oversight in research involving human participants is typically grounded in established procedural frameworks. However, university-based research environments present contextual dynamics that warrant further consideration. In educational settings, participation is embedded within institutional structures—such as course-credit systems and faculty authority—that shape how students engage with research, raising questions about whether procedural safeguards adequately protect participants even when Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols are followed. This article examines how IRB practices and federal regulations (45 C.F.R. §46) address context-dependent vulnerability within university research environments. Drawing on research ethics and decision-making scholarship, it conceptualizes situational vulnerability as context-dependent constraints on participants’ capacity for autonomous decision-making arising through interactions among participant characteristics, research design, and institutional context. The analysis distinguishes formal consent from substantive autonomy and argues that current procedural ethics frameworks remain limited in their ability to identify and respond to forms of vulnerability that emerge dynamically during participation, rather than existing as fixed or stable categories. The article proposes a context-sensitive extension of procedural ethics incorporating ongoing consent, dynamic safeguards, and real-time responsiveness to participant experience in educational research settings.
Stones, Clay, and Memory: Architectural Preservation of Nigeria’s Heritage Buildings Through the Use of Indigenous and Local Materials
Godsportion Emeka
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There is something quietly devastating about the way Nigeria is losing its architectural heritage. It does not happen all at once, through a single dramatic act of destruction, though that happens too. It happens gradually, through the accumulation of small decisions that each seem reasonable at the time: a crumbling wall patched with Portland cement, a rotting timber lintel replaced with a concrete beam, a lime-plastered facade painted over with synthetic emulsion. Each intervention is made in good faith, often by people who simply do not know any better. Together they constitute the systematic destruction of building fabric that took centuries to create and cannot be remade once it is gone. This article examines the current state of architectural preservation in Nigeria, with particular attention to the role that indigenous and locally sourced materials must play in any serious conservation effort. It draws on the scholarship of Dmochowski, Moughtin, Elleh, Prussin and others who have documented Nigeria’s traditional building traditions, and on the technical conservation literature of Ashurst and Ashurst, Holmes and Wingate, and the ICOMOS charters, to argue that the most technically correct approach to preserving Nigeria’s earthen, lime-based and timber heritage is the one that returns, as far as possible, to the materials from which that heritage was originally made. The article also argues that this approach cannot be implemented without a fundamental change in how building technology education in Nigeria addresses the knowledge and skills of conservation, which at present it barely addresses at all.
Beyond Static Typologies: Spatial Stability and Territorial Expansion in Long-Duration Serial Homicide
DANIEL SALAFRANCA BARREDA
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The 2008 FBI removal of the cooling-off period from the serial homicide definition left a persistent analytical gap: existing geographic mobility typologies assign static labels to offenders with no capacity to capture longitudinal dynamics of criminal careers. Although the distinction between territorially anchored and expansive offenders has been widely theorised, it has rarely been operationalised as an incident-by-incident dynamic metric across a verified cross-national sample. This study proposes an exploratory spatial framework for examining stability and expansion patterns in serial homicide trajectories. A dataset of 40 verified series from 13 countries (1918–2010) was analysed using two longitudinal metrics calibrated incident by incident on first-contact coordinates: the Stability Index (I_s) and the accumulated dispersion ratio_{RetExp}. A candidate transition region was identified around ratio_{RetExp=1.1082}\ with consistent convergence across independent calibration samples (AUC\ =\ 0.556;\ \mathrm{\Delta AUC}\ =\ 0.000), arguing against a sample-specific artefact. Leave-one-out cross-validation (n = 35) yielded R_{LOO\ }^2=\ 0.432 (degradation = 14.8%), suggesting moderate structural consistency without severe overfitting. One influential case (Dahmer) was identified; its exclusion substantially improved model performance. Longitudinal examination of the East Area Rapist Sacramento series revealed significant reduction in inter-event intervals across spatial phases (n\ =\ 30;\ Wilcoxon\ W\ =\ 142,\ p\ =\ .015), consistent with optimal foraging predictions. Findings do not support strong individual-level prediction but suggest that criminal longevity may be partially associated with sustained spatial stability, offering a preliminary framework for integrating longitudinal mobility dynamics into geographic profiling research.
The Discretionary Color Line in International Institutions
Andrew Rosenberg
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A growing literature documents racial hierarchy in international institutions. I test whether formally equal rules eliminate that hierarchy in practice. The Schengen visa regime offers a hard case because member states process applications under identical law. I show that ancestral distance, a measure of perceived racial difference, predicts visa refusals. Contemporary ancestral distance drives the result. A pre-1500 measure does not, consistent with the social construction of race. A consulate-level analysis isolates the discretionary channel. Busier consulates discriminate more against ancestrally distant applicants, even though a nationality's risk profile does not change with consular workload. Routine operational pressures activate the categorical shortcuts that institutional design was supposed to prevent. A further test shows the effect is stronger where national populations hold more restrictive racial attitudes, not where institutional capacity is weakest. Harmonized rules do not eliminate international institutional racism. They push it into discretionary gaps that formal law cannot close.
Scarcity, Strategy, and the Racialized Politics of Refugee Admission in the Global North
Andrew Rosenberg
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Why do some refugee "crises'' elicit generosity while others provoke restriction, particularly in the Global North? In 2015, European governments responded to Syrian arrivals with increasingly restrictive policies, yet the same states were welcoming toward Ukrainians in 2022. I develop a formal model in which governments weigh economic scarcity, the racialized identity of arrivals, and foreign-policy salience. The model predicts that scarcity amplifies restriction toward non-White groups but can weaken or even reverse restrictiveness toward White groups when crises are geopolitically salient. I test these propositions using a country-year panel of asylum-policy admission and entry rules across Global North states. The results show that scarcity heightens backlash against non-White arrivals but reduces restrictiveness toward White arrivals when foreign-policy considerations are salient. Together, the findings demonstrate how race, economic conditions, and foreign policy interact to structure the politics of protection in the Global North.
Brain rot: Cognitive decomposition as a structural externality of attention assetization
Hera Hyeonseo Lee
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While brain rot has entered the popular lexicon as a marker of cultural-intellectual decline, this article theorizes it as a systemic condition of late-capitalist survival. Integrating world-systems analysis with the critique of the attention economy, I argue that cognition has emerged as the new frontier of intensive accumulation. As material expansion shifts toward cognitive extraction within the post-2008 conjuncture, platforms assetize attention to stabilize speculative valuation. This induces a biopolitical rewiring that functionally degrades the capacity for sustained thought. This systemic brain rot is analyzed through its class-stratified distribution and institutional collision within the university, where deep learning confronts the high-frequency logic of extraction. Ultimately, this mutagenic mode of accumulation consumes capitalism’s social and cognitive foundations, necessitating a shift from therapeutic self-management toward the political contestation of attentional regimes through structural alternatives like engagement metric caps and public digital infrastructures.
Can We Measure Gendered Inflation? A Methodological Framework for a Household Provisioning Price Index Using India’s CPI 2024 Series
Krishnashis Das; Amrit Chatterjee
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Standard Consumer Price Indices treat the household as a single economic agent, ignoring which member manages each expenditure category. This paper proposes and demonstrates a methodology for constructing a Household Provisioning Price Index for Women (W-CPI) that weights categories by management responsibility rather than physical consumption, and applies it to India’s newly released CPI 2024 series.
Social media use, genotype and adolescent mental health: A social push pattern among girls
Gaia Ghirardi; Alessandro Ferrara
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Research shows that social media use is associated with poorer adolescent mental health, with stronger adverse consequences for girls. Little is known about whether the effect of social media varies depending on adolescents’ genetic propensity for poor mental health. On the one hand, social media use could trigger genetic propensities for mental health issues (“diathesis-stress model”); on the other hand, it could act as a pervasive adverse environment that can reduce the relative contribution of genetic differences by increasing risk broadly across individuals (“social push model”). This study examines whether the association between social media use and adolescent mental health outcomes – depressive symptoms, low self-esteem, and body dissatisfaction – varies by gender and genetic propensity for depression. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we employ a trio design to account for confounding by parents’ genotypes. Results indicate that genetic propensities for depression and greater social media use are associated with poorer adolescent mental health. The influence of social media use is significantly stronger for girls. The genotype-social media use interaction is also highly gendered: the detrimental influence of social media is strongest among girls with low genetic propensities for depression. A moderate use of social media is enough to worsen mental health and compress any genetic predispositions, suggesting that social media use acts as a strong environmental influence consistent with a social push model.
Colonial Shadows: A Sociological Study of Colonial Mindsets in Post-Independent India
Ankita Roychowdhury
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This study explores the persistence of colonial mindsets in post-independent India and examines how colonial legacies continue to influence language preference, cultural identity, social behaviour, and perceptions of modernity in contemporary society. Although India achieved political independence in 1947, colonial influence remains embedded within educational systems, language hierarchies, institutional structures, and everyday social practices. The research particularly focuses on the dominance of English language, preference for Western cultural norms, and the reproduction of colonial values through social interaction and cultural perception. The study adopts a mixed-method research design, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Primary data were collected from 80 respondents aged between 18–45 years through a structured interview schedule consisting of close-ended and open-ended questions. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were used to select respondents from different educational and social backgrounds. Quantitative data were analyzed through frequency and percentage distribution, while qualitative responses were interpreted thematically. The findings reveal that English continues to function as a symbol of intelligence, professionalism, status, and social mobility. Respondents also associated Western lifestyle and culture with modernity and social acceptance. At the same time, many participants demonstrated hybrid cultural identities by balancing traditional values with global influences such as Western and Korean Gen-Z culture. The study further indicates that colonial values are often internalized unconsciously and reproduced through education, media, and social behaviour. The research is theoretically informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. Overall, the study concludes that although India is politically independent, colonial influence continues to shape social consciousness and identity in subtle but significant ways.
Intersectional Inequalities in Educational Attainment – Cohort Trends in West Germany, 1970-2008
Jascha DrÀger; Tom Hartl
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Despite the educational expansion, educational attainment still depends strongly on factors beyond individual’s control, such as social origin, gender, and migration background. Although these different social categories likely intersect to produce compounded forms of disadvantage, most existing research has studied these factors in isolation. This study describes trends in intersectional inequalities of educational opportunity by the combinations of social origin by combinations of social origin, gender, and migration background for the birth cohorts 1970-2008 in West Germany using data of the Socio-Economic Panel. We use two complementary quantitative approaches to evaluate intersectional inequalities: the “multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy” approach and Conditional Inference Forests. The results show that intersectional inequalities remained remarkably stable across cohorts. Social origin is the dominant social category: no combination of gender and migration background compensates for disadvantaged parental education. Intersectional interaction effects account for only a limited share of between-stratum differences and are not stable across cohorts. The Conditional Inference Forests further show that detailed measures of social origin are more informative for describing inequalities in Gymnasium attendance than specific intersectional groupings.
Burden Without Backlash? Trust and Procedural Fairness in Response to Welfare Compliance Demands
Frederik Godt Hansen; Aske Halling
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To access public services, citizens often navigate complex administrative requirements. These demands are introduced to ensure program integrity and maintain public support for welfare policies, yet they may create barriers for those in need. While prior studies on policy feedback and administrative burden show that burdensome encounters can reduce trust among welfare recipients, less is known about how the general public reacts to compliance demands. Stringent requirements may signal that programs are protected against fraud, potentially increasing perceptions of fairness and trust among non-recipients. We further hypothesize that compliance demands have positive effects on these outcomes when: 1) individuals are non-recipients rather than recipients of welfare services, and 2) the welfare recipient is perceived as undeserving. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a pre-registered vignette survey experiment in Denmark with a sample of the general public (N = 1,624) and welfare recipients (N = 409). We find that stringent compliance demands increase perceptions of fairness but do not affect trust in government among the general public. We find no support for the moderation hypotheses. Our findings challenge prevailing understandings of administrative burden, showing that stricter requirements can enhance perceived fairness without undermining trust—regardless of welfare experience and deservingness perceptions.
Informe Nacional 2026 sobre Consumo de Noticias y EvaluaciĂłn del Periodismo en Chile
Claudia Mellado; Alexis Vladimir Cruz Isidro
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El Informe Nacional 2026 sobre Consumo de Noticias y EvaluaciĂłn del Periodismo en Chile —liderado por la Escuela de Periodismo de la Pontificia Universidad CatĂłlica de ValparaĂ­so, en colaboraciĂłn con Feedback— constituye la tercera entrega de una serie anual orientada a monitorear cĂłmo las audiencias chilenas se relacionan con las noticias, los medios de comunicaciĂłn y el periodismo. Luego de las mediciones realizadas en años anteriores (Mellado & Cruz, 2024; 2025), esta nueva ediciĂłn permite observar con mayor claridad quĂ© tendencias se mantienen, cuĂĄles se intensifican y quĂ© nuevas dimensiones comienzan a adquirir relevancia dentro del ecosistema informativo nacional. El estudio se desarrolla en base a una encuesta aplicada a 9,797 personas mayores de 18 años, provenientes de todas las regiones del paĂ­s, agrupadas en cuatro macrozonas: Norte, Centro, Sur y RegiĂłn Metropolitana. El levantamiento de los datos fue realizado por Feedback entre el 5 de marzo y el 24 de abril de 2026, mediante una estrategia online.
In the First Place, Who Are We? Scholarly Formation and Institutional Fragmentation in Philippine Higher Education
Karl Patrick Regala Mendoza
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Philippine higher education increasingly emphasizes research productivity, publication performance, and global competitiveness despite lacking a coherent and historically sustained framework for scholarly formation, researcher development, or research university building. This article argues that the problem confronting Philippine academia is not merely weak research capacity, but fragmented institutional horizons and unstable conceptions of academic identity itself. Drawing from higher education studies, sociology of academia, institutional theory, and Global South scholarship, the article examines how competing models of the academic—as teacher, researcher, bureaucratic employee, entrepreneurial knowledge worker, public intellectual, and postcolonial scholar—coexist unevenly within Philippine higher education without coherent institutional integration. It further argues that dominant researcher development frameworks insufficiently account for fragmented institutional realities, and that scholarly formation in the Philippine context is better understood as relational, improvisational, and institutionally mediated rather than linear and competency-driven. The article concludes that before coherent researcher development can emerge, Philippine higher education must first confront what forms of scholarly life its institutions seek to cultivate.
The Limits of De-politicizing--and Also of Annotation: A Case Study in Russian Media Outlets' Social Media Posts, 2016--2024
Daniel Hopkins; Liancheng Gong; Sam Wolken
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We seek to understand the impact of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine on political coverage and engagement with it. Accordingly, we introduce new annotated data with more than 2 million social media posts from prominent Russian-language print and online media outlets. After manually annotating 6,661 posts that appeared on V'Kontakte (VK) as well as additional posts on Facebook and Telegram—and supplementing human annotation with Large Language Models (LLMs)—we assess the validity and reliability of our measures before considering substantive questions. Varied analyses point to one conclusion: the ecosystem for political news durably changed with the invasion. Post-invasion, political posts spiked, and social media users became more likely to engage with political posts versus non-political posts. Moreover, analyses using embeddings illustrate that the similarity between independent and government-oriented media posts briefly grew after the invasion. By analyzing both outlets' coverage and engagement with it, this research indicates that autocrats' strategies for managing news coverage are not static. Instead, autocratic regimes may abandon de-politicization in favor of more invasive approaches when events drive heightened engagement with news. This research also provides methodological tools for future research. It evaluates the value and limitations of deploying LLMs to annotate and analyze text in Russian, and also of translating text from Russian to English before annotation or analysis. This research contributes to our understanding of the possibilities and limits of using LLMs to measure more abstract concepts, too.
Fairness in Healthcare E-Rostering: An Empirical Analysis of Antecedents and Effects
Manuel Bieri
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Fairness in healthcare shift scheduling is crucial for well-being of workers but remains challenging to achieve due to numerous requirements. While electronic rostering (e-rostering) helps manage the complexity of shift scheduling, its impact on fairness remains unclear. First, we develop a stimulus- organism-response model guided by organizational justice theory to explain how contextual factors in healthcare shift scheduling (schedule predictability, scheduling control, and relationship with supervisors) shape workers’ scheduling fairness perceptions and, in turn, influence job satisfaction. Second, we examine how e-rostering, compared to human scheduling, alters the relationships in this model. Using data from 185 healthcare workers, our results show that contextual factors significantly impact fairness perceptions, and salience shifts from procedural to distributive fairness in determining job satisfaction under e-rostering. We contribute to future research by highlighting how technologies can reshape the relationship between fairness and work attitudes, and to practice by offering design guidance for fair e-rostering.
Reply to Westwood: Questioning the empirical evidence that AI survey contamination is real and substantial
David Rothschild; Soubhik Barari; Trent D Buskirk; D. Sunshine Hillygus; Andrew Gordon
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Westwood [2025], followed closely by Van der Stigchel et al. [2026] and Westwood and Frederick [2026], argues that “AI contamination” poses a “potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research.” Although AI (frequently LLMs) poses potential challenges for survey research, the articles overstate their case, conflating distinct risks and advancing claims of field-level vulnerability without (1) clear definitions, (2) appropriate benchmarks, or (3) reproducible demonstrations of real-world impact.