I checked 4 preprints servers on Friday, October 16, 2026 using the Open Science Foundation API. For the period October 09 to October 15, I found 128 new paper(s).

MetaArxiv

Responsible Research Assessment of Faculty: maximizing quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of scientific research in Research-Performing Organizations
David Moher; Kelly Denise Cobey; Anna Catharina Vieira Armond; Annette Nicole Brown; Maximiliano Sergio Cenci; Leslie Chan; Lavinia Gambelli; Michael Halas; Susan H. Fox; Michael Hoffman
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This multi-interest holder consensus effort highlights the essential influence and responsibility of Research-Performing Organizations (RPOs) in shaping the quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of scientific research. Despite the use of metrics to assess transparency and openness by academic journals and funders, most RPOs do not yet have metrics/indicators or monitoring that address deep-rooted shortcomings in research practice and assessment. These shortcomings manifest as restricted access to research outputs, poor availability of underlying data and materials, infrequent reproducibility checks and direct replications, and ongoing incidents of research misconduct all contributing to erosion of public trust in research. Such issues are exacerbated by institutional incentive structures that reward the number of publications and journal prestige, while neglecting research credibility, societal relevance, and transparent communication. To respond comprehensively to these challenges, our working group reached consensus on six core practices for RPOs to monitor: data, code, and material sharing; open access publishing; prospective study registration; reporting transparency; disclosures of interest and funding; and verification efforts. Collectively, these six practices offer a pragmatic and flexible framework that RPOs can tailor to their local context. The paper provides an implementation guide for these practices and calls for renewed leadership by RPOs in realigning research(er) assessment and incentives to reward quality, transparency, and trustworthiness in research, closing persistent gaps, and reinforcing science’s credibility and utility for society.
Responsible Research Assessment of Faculty: maximizing quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of scientific research in Research-Performing Organizations
David Moher; Kelly Denise Cobey; Anna Catharina Vieira Armond; Annette Nicole Brown; Maximiliano Sergio Cenci; Leslie Chan; Lavinia Gambelli; Michael Halas; Susan H. Fox; Michael Hoffman
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This multi-interest holder consensus effort highlights the essential influence and responsibility of Research-Performing Organizations (RPOs) in shaping the quality, transparency, and trustworthiness of scientific research. Despite the use of metrics to assess transparency and openness by academic journals and funders, most RPOs do not yet have metrics/indicators or monitoring that address deep-rooted shortcomings in research practice and assessment. These shortcomings manifest as restricted access to research outputs, poor availability of underlying data and materials, infrequent reproducibility checks and direct replications, and ongoing incidents of research misconduct all contributing to erosion of public trust in research. Such issues are exacerbated by institutional incentive structures that reward the number of publications and journal prestige, while neglecting research credibility, societal relevance, and transparent communication. To respond comprehensively to these challenges, our working group reached consensus on six core practices for RPOs to monitor: data, code, and material sharing; open access publishing; prospective study registration; reporting transparency; disclosures of interest and funding; and verification efforts. Collectively, these six practices offer a pragmatic and flexible framework that RPOs can tailor to their local context. The paper provides an implementation guide for these practices and calls for renewed leadership by RPOs in realigning research(er) assessment and incentives to reward quality, transparency, and trustworthiness in research, closing persistent gaps, and reinforcing science’s credibility and utility for society.
Credit sharing reorders researchers more than self-citation handling: A note on the 2026 Stanford/Elsevier science-wide author databases
Achilleas G. Samaras
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The 2026 release of the Stanford/Elsevier science-wide author databases (the “top-2% list”) publishes every citation indicator with and without self-citations, whereas co-authorship enters its composite score only through the hm-index and through citations to single-, first- and last-authored papers. This work examines which of the two choices matters more for how researchers are ordered. Two levels of data are used: the career-long list in five fields (Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Clinical Medicine, Mathematics & Statistics, Economics & Business; 123,693 scientists), and the OpenAlex citation records of 596 listed scientists, in which every citation link is classified as own, co-author, collaborator-network or independent. The analysis follows a plan fixed before the citation data were fetched. In each of the five fields, sharing citation credit equally among co-authors moves 31–54% of scientists to a different quintile, against 7–20% for removing self-citations under the list’s rule; the list-level quintile analogue points the same way. Co-authors supply a median 36–64% of measured self-citations, and collaborators who are not on the cited paper a further 3–10% of all citations. A fractional rule that discounts only the overlapping authors’ share of each citing paper keeps 93–97% of the h-index, against 88–96% under the list’s all-or-nothing rule. Declared contribution shares could weight both the credit each author receives and the overlap removed as self-citation.
Evaluating methods for testing publication bias in meta-analyses with confounding covariates: A simulation study
Man Chen
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Selective publication of favorable results can bias meta-analytic estimates and threaten the validity of meta-analyses. Many methods that detect and adjust for publication bias do not perform adequately under substantial between-study heterogeneity. Heterogeneity complicates publication bias assessment because study characteristics may be associated with both effect size estimates and standard errors. These characteristics can induce an effect-precision association that regression-based diagnostics may misattribute to selective publication when such characteristics are omitted. However, it remains unclear how best to incorporate these confounding characteristics across methods and how their performance varies with confounding level, selective publication, residual heterogeneity, and the number of studies. To address this gap, I conduct an extensive Monte Carlo simulation evaluating Egger-type regression tests, residual-based tests, and a likelihood ratio test of the three-parameter selection model (3PSM) under the one-step p-value selection mechanism. Results show that when confounding covariates were ignored, Egger-type regression tests and residual analyses exhibited inflated Type I error, whereas the 3PSM likelihood ratio test maintained near-nominal, albeit slightly inflated, Type I error across conditions. When confounding covariates were incorporated, Egger-type tests had well-calibrated Type I error, residual analyses based on residualizing effect sizes alone tended to be conservative, and the 3PSM test showed slight inflation. Nevertheless, 3PSM consistently yielded higher power than other methods. Overall, the findings suggest that Egger-type regression tests and 3PSM can be used as complementary analyses for assessing selective publication when confounding covariates are present.
Large-scale human predictions of the replicability of published social and behavioural science papers – a multi- study analysis
Fallon Mody; David Peter Wilkinson; Hannah Fraser; Fiona Fidler; Michael Metcalf Bishop; Mark Burgman; Martin Bush; Yiling Chen; Anna Dreber; Brandon Goldfedder
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This paper reports two approaches to forecasting replicability for a corpus of 3000 published social science papers, using large-scale human assessments. Replication Markets used incentivized surveys and prediction markets where participants traded assets linked to replication outcomes and market prices were interpreted as replication predictions. The repliCATS project used a structured group deliberation protocol, including interactive discussion, and mathematically aggregated forecasts to generate replication predictions. Accuracy for both approaches was validated against a subset of (n=37) independent, high-power replication studies. The predictive accuracy (median [range]) achieved for AUC by Replication Markets was 0.76 [0.72-0.82], and 0.76 [0.68-0.81] by repliCATS. Replication Markets achieved a classification accuracy of 73% [68-76%] and repliCATS achieved 68% [59-78%]. These results place the performance of both teams within the accuracy range achieved in prior replication forecasting studies. We conclude that informative forecasts can be elicited by both methods, but there are trade-offs between scale and accuracy.
No evidence of favorable U.S. case law for authors suing journals over retractions and corrections
Jason Michael Chin; Alison Avenell; Euan Fowler
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Journals and publishers report delaying or refraining from correcting the scientific record because of threats of legal actions from authors. Little is known, however, about the actual litigation risks they face in this context. To address this gap, we systematically searched for legal decisions in U.S. state and federal courts resulting from lawsuits against journals and publishers arising from their expressions of concern, corrections, and retractions (i.e., “journal corrective actions”). We found that available precedents are favorable to journals and publishers. U.S. courts consistently dismiss authors’ claims prior to trial under a variety of contract and defamation theories. And, in all three identified cases in which authors sought injunctive relief to delay, reverse, or permanently stay a corrective action, courts refused that relief. These decisions suggest the litigation risks facing journals and publishers may not be as substantial as they are sometimes portrayed. Further, these decisions give journals and publishers a concrete point of leverage when negotiating with authors who threaten litigation over a journal corrective action.
Preregistration Works: Increased Reporting Quality, Internal Validity, and Protocol Adherence in Animal Studies
Julia Marie, Léa Menon; Celine Heinl; Timothy M. Errington
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Background: Transparency is essential for reliable research but is often compromised, contributing to irreproducibility. Preregistration can improve transparency, limit selective reporting, and prevent post hoc hypothesis changes. Despite the clear benefits of preregistration in multiple fields, its effect on reporting and quality in experimental animal studies has not been studied. Methods: We collected preregistered protocols from Preclinicaltrials.eu and Animalstudyregistry.org, along with their corresponding manuscripts and matched it with control papers to evaluate reporting quality (ARRIVE essential 10), internal validity (SYRCLE’s risk of bias tool) and deviations between protocols and manuscripts. Results: Preregistered papers (n=22) scored higher on reporting quality than controls (mean=0.794 vs 0.637 author-matched (n=13) and 0.593 journal-matched (n=20); p<0.001). They also displayed lower risk of bias, particularly for selection, performance, and detection biases. Consistency between preregistered protocols and manuscripts represented 47.6% of the answers, with highest consistency for primary outcomes, study type, and hypotheses. Frequent inconsistencies, 28.2% of the answers, also occurred, especially regarding secondary outcome reporting, bias-reduction measures, and animal numbers. Conclusions: Preregistration stimulates high quality reporting, internal validity and consistent reporting in animal research. However, reporting across the board could be improved and undisclosed deviations to protocols remain common. Enhancing protocol templates with more detailed structure may improve reporting practices. Next steps would be to validate these findings, optimise preregistration formats, and guide journal policies supporting transparent reporting.
Assessment of facilitators and barriers to open science implementation in the Brain-Heart Interconnectome Research Program: a qualitative study
Edward Xu; Marc Antonino Albert; Gustavo de Paula Dídimo; Anna Catharina Vieira Armond; David Moher; Emilio I. Alarcón; Ian D Graham; Krystina B. Lewis; Alexandra King; Malcolm King
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Open science improves research transparency, reproducibility, and equity. This qualitative study assessed facilitators and barriers to implementing open science practices within the Brain-Heart Interconnectome (BHI), an interdisciplinary research program funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) to advance prevention and treatment of brain-heart conditions (e.g., stroke and cardiac disease). The study aimed to explore perceptions and behaviours of BHI-funded investigators and teams regarding open science mandate implementation. Data were collected through virtual focus groups with 36 participants from 17 funded projects. Participants include principal investigators, research staff, trainees, and Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Holders. Focus groups were designed and analyzed using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). Barriers included limited financial and logistical resources, intellectual property and ethical concerns, and a lack of guidance and training. Facilitators included mandates from journals and funders, along with perceived improvements in research accountability and quality. Findings were mapped onto the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) using the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation – Behaviour (COM-B) model, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding behaviour change and informed implementation strategy development. These insights will be critical to effective and efficient open science uptake within BHI and are likely transferable to other biomedical and interdisciplinary research programs.
The Ability of Generative Artificial Intelligence to Evaluate the Quality of Scholarly Output
Tom Heyman; Marta Sereno
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being considered as tools to support the peer-review process. However, we currently have a limited understanding of their capabilities and biases in this area. In a set of three studies, we examined how out-of-the box LLMs evaluate scientific quality when presented with controlled, systematically manipulated research abstracts from various scientific disciplines (Study 1 & 2), and psychological science in particular (Study 3). Our design independently varied six key dimensions: Novelty, Analysis Quality, Internal Validity, Sample Size, Preregistration, and Statistical Significance. The results showed that GPT-4o-mini is sensitive to all six variables to some extent, but Statistical Significance had by far the strongest effect: Abstracts that mentioned finding a statistically significant effect received substantially higher ratings compared to abstracts that reported null effects but were otherwise identical. In contrast, newer models with more reasoning capabilities (i.e., GPT-5.6-terra and Claude-sonnet-5) consistently preferred abstracts with higher sample size, analysis quality and internal validity. Abstracts mentioning that the study was preregistered also tended to receive somewhat higher ratings. Interestingly, statistical significance and novelty consistently failed to explain a significant amount of variability in the ratings of those models. Taken together, these results highlight both the potential of advanced LLMs to support scientific evaluation and the importance of understanding the criteria that drive their judgments before incorporating them into peer-review workflows.

PsyArxiv

The medial temporal lobe and the retention of scene memories across a one-week delay
Angelique I. Delarazan; Alexis N. Garcia; Ashley Huggins; Matthew D. Grilli
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Remembering everyday events involves retaining multiple components, including the scenes that provide the spatial and contextual setting in which events occur. The medial temporal lobe (MTL) supports scene construction and complex event memory. However, less is known about its contribution to retaining the details of an event’s scene over time, as scene information is typically embedded within narrative and event structures that are assessed for memory shortly after encoding. To examine scene memory retention, fifty-seven cognitively healthy older adults viewed 360-degree panoramic videos depicting real-world environments and freely recalled each scene shortly after viewing and again one week later. We tested whether individual differences in MTL volume were related to retention of scene memory and whether these relationships changed across the one-week delay. The proportion of episodic detail retrieved did not significantly change across the one-week delay, but the details recalled changed and became more participant specific, as measured by several measures of text-based similarity. Critically, relationships between MTL volume and scene memory also changed over time such that greater MTL volume was associated with being more consistent with what was originally recalled. Exploratory subregional analyses further showed that perirhinal cortex volume was robustly associated with the text-based similarity measures. These findings suggest that MTL is related to memory for the scene component of complex experience, particularly the ability to consistently recall the details of a scene over time.
The time course of neural activity predictive of self-initiated movement
Lucas Jeay-Bizot; Mehmet Basbug; Uri Maoz; Robert Schapire; Aaron Schurger
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Decades of research have shown that early ramping activity is a very reliable antecedent of self-initiated movement. However, the dominant paradigm has been to only analyze data epochs culminating in movement, which discounts how often slow ramping might occur when no movement follows. To address this, we introduced a matched control condition that did not culminate in movement. We recorded electroencephalography data and compared these two conditions using a variety of powerful machine-learning classifiers. Although early ramping activity was present, it did not predict movement. Instead, classification accuracy rose abruptly about 100 ms before movement. By contrast, the traditional approach reproduced the spurious impression of early predictability. Our results resolve a long-standing controversy, showing that the neural commitment to act is a late-stage event consistent with the timing of conscious intention and the ability to inhibit movement. More broadly, our results show that a reliable antecedent is not necessarily a good predictor, underscoring the need for proper control conditions in time series analyses.
Contexts, Risks, and Affordances among Autistic Adults Using Psychedelics for Therapeutic Purposes: A Naturalistic, Mixed-Methods Study
Alvita Sam; Alexander De Foe; Aspasia Stacey Rabba; Paul Liknaitzky; Kyle Greenway; Stephanie L. Lake; Philippe Lucas
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Background: Autistic adults are under-investigated in psychedelic research, despite speculated elevated likelihood of substance use for therapeutic and recreational purposes. Aims: This study explored contexts of naturalistic psychedelic use and wellbeing and mental health indicators in a group of Autistic adults using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes, and compared these with the broader population of naturalistic psychedelic users. Methods: Secondary analysis of Global Psychedelic Survey 2023 data (N = 6,378) was undertaken with a sub-sample of naturalistic psychedelic users who self-indicated being Autistic adults who used psychedelics therapeutically. A convergent parallel mixed-methods study design investigated quantitative between-group differences in contexts of naturalistic psychedelic use and mental health indicators, and explored qualitative implications for wellbeing in the Autistic sub-sample. Results: Compared with other psychedelic users (n = 6,166), the Autistic sub-sample (n = 212) reported higher rates of lifetime use of less common psychedelic substances and use in structured therapeutic settings, lower perceived psychedelic knowledge and experience, and greater prevalence of persisting hallucinations (65.09%) and clinically significant symptoms of anxiety (57.35%) and depression (60.66%) at the time of survey completion. Concurrently, three qualitative themes described largely beneficial, yet context-dependent implications for wellbeing within the Autistic sub-sample: Shifting Perspectives, Therapeutic Utility, and Conditional Affordances. Conclusions: Integrated mixed-methods findings highlighted that wellbeing-related affordances of psychedelic use in the Autistic sub-sample were sometimes contingent on context and support, and adverse mental health indicators could co-exist with personal growth. Future research should further evaluate quality-of-life and adverse outcomes from psychedelic use in Autistic populations.
How Are Daily Events Related to Subjective Well-Being? A Meta-Analytic Review of Intensive Longitudinal Studies
Lukas Schellenberg; Lina Hungerbuehler; Max Lustenberger; Wiebke Bleidorn; Peter Haehner
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Theory and research indicate that daily events—frequently occurring, time-discrete experiences that disrupt everyday life—are important predictors of momentary subjective well-being (SWB). However, findings about the associations between daily events and SWB vary substantially across studies, potentially reflecting differences in samples, event characteristics, or assessment methods. Moreover, it remains unclear whether these associations emerge at both the within- and between-person level and whether daily events prospectively predict SWB. To address these limitations, we conducted a preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis of within- and between-person associations between daily events and SWB across 217 intensive longitudinal studies (Ntotal = 48,311). Consistent with theoretical accounts, findings showed small-to-medium positive associations between daily uplifts and SWB, within (r = .16) and between persons (r = .21), and medium-to-large negative associations between daily hassles and SWB, within (r = −.18) and between persons (r = −.28). Moderator analyses further showed that these associations varied systematically depending on the type of daily event, its operationalization, and the examined SWB dimension. Furthermore, whereas daily events were associated with SWB when assessed concurrently, there was little evidence that these associations persisted into subsequent moments or days. Overall, the present meta-analytic review provides a comprehensive account of the associations between daily events and SWB. It indicates that daily uplifts and hassles are important correlates of SWB at both the within- and between-person level, but that their associations with SWB are relatively short-lived within individuals.
Configural Object Novelty Alters Network Coordination Across the Medial Temporal Lobe
Lauren Alexandra Homann; Jennifer D. Ryan; Rosanna K. Olsen; Natalia Ladyka-Wojcik; Morgan Barense
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Object identity depends on how constituent features are combined, such that the same features may form distinct objects when their configuration changes. The perirhinal (PRC) and anterolateral entorhinal (alERC) cortices are implicated in such conjunctive object processing; however, regional sensitivity alone cannot reveal how information is coordinated across regions, or whether this coordination extends beyond object-processing regions to spatial and relational regions. Using generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analysis of BOLD signals extracted from manually-segmented medial temporal lobe regions, we examined task-modulated functional connectivity while younger adults viewed repeated objects (familiar features in familiar configurations), recombined objects (familiar features in novel configurations), and novel objects (novel features in novel configurations). This design permitted isolation of connectivity changes associated with configural, featural, and global object novelty. Configural novelty (repeated vs. recombined objects) was associated with widespread reductions in connectivity spanning anterior-temporal, posterior-medial, and hippocampal regions, extending to medial prefrontal and posterior-medial cortex, alongside more limited increases in connectivity between posteromedial entorhinal cortex (pmERC) and superior parietal and frontal regions. In contrast, featural novelty (recombined vs. novel objects) and global novelty (repeated vs. novel objects) were not associated with significant connectivity differences. These findings demonstrate that configural object novelty alters coordination across a distributed hippocampal-cortical network, with connectivity effects extending beyond the anterior-temporal regions traditionally implicated in object processing, highlighting how object and relational processing systems work in concert to support conjunctive object processing. Connectivity thus provides a complementary window onto how conjunctive information is coordinated, beyond what regional sensitivity alone can reveal.
Enhanced Sensitization Training in Aplysia Produces a Focused, Distinctive Set of Transcriptional Changes that Mostly Decays as Memory is Maintained
Irina Calin-Jageman; Jashui Zarate Torres; Theresa Wilsterman; Christian Gonzalez; Jaquelin Gutierrez; Carys McFaul; Nelly Musajeva; Zayra Juarez; Steven Proutsos; Octavian Calin-Jageman
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Forgetting remains a key puzzle in the neurobiology of memory. One mysterious aspect of forgetting is its selectivity: most long-term memories are forgotten, becoming progressively less likely to be recalled, but extensive training can produce long-term memories that are readily expressed for a lifetime. What are the molecular mechanisms through which training forestalls forgetting? To explore this issue, we leveraged a well-documented training effect in long-term sensitization in Aplysia californica: a 1-day training protocol (standard) produces sensitization that is forgotten within 7 days, whereas 4-days of training (enhanced) produces sensitization that is durably expressed. Here we confirm that enhanced sensitization training produces an enduring form of sensitization, with only subtle levels of forgetting for up to 11 days after training. We then used microarray and qPCR to characterize the transcriptional changes occurring 1, 5, and 11 days after enhanced sensitization training. We find that enhanced sensitization sustains only about 6% of the transcriptional changes induced by standard training, with many memory-linked transcripts showing no (ApCREB1) or significantly weaker (ApEgr) regulation with additional training. Enhanced training also produces distinct activation of about 20 transcripts (relative to standard training), including up-regulation of putative homologs of genes related to synaptic plasticity (HINT1) and axon maintenance (zig-4). Surprisingly, most of the transcriptional changes initially accompanying enhanced training fade rapidly, with the typical training effect at day 1 declining to 45% as strong by day 5 and then 28% as strong by day 11. This decay is not complete, and we find sustained regulation of several transcripts, including some also persistently regulated by enhanced training (e.g. FMRFa and a putative GRIK1 homolog). Overall, our results suggest that additional training produces a weaker but somewhat distinctive transcriptional response, most of which fades well before memory expression.
From Access to Stabilisation: A Systems-Level Architecture of Cognitive Pathway Formation
Andrew Rockliffe
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Contemporary psychology provides well-developed accounts of framing, memory accessibility, salience, cognitive control, fixation, flexibility, and stabilisation. However, their functional integration during the formation and persistence of a cognitive pathway remains less clearly specified. This paper proposes a systems-level architecture in which cognition is understood as the currently active configuration of functional relationships within a highly interactive system. The current frame of mind represents this wider configuration, within which deployment profiles regulate the relative weighting and organisation of cognitive processes and capacities, memory access remains selective and state-dependent, and available information acquires differential functional prominence through salience. Candidate pathways are evaluated against current constraints and may become progressively stabilised, while feedback, changing conditions, closure modulation, and hysteretic dynamics can reinforce, modify, or reopen the developing state. The architecture distinguishes what is represented within the wider memory landscape from what becomes functionally accessible and subsequently salient, while treating stabilisation, closure, and reopening as dynamically related rather than as discrete terminal stages. Its contribution lies in specifying how interactions among these functions can generate qualitatively different outcomes, including efficient commitment, fixation, cognitive reorganisation, insight, persistence, and reopening. It therefore provides an analytical representation of a recursive, history-dependent system and generates testable questions concerning how cognitive pathways become accessible, influential, evaluated, sustained, revised, or reopened.
The Effects of Cognitive Load on Intergroup Empathy Biases [Registered Report Stage 1, Version 2]
Jillian Elizabeth Franks; Jennifer Nadine Gutsell; Social Interaction and Motivation Lab
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Accurate and quick judgments of others’ mental and emotional states are crucial for social interaction. However, these judgments can be compromised by social biases, especially while cognitive demands are high and cognitive resources are low. Empathy is not always allocated to everyone equally, especially when the target is considered an outgroup member. One factor that may exacerbate such empathy biases is cognitive load, as cognitive load has been shown to increase ingroup biases and impair empathizing. This study investigates whether high cognitive load and racial outgroup membership interact, potentially worsening behavioral and self-reported indicators of empathy bias. To our knowledge, the present work is the first to directly manipulate cognitive load during intergroup empathizing, examining its effects on two distinct, yet interacting, routes of empathy—experience sharing and mentalizing. Mentalizing (cognitive empathy) and affective experience sharing (emotional empathy) activate different brain networks but interact during social situations, necessitating separate examination within the same paradigm. Using an empathy task designed to test racial empathy biases, we integrate behavioral and self-report measures to capture empathy dynamics in response to naturalistic stimuli. This approach allows us to test how group biases and cognitive load independently and jointly affect mentalizing and experience sharing.
The Short General Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence Scale in Japan: Psychometric Validation and Exploratory Measurement Invariance with the Original UK Sample
Yu Kanno; Rina Kagawa
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As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly widespread, reliable measures of general attitudes toward AI are needed to understand public responses, and cross-national comparisons require evidence of measurement equivalence. This study addressed two objectives: validating the Short General Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence Scale (Short GAAIS-10; Schepman & Rodway, 2026) in Japan and exploring its comparability with the original UK sample. We translated the scale into Japanese (GAAIS-10-J) and examined its psychometric properties among 468 Japanese adults, including a one-month retest (N = 429). The original two-factor structure (Positive and Negative) received partial support, although some confirmatory factor analysis fit criteria were not met. Most items showed acceptable functioning, and both subscales demonstrated good internal consistency and adequate temporal stability. The two subscales captured related but distinguishable aspects of AI attitudes. Furthermore, the GAAIS-10-J explained additional variance in AI usage intention beyond perceived usefulness and ease of use. An exploratory comparison with the original UK sample (N = 500) approximately supported threshold and metric invariance but not full scalar invariance. Under a partial scalar invariance model, the Japanese sample had a higher latent Positive mean and a lower latent Negative mean than the UK sample, although these differences cannot be attributed directly to national or cultural factors. Overall, the GAAIS-10-J offers a brief measure of general AI attitudes in Japan, while the findings highlight the importance of accounting for measurement differences in cross-national comparisons.
Gambling-related suicide and serious suicide attempts in the United Kingdom: a psychological autopsy and qualitative investigation
Amanda Roberts; Jim Rogers; Richard J. E. James; Annie Ashton; Emily Beck; Pauline Turnbull; Gursharan Johal; Charles Ritchie; Tony Parente; Pauline Rivart
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Background: Gambling-related harms are an important public health issue, with suicide representing one of their most serious potential consequences. However, although previous literature has identified elevated prevalence of suicidality among people who gamble, less is known about how gambling-related harms develop and subsequently relate to suicidal crisis. Aims: To characterise the events and circumstances preceding gambling-related suicide and serious suicide attempts, and to examine the interacting socioecological, environmental and psychological processes through which gambling-related harms may have been linked to suicidal crisis. Design: Exploratory multi-source psychological autopsy and qualitative inquiry, co-produced with people with lived experience. Narrative interviews were integrated, where available, with banking, gambling operator, health and coronial records. Interviews underwent iterative thematic analysis; records were analysed descriptively at case level using time series, case timelines and cross-case matrices. Setting: United Kingdom. Study period: Jan 2023 to Dec 2025. Participants/Cases: Twenty core cases were examined: 10 people who had died by gambling-related suicide, represented by close relatives or other affected people, and 10 people who had survived a serious suicide attempt associated with gambling-related harms. People who died were aged 19-46 years (9 male, 1 female); attempt survivors were aged 34-62 years (7 male, 3 female). Measurements: Narrative interviews lasted approximately 3-4 hours and covered broad life history, key aspects of gambling history, industry interactions, suicidality, health, money, perceptions of gambling, and help-seeking and treatment. Record data were available for 14 of 20 cases. Sources included banking and operator activity, communications, health records and, in a small number, coronial or inquest material; coverage varied substantially between cases. Results: Ten interconnected themes were identified: normalisation of gambling; the ‘responsible gambling’ narrative and individualisation of responsibility; industry practices and products; regulatory and policy weaknesses; lack of knowledge, information and understanding; shame, self-blame and stigma; money, debt and financial desperation; lack of recognition and ineffective treatment; lapse and recurrence; and entrapment and hitting the lowest point. Documentary records were consistent with interview findings, including intense or renewed gambling close to serious suicide attempts in several cases, substantial financial losses and borrowing, inducements and, in some cases, account restrictions followed by switching between operators. Conclusions: In these cases, gambling-related suicidal crises involved interacting commercial, financial, psychological, relational and service-level processes. The findings identify potential opportunities for earlier recognition, stronger safeguards and sustained support.
Feasibility and engagement of smartphone delivered yoga imagery with or without personalized avatars in residential substance use treatment: The AT-REACH nonrandomized pilot
Dennis McChargue; Byrav Ramamurthy; Wenyue Wang; Ashlin Ondrusek; Srikar Chanamolu; anna henson
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Background. Brief guided imagery may provide a practical way to rehearse a yoga experience between live sessions. We evaluated smartphone delivery and repeated use of yoga imagery and explored whether adding a personalized animated avatar was associated with different outcomes. Methods. This nonrandomized pilot enrolled 35 adults in four cohorts at residential substance use recovery facilities in Nebraska. Participants received an introductory yoga session and brief app delivered imagery practices, with three daily prompts. Thirteen participants received imagery with an animated avatar and 22 received imagery without the avatar. Allocation was by seat choice rather than a randomized sequence; the fourth cohort received the comparison condition only. We summarized app use over the first 28 days of logs, rated emotion changes around practice, and baseline to exit questionnaire outcomes. Results. All 35 initiated the app and 27 (77%) completed the exit assessment. Participants logged 2901 sessions, a median of 86 per person (interquartile range 62 to 104). At least three sessions were logged on 59% of days and at least one on 68%. The between group engagement effect was close to zero but imprecise (Hedges g = 0.03, 95% CI -0.66 to 0.71). Mean negative emotion intensity changed by -8.9 points on a 0 to 100 scale (95% CI -15.9 to -1.9). The baseline adjusted DERS total difference was 9.2 points (95% CI -6.7 to 25.2). The exploratory DERS Awareness change effect favored animated visual support (g = 0.89, 95% CI 0.06 to 1.73), but the cohort adjusted exit difference was smaller and imprecise (-1.30 points, 95% CI -5.05 to 2.46). Other questionnaire findings were mixed. Conclusions. The pilot documents repeated use of brief guided yoga imagery in residential recovery settings. It does not establish imagery efficacy, equivalence between formats, or an added benefit of animated visual support. Randomized evaluation with consistent assessment and complete delivery logs is warranted.
Passive Smartphone-Based Digital Phenotyping for the Identification of PTSD Symptoms: Initial Validation of a Digital Behavioral Marker
Rony Kapel Lev-ari; Christian A. Webb; Doron Amsalem; Annika C. Sweetland; Yuval Neria; Milton Wainberg
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Background: Passive smartphone-based digital phenotyping offers a scalable approach for continuous mental health assessment. Continuous passive monitoring may be particularly valuable for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), given fluctuating symptoms and the limitations of episodic clinical assessment. While previously validated for depression and anxiety, its application to PTSD remains limited. This study evaluated passive smartphone behavioral data for estimating PTSD symptom severity. Methods: Adults (N = 176) completed the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) and passively contributed smartphone behavioral metadata via the Behavidence app. A Random Forest classifier using 44 behavioral features was developed to classify none (PCL-5 <31) versus severe (PCL-5 >61) PTSD symptom severity. The final model generated participant-level PTSD-related scores, which were evaluated across the full cohort. Feature importance was examined using Gini impurity and SHAP. Results: In the holdout test set, the classifier achieved 80.3% accuracy, an AUC of 0.82, and 89.5% precision. When applied to the full cohort, participant-level MHSS values demonstrated a moderate positive correlation with continuous PCL-5 scores (r = 0.49, p < .001) and increased significantly across questionnaire-defined PTSD severity groups (F(3,172) = 24.06, p < .001, η² = 0.30). Feature importance analyses identified smartphone engagement, temporal usage patterns, and application-specific behaviors as the strongest contributors to model predictions. Conclusions: Passive smartphone-based digital phenotyping demonstrated promising performance for identifying PTSD symptom severity. Participant-level MHSS values were associated with continuous and categorical measures of PTSD severity, supporting passive behavioral monitoring as a scalable complement to traditional PTSD assessment and longitudinal symptom monitoring.
Do Students Experience Character Growth During Higher Education? Evidence From a Large, Multi-Institutional Study
Michael Prinzing; Juliette Lawson Ratchford
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Decades of theoretical work in education research and developmental psychology suggest that students’ time in higher education is a critical period in their personal and moral development. Indeed, many institutions of higher education explicitly seek to promote students’ character growth. Yet empirical evidence regarding such growth during higher education remains limited. The present study (N = 473,627 undergraduates at 414 United States colleges and universities) used mixed-effects models to examine students’ character growth across four years in higher education and to test whether such growth is moderated academic major, institutional characteristics, or students’ engagement in their campus communities. Results indicated that students do experience significant growth during their years in higher education. However, academic major and institutional type accounted for little variation. Instead, specific forms of community engagement, including participation in student organizations, mentorship and conversations about social and cultural issues, emerged as clear moderators. Alongside these theoretical implications, the findings have practical significance. The factors that appear to play the largest roles in shaping students’ growth are precisely those that staff, faculty, and administrators can influence, for example by prioritizing mentorship and promoting organizational involvement and dialogue across differences.
Enhancing Clinical Psychological Science’s Role in Addressing Pressing Societal Issues: The Case Example of Firearm Violence Prevention
Edelyn Verona; Nicholas D. Thomson
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Clinical psychological science has contributed a range of methodological and treatment innovations that have improved human well-being. At the same time, our field can play a larger role in studying and addressing a range of societal problems and, crucially, in training future clinical scientists in this work. Applying the case example of firearm violence research, we describe ways to expand concentrations and training in “public” clinical psychological science to increase support for social problems research and its reach to impacted communities. We outline ways in which clinical science is well-positioned to advance such research and highlight potential reforms needed to create a sustainable pipeline of investigators interested in public health and clinical psychological science. The article presents an integrated agenda for building interdisciplinary collaborations, embedding cultural and policy competence into training, and ensuring sustained mentorship in the study and prevention of social problems, including firearm violence.
Breaking the Cycle: Rewiring Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia Through Physical Exercise
Bénédicte Thonon; Damien Brevers
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Individuals with schizophrenia commonly exhibit debilitating negative symptoms, including avolition and anhedonia, which represent a significant barrier to engagement in goal-directed behaviours, including physical exercise. They are less physically active than the general population, yet physical exercise is known to improve their symptoms. This narrative review investigates the bidirectional relationship between negative symptoms and physical activity. We propose that negative symptoms hinder engagement in physical activity by altering the cost-benefit analysis of exercise. This is exacerbated by deficits in anticipatory pleasure and reward learning, underpinned by dysfunctions within dopaminergic and glutamatergic circuitry which are critical for motivated behavior. We hypothesise that physical exercise can rewire these deficits through enhanced dopamine transmission, modulation of glutamatergic and GABAergic systems, and reduced inflammation. Furthermore, grounded in learning theories and adopting a cognitive-behavioural perspective, this review establishes a theoretical foundation for developing targeted interventions designed to enhance physical activity engagement in this population. We highlight that it is critical to ensure that physical activity is experienced as less effortful and more pleasurable than expected. By generating positive prediction errors (when the experience of exercise is less effortful or more pleasurable than anticipated) exercise helps individuals re-associate it with positive outcomes. Cognitive changes coupled with the biological effects of physical exercise on reward neural pathways are likely to have a synergistic effect, promoting a virtuous cycle of sustained engagement and symptom improvement.
What Kind of Disliked Group Are Environmentalists? A Four-Sample Test of the Dual-Process Model
Taciano L Milfont; Felipe Vilanova; Angelo Brandelli Costa
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Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) are well-established correlates of weaker environmentalism but less is known about how these ideologies relate to attitudes toward environmentalists as a social group. Drawing on the Dual-Process Motivational model, this brief research report first examines whether environmentalists are disliked as a dangerous, derogated or dissident group, using secondary analyses of four Brazilian samples (Ntotal = 1,679; Mage = 39.12 years, SDage = 15.34; 53.9% women). Social perceptions of environmentalists were positive on average, and attitudes toward environmentalists correlated most strongly with prejudice toward dissident groups (pooled r = .52). Confirmatory factor models confirmed that environmentalists loaded most strongly on the dissident factor in every sample (λs = .38 to .74), with smaller derogated loadings in two samples and null or negative dangerous loadings. We then examined how these ideologies relate to prejudiced attitudes toward environmentalists. RWA and SDO showed independent positive associations overall (pooled βs = .23 and .28), and their coefficients did not differ significantly in any sample after adjustment for multiple comparisons. Negativity toward environmentalists thus aligns with prejudice toward groups seen as challenging the status quo and is associated with both authoritarian and dominance-related ideology.
Hallucination-proneness is associated with more extreme social evaluations of external voices
Nadine Lavan; Georgina Needham-Bennett; Pedro Roberto Rojas Muñoz; Neve Elizabeth Greenfield
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Auditory verbal hallucinations are often experienced as the voices of entities who have a character and personality of their own. We asked whether hallucination-proneness in listeners affects how they evaluate the personality of external voices. 48 participants who self-reported a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder, and 50 participants without a similar diagnosis rated brief vowel recordings on attractiveness, competence, dominance, friendliness and trustworthiness. Hallucination-proneness was measured with the Cardiff Anomalous Perceptions Scale (CAPS) and the auditory hallucinations subscale of the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales (PSYRATS-AH). Despite clearly higher symptom levels in listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders, there was no group-level difference in average social trait evaluations, nor were average ratings associated with hallucination-proneness. There was, however, a numerical trend for listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders to report more extreme social trait evaluations, where additionally, greater hallucination-proneness was also significantly associated with more extreme ratings across all social traits, on both measures. This association was, however, primarily present in controls but not in listeners diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Hallucination-proneness therefore appears to amplify, rather than directionally bias, social trait evaluations of voices. Our findings link proneness to experiencing internal voices, i.e. auditory verbal hallucinations, to how external voices are perceived. This finding is broadly consistent with previous work reporting that hallucination-prone individuals may be more likely to detect a signal (here: a salient social evaluation) in relatively ambiguous stimuli, speaking to mechanistic accounts that propose that stronger priors imbue stimuli with meaning.
When Risk Factors Compete: A Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Antecedents of Adolescent Delinquency Across Domains, Development, and Gender
Matthew R. Cashman; Anna-Karin Andershed; Henrik Andershed; Frida Bood; Evelina Landstedt; Louise Frogner; Karin Hellfeldt
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Risk factors for adolescent delinquency have been identified at multiple levels, from individual dispositions through family and school processes to ecological context, yet their relative importance remains unestablished. Which factors carry greatest weight, and when, has not been tested in simultaneous modelling. This study assessed 111 predictors spanning five domains across four developmental periods, predicting self-reported delinquency in mid-adolescence. Predictors were teacher- and parent-reported and the outcome adolescent self-reported. Participants were a Swedish population-based cohort followed from early childhood into adolescence (N = 2,121; 46.6% girls; mean age 3.86 years at baseline; 97.8% born in Sweden). Using machine learning techniques, random forests were estimated across the full span (AUC = .787, 95% CI [.747, .826]) and at each developmental period for boys and girls. Parent-rated conduct problems ranked among the leading predictors at every period, while caregiver emotional functioning carried greatest weight in early and late childhood before being displaced by dispositional and behavioral characteristics. Parent-rated social competence was the strongest protective factor. Associations were threshold-shaped, with the shift to elevated risk falling within the ordinary range of the measures. Gender differences in ranking were not supported by formal testing, which was low-powered.
Using Language Models to Predict Values, Personality, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life From Ideal-Life Descriptions
Joffrey Fuhrer; Théo Desbordes
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Does the way we picture our ideal life reveal what we value, who we are, and how we thrive? In a preregistered study (N = 273), we tested whether free-form descriptions (median 109 words) and seven-keyword lists of one's ideal life predict a broad battery of psychological constructs: the Big Five, the ten Schwartz values, social dominance, political orientation, meaning in life, and subjective well-being. Using regularized linear probes on embeddings from transformer large language models (LLMs), inspired by model-interpretability research, we find that ideal-life narratives predict most constructs above chance in both conditions (mean r = 0.24 for free-form, mean r = 0.12 for keywords). This free-form advantage was concentrated on constructs people rarely name outright, such as achievement, benevolence, conformity, and emotional stability, implying that part of the signal lies in the manner of the telling rather than in the referents alone. Nineteen of the 24 constructs were recovered from roughly 120 words of text, a far broader battery than earlier language-based work, which has relied on much longer samples and focused on personality and well-being. Our approach offers an open, privacy-preserving alternative to zero-shot commercial LLMs, with comparable accuracy, no API cost, and freely released data and code.
Classroom Group Meditation and Frontal EEG Power-Envelope Networks: A Twelve-Session Single-Channel Hyperscanning Study
GAO JUNLING; Yilin Zhang; Hank Leung; Kin Cheung Lee; Chun Chi Poon; Bonnie Wai Yan Wu; Hin Hung Sik
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Portable electroencephalography (EEG) allows neural activity to be recorded from whole classrooms, but correlated activity across students can arise from shared instructions, parallel changes in arousal or common artefact rather than interpersonal coupling, and dyads within one class are not independent observations. In this exploratory analysis, single-channel frontal EEG was recorded during eyes-closed rest and guided group meditation in twelve classroom sessions at four schools (194 students; 9–23 per session). For each session and band (alpha, theta, delta, beta), sparse partial-correlation networks among participants were estimated from 140 consecutive 2-s band-power values with the Graphical Lasso, using one condition-blind penalty for both conditions. The primary outcome, positive network strength, was compared between conditions with the session as the unit of inference, using exact sign-flip tests and false-discovery-rate control across bands. No band differed between meditation and rest (alpha: mean session difference = 0.00006, 95% CI [−0.00083, 0.00096], raw p = .887, q = .939). No band differed after calibration against circular-shift surrogates or when one penalty was applied to all sessions, and alpha stayed null when any one session was removed. Along the penalty path, 9 of the 12 sessions changed the sign of their own alpha difference. A tuning-free mean pairwise correlation, calibrated against circular-shift surrogates, also showed no condition difference in any band. These data do not show that brief group meditation changes interparticipant EEG organisation in classrooms, and they indicate that per-session penalised network summaries need penalty-path and tuning-free checks before they are interpreted.
Positive and Self-Transcendent Eco-Emotions as Fuel for Collective Action: A Social Identity Account
Ronan Bellemin; Anna Tcherkassof; Aurélien GRATON
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Emotions are key predictors of pro-environmental behavior. Despite the growing interest in eco-emotions in recent years, negative eco-emotions can be detrimental, which opens the way for the study of positive and self-transcendent eco-emotions. Across four pre-registered studies, we examined how positive and self-transcendent eco-emotions relate to pro environmental collective action through group-based processes. A correlational study (N = 502) revealed that positive and self-transcendent eco-emotions were associated with pro environmental collective action intentions, mediated by pro-environmental ingroup identification. An online experiment (N = 387) inducing eco-compassion found neither significant effect on actual donations nor mediation by ingroup identification. A replication of the first study (N = 461) confirmed the mediation effect on intentions. Finally, an online experiment inducing awe at nature (N = 542) demonstrated that this emotion increased pro environmental collective action intentions, again mediated by pro-environmental ingroup identification. Together, these findings support social identity frameworks in which affective reactions act as motivational levers for collective engagement.
Cognitive impairment in older adults with type 1 diabetes: Influence of premorbid ability and associations with depression, anxiety, and diabetes-related distress
Lily Li; Dana Wong; Caroline Fisher; Jennifer Conn; Spiros Fourlanos; Paul Wraight; Kerryn Elizabeth Pike
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Objective: This study characterised cognitive and psychological functioning in older adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D), compared the prevalence of cognitive impairment under age-based and premorbid-ability+age-adjusted (PA+AA) norms, and examined associations between cognitive status and depression, anxiety, and diabetes-related distress. Method: Forty-three adults aged ≥55 years with T1D completed a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment covering attention, working memory, verbal and visuospatial memory, processing speed, executive function, verbal fluency, and confrontation naming, alongside measures of depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), and diabetes-related distress (PAID-11). Impairment was defined as performance ≥1.5 SD below expected levels on at least two tests, with expected scores derived from either age-based norms or estimated premorbid ability combined with age. Results: Group-level performance was within or above age-expected ranges. Individually, 14% met criteria for impairment under age-based norms versus 42% under PA+AA norms; the additional 28% were identified only against estimated prior ability. Impairments were most frequent in confrontation naming and processing speed. PA+AA norms additionally revealed impairments in attention, working memory, verbal fluency, and cognitive flexibility. Impaired participants reported significantly higher depression under both approaches. Anxiety was significantly elevated under PA+AA norms, and diabetes-related distress under age-based norms only. Conclusions: Age-based norms may substantially underestimate cognitive impairment in older adults with T1D, particularly among those with higher premorbid ability. The association between impairment and elevated psychological distress supports the integration of cognitive and mood assessment in routine diabetes care.
From Phonological Skills to Reading Fluency: The Mediating Role of Reading Prosody
Petra Kóródi; Ferenc Honbolygó
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Purpose: The development of reading fluency relies on phonological skills and prosodic competence, but evidence about the developmental mechanisms underlying this relationship remain scarce. Previous research has relied on subjective rating scales or adult-based acoustic comparisons, mostly in stress-timed languages. This study investigated whether objective acoustic markers of oral reading prosody mediate the relationship between cognitive skills (phonological awareness [PA] and rapid automatized naming [RAN]) and reading fluency in a syllable-timed language. Method: The sample consisted of 56 typically developing, Hungarian-speaking primary school children (Mage = 8.96 years, 55,36% boys) who completed standardized cognitive assessments. Prosodic competence was measured by comparing acoustic features from an oral reading task against each child's own prosodic imitation baseline, using dynamic time warping to align melodic and rhythmic contours. Data were analyzed using path analysis. Results: Temporal features, especially tempo stability, emerged as the strongest predictor of reading fluency, whereas melodic and rhythmic markers added no unique variance. Path analysis revealed that RAN predicted reading fluency directly, while PA's contribution was entirely indirect: stronger PA reduced pausal intrusions, which maintained temporal stability and, through it, reading fluency. Conclusion: PA appears to influence reading fluency indirectly through sequential, temporal prosodic execution. In syllable-timed languages like Hungarian, sentence-level temporal mechanisms may carry the primary explanatory weight, highlighting that reading development models should account for the specific rhythmic properties of the reader's native language.
A Computational Swinging Lexical Network: Cohort Concentration Predicts Semantic Interference in a Large-Scale Picture–Word Interference Dataset
Louis Schiekiera; Rasha Abdel Rahman; Alissa Melinger; Vincent Gruber; Fritz Guenther
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The Swinging Lexical Network (SLN) model explains semantic context effects in word production through the lexical cohort that a target and distractor co-activate: whether naming is facilitated or slowed depends on the balance between semantic priming and lexical competition within this cohort. As a verbal theory the SLN leaves open what counts as a competitor: any co-activated word, or only words whose activation stands out. We implemented the SLN computationally, letting activation spread through a 30,000-word distributional semantic network. From this process we derived two measures. Cohort concentration is the degree to which co-activation falls on a few words instead of being spread thinly across many. The swing is how much the activation pattern still changes over later spreading steps. In a harmonized picture--word interference dataset of 392,156 trials from 86 English and German experiments, cohort concentration was the only semantic predictor with a reliable effect in both languages: naming was slower when a few words stood out as strongly activated competitors and faster when activation was diffuse. Competitors are thus the words whose activation stands out from the background, not every word that receives some activation. Adding the swing improved fit, but its effect could not be separated from cohort concentration, with which it was strongly correlated. Because spreading converges on the same network-wide state for every word pair, later steps largely re-express the initial cohort. In line with the SLN, our computational implementation shows that semantic interference depends on how co-activation is distributed across the cohort.
Trauma, Cannabis Use and Attenuated Psychotic Symptoms: A Mediation Model in the Uruguayan General Population
Richard Rodriguez; Celia Ceballos-Munuera; Paul Ruiz; Juan F. Rodriguez-Testal; Álvaro Cabana
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Abstract Background: At-risk mental states (ARMS), involving subclinical attenuated psychotic experiences, occur in the general population with persistence rates above 30%, and may substantially affect quality of life, well-being and global functioning. Cannabis use has been linked to the onset, persistence and intensity of attenuated psychotic symptoms, whereas other evidence identifies trauma as a mediating factor. This study examined the potential effect and degree of interaction of cannabis use patterns in a general population sample with a history of traumatic experiences during childhood and adolescence. Methods: A selective ex post facto cross-sectional survey design was used. Adults residing in Uruguay with no prior psychopathological diagnosis (n = 652, 66.3% women, M = 31.9 years, SD = 8.5) completed a controlled online survey assessing traumatic experiences, negative symptoms, aberrant salience, ideas of reference and cannabis use patterns. Results: Statistically significant correlations confirmed a dual interaction of traumatic experiences, and of the frequency and grams of cannabis used, on attenuated psychotic symptoms. Traumatic experiences explained R2 = .202 of the variance in attenuated psychotic symptomatology, more than the dose (R2 = .14) and frequency (R2 = .048) of cannabis use. Combining the trauma effect with both use-pattern effects yielded a model with better fit and greater explained variance (R2 = .252). Conclusions: Traumatic experiences during childhood and adolescence are positively associated with cannabis use and, to a greater extent, with attenuated psychotic symptoms (ARMS) such as ideas of reference, aberrant salience and negative symptoms, showing greater explanatory power than cannabis use.
Perceptual similarity landscape differs between young and clinically unimpaired older adults and contributes to long-term memory precision
Haopei Yang; Mingjian He; Angela Han; Dulce Karina Pimentel-Hurlburt; Julia Glueck; Zoe Katherine Jung; Ryan J. Southward; Gayle K. Deutsch; Niyatee Samudra; Patrick L. Purdon
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The precision of memory for event features is lower in older relative to young adults. Recent studies that examined continuous reproduction data with a mixture model –– which estimates two parameters putatively reflecting reduced fidelity/precision and outright forgetting –– suggest age-related memory decline is associated with a selective or larger reduction in mnemonic precision vs. forgetting. However, emerging evidence indicates that performance on continuous reproduction paradigms depends not just on memory, but also on the psychophysical similarity function (PSF) of the perceptual feature space, which may also change with age. Using a recently developed one-parameter statistical model of continuous reproduction memory data that mechanistically accounts for the empirically measured PSF, we examined whether age-related differences in continuous reproduction data are at least partially explained by age-related differences in perception. Young adults (age 18-25 yrs, N = 55) and clinically unimpaired older adults (age 68-86 yrs, N = 54) with normal color vision performed (a) a continuous reproduction task probing long-term memory for object color, (b) a Likert color similarity judgement task, and (c) a color matching task. We first replicated previous findings of age-related differences in memory precision for the colors of previously encountered objects and identified age-related changes in color perception on the similarity and matching tasks. We then characterized the age- group specific perceptual landscape by constructing the PSF using the similarity task data. Subsequent model comparison revealed that for both age groups, the more parsimonious one- parameter model, which accounts for the age-group specific PSF, explained continuous reproduction data better than the mixture model. Notably, the PSFs differed between age groups, and the difference was not explained by individual differences in response bias or trial-history effects. When we replaced the PSF estimated from older adults’ perceptual data with that estimated from the younger adults in the one-parameter model, it produced a worse fit to older adults’ continuous reproduction data compared to the model with the age-group appropriate PSF, further supporting a link between age-related changes in perception and the precision of episodic memory.
AI-Powered Prevention and Early Intervention for Stress, Depression, and Anxiety: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Julie Youko Anne Cachia; Xuan Zhao; Wenxi Pu; Chi Liao; merel Keijsers; Julian De Freitas; Rebecca Fortgang
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Randomized evidence for purpose-built generative AI mental health support remains limited. In this preregistered trial, 1,137 unscreened university students were assigned to 6 weeks of Flourish or care as usual. All three primary endpoints were met, with more favorable trajectories for perceived stress (β = -0.03, p = 0.010), depressive symptoms (β = -0.03, p = 0.006), and anxiety symptoms (β = -0.04, p = 0.001). Benefits were observed across baseline severity, with less deterioration at low severity and greater improvement at elevated severity. Among participants with elevated symptoms, improvements were larger with Flourish for depression (d = 1.03 vs 0.56) and anxiety (d = 0.91 vs 0.60), with meaningful improvements of 52.3% vs 31.7% and 50.6% vs 38.1%, respectively. Reductions in perceived stress emerged as one potential pathway to broader improvements in depressive and anxiety symptoms. These findings support scalable first-line AI support spanning prevention and early intervention.
Clustering of differential conditioned response trajectories using skin conductance: Are fear conditioning studies affected by pre-existing characteristics?
Luke John Ney; Matthew Greaves; Matthew Paul O'Donohue; Trevor Steward; Yi Wang; Madeline Jarvis; Rachel Patterson; Camilla Luck; Ottmar Lipp
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Recent research suggests that responses during experimental fear conditioning follow distinct latent trajectory classes. Computational reinforcement learning models can be used to infer latent learning processes during the task (e.g., learning rates and prediction-error sensitivity) that may help explain these classes. The present study re-analysed previously published and unpublished datasets to examine patterns of fear learning using skin conductance responses (SCRs) in a large sample of healthy participants. Data were aggregated from 12 fear conditioning experiments (N = 1,083; Mage = 20.72 years), encompassing acquisition, extinction, and return-of-fear phases. Using k-means clustering, we identified solutions comprising either two or three distinct response profiles. Across clusters, approximately half of participants showed minimal differential SCRs, while the remaining participants exhibited higher conditioned responding during acquisition, with subsets differing in whether fear returned following extinction. Cluster membership was significantly predicted by gender, current anxiety levels, post-acquisition conditioned stimulus pleasantness ratings, and Bayes factors quantifying evidence for model-based learning. Comparison of reinforcement learning models indicated that a latent cause model provided a superior account of SCR data relative to Rescorla–Wagner, Pearce–Hall, and hybrid models, with latent cause parameters differing by cluster and gender. The clustering data provide preliminary evidence that SCR outcomes in fear conditioning studies may be disproportionately influenced by a minority of participants with specific pre-existing characteristics, rather than reflecting uniform learning processes. Moreover, the results provide support for latent cause theories of fear learning and highlight the value of combining clustering and computational approaches to better understand individual differences in fear acquisition, extinction, and relapse.
Associations Between Motives and Emotion Regulation Strategy Use in Everyday Life
Valentina Bianchi; Tyler Thorne; Elise Katherine Kalokerinos; Felicity Angelopoulos; Marina Milyavskaya
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Theories suggest that capturing people’s motives (the ‘why’) for regulating allows for a better understanding of how people choose to regulate their emotions. Yet, little empirical research systematically examines the link between motives and regulation strategies. Addressing this gap, we conducted an experience-sampling study to: 1) capture the prevalence of a wide range of regulatory motives (hedonic, instrumental) in everyday life and (2) test whether motives were associated with the selection of six regulation strategies, controlling for affect intensity. Data were collected in Australia in 2024, from an adult community sample (NID=303; Nobs=3496; Mage = 26.11; 80% women, mostly identifying as East Asian and South-East Asian). Hedonic motives were most frequent, but instrumental motives were also common. Regulatory motives showed distinct strategy selection profiles: prohedonic motives were linked with greater distraction and cognitive reappraisal, whereas contrahedonic motives were rare, and only predicted greater rumination. Different instrumental motives were differentially associated with the use of specific strategies. Only cognitive strategies (reappraisal and rumination) were linked to multiple motives, being significantly associated with prohedonic, contrahedonic (rumination), personal performance, social, epistemic, and eudaimonic motives. By investigating the momentary association between a broad range of motives and regulation strategies, this work suggests that emotion regulation strategies are associated not only with what people feel, but also with why they regulate. Future empirical work should explicitly consider individuals’ regulatory motives, rather than assuming regulatory effectiveness based on hedonic motives.
The Vanderbilt Report’s critique of humanistic scholarship is itself bad scholarship and should be corrected or retracted
Patrick E. Savage
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Vanderbilt University’s “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” (Boghossian et al., June 25, 2026) argued that humanistic scholarship has experienced “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria”. The initial (August 2026) version of my critique emphasised that these conclusions were primarily based on unpublished, unverifiable data. Now that most of the data underlying the report (largely from unvalidated Large Language Model [LLM] categorisations) have been belatedly published, I show that these data do not support the report’s main claims. I briefly review the main data from each published disciplinary sub-report (music studies, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies). Overall, there is an utterly indefensible mismatch between the actual empirical data (e.g., decreases in the ratio of Western classical music vs. all other music studied) and Boghossian et al.’s conclusions of an overall “deterioration in scholarly standards”. While I agree with the authors that critical evaluation of the quality of academic scholarship is urgently needed in today’s global political climate, the report’s main conclusions are not remotely justified by their data and are likely to hinder rather than facilitate informed debate. I recommend Boghossian et al.’s report be corrected or retracted to resolve these issues.
Navigating Autistic College Students’ Career Development: A Capability-Oriented Perspective on Agency and Advocacy
Yilun Jiang; Karly Ball Isaacson; Bradley E. Cox; Brett Ranon Nachman
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Autistic college students navigate career development through their interests and strengths, while encountering deficit-oriented assumptions about autism. Research on autistic students’ career development usually focuses on career support and skill development, while limited studies have examined how they pursue career pathways from a strengths-based perspective. Drawing on a secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews from a national mixed-methods study (n = 36), we examined how autistic college students in four-year U.S. colleges navigate career development. Applied thematic analysis identified three themes: participants developed purpose-driven career goals through long-standing interests, lived experiences, and community exposure; navigated judgments about capability and professional fit across academic and career contexts; and assembled career support across career centers, faculty, and autism support groups. Our findings highlight autistic participants’ capability to explore career pathways that reflect their interests and goals and suggest an agency-beyond-advocacy interpretation, in which agency refers to broader forms of action through which students shape their career development and advocacy represents one important form of agency. Finally, we offer suggestions for universities and employers to develop resources more tailored to autistic students’ career goals and needs.
Predicting and explaining public support for environmental policies: A comparative analysis of two theories
Violetta Vysevkova; Claire Farrow; Jason Thomas; James Reynolds
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Environmental policies are crucial for mitigating climate change and protecting people’s health. Public opposition, however, often undermines their adoption and success. Theories that seek to explain and predict policy support and opposition are insufficiently tested or have not received empirical support. This study tested how well one influential theory, and one new theory explain and predict support for environmental taxes on frequent flying, fast fashion, and red meat. These two theories are the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory and the Integrative Public-Policy-Acceptance (IPAC) framework. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted with a nationally representative sample of adults in the United Kingdom (N = 1,270). Data were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling. The IPAC model explained a substantially greater proportion of variance in support for all three policies (R2 = .81–.85) than the VBN model (R2 = .20–.26). The IPAC model also produced practically meaningful predictions of policy support (RMSE/MAE = 0.63–0.91), whereas the VBN model did not (RMSE/MAE = 1.40–1.78). The direct comparison confirmed the IPAC is the superior model of policy support (BICIPAC < BICVBN). Several propositions of the IPAC framework were not supported, highlighting the need for further tests and perhaps refinements to its structure. To enhance the precision of explanations and predictions, we recommend that theories of policy attitude include policy-specific beliefs, such as perceived policy fairness and effectiveness—the strongest determinants of policy support. Other relevant factors can be considered in assumptions that supplement theories for application in specific contexts.
Everyday Encounters with Economic Inequality
Carla Moccia; Matthew John Easterbrook; Matthias S Gobel
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Research on economic inequality has traditionally relied on macro-level indices, though a growing body of work examines how economic inequality is perceived in everyday life. Whether different forms of everyday encounters carry different political and psychological consequences remains unclear. Across four studies with London-based samples (N = 1,554), we used a situation-sampling approach to identify forms of real-world inequality encounters and test how they relate to appraisal, redistribution support, and psychological distress. Study 1 identified two forms of inequality: Structural Inequality, describing disparities in essential goods and institutions, and Lifestyle Inequality, involving differences in consumption, leisure, and social participation. Study 2 showed that Structural situations were perceived as more unequal and unfair and elicited stronger redistribution support than Lifestyle Inequality situations. Study 3a, reported in Supplementary Materials, showed that greater redistribution support for Structural Inequality situations was largely carried through greater perceived unfairness. Study 3b modelled Structural and Lifestyle Inequality content continuously: Structural Inequality was linked to redistribution support and distress through unfairness, whereas Lifestyle Inequality was linked to distress through upward social comparison. The political and psychological consequences of inequality therefore depend on the form of encounter, not only on its perceived magnitude.
Attentional network processing in children and adults shows comparable behavioural effects but distinct ERP and time–frequency activity
Praghajieeth Raajhen Santhana Gopalan; Otto Loberg; Jarmo Hamalainen; Paavo H. T. Leppänen
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Visual attention comprises alerting, orienting, and executive-control networks. Although these networks are behaviourally evident in childhood, age differences in the neural processes supporting them remain unclear. Typically developing 12–13-year-old children (n = 77) and 19–33-year-old adults (n = 21) performed the Attention Network Test while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Behavioural performance was assessed using reaction time and accuracy. Neural processing was examined using event-related potentials (N1 and P3 amplitudes and latencies) and induced time–frequency analyses of theta (4–7 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), and beta (13–25 Hz) band activity. Significant alerting, orienting, and executive-control effects were observed in reaction time, with children responding more slowly overall than adults. Children showed longer N1 latencies than adults during the orienting comparison, indicating slower early target-related processing. Alerting cues increased target-related N1 amplitudes similarly in both groups. Adults, but not children, showed smaller P3 amplitudes for incongruent than congruent trials, whereas children showed larger P3 amplitudes overall, suggesting age-related differences in conflict-related processing. Time–frequency analyses showed that alerting modulated theta-, alpha-, and beta-band activity similarly in both groups. Orienting-related theta activity differed between age groups, with children showing higher theta power for spatial- than centre-cue trials. Alpha-band activity also differed between orienting conditions similarly in both groups. These findings indicate that children and adults can show comparable behavioural attentional network effects despite differences in neural processing. The results further suggest that electrophysiological measures of attentional processing show age-related differences beyond late childhood.
Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation for Epilepsy: A Shared Language for Integrated Care
Islam Elbanna; Yamane A. Makke
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Epilepsy is among the most burdensome neurological disorders worldwide, with an impact that extends far beyond seizure frequency alone. Depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and internalized stigma affect a substantial proportion of individuals with epilepsy, yet these comorbidities remain systematically undertreated in routine neurological care. Conventional psychoeducation, largely centered on passive information delivery, has shown limited effectiveness in addressing the psychological and social complexities of living with epilepsy. Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation for Epilepsy (NIPE) offers a fundamentally different approach: one that translates the neuroscience of seizure generation, network dysfunction, and neuroplasticity into accessible frameworks, shifting patients from passive recipients of information to active, metacognitively engaged participants in their own care. This chapter presents NIPE as both a clinical framework and an integrative layer across the continuum of epilepsy management. Beginning with the neurobiological mechanisms underlying seizures and epileptogenesis, it highlights how the same neural networks implicated in ictal activity also contribute to the psychiatric and cognitive comorbidities that shape patients’ daily experiences. It further examines how NIPE interfaces with evidence-based psychological interventions, pharmacologic education, neuromodulation, epilepsy surgery, and the management of refractory epilepsy, as well as the unique needs of women and other populations with distinct clinical considerations. In addition, the chapter explores the digital expansion of NIPE, including adaptive telehealth platforms, wearable biosensors, digital phenotyping, and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in tailoring psychoeducational delivery. Importantly, it addresses current limitations and ethical considerations with transparency, including the absence of standardized NIPE protocols and the relative scarcity of randomized controlled trials specifically within epilepsy populations. The chapter concludes with a forward-looking perspective on the infrastructure, research agenda, and cross-disciplinary collaboration required to embed NIPE into routine epileptology practice. NIPE is positioned not as an adjunct to epilepsy care, but as a unifying framework, a shared language that enables truly integrated, patient-centered care.
Who cares about human rights and the environment? Replicating and extending McFarland’s structural model
Taciano L Milfont; Felipe Vilanova
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Why are some people more committed than others to protecting human rights worldwide? McFarland (2010) proposed that people high in Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) are less committed to universal human rights partly because they are more ethnocentric and identify less with humanity as a whole. We tested this model in a larger sample of US adults (N = 512). The core model was supported: RWA and SDO were linked to greater ethnocentrism, which was associated with weaker identification with all humanity (IWAH) and human-rights commitment, whereas IWAH was associated with stronger commitment. As McFarland found, SDO also had a direct negative association with commitment that empathy did not explain. However, McFarland’s original hypothesized model fit significantly better than his final trimmed model. Two previously excluded paths emerged in our larger sample, linking SDO with lower IWAH and RWA with weaker human-rights commitment. Extending the model to environmentalism revealed several similar associations, but poor overall model fit. Our findings support McFarland’s framework while refining its specification and suggesting limits to its generalizability across domains and national contexts.
The longform recordings era: The importance of scientific communities in advancing language development research
Federica Bulgarelli; Monica E Ellwood-Lowe; Naja Ferjan Ramirez; Hillary Ganek; Jessica Elizabeth Kosie; Alfa Montiel; Ashlie H Pankonin; Ritwika VPS; Eva Ståhlberg-Forsén; Sarah Surrain
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Longform recordings — passive audio recordings that capture the audio environment around a child, often for a full day — contribute to our understanding of language acquisition. This manuscript focuses on the practice of investigating children’s natural language experiences using longform recordings and the contributions of international scientific consortia to advancing this methodology. Drawing on a sys-tematic literature search identifying 378 studies, we describe the history of longform recordings, syn-thesize key research findings, and identify opportunities for growth. Further, we describe the impact of international collaborative communities on this work. In particular, we highlight the role of DARCLE (Daylong Recordings of Children’s Linguistic Environments), an international consortium of researchers that, starting in 2014, has spurred major advances in the field, including data sharing platforms and annotation norms, open-source technology for quantifying children’s language environments, and a set of best practices for conducting this research in diverse environments. This community of open discus-sion and data sharing serves as a model for advancing rigor, accessibility, and scale. We conclude with recommendations both to further strengthen research with longform recordings and for international research communities across disciplines.
Judging orientation does not elicit the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes: Testing the Neural Overlap Hypothesis
Valter Prpic; Stefano Pileggi; Alberto Mariconda; Serena Mingolo; MAURO MURGIA
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According to the neural overlap hypothesis (Fias et al., 2001), numerical magnitude may influence performance in a non-semantic task when the processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information recruits overlapping neural structures. Specifically, because number and orientation processing both engage parietal regions, the account predicts a SNARC effect during orientation judgments, whereas effects should be weaker in tasks with less parietal involvement, such as colour judgments. However, only a few studies have attempted to replicate the original findings. Here, we conducted a large-sample replication of the line orientation task introduced by Fias et al. (2001, Experiment 4) and included letters as a complementary condition. Across two experiments, conducted online and in the laboratory, we consistently failed to detect a SNARC effect for numbers or a SNARC-like effect for letters. A cumulative analysis likewise provided no evidence for either association. These findings fail to replicate a key result supporting the neural overlap hypothesis and suggest that shared parietal processing may not give rise to spatial-numerical associations as robustly as previously assumed.
EEG in Parkinson’s Disease: Mechanisms, Biomarkers and Translational Opportunities
Sümeyye Özdemir; Sahar Allouch; Manon Auffret; Mahmoud Hassan; Marc Vérin
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Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by nigrostriatal dopaminergic degeneration and basal ganglia dysfunction, yet these pathophysiological abnormalities alone do not fully explain its heterogeneous motor and non-motor manifestations. Over recent decades, electroencephalography (EEG) has evolved from a primarily descriptive technique into a quantitative approach for investigating cortical electrophysiological dynamics associated with PD. Accumulating electrophysiological evidence implicates altered oscillatory synchronization and interactions across cortical and subcortical circuits in PD-related dysfunction, suggesting disturbances in the temporal coordination of neural activity. Emerging approaches, including large-scale datasets, multimodal integration, individualized modeling and wearable EEG technologies, offer opportunities for physiological phenotyping and real-world monitoring. However, methodological heterogeneity, limited reproducibility, insufficient external validation and uncertainty regarding clinical utility continue to constrain translation. This Review critically synthesizes EEG-derived measures spanning spectral activity, oscillatory coupling, functional connectivity and dynamic brain states, examining their relationships with motor, cognitive and neuropsychiatric manifestations of PD. By distinguishing mechanistic interpretations, clinical associations and current levels of biomarker validation, it identifies opportunities and requirements for translating EEG-derived measures into reliable tools for individualized assessment and clinical decision-making.
Enduring or Adaptable? A formal model and meta-analytic test of the stability of personality disorders
Orestis Zavlis; Michael Moutoussis; Peter Fonagy; Patrick Luyten
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Personality disorders have been traditionally framed as enduring dispositional conditions. Yet accumulating evidence suggests that they also reflect dynamic patterns of contextual adaptation. In this paper, we develop a formal framework that partitions personality stability into two components: an enduring portion (which is retained perfectly over time) and an adaptable portion (which dissipates over time, at either a fast or slow rate). After validating the model in computer simulations, we conduct a meta-analysis of 12 longitudinal investigations (N=17,785), yielding 145 test-retest correlations that quantify the stability of all personality conditions over 18 years. We then apply our formal model on these meta-analytic stability estimates to quantify the extent to which personality disorders are enduring vs. adaptable over time. Results indicate that most of personality pathology (60-70%) is adaptable over 18 years’ time, though it dissipates at a moderate rate (R≈55%). We conclude by suggesting that there is no formal distinction between personality pathology and psychopathology and outline a program aimed at studying all mental disorders as personality disorders.
Large-scale analysis of the Galton-Crovitz cue-word technique shows strong word-specific retrieval biases in autobiographical memory
Steve M. J. Janssen; Jaap M. J. Murre
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With the Galton-Crovitz cueing technique, each participant reports personal events that are elicited by cue words, and then later dates these autobiographical memories. A persistent finding is a predominance of memories from the period in which the participants were between the ages of 10 and 30 years, which is called the ‘reminiscence bump’. Using the Internet, we collected nearly 140,000 memories with 64 cue words and plotted the lifetime distribution of each individual cue word. Many presumably neutral words, like chair, flower or sugar, most frequently triggered memories from early childhood (4 to 10 years), whereas others, such as wine, baby or army, triggered mostly memories from later ages. The selection of cue words—even seemingly unbiased ones—strongly affects the shape and location of the reminiscence bump. On the basis of these results, we recommend that, when the Galton-Crovitz cueing technique is used, word-specific effects should always be taken into account.
Checkmating Cognitive Aging? A Pilot Study Examining the Relationship between Chess Play and Cognitive Functioning in Older Adults
Caton Tsao; Aman Sreshta; Kaileigh A. Byrne
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Objectives: Engagement in cognitively stimulating activities may support cognitive functioning in older adulthood, yet the potential benefits of chess participation remain understudied. This pilot study explored differences in working memory and global cognitive functioning between older adult chess players and non-chess players, while accounting for demographic characteristics and social engagement. Methods: Eighty-three older adults (46 chess players; 37 non-chess players) completed computerized assessments of working memory capacity using a shortened Operation Span task and global cognitive functioning using a battery assessing memory, language, orientation, and executive functioning. Participants also reported their chess experience and social engagement. Analyses of covariance examined differences in cognitive performance between chess players and non-chess players, adjusting for age, gender, education, and social engagement. Results: Older adult chess players (M = 14.62, SD = 6.35) exhibited better working memory capacity than non-chess players (M = 13.08, SD = 6.04, p=.032) independent of demographics and social engagement, while social engagement was associated with broader cognitive functioning (r = .267, p = .030). Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest that chess participation is selectively associated with working memory capacity, whereas broader social engagement is associated with global cognitive functioning. This distinction highlights the importance of examining specific forms of cognitive and social enrichment when investigating healthy cognitive aging. Larger longitudinal and experimental studies are needed to determine whether chess participation contributes to maintaining working memory in later life.
Desarrollo de la Escala FAGIMAS: Fuentes de la Actitud hacia la Guerra de las Islas Malvinas del Atlántico Sur
Alejandro César Cosentino
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Esta investigación desarrolló y validó la Escala FAGIMAS (Fuentes de la Actitud hacia la Guerra de las Islas Malvinas del Atlántico Sur) mediante un diseño de investigación mixta secuencial. La investigación abarcó tres estudios: desarrollo de ítems, desarrollo de la escala y validación. El Estudio 1 incluyó 553 participantes que brindaron respuestas textuales sobre la Guerra de Malvinas, analizadas mediante lexicometría para desarrollar los ítems iniciales. El Estudio 2, con 397 participantes, utilizó análisis factorial exploratorio y modelado de ecuaciones estructurales para refinar el modelo, resultando una escala de 12 ítems que mide tres factores: patriotismo bélico, indignación bélica e interés bélico. El Estudio 3, con 670 cadetes militares, confirmó la estructura de la escala y examinó sus relaciones con la actitud hacia la Guerra de Malvinas. El modelo refinado confirmó buenos índices de ajuste robusto (CFI = 0.975, SRMR = 0.042, RMSEA = 0.067), adecuada confiabilidad de constructo (CR ≥ 0.83), validez convergente (AVE ≥ 0.59) y discriminante (HTMT2 ≤ 0.81). Los tres factores demostraron relaciones predictivas con la actitud hacia la Guerra de Malvinas, siendo interés bélico el que mostró la relación positiva más fuerte, seguido por patriotismo bélico, mientras que la indignación bélica mostró una relación negativa. Además, los factores del modelo refinado demostraron una capacidad predictiva incremental por sobre las fortalezas del carácter para la actitud hacia la Guerra de Malvinas. La Escala FAGIMAS es una medida confiable y válida para evaluar las fuentes cognitivas, afectivas y comportamentales de las actitudes hacia la Guerra de Malvinas.
Development and Validation of Team Functional Degrees of Freedom (TfDoF): An Eco-Physical Variable for Functional Collective Off-ball Movements in Football
Li Xiao; Daniel Carrilho; enrico serra; Nelson Caldeira; Rui J. Lopes; Duarte Araújo
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In football, limited research has considered both the processes underlying collective behavior and its functional outcomes, constraining its practical applicability. In this study, we developed and validated an eco-physical variable, Team Functional Degrees of Freedom (TfDoF), to quantify how off-ball players dynamically coordinate their movements with teammates, opponents, and the ball to afford functional passing opportunities for a team in football. TfDoF was developed through a “glocal” spatial framework integrating centroid dynamics, Voronoi diagrams, dynamic pitch zoning, and a rule-based degrees-of-freedom approach. Validation comprised two complementary stages. First, expert-based validation involved seven football experts who evaluated the computational framework and identified passing opportunities in 30 match clips at the instant of passing. TfDoF showed a very strong correlation with expert-perceived passing opportunities (r = .98, p < .001), while all content validity indices exceeded .86, providing preliminary evidence of its content and convergent validity. Second, performance-based validation examined the relationship between TfDoF and pass outcomes using synchronized tracking and event data from 35 Italian Serie A matches (20,531 passes). Among six machine learning algorithms, XGBoost achieved the best classification performance (AUC = 0.909). SHAP analysis identified TfDoF as the most influential predictor of pass success (FI = 1.453), providing evidence of its predictive validity. Notably, TfDoF’s contribution to pass success was non-linear, with the greatest marginal effect occurring between TfDoF values of 5 and 7. Finally, we proposed a multi-timescale analytical framework demonstrating how TfDoF can support tactical analysis and coaching practice.
Group psilocybin in an integrative retreat setting enhances social connection: an observational case report
Dayne Rayford; Shivani Dayal; Kosu Boudreau; Dingle Spence; Marik Hazan; AZA Stephen Allsop
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Background and aims Psilocybin can induce profound alterations in perception, emotion and self-referential processing. These changes are often accompanied by increased feelings of interpersonal connection, found via both psychometric survey data and anecdotally collected qualitative data. Despite recent increases in psychedelic research and treatment, most clinical trials have been performed in individualized patient treatment paradigms. Few studies have examined the outcomes of psilocybin in group contexts, even though ceremonial and group-based usage is historically ecological and may uniquely enhance group dynamics and social bonding. Methods This case study investigated psychological and social outcomes among participants (n=14) of a group psilocybin ceremony conducted in an integrative retreat setting. Participants completed a series of psychometric surveys and performed a social behavioral task designed to measure social perceptions at baseline and again at two timepoints following the psilocybin ceremonies. Results and conclusions Our results indicate significant increases in perceived social connectedness on the Social Perception Assessment (SPA) and the Watts Connectedness Scale (WCS) as well as significant decreases in distress on the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS). These findings highlight the importance of studying group-based psychedelic administration and suggest that collective settings may generate synergistic social benefits not captured in individual therapeutic models.
Differences in AI Anxiety: Exploratory Factor Analysis Suggests Similar AI Anxiety Structure in German- and English-Speaking Samples
Nick Sheth; Klemens Weigl
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The mass use of AI applications is transforming human-AI interaction while uncovering and intensifying AI anxieties. To measure these anxieties in German-speaking populations, this study translates and psychometrically evaluates the Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Scale (AIAS) [31]. In contrast to a concurrently German published version by Hajek et al. [9] exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is employed to test whether a distinct anxiety structure emerges from the data. A quota sample (N = 225) with balanced age and gender representation completed an online survey. The full scale (α = .95) and subscales (α = .85-.96) demonstrated good to excellent reliability. EFA identified four factors: learning, AI configuration, replacement, and socio-technical blindness, largely consistent with the original English structure. Five items required removal, suggesting cultural and linguistic specificity. Limitations include the sample’s composition and the factor characteristics. The German AIAS provides a reliable instrument for human-AI interaction research and targeted anxiety interventions.
A general method for estimating reliability using Bayesian Measurement Uncertainty
Giacomo Bignardi; Rogier Kievit; Paul - Christian Bürkner
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Unreliable measurement can lead to lower statistical power, attenuated effect sizes and residual confounding. However, estimating reliability can be challenging for complex cognitive and behavioural assessments without test-retest data. Most statistical methods for assessing reliability with a single test administration are designed for fixed-item questionnaires. We introduce a novel Bayesian procedure called relative measurement uncertainty (RMU) for estimating reliability that can be broadly applied, including to many widely used computational models. Our approach draws pairs of samples from each subject's posterior and calculates the correlation between draws. We demonstrate analytically and via simulation that this method provides accurate reliability estimates and well-calibrated credible intervals across linear factor, signal detection and reinforcement learning models. Simulations found that RMU was more accurate (lower root mean square error) than existing measures (coefficient alpha, coefficient H, split-half), but more importantly, it can be applied across a wide range of computational models. RMU offers a general method for estimating reliability, leveraging the modelling flexibility of Bayesian statistical methods.
Relationship between physical activity and resilience to stressors in non-clinical samples of adolescents and young adults: A systematic review
Bertalan Polner; Nina van den Broek; Anna Tyborowska; Linda Visser; Jacqueline Vink; Jonas Wachner; Margarita Karakara; Imke Adams
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While the benefits of physical activity for physical and mental health are well-established, it is less clear whether it also boosts resilience, defined as preserved mental health after exposure to stressors. Resilience in adolescents and young adults is critical given the high prevalence and lasting impact of mental health problems that emerge during development. Despite increasing recognition of the importance of physical activity for resilience, a structured overview is missing. Therefore, a systematic review of the literature was conducted including records published until December 2025 in PsycInfo, PubMed, Embase and Web of Science. We included 90 intervention and longitudinal studies on physical activity, and resilience in adolescents and young adults (10- 25 years) without a diagnosed mental health problem. In general, controlled intervention studies (n=39) showed various physiological and psychological benefits of physical activity in youth exposed to adversity and stressors. Intervention studies without a control group (n=26) and longitudinal observational studies (n=25) yielded comparable results. These findings imply that physical activity may causally impact resilience in youth exposed to adversity and stressors. It should be noted, however, that more preregistered, well-powered studies are required to corroborate these conclusions before formulating clinical or policy recommendations.
Does creative engagement spill over into risk-taking behavior?
Shenghui Xiaoyong; Zhuoqi Yin; Huimin Kong; KelongLu
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Creative engagement may shape not only the ideas people generate but also how they approach risk in subsequent decisions, yet this possibility remains underexplored. Across three studies, we examined this relationship and whether general self-efficacy or affective state accounts for the relationship. Study 1 (N = 228) used a cross-sectional survey and found that everyday creative ideation behavior was positively associated with overall and domain-specific risk-taking propensity. General self-efficacy did not mediate this association. Study 2 (N = 83) experimentally compared risk taking after creative drawing versus standard coloring using a binary lottery choice. Creative drawing increased affective dominance but did not significantly influence subsequent risk taking. Study 3 (N = 94) compared risk taking after creative writing versus standard typing using a six-level investment-choice task. Creative writing increased both risk taking and affective dominance, but the change in dominance did not mediate the effect on risk taking. These findings suggest that creative engagement can influence subsequent financial risk taking, although the effect may depend on the creative task and the sensitivity of the risk measure. Neither general self-efficacy nor affective dominance explained this relationship, highlighting the need to investigate alternative psychological mechanisms.
Optimization, Validation, and Application of the Chinese Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire (C-BMRQ)
Jiang Xintong; Hua Shan; Qin He; Yi Du
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The present study optimized, validated, and refined the Chinese version of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (C-BMRQ) to address key limitations of the existing culturally adapted iteration. We aimed to deliver a psychometrically robust, culturally tailored tool for assessing music reward sensitivity—a core component of musical aesthetic experience and creative engagement—among Chinese populations. Two sequential validation studies were conducted: Study 1 completed preliminary optimization and validation with two Beijing samples (Ns = 387, 391); Study 2 comprehensively verified the scale’s psychometric properties using three independent nationwide datasets plus Study 1’s second‑round data (N = 1,650). Rather than developing a novel scale, we employed a rigorous culture-adaptive strategy to optimize the existing version, preserving its original 20-item, five-factor structure (Music Seeking, Sensorimotor, Emotion Regulation, Emotional Evocation, Social Reward) without item deletion. Validation results confirmed the optimized C-BMRQ exhibited a stable five-factor model, strong internal consistency and test-retest reliability, configural and metric measurement invariance across gender and musical-training groups, and satisfactory convergent validity. Notably, the 10th percentile corresponded to a C-BMRQ total score of 69 in the pooled sample, providing a sample-derived reference value for low music reward sensitivity in Chinese adults. This value is intended for research use and requires independent clinical validation before being interpreted diagnostically. The optimized C-BMRQ is a reliable, culturally resonant instrument for Chinese populations, suitable for investigating musical aesthetic experiences, creativity in musical engagement, and cross-cultural differences in music reward processing, with meaningful implications for aesthetic neuroscience, creative arts research, and clinical practice.
Supporting creativity education in the age of AI: The role of perceived exemplar source
Shenghui Xiaoyong; Yingning Lu; Yihui Liu; Yueyue Ge; Qiannan Ruan; Ke Jiang; KelongLu
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Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated creative exemplars are increasingly used as scalable digital instructional resources in creativity education. However, it remains unclear whether labeling identical exemplars as human- or AI-generated shapes how learners engage in group creative activities. We tested this possibility in 113 dyads using an fNIRS hyperscanning group creative ideation paradigm. Dyads completed creative ideation tasks before, during, and after exemplar-stimulation. During stimulation, the human- and AI-attribution groups received identical exemplars labeled as produced by human or AI, whereas the control group received no exemplar. Human attribution increased idea uniqueness during stimulation relative to both the other phases and the AI-attribution and control groups. AI attribution temporarily increased switching among ideation pathways. Neither behavioral effect persisted after exemplar withdrawal. The two attribution groups did not differ in exemplar-category overlap or nearest-exemplar semantic distance, but human-attribution dyads rated the exemplars as more helpful. Human attribution also increased interbrain synchronization (IBS) in bilateral premotor and supplementary motor cortices during stimulation, whereas AI attribution was associated with decreased IBS in the left supramarginal gyrus and right frontopolar cortex from pre- to post-stimulation. Thus, exemplar-source attribution shapes the process and outcome of group creative ideation, revealing an important social-contextual factor in AI-supported creativity education.
Beyond Color: A Constructivist Account of Chromatic Stimuli as Multidimensional Physiological and Psychological Events
David Henry Peterzell
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Color science has spent most of its history explaining one thing: the conscious sensation of hue, saturation, and brightness. Yet beside that success sits a growing list of inconvenient findings. Examples include ambiguous colors (one photograph seen as white-and-gold by some and blue-and-black by others); memory colors (a gray banana that looks faintly yellow); color before form (newly sighted patients who see color before objects); imagined or dreamed colors (chromatic experiences generated without light or eyes); aphantasia (people who cannot summon a color in imagination); synesthesia (a printed letter flooded with color); and large, stable individual differences in the colors people report. These are not marginal curiosities or isolated anomalies. They are the ordinary output of a system that the percept-centered framework leaves out. A chromatic stimulus does not simply produce a color percept; it initiates a broad physiological and psychological event, of which the percept is only one part. That percept is constructed at the moment of seeing by memory, language, attention, affect, and culture, and it shapes them in turn, a reciprocal determinism of percept and event. I develop this framework at three levels, as two nested theories: a new theory of color contained within a constructivist model of the entire chromatic event. The account retains trichromatic and some opponent-process theory rather than replacing them, but extends them by predicting phenomena the traditional framework treats as noise. Chief among these are the individual differences that, on this view, become the primary evidence for how color is constructed.
General and domain-specific genetic signals shape educational outcomes in children and adults
Alexandra Starr; René Pool; Hailey Adelene Davis; Iorana Fosca Alice Fey; Ana Luisa Henriques Fürst; Eugenia Kis; Yola Sol; Lannie Ligthart; Bruno Sauce; Elsje van Bergen
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Abstract Purpose: Individual differences in literacy and numeracy – that is, how well one can read, write, and work with numbers – emerge early in childhood and are crucial indicators of later educational success. Twin and family studies revealed substantial heritability of literacy and numeracy, and genetic overlap between these domains. Yet, it is unclear whether measured genomic variation shows a similarly overlapping or domain-specific pattern, and whether such molecular signals also predict adults’ educational attainment. Method: In N=15,669 participants (52.7% female; Netherlands Twin Register), we predicted children’s literacy, numeracy, and academic achievement, and adults’ educational attainment from genetic predispositions. Children’s learning outcomes were assessed via teacher and parent reports and a nationwide test (age M=12.25 years). Adults reported their highest educational qualification (age M= 42.47 years). We derived polygenic scores (PGSs) for years of education, dyslexia, and reading skills to predict these outcomes. Results: All three PGSs significantly predicted educational outcomes, but the broad years-of-education PGS exceeded the domain-specific dyslexia and reading-skills PGSs. The years-of-education PGS explained up to 10.7% in children’s academic achievement and 13.2% in adults’ attainment, suggesting that broader, large-scale PGS of general education capture much of the genetic signal shared across learning domains. Conclusion: Findings indicate both shared and specific genetic influences on learning. Broad, high-power PGSs maximise prediction, whereas literacy-focused PGSs highlight domain-specific signal. While current PGSs are not suitable for individual prediction, they are valuable for accounting for genetic propensities and improving causal inference in developmental and education research.
Statistical Learning of Distractor Suppression Generalizes Across Contexts Despite Blocked Learning
Milan Geldhof; Brent Vernaillen; Christophe Vanhouwe; Louisa Bogaerts
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Statistical learning can shape visual attention by enabling spatial suppression of locations that frequently contain distractors. Although learned suppression may be context-dependent, the underlying factors driving this dependency remain unclear. While previous research has largely focused on the nature of the context itself, less attention has been paid to how context–regularity pairs are presented, particularly whether they are blocked or intermixed across trials. Multiple uninterrupted pairings may be necessary for less salient contextual cues, such as background colors or images, to support context-dependent learning. The present preregistered, high- powered study (N = 136) therefore used a blocked presentation, with two blocks each pairing a unique background color with a high-frequency distractor location, followed by an intermixed testing phase with equiprobable distractor locations. Results show that although distractors reliably captured attention, the background context did not affect response times in the testing block, with Bayesian analyses providing decisive evidence for context-independent suppression. These results show that implicitly learned distractor suppression is highly robust, persistent, and generalizes across non-task- relevant contexts, even when context–regularity associations are repeated and uninterrupted during learning.
Registered Reports as the default pathway for confirmatory publication
Marta Topor; Joshua Silberstein Bamford; Marina Bazhydai; Zhang Chen; Hu Chuan-Peng; Clare Conry-Murray; Thiago Leiros Costa; Antica Culina; Mario Dalmaso; Zoltan Dienes
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By rewarding speed, volume, and coherent positive narratives, traditional publishing incentivizes questionable scientific practices and analytic flexibility. The latter especially contributes to blurring the distinction between exploration and confirmation, which inflates the apparent strength of confirmatory claims. This systemic issue has gone unchecked for decades, leaving the scientific community with a body of scholarly literature that is unreliable and lacking validity. Registered Reports (RRs) address problematic publishing practices by requiring a priori registration of confirmatory tests, which is peer-reviewed before the research begins (stage 1). The editorial acceptance of a stage 1 plan establishes a commitment to publication regardless of research outcomes. Publication remains, nonetheless, contingent on a second peer review and editorial scrutiny (stage 2) to verify that the approved plan was followed, all deviations were transparently disclosed and justified, confirmatory and exploratory claims are clearly delineated, and the integrity of the design was maintained. Meta-scientific comparisons indicate that RRs reduce outcome-based publication bias and improve methodological rigor without compromising perceived novelty. By making accepted RR protocols and their review history citable research outputs, RRs also strengthen recognition for peer-review work. In this perspective, we argue that RRs should become the primary mode of confirmatory publication moving forward.
On Color and Emotion: What Can Vision Science Learn from the Rorschach?
David Henry Peterzell
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For a century, clinicians have recorded how people use color when they interpret inkblots, rank colored cards, or draw. They believed that how a person handles color reveals how that person handles feeling. Vision science has rarely read this literature, and the most complete modern review of color and emotion research excluded it. This paper introduces the projective color literature to vision scientists in plain language. Three conclusions follow. First, the tradition’s central belief, that chromatic color stirs emotion directly, was tested from the 1940s onward and largely failed. Second, narrower findings survived. The degree to which a person lets color lead over form in an ambiguous image is modestly related to several independently assessed clinical, behavioral, and biological outcomes. Some indices that set color in balance with other responses, such as coping versus overload, are also supported. What these scores measure is disputed. Third, the findings concern how color is weighted against form, which vision science already studies, yet only one study has linked that weighting to an object-recognition task, and none has used calibrated stimuli. I then read both literatures through a constructivist model of color in which the percept and the wider event it belongs to determine each other reciprocally. On this reading, the question is not only whether color influences emotion but also whether emotion influences color. The projective tradition raised the second question. Modern color-emotion science has mostly set it aside. Five studies are proposed that would join the two fields.
Artificial observers and real individual differences: A roadmap for a computational psychometrics of vision
David Henry Peterzell
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Deep neural networks are increasingly used as models of vision, yet they are evaluated against the average observer: average performance, average neural response, average representational geometry. This discards one of the richest constraints on theory: stable individual differences. Fitting the average is necessary but not sufficient. I argue that future models should be judged not only by their fit to mean human performance, but by whether populations of artificial observers reproduce the covariance structure and latent factors found across human observers. Two mature but disconnected literatures motivate this. Decades of factor-analytic psychophysics and electrophysiology show that interindividual variation is signal, not noise: the pattern of correlations among observers reveals the number and tuning of underlying mechanisms, and fractionates vision into many narrow factors rather than one general ability. Meanwhile, neural networks differing only in random initialization develop measurably different internal representations, so any single trained network is one sample from a distribution of possible observers. Joining these yields a computational psychometrics of vision: construct a designed population of artificial observers (varying in architecture, initialization, training diet, and front-end sampling), submit them to the same latent-variable analyses used on humans, and test whether the recovered factor structure matches. Recent work showing that seed-varied networks align with specific individuals is an existence proof. This article generalizes it into a framework, a staged roadmap, and a benchmark, together with the safeguards that keep such a benchmark from becoming an optimization target, for testing hypotheses about human visual variation with artificial observer populations.
Latent visual mechanisms as computational phenotypes: Toward a precision science of vision
David Henry Peterzell
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Vision science has traditionally sought mechanisms shared across observers, treating individual differences as noise. Yet factor-analytic and latent-variable studies show that variation among observers is highly structured, recovering reproducible dimensions in contrast sensitivity, color, stereopsis, motion, and face recognition, among others. What are these latent dimensions? I propose they be treated as candidate computational phenotypes: a term borrowed from computational psychiatry and re-operationalized for vision as a stable, measurable pattern of visual information processing recovered from the covariance structure of individual differences. A computational phenotype is not a latent factor, mechanism, endophenotype, or biomarker; it occupies Marr's algorithmic level, between behavior and biology, and earns the name only by meeting stringent criteria of reliability, replication, convergent validity, and mechanistic relevance. I review candidate phenotypes drawn from many laboratories, recast development, aging, and disease as perturbations of phenotypic structure, and turn the strongest objection (that vision has no common factor) into support, since the relevant phenotypes are narrow and mechanism-specific. The payoff spans audiences: diagnostic profiles for clinicians, a non-invasive way to count and test visual mechanisms for basic scientists, and performance-predicting traits for human-factors work. The framework moves vision science from the average observer toward a precision science of visual computation.
A Brief Intervention Highlighting Counter-stereotypical Role Models Changes Children’s Gender Stereotypes about Values and Careers
Katharina Block; Sophie Arnold; Heather MacRae; Andrei Cimpian
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Care-oriented values and careers are vital, yet men remain less engaged with them. We tested a brief, preregistered role-model intervention to reduce children’s gender stereotypes about communion (caring for others) and agency (achievement and independence). We also examined whether this intervention would narrow gender differences in children’s own values and career interests. Seven- to 10-year-olds from the US and Canada (N = 244; 121 boys, 123 girls) viewed six animated vignettes about fictional children who grew up to choose careers aligned with their values. In the “stereotypical” condition, girls were communal and entered communal careers, while boys were agentic and entered agentic careers. In the “counter-stereotypical” condition, these pairings were reversed. A third, “counter-stereotypical + status” condition added wealth cues to both careers. Compared with the stereotypical condition, both counter-stereotypical conditions weakened children’s gender stereotypes about communal and agentic values and careers. They also reduced gender differences in children’s own communal values and career interests, although these effects were smaller and less consistent. Wealth cues did not strengthen the intervention. These findings suggest that counter-stereotypical role models are a promising, scalable method for combating stereotypes that steer boys away from communion—though likely one component of broader efforts.
Investigating the Factors Motivating the Adoption of Optimal Attentional Strategies
Tianyu Zhang; Molly R McKinney; Isaac Savelson; Jessica Irons; Andrew B. Leber
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Our goal-directed attentional control abilities enable us to flexibly maximize how efficiently we search the visual environment. However, a growing body of research reveals that we often fail to use these abilities. Here, we question how motivational incentives might be used to improve attentional control strategies. Using the Adaptive Choice Visual Search (Irons & Leber, 2018), a task designed to measure attentional strategy use, we manipulated motivation in two ways. In Experiment 1, we limited the exposure of the visual search items, and in Experiment 2, we provided a greater monetary reward for faster search performance. In both experiments, we reasoned that participants would choose the search strategies that enabled faster target identification times; faster search would reduce errors in Experiment 1 and increase earnings in Experiment 2. Results showed that the time-pressure manipulation failed to induce more optimal strategy choices, while the performance-contingent reward manipulation did induce a modest improvement in strategy. Overall, we find some evidence of a link between motivation and strategy optimization, although methods to elicit a more robust boost in optimization remain elusive. Further work is needed in this understudied but vital domain of research.
The Psychology of GLP-1 Receptor Agonists: Evidence for Distinct Effects on Reward, Interoception and Cognition
Poppy Watson; Simone Rehn; Mike Kendig; Dominic M. D. Tran; Justin Mahlberg; Kristi Griffiths
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Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) are widely used for obesity and type 2 diabetes, supporting weight loss and glycaemic control through effects on appetite and ingestive behaviour. The psychobiological mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. We reviewed evidence for candidate mechanisms and analysed quantitative and qualitative self-reported changes in appetite-related experiences from 704 people using GLP-1 RAs. Participants reported multiple changes that appeared distinct for food versus alcohol, with reductions in food urges and cravings largely independent of changes in alcohol use. Enhanced awareness and utilisation of hunger and satiety signals were frequently described, suggesting potential changes in interoceptive processes. Changes in enjoyment of eating were largely independent of reductions in food cravings, urges to eat, and gastrointestinal side effects. Improved ability to eat in a goal-directed manner was also frequently reported. Results support the presence of multiple cognitive and behavioural processes contributing to reduced food intake and provide testable hypotheses to explore in experimental work designed to isolate effects of GLP-1 RAs on goal-directed control, interoceptive awareness, attention, memory, and executive function.
Group psilocybin in an integrative retreat setting enhances social connection: an observational case report
Dayne Rayford; Shivani Dayal; Kosu Boudreau; Dingle Spence; Marik Hazan; AZA Stephen Allsop
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Background and aims Psilocybin can induce profound alterations in perception, emotion and self-referential processing. These changes are often accompanied by increased feelings of interpersonal connection, found via both psychometric survey data and anecdotally collected qualitative data. Despite recent increases in psychedelic research and treatment, most clinical trials have been performed in individualized patient treatment paradigms. Few studies have examined the outcomes of psilocybin in group contexts, even though ceremonial and group-based usage is historically ecological and may uniquely enhance group dynamics and social bonding. Methods This case study investigated psychological and social outcomes among participants (n=14) of a group psilocybin ceremony conducted in an integrative retreat setting. Participants completed a series of psychometric surveys and performed a social behavioral task designed to measure social perceptions at baseline and again at two timepoints following the psilocybin ceremonies. Results and conclusions Our results indicate significant increases in perceived social connectedness on the Social Perception Assessment (SPA) and the Watts Connectedness Scale (WCS) as well as significant decreases in distress on the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS). These findings highlight the importance of studying group-based psychedelic administration and suggest that collective settings may generate synergistic social benefits not captured in individual therapeutic models.
LOVE AND CHANGE
Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė; Julian Savulescu; Brian D. Earp
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Philosophers and laypeople often have two seemingly conflicting intuitions: that love must be caused by who the beloved is and that it should persist despite personal change. Little attention has been paid to which changes are, and which are not, compatible with the requirement that real love should persist – and associated obligations. Across three online studies with UK-based participants (total N = 2482), we used vignettes in which a person’s moral character, memory, or physical appearance changed. We found that judgments on whether love that ended after the change was real and whether people should remain bound by their marital obligations depend on the same properties as judgments about the continuity of personal identity. For both the continuity of personal identity and love, together with the obligations that love brings, moral properties were the most important, followed by memory, while physical properties were considered considerably less important. Negative changes in moral character or autobiographical memory, compared to positive changes, were seen as more disruptive both to identity and marital obligations, and more compatible with past love being real.
Feasibility and engagement of smartphone delivered yoga imagery with or without personalized avatars in residential substance use treatment: The AT-REACH nonrandomized pilot
Dennis McChargue; Byrav Ramamurthy; Wenyue Wang; Ashlin Ondrusek; Srikar Chanamolu; anna henson
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Background. Brief guided imagery may provide a practical way to rehearse a yoga experience between live sessions. We evaluated smartphone delivery and repeated use of yoga imagery and explored whether adding a personalized animated avatar was associated with different outcomes. Methods. This nonrandomized pilot enrolled 35 adults in four cohorts at residential substance use recovery facilities in Nebraska. Participants received an introductory yoga session and brief app delivered imagery practices, with three daily prompts. Thirteen participants received imagery with an animated avatar and 22 received imagery without the avatar. Allocation was by seat choice rather than a randomized sequence; the fourth cohort received the comparison condition only. We summarized app use over the first 28 days of logs, rated emotion changes around practice, and baseline to exit questionnaire outcomes. Results. All 35 initiated the app and 27 (77%) completed the exit assessment. Participants logged 2901 sessions, a median of 86 per person (interquartile range 62 to 104). At least three sessions were logged on 59% of days and at least one on 68%. The between group engagement effect was close to zero but imprecise (Hedges g = 0.03, 95% CI -0.66 to 0.71). Mean negative emotion intensity changed by -8.9 points on a 0 to 100 scale (95% CI -15.9 to -1.9). The baseline adjusted DERS total difference was 9.2 points (95% CI -6.7 to 25.2). The exploratory DERS Awareness change effect favored animated visual support (g = 0.89, 95% CI 0.06 to 1.73), but the cohort adjusted exit difference was smaller and imprecise (-1.30 points, 95% CI -5.05 to 2.46). Other questionnaire findings were mixed. Conclusions. The pilot documents repeated use of brief guided yoga imagery in residential recovery settings. It does not establish imagery efficacy, equivalence between formats, or an added benefit of animated visual support. Randomized evaluation with consistent assessment and complete delivery logs is warranted.
Preliminary Effects of PRECISE, a Personalized and Idiographically-Tailored Adjunctive Intervention for Treating Suicidal Ideation and Psychiatric Symptoms in Young Adults: Open Trial
Kevin Scott Kuehn; Raeanne C. Moore; Katherine T. Foster; Colin A. Depp
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Background: Individuals at high risk for suicide are phenomenologically heterogeneous, yet most evidence-based interventions deliver the same content to everyone. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is effective but lengthy, in part because every patient receives the full skills curriculum regardless of which skills address their own drivers of risk. PeRsonalizEd Clinical Intervention for Suicidal Events (PRECISE) uses idiographic models derived from each participant’s ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data to identify and teach only the DBT skills most relevant to that individual, allowing treatment to be delivered in six weeks. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impact of PRECISE on suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), depressive and anxiety symptoms, and related secondary outcomes. Methods: Thirty young adults (ages 18–26) with active STBs, recruited from a university and the surrounding community, enrolled in a six-week course of PRECISE alongside five times per day EMA in a single-arm open trial. STBs were assessed at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks using the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (CSSRS) and the Modified Scale for Suicidal Ideation (MSSI); depressive and anxiety symptoms (PROMIS), coping self-efficacy (CSES), and emotion regulation strategy use (CERQ) were also assessed. Bayesian multilevel models with participant-level random intercepts estimated change over time. Results: Retention was 93% (28/30) at 6 weeks and 87% (26/30) at 12 weeks. Participants attended a mean of 5.4 of 6 coaching sessions and rated the intervention as highly acceptable (AIM: M = 17.2), appropriate (IAM: M = 16.9), and feasible (FIM: M = 17.2; each out of 20). From baseline to 12 weeks, suicidal ideation declined on both measures (CSSRS: −2.28 points, 95% CrI [−2.75, −1.81]; MSSI: −5.38 points, 95% CrI [−8.21, −2.53]; probability of direction [pd] ≥ 99.99%). Depressive symptoms (−6.51 T-score points, 95% CrI [−8.60, −4.38]) and anxiety symptoms (−3.60, 95% CrI [−5.70, −1.50]) also declined, and coping self-efficacy increased (+29.30 points, 95% CrI [18.21, 40.50]; all pd ≥ 99.95%). Maladaptive emotion regulation strategy use showed a smaller, less certain decline (−3.20 points, 95% CrI [−6.42, 0.03]; pd = 97.36%), and adaptive strategy use showed no credible change (0.97 points, 95% CrI [−3.75, 5.63]). No serious adverse events or suicide attempts occurred; 11 mild episodes of non-suicidal self-injury were reported by 5 participants. Conclusions: In this open trial, a brief intervention that personalizes DBT skills using participants' own idiographic EMA data was feasible, acceptable, and associated with clinically meaningful and sustained reductions in STBs, psychiatric symptoms, and maladaptive coping skills as well as improvements in coping self-efficacy. Pending further confirmatory testing, PRECISE may be a useful suicide prevention approach.
Poor reliability in measuring habituation: Implications for clinical and translational research on exposure and extinction
Emma Dear; Gabrielle Rose Messner; Julia Levitan; Richie Ward Gray; Cheri A Levinson; Eric Lenze; Jaclyn Weisman; Thomas Rodebaugh
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Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability of change indices in exposure therapy. Method: We analyzed data from 119 adults with elevated social anxiety who participated in studies of public speaking exposures. Participants reported their distress using the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS) at regular intervals. The reliability of within-session habituation, between-session habituation, and expectancy change measures were estimated. Results: Commonly used measures of between-session habituation (BSH) typically demonstrated only moderate reliability, and commonly used measures of within-session habituation (WSH) typically demonstrated poor reliability. Exploratory tests in expectancy change indices suggests these findings apply to other measures of change during exposure. Conclusions: Our results indicate that measures underlying the study of habituation may be inadequate because of low reliability. This threatens the foundation of clinical and translational research, such that no substantive conclusions can be drawn from them.
Reward Contingency Shapes Incidental Reward Effects on Cognitive Flexibility
Joseph M Orr; Beatrice Lomeo; Juan Balcazar; Daniela Porro
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Voluntary task switching (VTS) provides a useful paradigm for examining how recent reward outcomes are associated with the balance between cognitive stability and flexibility. We investigated whether reward-history effects on task choice varied as a function of cue–outcome contingency. Participants (N = 616) completed a VTS task with performance-contingent rewards. Reward contingency was manipulated between-subjects at probabilities of100\%, 80\%, 70\%, and 60\%. Switch probability was modeled using logistic mixed-effects regression. The relationship between prior reward outcomes and the current reward prospect in predicting switch behavior differed across probability conditions. Reward transition effects were larger at 100\% and 80\% than at 70\% and 60\%. Secondary analyses further indicated that outcomes that were unexpected given the cue–reward mapping were associated with subsequent switching in some comparisons, although evidence that these associations systematically varied with probability was mixed. Because task choices did not influence reward outcomes, the observed effects are more consistent with carry-over associations between reward history and task selection than with reward-guided exploration or reward maximization. Exploratory individual-differences analyses suggested that reward transition effects were more pronounced in males than in females; additionally, trait-level reward sensitivity moderated the magnitude of reward transition effects on switch behavior. Overall, the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cue-outcome contingency modulates the extent to which recent rewards are followed by particular task-choice patterns, although further research is required to clarify the mechanisms through which reward uncertainty may contribute to these effects.
Feeling the heat: How climate emotions shape trust in government and policy support across 68 countries
Jlenia Avellino; Fabienne Stucki; Omid Ghasemi; Viktoria Cologna; Theofilos Gkinopoulos; Niels G. Mede; Stylianos Syropoulos; Sebastian Berger
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Negative emotions related to climate change can adversely impact people’s mental health and wellbeing. However, they could also accelerate action on climate change by driving support for environmental policies. Using the TISP Many Labs data, we present results from a cross-sectional secondary analysis of survey responses from 69,534 participants across 68 countries worldwide. The survey included items on people’s emotional response to climate change, perceptions of government responses to climate change, and support for environmental policies. Participants experienced relatively low levels of negative emotions toward climate change (M = 2.79, SD = 1.01; 1 = not at all, 5 = very strongly), with relatively little variation across countries (SD = 0.27). Individuals reporting stronger negative emotions were less satisfied with their government’s climate action and expressed greater support for environmental policies. Our results thereby contribute to a global assessment of climate emotions and its correlates, crucially augmenting past research that has been more limited in global scope.
Multilevel meta-analyses of emotional processing deficits associated with callous-unemotional (CU) traits: Do they differ by age and sex?
Emily C. Kemp; Paul Frick; Taylor Miller; Julianne Speck; David Gertz; Zeying Du
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Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, defined by deficient empathy and remorse, characterize a distinct subgroup of antisocial individuals with more severe behavioral problems and unique affective profiles. Two processes implicated in the development of CU traits are hyporeactivity to and inaccurate recognition of others’ emotions. Although many studies link CU traits to emotional processing deficits, findings have been inconsistent across age and sex. We conducted multilevel meta-analyses of emotional reactivity and recognition, accounting for age and sex as moderators, to clarify these discrepancies. A four-level meta-analysis indicated CU traits were negatively associated with emotional reactivity to both broad emotional stimuli (r = -.23, p < .0001; k = 106, n = 402) and distress-specific stimuli (r = -.22, p < .0001; k = 83, n = 234), with no moderation by age or sex. Similarly, a three-level meta-analysis showed CU traits were negatively associated with recognition accuracy for both broad facial emotions (r = -.09, p < .0001; k = 97, n = 437) and distress (e.g., fear, sadness; r = -.10, p < .0001; k = 60, n = 140). Sample age moderated broad (r = .003, p = .01) and distress (r = .004, p = .04) recognition deficits, such that effects diminished with sample age. These results have important implications for causal theories of CU traits and support emotional hyporreactivity as a core deficit that may cause delays in the development of emotion recognition abilities. Such developmental changes have implications for improving treatments for individuals with elevated CU traits.
A clinician-informed framework for precision psychotherapy in psychosis
Shenaya Maria Lisboa; Maria Chiara Del Piccolo; Anna Georgiades; Sandra Vieira
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Background. Despite evidence supporting cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis (CBTp), engagement and treatment response remain highly variable, and robust predictors are lacking. Existing research may overlook clinically relevant factors. We aimed to identify candidate predictors of CBTp engagement and outcomes by integrating clinicians’ perspectives with the existing literature. Methods. Twenty clinical psychologists experienced in delivering CBTp participated in semi-structured interviews. Using a mixed-methods design, we first identified candidate predictors through inductive framework analysis of unprompted accounts. Clinicians subsequently rated the perceived importance of these and 32 literature-derived factors on a 10-point scale. Mean ratings and variability were examined to characterise clinician agreement. Findings were integrated into a candidate predictor framework linked to available measurement instruments. Results. Clinicians spontaneously identified 38 factors, of which 16 were absent from the literature-derived list. Frequently identified factors included readiness and motivation (90%), cognitive flexibility (85%), social support (80%), previous experiences of care and therapy (70%), and socioeconomic and environmental stability (70%). Clinicians emphasised therapy-related, contextual, and clinical management factors, including expectations of therapy, substance misuse, and medication, which remain underrepresented in prediction research. Literature-derived factors receiving relatively high importance ratings and agreement included insight, cognitive flexibility, hopelessness, and social functioning. Demographic characteristics were generally considered less important. Conclusion. Clinicians identified factors extending beyond those conventionally investigated as predictors of CBTp engagement and outcomes. The resulting clinician-informed measurement framework provides a broader, clinically grounded candidate predictor set to guide prospective studies and the development of personalised prediction models in psychosis. Keywords: Precision psychotherapy, psychological intervention, CBT, psychosis, schizophrenia
Comparing Time- and Event-Contingent Ecological Momentary Assessments of Daily Stressors
Lara Oeltjen; Johannes Andreas Christoph Laferton
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Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies offer a unique access to within-person variability processes. Despite their widespread use in psychological research, we know very little about the factors that determine their successful application. This study combines time- and event-contingent assessments to examine the reliability of event-contingent reporting, person-level predictors of compliance, and qualitative differences between assessment methods in a 14-day EMA study of daily stressors. Our results indicate that stress beliefs, personality and mental health are associated with compliance and event-contingent reporting. There was no evidence that event-contingent reports might have been omitted in high-stress situations. On the contrary, event-contingent assessments were generally more extreme in terms of stress-intensity, affect and somatic symptoms. Event-contingent assessments may thus capture a more extreme subset of events and certain types of participants may be particularly likely to self-initiate these assessments. We discuss implications of these findings for the design of future EMA studies.
From Lab to Life: Stress Beliefs and the Stress Optimization Model in Everyday Stress
Lara Oeltjen; Susanne Fischer; Johannes Andreas Christoph Laferton
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Individuals’ beliefs about stress have been linked to health and performance. The stress optimization model proposes regulatory strategies through which these beliefs may shape stress responses, but evidence for these mechanisms comes largely from laboratory research. We investigated whether these mechanisms generalize to everyday life in a 14-day ecological momentary assessment study of N = 173 university students (86% women, M_age = 22.6). Multilevel models examined associations of stress beliefs with stress regulation strategies, affect and somatic symptoms. Stress beliefs were associated with several regulation strategies on the between-person level, but explained little variability in how regulation changed with increasing stress intensity. Associations with affective and somatic responses were limited. Thus, laboratory-derived stress-belief mechanisms appear to generalize only partially to everyday life. We discuss advantages of laboratory and daily-life research on this topic. Interpretation is limited by a homogenous sample, potentially missed event-contingent assessments and independently modeling regulatory processes.
Investigating the Possible Prevalence of AI Bots in Project Implicit Research Pool Studies
Imane Farah; Jordan Axt
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Due to an increased usage of AI agents in online behavioural research, several detection methods have been developed to ensure that data responses are from human participants. However, vision-enabled AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity Comet) are still able to complete studies that utilize traditional detection methods. Thus, the following study used the Cognitive Trap Framework introduced by Affonso (2026), which consists of six questions that are easy for human participants to complete but difficult for AI agents to process. A total of 410 participants on the Project Implicit platform completed the six "cognitive trap" questions. Participants failed an average of 0.78 questions, with only 5.61% of the sample failing three or more of the questions. Results indicate that the use of AI agents on the Project Implicit platform may be low at this time.
CAVL: A Cognitive Architecture for Vigilant Learning
Jean-Sébastien Vayre
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Newell’s challenge remains: experiments often study cognitive mechanisms separately, although real learning requires their coordination. We present CAVL, a functional, multilevel, precomputational architecture of socially embedded vigilant learning. It links working memory, long-term knowledge, expertise, epistemic vigilance, source representation, metacognition, and social context. Structural embedding shapes knowledge, opportunities, and verification costs. Interactional embedding shapes how learners evaluate claims and their sources. CAVL makes three testable claims. First, valid prior knowledge and processing conditions alter the balance between content quality and attributed authority. Second, private acceptance can diverge from public expression when social costs are high. Third, unequal cognitive resources and allocated epistemic credit jointly shape participation and later learning. Six propositions specify critical tests and reasons to revise the architecture. CAVL treats ecological validity as a problem for research, not as a label attached to realistic settings. It proposes controlled and systematically varied experiments that preserve relevant person–task–environment relations. Its purpose is to connect experimentally established mechanisms with socially situated learning, not to replace controlled experiments or existing theories.
Exploring Secondary School Staff’s Knowledge and Attitudes About Supporting Students Who Self-harm
Yasmin Safiani; Abigail Russell; Rowan Streckfuss Davis
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Background: Self-harm among adolescents is a major public health concern, with secondary school staff playing an important role in its prevention and intervention. However, limited research explores self-harm from a teacher’s perspective. Aim: This cross-sectional survey investigated the relationship between self-harm training status and staff knowledge, attitudes, available support, and perceived barriers/enablers. Methods: An online survey of UK secondary school staff (teaching ages 11–18) collected quantitative and free-text data on training, knowledge, and attitudes. Results: Forty-one participants responded. No statistically significant differences were found between trained and untrained staff, although trained staff showed slightly higher knowledge and more positive attitudes. Qualitative analysis generated three themes: school context and staff capabilities; barriers and enablers, particularly external collaboration; and experiences supporting students who self-harm. Conclusions: Findings highlight the need for universal staff training and improved integration between school and external support systems; however, small sample size limits generalisability. Further research should evaluate training effectiveness.
Hyper-Expressions: AI-Generated Faces Emulate and Amplify Stereotypical Human Emotions
Chen Reshef; Hillel Aviezer; Ariel Goldstein
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Artificial intelligence (AI) models are capable of generating highly realistic human images with a tendency to stereotypically bias race and gendered features. These models also readily generate emotional faces, but little is known about the perceptual nature of these expressions. To examine if AI-generated facial expressions emulate similar characteristics to human posed stereotypical facial expressions, we compared the perception of emotions from AI generated facial images to classic sets of human actors posing facial emotions in a stereotypical manner. Across two experiments (total N = 648), participants rated AI-generated and human-posed facial expressions on multiple emotion scales. Study 1 focused on expressions generated by Midjourney (N = 498), and Study 2 replicated the experiment using Google’s Nano Banana 2 (N = 150 . Confusion patterns were remarkably similar across Human and AI-generated expressions, and exploratory factor analysis revealed that the underlying dimensional structure of emotion perception was nearly identical for AI-generated and human-posed expressions), demonstrating their generalizability across image-generation models. Interestingly, some AI-generated emotion categories were rated with higher accuracy and reduced confusability than human posed stereotypical expressions, a finding most robust in Nano Banana 2. This suggests that AI-generated expressions are even more stereotypical and intense than stereotypically posed human expressions, a phenomenon we term Hyper-Expressions. Taken together, the findings suggest that generative AI not only captures stereotypical patterns of emotion expression, but also amplifies and biases them. Results are discussed in the context of current debates between basic emotion and constructional theories of emotion perception.
Head-Mounted Augmented Reality Enhances Affective and Perceptual Responses to Simulated Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity
Jonathan M. Bird; Henry Potts; Harold Kwong; Jingyi Zhang; John J Mitchell; Aidan Acquah; Joanna Blodgett; Abigail Fisher; Anthony Steed; Nikos Ntoumanis
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Background: Vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) refers to brief and sporadic (e.g., up to 2 min) bouts of vigorous physical activity performed as part of daily living (e.g., stair climbing, very fast walking). VILPA offers several accessibility advantages over structured exercise and confers substantial health benefits. However, there is a paucity of scalable interventions designed to enhance the VILPA experience. The primary aim of the study was to examine the effects of a novel head-mounted augmented reality application on affective and perceptual responses during and following a simulated VILPA bout. Methods: A counterbalanced within-subjects design was employed and 24 physically inactive adults (Nfemale = 14, Mage = 26.12 years, SDage = 3.56 years) completed 2-min bouts of vigorous-intensity incline walking under three experimental augmented reality conditions (i.e., motivational prompts, virtual pet, and gamification) and a no-technology control. Dependent variables included affective valence, arousal, perceived exertion, state attention, enjoyment, remembered pleasure, and heart rate responses. Data were analysed using linear mixed models. Results: The virtual pet and gamification experimental conditions elicited more positive affective valence (95% CI [0.41, 1.59], d = 1.13; 95% CI [0.33, 1.50], d = 1.03), greater attentional dissociation (95% CI [8.43, 21.99], d = 1.48; 95% CI [15.09, 28.66], d = 2.13), and higher ratings of enjoyment (95% CI [3.29, 8.62], d = 1.48; 95% CI [3.59, 8.91], d = 1.55) and remembered pleasure (95% CI [10.72, 39.12], d = 1.16; 95% CI [7.38, 35.78], d = 1.01), when compared to control. Motivational prompts did not enhance the VILPA experience relative to control. Conclusion: The findings provide initial evidence that augmented reality technology can enhance affective and perceptual responses to a simulated VILPA bout.
A deer in the elevator. The effect of information congruency on immediate recall and delayed recognition
Lucie Guštarová; Jan Chromý
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This study investigates how information congruency influences memory during sentence comprehension. Although previous research has shown that congruent information facilitates comprehension, it remains unclear whether this advantage arises already at the earliest stages of memory encoding. We addressed this question in four self-paced reading experiments in Czech, manipulating location congruency (congruent vs. incongruent), type of information targeted by the comprehension question (agent vs. location), and sentence position (initial vs. medial), and combining an immediate recall task with a delayed word recognition test. Across experiments, congruent locations were recalled more accurately than incongruent ones immediately after sentence processing, indicating a robust congruency advantage in early encoding outcomes. In contrast, delayed recognition showed no reliable congruency advantage, suggesting that the effect is primarily restricted to early encoding processes. If a piece of information is already encoded while the sentence is being read, it appears to be largely unaffected by congruency afterwards. Thus, incongruent information must pass a higher threshold to be encoded, but once it is successfully encoded, it is no longer disadvantaged.
Selective maintenance of aversive memories as a mechanism of spontaneous recovery of fear
Isabel Berwian; Yongjing Ren; Sashank Pisupti; Jialing Ding; Seohyun Moon; Jamie C. Chiu; Deepta Chandrasekhar; Yael Niv
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Return of fear after exposure poses a significant challenge for treatment of anxiety dis- orders. In this study, we used computational modeling to test competing mechanisms underlying spontaneous recovery of fear over time. We fit computational models of a novel theory of spontaneous recovery—selective maintenance of aversive memories— to behavior from a fear conditioning and extinction task (N=316), and showed that they uniquely captured spontaneous recovery and quantitatively outperformed alternative models embodying theories from the literature. The results were supported across mul- tiple datasets, including a preregistered replication (N=355) and a sample with mental health symptoms (N=520). The selective maintenance modeling framework addition- ally offers mechanistic insights into overgeneralization and the development of anxi- ety. Indeed, in the symptomatic sample we found that symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder correlated with estimates of overgeneralization in the model. Through simu- lations, we further demonstrated that insights from our model can explain how targeted interventions such as retrieval cues and cognitive interventions can prevent the return of fear. These results highlight selective maintenance of aversive events in memory as a critical and testable target for improving anxiety treatments and preventing relapse.
Language-based Assessments for Experienced Well-being: Accuracy and External Validity Across Behaviors, Traits, and States
August Nilsson; Ryan Boyd; Adithya V Ganesan; Oscar Nils Erik Kjell; Syeda Mahwish; Haitao Huang; Richard N. Rosenthal; Lyle H Ungar; H. Andrew Schwartz
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Self-reported rating scales have been central to social science for decades, even though language is our primary form of communication. We used language analysis with machine learning to compare self-reported ratings with language-based responses of experienced well-being (i.e., daily emotions) linked with human traits, states, and behaviors. In a sample of 764 U.S. service workers who reported their feelings daily for up to 12 weeks, responses were provided in 1) numerical ratings, 2) short essays, and 3) descriptive words. When predicting nine self-rated affective traits, essays were slightly less accurate than the ratings (r = .49 v .55, p < .001), while the word-based responses slightly outperformed the ratings (r = .53 vs .51, p < .001). For external predictive validity across 24 traits, demographics, and behaviors, both language formats doubled the ratings’ accuracy, with words reaching an average of r = .18 and essays r = .24 (p < .001). Beyond their greater accuracy, both language formats offered rich psychological insights, with words focusing on emotions and essays encompassing broader life domains. While both language-based formats showed advantages and disadvantages, each demonstrated greater information-richness than traditional rating scales.
Achievement Goals for Teaching
Martin Daumiller; Markus Dresel
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This chapter synthesizes research on teacher achievement goals, highlighting teachers as a theoretically informative population within achievement goal theory. Unlike students, teachers occupy a dual role as both architects of learning and achievement environments for students and learners and achievers themselves. We review the historical development and taxonomy of the teacher goal concept, including teaching-specific refinements such as relational goals and the distinction between task and learning goals. The analysis extends to the antecedents, consequences, and temporal dynamics of these goals, with particular attention to professional learning, well-being, and instructional behavior. Drawing on research in schools and higher education, we examine the processes through which teachers’ personal achievement goals may become relevant for student motivation and learning through their student-oriented goals, instructional behavior, and classroom goal structures. Finally, we discuss how considering the reasons underlying goal pursuit can advance research on teachers’ professional learning. This goal-complex perspective connects teachers’ aims with the broader meaning of their pursuit and provides a basis for investigating how goals and reasons relate to learning behavior and competence development.
Personality Differences among Men and Women of Various Sexual Orientations, Including Asexual and Pansexual Individuals
Jakub Fořt; Dominika Benešová; Petr Freudenfeld; Jaroslava Varella Valentova; Jan Havlicek
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Several theoretical approaches explain variance in personality related to sexual orientation. Drawing on the minority stress theory and the gender shift hypothesis, this study explores personality differences across people of various sexual orientations, including underrepresented groups, such as asexual and pansexual individuals. The minority stress theory posits that non-heterosexual individuals experience heightened social stressors, contributing to higher neuroticism. The gender shift hypothesis further suggests that prenatal hormonal influences may lead to sex-atypical development, explaining some personality variation in sexual minorities. Using a large Czech and Slovak sample (N = 6,476), we administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI-10) to heterosexual (N = 2,598), gay/lesbian (N = 1,943), bisexual (N = 1,412), pansexual (N = 389), and asexual (N = 165) cisgender individuals. We found that non-heterosexual men scored higher in neuroticism than heterosexual men, consistent with both the minority stress and gender shift hypotheses. Pansexual and bisexual individuals of either sex were higher in openness to experience than heterosexual individuals, and asexual individuals scored lower in extraversion than same-sex individuals of any other sexual orientation. We recorded mixed results for conscientiousness. No differences were found in levels of agreeableness. Effect sizes of the recorded differences are, except for few, generally small.
Measuring Emotion Differentiation: A Systematic Review of Current Practices, Methodological Concerns, and Directions for Future Research
Ilaria Telazzi; Michela Zambelli; Stefania Balzarotti
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Background: Emotion differentiation (ED) is the ability to represent emotional experiences with nuance and specificity. Because it is defined as an ability, ED requires performance-based measures, which makes its assessment particularly challenging and has led to highly heterogeneous operationalizations across the literature. Objective: The present systematic review has three main objectives. First, it systematically maps how performance-based ED has been conceptualized and operationalized across literature. Second, it identifies the main methodological concerns associated with current operationalizations. Finally, it derives recommendations for transparent reporting and a research agenda to strengthen the ED measurement. Methods: Following a preregistered protocol, we searched Scopus, PsycInfo, PubMed, and Web of Science from inception to January 2025. Three reviewers independently screened records and extracted data. Peer-reviewed empirical studies of non-clinical adult samples were included. Results: Ninety-six articles (115 studies) met the inclusion criteria. The results showed high variability in ED conceptualizations and operationalizations within and across three main methodological dimensions: Measurement approach (ecological vs. nonecological), emotion vocabulary (predefined labels vs. natural language), and computational procedures to derive ED indices. Key methodological choices were frequently unreported. Conclusions: Heterogeneity across methodological dimensions raises distinct concerns for the validity, reliability, replicability, generalizability, and cross-study comparability of ED measures. Critically, this heterogeneity reflects not only methodological variation but also different assumptions about what counts as evidence of the ability to differentiate emotions. Research requires aligning the theoretical meaning of ED, the information collected, and the assumptions used to derive scores. We propose reporting guidelines and future directions for refining the assessment of ED.
The Memory We Miss: Exploratory Behavior as a Window into Developmental Recognition Processes
Eleanor G. Williamson; Jesse Cushman; Patrese A Robinson
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Recognition memory tasks are among the most widely used approaches for studying learning and memory across the lifespan, yet the behavioral measures used to assess memory performance, particularly during developmental studies, remain limited. In most rodent studies, recognition memory is inferred almost exclusively from discrimination ratios or discrimination indices that quantify preferential exploration of novel stimuli. While these measures have proven valuable, their widespread use may constrain our understanding of the behavioral and cognitive processes that support nuanced memory expression across ontogeny. Similar concerns have emerged in the fear conditioning literature, where expanding analyses beyond freezing behavior has revealed previously unrecognized differences in learning and memory. In this perspective, we argue that recognition memory research would benefit from a comparable expansion of behavioral analyses. Drawing on affordance-based approaches to object exploration, we discuss evidence showing that object properties influence both memory performance and exploratory behavior. More importantly, our recent findings indicate that juvenile (but not adult) rats exhibit task-dependent shifts in exploratory behavior, contingent on the object's specific affordance, which are not captured by traditional discrimination measures. These findings suggest that developmental differences in memory may be expressed not only through recognition performance but also through the exploratory strategies animals employ during learning and retrieval. Expanding behavioral analyses in recognition memory tasks may therefore reveal developmental neurobehavioral mechanisms that remain hidden from conventional metrics, providing a more complete understanding of memory development. The challenge moving forward is not simply to determine whether young animals remember, but to identify how they remember and whether the behavioral routes to successful memory change across development.
What Laboratory Alcohol Experiments Capture About Real-World Drinking
Kasey Creswell; Jonas Dora; Kevin Michael King; Michael Sayette; Joshua M. Smyth; Aidan G.C. Wright
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Psychological science often relies on laboratory paradigms to identify mechanisms assumed to operate in daily life, yet the degree of laboratory-to-life generalizability is rarely tested directly. Alcohol research provides an especially strong test case because acute subjective responses to alcohol are clinically informative candidate mechanisms of alcohol use disorder risk and can be assessed in both experimentally controlled and naturalistic drinking settings. We studied 282 heavy-drinking young adults who completed an unscripted triadic alcohol-administration session and event-contingent ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of real-world drinking episodes. Identical self-report items assessed intoxication, stimulation, sedation, and craving at closely aligned intervals in both contexts. Using multilevel structural equation models, we compared both average response levels (“volume”) and within-episode change (“tempo”). Some average trajectories aligned across contexts, whereas others diverged, underscoring the importance of interpreting person-level correspondence in relation to the trajectory being compared. By contrast, correspondence in within-episode change was weaker and more selective, with sedation showing the clearest positive slope correspondence. Exploratory recentering analyses suggested that slope correspondence may be stronger early in drinking episodes than at the laboratory midpoint. These findings indicate stronger cross-context generalizability in overall response level than in within-episode change, while also showing that dynamic correspondence depends on response domain and timing. More broadly, the results support the value of laboratory and naturalistic methods as complementary tools for characterizing alcohol-response processes.
No Evidence that Retrieval Practice Facilitates Cortical Memory Integration: Insights from Novel Word Semantic Priming
Lewis Vincent Ball; M. Gareth Gaskell
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According to the Rapid Consolidation Hypothesis (RCH), retrieving new information from memory integrates the corresponding memory representations into cortical long-term memory, leading to longer-term memory benefits than restudy or rehearsal. However, this prediction has not been empirically tested. We explored this in the current study by comparing semantic priming effects between novel words taught under retrieval practice and restudy conditions. Words are more effective at priming (speeding up) the recognition of semantically related words once they have integrated with related knowledge in cortical language networks. According to the RCH, semantic priming should therefore be enhanced for novel words taught via retrieval practice. In a learning phase, participants learned 20 novel words and their definitions (e.g., blontack - a type of cat) under restudy conditions and 20 under retrieval practice conditions by retrieving part of the definition (e.g., blontack - a type of ___). The novel words, and a set of familiar words, then served as prime words for related (e.g., dog) and unrelated target words in a primed lexical decision task, both immediately after learning and ~48 hrs later. Familiar prime words successfully primed the recognition of related target words in both tasks. The definitions of novel words taught under retrieval practice were recalled more accurately ~48 hrs later than the restudy condition. However, we found no significant priming effects in either learning condition or task, with exploratory Bayesian analyses revealing moderate evidence in favour of the null hypothesis. Our findings suggest that retrieval practice facilitates the longer-term retention of novel words and their definitions, but may not support their integration with related knowledge in language networks. However, methodological factors could have attenuated the scope for semantic priming with novel words, with future research required to continue this investigation.
Valence Automatically Elicits Vowel Articulation
Saru Parajuli; Charlotte Sophie Löffler; Ralf Rummer; Anita Körner
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The association between vowels and valence is known as valence sound symbolism. For example, the vowel /i/ (as in English "meet") is associated with more positive valence than the vowel /o/ (as in German “Boot”). The present experiment employs an implicit paradigm to determine whether valence sound symbolism, like size and shape sound symbolism, operates automatically. Participants (N = 47) classified valenced facial expressions by articulating the target vowels /i/ or /o/. Specifically, in the congruent blocks, participants were instructed to say /i/ for happy and /o/ for angry faces, and in the incongruent blocks, to say /i/ for angry and /o/ for happy faces. Response initiation times were faster in congruent compared to incongruent blocks. An additional analysis of acoustic parameters revealed a significant interaction between congruency and vowel type for pitch (f0). Specifically, /i/ was produced with higher pitch in the congruent blocks (happy faces) than in the incongruent blocks (angry faces), whereas /o/ was produced with higher pitch in the incongruent blocks (happy faces) than in the congruent blocks (angry faces). In sum, the present results indicate that the association between vowels and valence operates automatically, thereby contributing to our knowledge of cognitive processing during valence sound symbolism.
Of Two Minds: A registered replication
Frederik Aust; Tobias Heycke; Benedek Kurdi; Pieter Van Dessel; Jeremy Cone; Melissa Ferguson; Xiaoqing Hu; Elsa Congjiao Jiang; Robert Rydell; Lisa Spitzer
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Several dual-process theories of social evaluation posit that implicit (or automatic) and explicit (or non-automatic) evaluations reflect distinct attitudes acquired via qualitatively different learning processes. Consequently, one may explicitly like a person but dislike them implicitly. Rydell et al. (2006) reported a striking demonstration of this dissociation: Briefly flashed negative words paired with a person described as behaving positively produced positive ratings of that person but negative Implicit Association Test scores. However, Heycke et al. (2018) could not replicate this dissociation. In two new replication attempts (N = 593) across four countries and three languages, with words flashed between 13 and 27 ms, we too found overwhelming evidence against the dissociation between directly and indirectly measured evaluations. We conclude that the dissociative evaluative learning effect reported by Rydell et al. (2006) is replicably non-replicable.
Mapping Personal Goals Linked to Honesty-Humility: Development and Validation of the GHGD Questionnaire
Giulio Costantini; Anastasiia Galkina; Simona Amenta; Calogero Zarbo; Marco Perugini
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Personal goals help explain how personality traits are expressed in behavior, yet the goals linked to honesty-humility remain poorly understood. We developed and validated the Goals for Honesty and Goals for Dishonesty (GHGD) questionnaire–the first instrument measuring goals of honesty-humility. Using a multi-method, bottom-up approach, we identified and classified personal goals associated with honesty-humility. Study 1 (N = 250) employed participant-driven goal elicitation using personality-descriptive adjectives. Responses were classified using natural language processing and raters' coding, yielding a final set of goals. Study 2 (N = 300) refined goals, selecting them based on their association with personality traits, developing the GHGD questionnaire. Study 3 (N = 400 participants and N = 209 informants) provided validation using self-reports, informant-reports, and observed behavior in an incentivized cheating task. Results revealed a two-component solution distinguishing honesty-oriented (GH) from dishonesty-oriented goals (GD). These dimensions were moderately negatively correlated, indicating distinct rather than bipolar motivational orientations. GD predicted dishonest behavior beyond trait measures, while GH related more strongly to authentic living and self-concept integrity. Overall, goal-based assessments predicted dishonest behavior above and beyond trait self-reports. This work integrates trait-based and process-oriented approaches to personality, delivering theoretical and empirical contributions for future research on moral personality and behavior.
Worry is underpinned by persistence in searching uninformative avenues
Alexis An Yee Low; Karl Friston; Michael Moutoussis
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Worry is common both in mental health and distress. What, then, distinguishes pathological worry? We hypothesized that what characterizes pathological worry is excessive internal search that fails to resolve uncertainty; i.e., is uninformative. In an information sampling paradigm, increased sampling was predicted both by trait (p = .018) and—more powerfully—state worry (p < .001). An information-poor environment significantly increased sampling in high worriers (p < 0.001, CrI 1.1% inside Region of Practical Equivalence defined as <0.2 SD), but not low worriers (p = 0.480, CrI 68.2% in ROPE). Crucially, this increase in sampling in high worriers did not increase their accuracy (CrI 97.5% inside ROPE). A ‘sampling until success’ heuristic was identified as a driver. Stimulus uncertainty and aversiveness had similar effects on sampling and worry, increasing both (p < 0.001). Persistent searching—in the face of irreducible uncertainty—may therefore be a key mechanism behind worry, differentiating high from low worrying.
Individual differences in response to universal school mental health interventions: A narrative review informed by young people’s perspectives
Jennifer Clare Fielder; Lucy Foulkes
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Universal school-based mental health interventions involve delivering mental health content to all young people within a class, regardless of need. They are typically evaluated in terms of average effects, yet there is growing evidence that individual young people may experience the same intervention very differently. In this narrative review, we consider five illustrative sources of individual variation in response to universal school-based mental health interventions: social relationships within the classroom, baseline mental health status, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), family circumstances and gender. For each factor, we review relevant theoretical and empirical literature to explore how each factor might contribute to positive, negative and/or neutral experiences during universal school-based mental health interventions. The review is additionally informed by reflections from a Young People’s Advisory Group of five 14–18-year-olds with experience of school mental health lessons, whose perspectives are integrated throughout. We conclude that understanding individual variability is crucial for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of universal school-based mental health interventions, and for determining whether and how these interventions can be adapted to meet the diverse needs of young people.
The Effects of Nature Walk on Positive and Negative Affect and Perceived Restorativeness in Deaf Adults
Georgios Stavrinos; Elisavet Panagiotou
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Background: Exposure to natural environments has been associated with positive affective responses and perceived restorativeness. However, these experiences have primarily been investigated in hearing populations, and little is known about deaf adults’ affective and restorative experiences in relation to natural environments. Purpose: We examined whether deaf and hearing adults differed in post-walk positive and negative affect, perceived restorativeness, and nature relatedness. We also explored the sensory pathways associated with their affective and restorative experiences. Methodology: We conducted a mixed-methods study with 15 deaf and 14 hearing adults who completed an outdoor nature walk in a national forest park in Cyprus. Participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Scale, the Perceived Restorativeness Scale, and the Nature Relatedness Scale, alongside semi-structured interviews. Hierarchical multiple regressions examined group associations with the quantitative outcomes after adjusting for relevant covariates. Deductive content analysis then explored affective and restorative experiences and their associated sensory pathways. Results: Deaf participants reported significantly higher post-walk positive affect than hearing participants (B = -3.82 for hearing relative to deaf group, 95% Confidence Interval [-6.89, -0.76], p = .017). No significant group associations were identified for negative affect, perceived restorativeness, or nature relatedness. Qualitative findings identified both high and low arousal positive affect experiences, alongside restorative experiences such as fascination and the feeling of being away. These experiences were linked to various sensory pathways in both groups, with visual pathways frequently described and auditory, tactile, and bodily/thermal experiences also contributing to participants’ accounts. Conclusion: Our study provides preliminary evidence of differences in post-walk positive affect between deaf and hearing adults while highlighting the diverse sensory experiences linked to affect and perceived restorativeness in natural environments. Larger studies are needed to clarify these findings and investigate the role of sensory experiences in nature restoration.
What difference do cash transfers make? Understanding impacts and mechanisms from cash transfer recipients and communities in Malawi and Lesotho.
Mirela Zaneva; Josphine Hapazari; Theodora Khofi; Christopher James Graham; Eunbi Han; Shruti; Aswathi Surendran; Rizwana Amin; Roseline Dzekem Dine; Hangala Siachiwena
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Cash transfers are a common poverty alleviation intervention, yet qualitative reports of recipients’ lived experiences are limited. Without these perspectives, policy frameworks risk reducing beneficiaries to passive inputs in programmatic equations. This means potentially overlooking the social meanings, moral negotiations, and relational dynamics through which transfers are actually received, used, perceived, and redistributed. To address this gap, we analyzed 74 in-depth interviews with cash transfer recipients and their household members in rural Malawi and Lesotho. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we created four themes: 1) “With my poverty it can’t work”: Enough to survive, not enough to change, 2) “I can’t be eating in my house while my children are hungry next door”: Grandmothers and the obligation to share, 3) “I am already worried as to what I will be doing”: Psychological relief and stress intertwine, 4) “Sky-falling” and “satanic” money: Notions of deservingness produce stigma and jealousy. Recipients consistently noted improvement in food security, while effects on mental health and social relationships were more mixed. We argue that recipient-centered reports complement and strengthen quantitative evidence about the impacts and mechanisms of cash transfers. We discuss specific policy recommendations, such as larger and more predictable payments, better communication, and sensitive disbursement options, gender-sensitive support, and more active monitoring of psychosocial and community effects in order to mitigate potential negative impacts. Finally, we argue there is a need for a more ambitious focus on development as the key path to poverty eradication.
From Green to Technology: Age Group Variability in Conceptual Complexity and Concreteness
Ilenia Falcinelli; Chiara Fini; Claudia Mazzuca; Anna M. Borghi
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Concepts are widely recognized as flexible and shaped by multiple factors. Here, we investigate how conceptual representations differ across age groups by focusing on four timely domains—ecological, geo, natural (which we labeled altogether green), and technological. Replicating a previous study, we collected ratings from 320 Italian older adults (aged >64) on 50 concepts per domain across 39 semantic dimensions targeting different conceptual aspects (e.g., sensorimotor, sociopolitical, inner, emotional). We then compared these ratings with those from younger adults (aged 18–35) collected in the earlier study. Results revealed strong semantic proximity among green concepts and a clear separation between them (especially natural) and the technological ones. The internal semantic composition of each domain revealed clear age group differences. Within the green domains, older adults exhibited richer, more multifaceted, and more concrete conceptual representations than younger adults, with fine-grained divergences across green concepts. In contrast, no age group differences emerged in the complexity of technological concept representations; however, younger adults characterized this domain more concretely. These differences were closely linked to self-reported domain experience and familiarity: older adults reported greater personal experience with ecological topics, whereas younger adults reported higher familiarity with technology. Theoretically, our findings suggest that conceptual complexity and concreteness vary across domains and are shaped by age group membership and all that it entails. Scientifically, the resulting O-TECo database provides the first semantic norms tailored to older adults. Societally, results highlight the need for age-sensitive interventions to foster engagement with environmental policies and responsible technology use.
When Better Treatment Is Not Enough: Relearning Expectations of Harm at Work
Robin Umbra
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Better treatment can ease an employee’s anger without changing what they expect from the next encounter. When, then, does a new workplace encounter revise a learned expectation of harm? A theory of expectancy updating grounded in cue-appraisal learning explains why positive experiences can leave anticipated mistreatment intact, establish a narrow exception, or support broader change. Confirming encounters can strengthen expected harm and consolidate confidence even as immediate emotion subsides. Favorable encounters support revision when they provide credible evidence about the anticipated consequence and the conditions that made it likely. Safety attributed to exceptional monitoring can be learned as an exception; protection that extends across ordinary conditions offers grounds for broader revision. Harm expectancies can also spread to similar workplace cues and to actors judged responsible for producing or enabling harm. Credible differences in consequences, authority, or responsibility can limit that spread. Earlier and corrective expectations may nevertheless coexist, allowing anticipated harm to return with changes in context or the passage of time. Such return must be distinguished from responses to renewed mistreatment or withdrawn safeguards. Six propositions connect these processes with differentiated emotion and choices among protective distancing, accountability-oriented engagement, and punishment. The central prediction is that equally favorable encounters can produce unequal revision: the corrective value of better treatment depends on what it reveals about the harm employees expect to face again.
The Verifiability of Recovered Memories of Abuse
Mirjam ter Beek; Henry Otgaar; Linsey Raymaekers; Corine de Ruiter; Paul Riesthuis; Tamara L. F. De Beuf; Anne Hoving; Meike Hogenkamp; Bruno Verschuere
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Different ways of remembering sexual abuse - continuous memories, spontaneously recovered memories, and recovered memories following an active search - have been shown to differ in the availability of case-level corroborative evidence. The present study examined whether memory types in delayed sexual abuse statements also differ in terms of verifiability, a statement feature previously associated with differences between truthful and deceptive accounts. Victim statements from archival police files (N = 140) were classified according to how the abuse was remembered. Confirmatory analyses showed that statements based on continuous memories contained more verifiable details than statements based on recovered memories following an active search. Exploratory analyses indicated that details reported following an active search were more often disconfirmed than those reported in continuous or spontaneously recovered memories. Verifiability may extend beyond deception detection paradigms to capture systematic differences associated with memory retrieval and reconstruction processes in delayed sexual abuse reports.
Detecting the “We-Mode” in Observed Interactions: Infants’ Increasing Selectivity to Cues of “Truly” Joint Attention From 9 to 18 Months
Maleen Thiele; Daniel Hanus
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Human social cognition is grounded in “we-mode” interactions, providing a psychological foundation for coordinating attention and knowledge, thereby facilitating human-specific cultural learning. While infants’ sensitivity to interpersonal sharedness is well-documented in participation-based “first-party” interactions, its ontogenetic origins in observed “third-party” settings remain poorly understood. Focusing on joint attention as a foundational mechanism of shared cognition, this study investigated when infants begin to appreciate the “we-dimension” within observed triadic interactions, addressing theoretical debates between leaner and richer accounts of joint attention. In a screen-based object-encoding task, 9-month-old infants and 18-month-old toddlers saw videos of two adults looking at an object. We systematically manipulated (a) partner-directed gaze (looking at partner vs. away) and (b) its temporal alignment (synchronously vs. asynchronously). This allowed us to contrast “truly joint attention” (coordinated mutual awareness, “we-mode”) with “parallel attention” (mere co-orientation) and a novel “social gaze” condition featuring uncoordinated partner-looks without sharedness. Results from a looking-time-based novelty-preference test revealed that 18-month-olds selectively encoded objects only when observing eye contact in the “synchronous–looking at partner” condition, indicative of “truly joint attention”. Conversely, 9-month-olds exhibited a broader sensitivity, encoding objects in all conditions featuring partner-directed gaze, including “social gaze” scenarios lacking markers of sharedness. These findings demonstrate that infants’ early sensitivity to third-party joint attention refines into a more selective appreciation of the observed “we-dimension” during the second year. This developmental progression marks a critical milestone in recognizing others’ collaborative engagement, providing the foundation for the specialized observational learning that underpins human-unique cultural transmission.
Dissociation as a candidate mechanism in functional neurological disorder: Evidence from digital remote monitoring in everyday life
Susannah Pick; L. S. Merritt Millman; Gabriela Crispim Baiocchi; Snigdha Bhuma; Sorawit Wainipitapong; Jemima Uloyok-Job; Jessica Davies; Yasmine Basamh; Lauren Blunstone; Rhiannon White
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Background: Affective hyperarousal and dissociation are possible mechanisms underlying symptom occurrence in functional neurological disorder (FND), although evidence is limited by retrospective and cross-sectional measurement. We aimed to examine these mechanisms in everyday life with digital remote monitoring technologies in functional seizures (FS) and functional motor symptoms (FMS). Methods: Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) tracked subjective functional neurological symptoms (FNS), subjectively significant daily events, affect, dissociation, and subjective arousal six times daily over 14 days, alongside wearable heartrate monitoring (Fitbit Charge 5). Participants were aged 18-65 years with FS (n=45) or FMS (n=48). Healthy (HC, n=45) and clinical controls with anxiety/depressive disorders (CC=47) were included for comparison. We used linear mixed-effects models to compare groups and to interrogate concurrent and time-lagged temporal relationships between variables. Results: FS and FMS groups reported elevated dissociation across the 14 days compared to CC/HC (p≤0.01), including depersonalisation, derealisation, and amnesia (p<0.05). Reduced event-related pleasantness was also reported by FS/FMS/CC groups compared to HC (p<0.05). At the day- and momentary-levels, dissociation was the most robust correlate and/or temporal predictor of FNS severity in the FS/FMS groups (p=0.02-<0.001), withstanding correction for confounds. Event-related stress/pleasantness ratings, negative affect, and subjective arousal significantly predicted FNS severity in some models. Conclusions: Dissociation is a distinguishing feature in FS/FMS and a prominent correlate and momentary temporal predictor of FNS severity in both groups, indicating a possible shared mechanism. Future studies should examine the neurobiological basis of dissociation-FNS interactions and explore interventions that enhance management of dissociative states in this population.
Unresolved snack desire and subsequent snacking in daily life
Giuseppe Marrazzo; Trung Dung Tran; Leonardo Pimpini
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Snacking on calorie-dense foods is often assumed to follow from craving, yet in daily life craving and snacking are only loosely coupled. In an exploratory secondary analysis of a preregistered 21-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study of 136 young women with healthy-range BMI (3, 6, or 9 prompts/day), we examined whether snack desire reported without snacking was associated with consumption in the subsequent reporting interval. Because these EMA items referred to the period since the previous prompt, desire and snacking reported within the same window could not be temporally ordered. Across 8,492 eligible adjacent-window pairs, snack desire without snacking was associated with higher odds of snacking in the subsequent interval (within-person OR = 1.71, 95% CI [1.48, 1.97]). Participant-balanced model-standardized probabilities were 42.1% following desire-present intervals and 30.7% following desire-absent intervals, an adjusted difference of 11.4 percentage points (95% CI [8.2, 14.6]). The association remained positive in participant-day fixed-effects analyses (+12.66 percentage points, 95% CI [9.13, 16.20]) and exceeded expectations from a constrained surrogate distribution (observed unadjusted difference = 16.44 versus surrogate mean = 9.59 percentage points; empirical p = .0002). A complementary exploratory matched comparison showed that desire was modestly more frequent before snack than matched non-snack windows (+4.47 percentage points, uncorrected p = .019). Additional matched comparisons of the intervals surrounding snacking showed pronounced elevations in desire and low perceived control during snack-reporting windows, whereas stress showed a smaller difference. These findings identify snack desire reported without consumption as a prospective correlate of subsequent snacking, without establishing causality. More generally, they demonstrate why it is important to distinguish events reported in successive EMA intervals from events reported within the same interval.
Developmental Language Disorder and Mental Health Related GP Visits: Evidence from Health Records in England
Megan Frith; Hannah Hobson; Melisa Parlak; Umar Toseeb
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Introduction/Objectives. Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a childhood-onset neurodevelopmental condition. It is associated with elevated levels of psychopathology. There is no scholarship on the help-seeking behaviour amongst children and young people (CYP) with DLD from their General Practitioner (GP). We examined the relationship between psychopathology, mental health-related GP visits, and DLD. Methods. We analysed existing data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) with linked GP records up to the age of 25 years (maximum n=5,524; 51% female, 9% DLD). We fitted mixed-effects and logistic regression models to the data. Results. CYP with DLD had higher odds of visiting their GP for mental health needs than peers without DLD (OR 1.54, 95% CI 1.21-1.94) even after accounting for their levels of mental health need (adjusted OR 1.38, 95% CI 1.08-1.75). Among CYP with DLD, being identified as having special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) was associated with higher odds of mental health related GP contact (OR 2.10, 95% CI 1.29-3.40). Conclusions. CYP with DLD are more likely to visit their GP for mental health needs. Those whose SEND is recognised in school are more likely to visit their GP for mental health needs. Increased awareness and recognition of DLD in educational settings may facilitate access to mental health care for CYP with DLD. GPs are likely to have a central role in supporting the mental health of CYP with DLD and thus need suitable support and resources to do so.
Comparing the temporal dynamics of top-down mindfulness and bottom-up reward systems in optimizing cognitive functioning
Preslava Hristova; Silvy Collin
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Optimizing human cognitive functioning requires a delicate balance between top-down self-regulation and bottom-up motivational reinforcement. However, the precise temporal trade-offs between these opposing trajectories (specifically, immediate reward-driven gains versus gradual mindfulness-based structural adaptation) remain poorly understood. Using a mixed longitudinal design, we assessed cognitive and psychological outcomes using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, Stroop task (executive control), N-back task (working memory), and Rapid Visual Presentation task (sustained attention). Results showed that mindfulness meditation significantly improved working memory (in an N-back task). Interestingly, the Stroop task showed declined accuracy, but with faster reaction times, suggesting a speed-accuracy trade-off rather than genuine improvement for executive control. Moreover, while mindfulness did lead to an increase in the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, it did not decrease perceived stress. The result patterns for the reward condition differed from mindfulness meditation. Explicit reward resulted in faster reaction times on the Stroop task, but these were accompanied by reduced accuracy, suggesting a speed–accuracy trade-off rather than genuine cognitive improvement for executive control (in line with mindfulness meditation). Reward did not lead to any significant changes over time in other cognitive tasks. Thus, the improvements in working memory over time were specific to mindfulness meditation and not shown for reward-based manipulations. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of distinguishing genuine cognitive improvements from changes in response strategies.
General Exploitation Theory (GET)
Norbert Meskó
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Exploitation is a pervasive yet under-theorized phenomenon shaping interactions from intimate relationships to global institutions. Existing approaches typically examine narrow domains—manipulation in interpersonal contexts, cheating in economic games, or corruption in political systems—without an integrative account. The General Exploitation Theory (GET) addresses this gap by conceptualizing exploitation as a continuum, ranging from benign utilization of opportunities to abusive appropriation that imposes disproportionate costs on others or the environment. This continuum-based approach aligns with dimensional models in psychology and the behavioral sciences. GET advances a bio-psycho-social model in which exploitation emerges through the interplay of evolved biological mechanisms, intrapsychic processes, interpersonal strategies, and societal structures. Reward circuits, hormonal modulation, and cognitive biases may bias individuals toward short-term opportunism; emotions and motivational drives such as envy, greed, and status striving provide proximate energy for exploitative behavior; interpersonal dynamics translate these tendencies into deception, coercion, and betrayal; and societal and institutional arrangements embed exploitation at scale through hierarchies, inequalities, and legitimizing ideologies. Evolutionary theory clarifies its resilience, framing exploitation as a conditional strategy that can yield reproductive or material benefits despite long-term costs. By synthesizing insights across disciplines, GET offers a comprehensive framework for understanding exploitation as an adaptive, multi-level process. This perspective not only explains its persistence but also provides a roadmap for systematic research on mechanisms, variability, and consequences. In doing so, GET positions exploitation as a central construct for the behavioral sciences and a consequential dimension of human nature across levels and contexts and over time worldwide.
Registered Report: Does the valence-dominance model apply to deepfake faces? Validation and its impact on deepfake detection
Gianmarco Convertino; Mara Stockner; Michela Marchetti; Danilo Mitaritonna; Luca Corvitto; Luca Maiano; Lorenzo Papa; Irene Amerini; Giuliana Mazzoni
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Artificial Intelligence has given rise to increasingly more realistic fake contents such as deepfake faces, hardly distinguishable from real faces. However, evidence has shown that social evaluations of real faces are also able to impact the detection of deepfake faces. The present study aimed at applying for the first time the valence-dominance model for face evaluation on deepfake faces. Moreover, the impact of its thirteen attributes on deepfake detection performances was investigated. Specifically, 311 participants categorised 120 faces (50% real, 50% deepfake created ad hoc by Diffusion Model technology) and rated faces in regards to one of the attributes. Principal Component Analysis was applied in order to validate the valence-dominance model on deepfake faces, and a Brunswikian lens model was applied to understand how each attribute contributes to a face being judged as deepfake. Results replicated the valence-dominance model on real faces as well as on faces categorized by participants as deepfake, but not on actual deepfake faces. Finally, the indirect effects of the Brunswikian model revealed caringness and intelligence to impair detection of deepfake stimuli, whilst weirdness was revealed to be a positive indirect predictor, being positively associated with higher detection accuracy of deepfake faces. Our results shed, for the first time, light into the differential cognitive processing of deepfake faces and their social evaluation whilst also providing novel insight into underlying mechanisms associated with deepfake detection. Interdisciplinary implications regarding the theoretical and applied contribution are discussed.
Dissociating Accuracy and Metacognition in Nutritional Judgements
Kelly Hoogervorst; Francesco Bavato; Ashley Tyrer; Micah G. Allen
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The gap between nutritional knowledge and dietary behaviour remains poorly understood, yet may partly reflect systematic biases in how individuals evaluate food and assess their own nutritional judgements. Here, we introduce the MetaBites task, a novel two-alternative forced-choice paradigm in which 32 healthy volunteers compared foods on either caloric density or nutritional quality, quantified using the Nutrient-Rich Foods (NRF) 9.3 index, under adaptive difficulty control. Participants provided both trial-level and block-level confidence ratings, enabling assessment of metacognitive monitoring across multiple levels. Task validity was confirmed through staircase convergence, a clear speed-accuracy trade-off, and higher confidence in correct relative to incorrect trials. Results revealed a consistent dissociation across conditions: participants showed higher objective performance when judging nutritional quality, yet reported significantly higher confidence and greater metacognitive efficiency for calorie judgements. Global confidence decreased significantly in the NRF condition but remained stable for calorie judgements. Furthermore, familiarity with food items biased choice behaviour in opposing directions across conditions, consistent with a tendency to perceive familiar foods as more nutritious and less calorie-dense. These findings indicate that metacognitive monitoring in nutritional judgements is not a straightforward readout of objective performance, and that domain familiarity modulates choice behaviour. The MetaBites task offers a promising tool for investigating metacognitive contributions to nutritional decision-making in both healthy and clinical populations.
Is Insomnia a Western-centered disorder? A cross-cultural study of sleep satisfaction and perceived sleep duration
Kevin Mammeri; Leela McKinnon; Ming Fei Li; David Samson; Lampros Perogamvros
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Insomnia disorder (ID) is highly prevalent in industrialized societies, yet it is primarily conceptualized and treated at the individual level, with limited consideration of sociocultural influences. This cross-sectional, cross cultural study investigated subjective sleep satisfaction and perceived sleep duration across groups differing in lifestyle, scale and degree of industrialization. A total of 1,389 adults from seven countries completed measures of sleep satisfaction and perceived sleep duration. Healthy participants included 37 individuals from the Hadza hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania (small-scale, non-industrialized group), 447 individuals from rural regions of Madagascar, Guatemala, and South Africa (mixed-scale groups) and 833 participants from large-scale, industrialized groups (United States and Mexico, large-scale). A separate clinical sample of 72 Swiss patients suffering from ID was included. Logistic regressions and Bayesian analyses were conducted on two dichotomous outcomes: sleep satisfaction and perceived sleep duration (<6 h vs. ≥6 h). Participants from the Hadza group showed a significantly higher probability of being satisfied with their sleep than participants from large scale groups and patients with ID. All non-clinical groups reported greater sleep satisfaction than the ID group. In contrast, no significant differences in perceived sleep duration were observed across groups. Sleep satisfaction, but not perceived sleep duration, varied across groups differing in levels of industrialization. These findings suggest that subjective sleep experience extends beyond perceived sleep duration and that sociocultural factors may play an important role in subjective sleep experience and should be considered in models of insomnia and sleep health.
A Dynamic and Recursive Allocative Model of Talent Development and Expression
Rony Moortgat
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Talent development is increasingly understood as domain-specific, temporally extended, and shaped by interactions between persons and environments. Yet existing models remain underspecified regarding how structural and institutional conditions, together with prior developmental histories, become concrete developmental conditions for persons over time. This article develops a dynamic and recursive allocative model of talent development and expression. Person-specific allocation is conceptualized as an endogenous, multidimensional interface through which configurations of tasks, developmental resources and support, demands and constraints, recovery affordances, and recognition are generated. The model distinguishes allocated conditions from their person-level realization and embeds these processes within successive developmental windows separating available capacities, domain-directed focus, independently measured learning speed, realized goal-directed activity, proximal conditions, and domain-specific performance. Aptitude is represented as a latent person-by-domain component of the focus–learning relation. Prior performance and allocation configurations contribute to subsequent allocations, creating recursive pathways through which cumulative advantage and disadvantage may emerge. The model further distinguishes proximal fit from outcome-specific developmental functionality and recovery affordances from realized recovery, allowing the same configuration to have different consequences across outcomes. It yields falsifiable propositions and a multilevel, multimodal measurement architecture for domain-specific empirical evaluation. The framework offers a testable account of recursively reallocated developmental conditions.
Similarity Judgments Reveal the Multidimensional Representations of Naturalistic Faces
Natalie Peluso; Amanda K Robinson; Tijl Grootswagers; Julie Henry; Jessica Taubert
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The human face affords a remarkable array of complex social cues, yet our understanding of how it is spontaneously perceived relies almost exclusively on controlled, posed stimuli that suppress the natural variation which makes faces so informative. Here, using a data-driven similarity task with 75 naturalistic face images, we mapped perceptual judgments across 365 adults aged 20 to 76. The results indicated that naturalistic face space was hierarchically organized by physical and demographic cues: smiling faces formed a coherent category that transcended gender and age, whereas non-smiling adult faces stratified along apparent gender. Multidimensional scaling and representational similarity analysis revealed that perceptual organization was driven by physical attributes – including facial action unit and age – rather than higher order social inferences or classic emotion categories. These findings reveal a robust, flexible geometry that accommodates naturalistic facial variation, advancing a more ecologically valid framework for real-world social perception.
Memory and Cognitive Control in Hypothesis Sampling: Individual Differences in Resampling Rejected Hypotheses
Yoonsang Lee; Randall W Engle
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Efficient hypothesis sampling requires avoiding resampling: returning to hypotheses that have already been rejected. Doing so could depend on maintaining information about which hypotheses have been ruled out, or on disengaging from previously activated hypotheses once they are no longer relevant. Participants (N = 302) completed a hypothe- sis sampling task in which they tested hypotheses from six alternatives until identifying the correct one, along with batteries measuring working memory capacity (WMC), fluid intelligence (Gf), and attention control (AC). In latent- variable models, higher WMC, Gf, and AC were each associated with less resampling when considered separately, but only Gf uniquely predicted resampling once their overlapping contributions were partialled out. Mediation anal- yses showed that AC accounted for the WMC association but not the Gf association. Separating AC into selective and sustained components, selective but not sustained AC predicted resampling, although not uniquely after ac- counting for Gf and WMC, and neither component mediated the Gf effect. Overall, this pattern is consistent with the idea that avoiding rejected hypotheses depends more on disengaging from outdated representations than on maintaining information in working memory. The unique Gf association beyond AC suggests that this contribution is not fully reducible to domain-general attention control.
Psychosocial interventions for school refusal in children and adolescents: a protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis
Akira Sato; Yan Luo; Satoshi Funada; Masatsugu Sakata; Motoki Kurumai; Ethan Sahker; Toshi A. Furukawa
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Background: Attending school can be emotionally distressing for some children and adolescents. When school attendance becomes difficult for a child and is accompanied by emotional distress, the condition is called school refusal. Contextual factors at the individual, parental, and school levels that interfere with school attendance may complicate school refusal. A 2015 systematic review of psychosocial interventions, including both randomized and non-randomized studies, reported mixed results for treating anxiety in school refusal, while showing promising results for school attendance. No systematic review or meta-analysis restricted to randomized controlled trials, however, has been conducted. We will therefore conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials to determine whether psychosocial interventions reduce anxiety and improve school attendance among school-refusing children and adolescents. Methods: Our protocol followed the PRISMA-P guideline. We will include individually- and cluster-randomized trials in which most children and adolescents are aged 18 years or younger, are enrolled in primary or secondary education, have exhibited school absence, and received psychosocial interventions for school refusal. Our primary aim is to reduce anxiety and increase school attendance. We will search CENTRAL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, ERIC, ClinicalTrials.gov, and the ICTRP. Two reviewers will independently assess the study selection, data extraction, risk of bias in included studies, and reporting bias. We will also investigate heterogeneity and conduct sensitivity analyses. We will present ‘summary of findings’ tables to show the estimated effects and the certainty of the evidence. Discussion: This will be the first systematic review to include only randomized trials and to broaden the concept of school attendance to capture the child’s engagement with learning in education.
People Don't Have to Be Native to Hear Size: Evidence From Voiced Obstruent Perception in L2 Learners of Japanese
Rean Du; Marco Aurelio Silva Fonseca
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Voiced obstruents are sounds that are produced with complete closure of the vocal tract and vibration of vocal folds (e.g., /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/). They have been shown to be associated with largeness by native Japanese speakers using Pok\'emon-style nonce names, but whether this sensitivity extends to second-language (L2) learners remains unclear. Twenty-five L2 learners of Japanese rated 30 nonce names with fixed mora counts, containing zero, one, or two voiced obstruents, for perceived height and perceived weight on a sliding scale. Ratings increased with each additional voiced obstruent for both height and weight, and the same pattern was reported for native speakers. This sensitivity did not differ by Japanese proficiency or between English-Japanese bilingual and multilingual learners.
Disentangling Ethnicity from Nationality: Equivalence and Correlates of the CES-D Among Asian American, Asian National, and Euro American College Students
Takakuni Suzuki; Catelyn Kalm; Zachary Willett; P. Priscilla Lui
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The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) is one of the most researched, freely available self-report measures of depression designed to be used in large-scale research. Although the four-factor structure originally identified by Radloff (1977) is well-replicated with Euro Americans, in whom it was developed, evidence suggests that the latent factor structure of the CES-D varies by demographic backgrounds. Thus, reliance on the original CES-D factor structure could mischaracterize depressive symptoms in non-Euro American individuals. Further, past studies have not clearly differentiated the roles of ethnic heritage and socializing culture in equivalence of the CES-D structure across groups. Specifically, both Asian American and Asian national (international) students would be categorized as “Asian” group in the United States but their socializing background and cultural experiences differ. This study investigated the CES-D factor structure and correlates in three ethnoculturally different samples to test for the effects of socializing culture and racial/ethnic differences using measurement invariance (MI) and nomological network analyses. Data were collected from 144 Asian American, 127 Euro American, and 168 Asian national college students. Asian American and Euro American students share a mainstream socializing culture while Asian American and Asian national students share racial/ethnic heritage. Euro American and Asian national students do not share either. MI analyses suggest that Radloff’s four-factor structure met strict invariance between Asian American and Euro American students. The four-factor structure was not identified in the Asian national group. Removing the Interpersonal Problems factor and Item 7 resulted in achieving up to scalar invariance across the three groups. Further, the external correlates of the modified CES-D factor scores indicated similar nomological network of cultural experiences of depressive symptoms in Asian American and Euro American students, as well as Asian American and Asian national students. However, Euro American and Asian national students did not share as much. These findings suggest socialization background to be a source variance underlying factor-structures of depression, and association of depressive symptoms and cultural experiences are affected by both. This study highlights the need to consider contextual information to fully understand how depression may manifest differently across individuals.
A Framework for Item Difficulty Prediction Using AI with Ordered Anchor Booklets
Kyung T. Han; Ye Yuan
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Item difficulty prediction from item content has been studied with linguistic features, supervised models, and AI systems, but most approaches ask a model to produce a calibrated numeric difficulty value directly. This study evaluates a Bookmark-inspired framework in which an AI system places a new item within an ordered booklet of anchor items with known difficulty. To examine whether the framework generalized beyond a single system, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 placed 50 target items on booklets of 5 to 50 anchors dealt from the same 50 anchors in three pools: Reading Comprehension and Quantitative Reasoning items from a high-stakes examination for admission to higher education, scored on the IRT b scale, and publicly released NAEP grade 8 mathematics items, scored on percent correct. Correlations with known difficulty were generally in the mid-.70s for the reading items, about .90 for the quantitative items, and in the mid-.70s for the NAEP items, at or above the accuracy reported for informed human panels. Booklet length made no meaningful difference within a fixed anchor budget. The self-pilot run predicted the target run's accuracy to within about .09 and closely reproduced its bias. The framework's pilot-based bias correction was effective in reducing bias in the target item predictions.
Direct and Generative Retrieval and the Phenomenological Characteristics of Future Thinking Associated with Depressive Symptoms: The Relevance of Contrast Avoidance and Memories of the Future
Noboru Matsumoto; David John Hallford
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Depression is characterized by reduced future thinking specificity, yet the retrieval processes underlying this impairment remain unclear. We examined whether depressive symptoms are differentially associated with direct retrieval (i.e., effortless searches that immediately bring future thoughts to mind) versus generative retrieval (i.e., searches requiring cognitive effort or additional information) of specific and categoric future events, and whether contrast avoidance (i.e., maintaining a negative mood to avoid a sudden negative emotional shift) contributes to these patterns. In Study 1 (N = 80) and preregistered Study 2 (N = 113), Japanese adults completed a future thinking task in which they imagined personally-relevant future events for positive and negative cue words, classified each retrieval as direct or generative, and rated phenomenological characteristics. Drawing on preliminary results from Study 1, Study 2 clearly linked depressive symptoms to more frequent directly retrieved categoric futures for negative cues. In contrast, regressions (but not correlations) showed associations between depressive symptoms to reduced generatively retrieved specific futures for positive cues. Depressed individuals also reported lower emotional valence, likelihood, and similarity with past events for positive future thinking, suggesting limited memory resources for generating plausible positive events. In Study 2, a higher propensity for emotional contrast avoidance was linked to increased retrieval of negative categoric futures and decreased retrieval of positive specific futures. These findings suggest that increased accessibility to negative categoric futures and reduced accessibility to positive specific futures may be a distinct pathological process in depression, with contrast avoidance potentially maintaining these biases.
Beyond Anxiety and Avoidance: A Dynamic Feedback-Regulation Framework for Adult Romantic Attachment
Mateusz Pomianek
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Adult attachment is commonly represented by attachment anxiety and avoidance, but these person-level dimensions do not by themselves specify how momentary relational conditions are perceived, compared with desired conditions, translated into action, and updated after interpersonal feedback. We present the Attachment Regulation and Control (ARC) framework as an integrative feedback-regulation account that makes these temporal assumptions explicit and empirically testable. In ARC, control refers to feedback-based regulation toward relational goals in the control-theoretic sense, not interpersonal dominance, coercion, or a generalized need for control. ARC does not claim a novel control-system architecture. Instead, it synthesizes established control-theoretic attachment ideas, secure-base representations, perceived partner responsiveness, relational discrepancy, dyadic regulation, and recovery into a parsimonious sequence for adult romantic relationships: perceived relational state, desired relational state, discrepancy, regulatory action, partner feedback, state updating, and recovery. The framework treats the discrepancy score itself as a falsifiable modeling restriction by comparing it with perceived-state-only, unconstrained perceived-plus-desired-state, and asymmetric discrepancy alternatives. Attachment anxiety and avoidance form the current person-level core and are modeled as moderators of channel-specific regulation. Positive secure-base representation is not yet required by the core; it is a prespecified candidate whose promotion depends on demonstrating incremental prediction of preregistered recovery outcomes beyond anxiety and avoidance. Mentalized affectivity and emotion-regulation flexibility remain optional moderators, and adult disorganization remains an independently measured extension outcome. The article derives core, candidate-core, and extension hypotheses, specifies competing observation models, and proposes staged intensive longitudinal and recovery-focused human tests.
Navigating Autistic College Students’ Career Development: A Capability-Oriented Perspective on Agency and Advocacy
Yilun Jiang; Karly Ball Isaacson; Bradley E. Cox; Brett Ranon Nachman
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Autistic college students navigate career development through their interests and strengths, while encountering deficit-oriented assumptions about autism. Research on autistic students’ career development usually focuses on career support and skill development, while limited studies have examined how they pursue career pathways from a strengths-based perspective. Drawing on a secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews from a national mixed-methods study (n = 36), we examined how autistic college students in four-year U.S. colleges navigate career development. Applied thematic analysis identified three themes: participants developed purpose-driven career goals through long-standing interests, lived experiences, and community exposure; navigated judgments about capability and professional fit across academic and career contexts; and assembled career support across career centers, faculty, and autism support groups. Our findings highlight autistic participants’ capability to explore career pathways that reflect their interests and goals and suggest an agency-beyond-advocacy interpretation, in which agency refers to broader forms of action through which students shape their career development and advocacy represents one important form of agency. Finally, we offer suggestions for universities and employers to develop resources more tailored to autistic students’ career goals and needs.
Echoes of Thought: Task Complexity, Inner Speech Analogs, and Prompt Design Shape LLMs’ Response Behavior in the Two-Step Task
Franziska Usée; Daniel Schad
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, yet the mechanisms behind their response behavior remain poorly understood. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and the computational framework of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning (RL), we examined conditions under which GPT-3.5 and four open-weight LLMs can exhibit behavioral signatures of model-based RL in the two-step task, a well-established paradigm for studying human learning and decision-making. Across nine simulation studies, we varied the task complexity and prompt design to examine conditions under which previously reported model-based RL signatures could be replicated. We found that GPT-3.5 showed model-based RL signatures in simplified task settings, but that these effects disappeared under de-simplified task versions. Crucially, model-based reasoning signatures could be re-established when incorporating an inner speech-analog prompt, requiring the LLM agent to reflect on previous trials and anticipate consequences of future actions. For the open-weight LLMs tested, we observed diminished signatures of model-based reasoning under both de-simplified and facilitative task conditions. Our fine-grained analyses of behavioral learning dynamics highlight the role of structured reflective and anticipatory linguistic processes in enabling complex response patterns in LLMs and reveal both similarities to and differences from human decision-making patterns.
How Self-Location Predicts the Degree and Quality of the Felt Sense of Connection
MARIE SESTER; Glenn Hartelius; Michaël Dambrun
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Research has typically examined how self-location in the head or heart is associated with traits and behavior, yet its link to relationality—specifically the felt sense of connection—remains underexplored. This study investigated how dispositional self-location predicts the embodied experience of being relationally linked to others and the world. We initially developed the Dispositional Self-Location Questionnaire (DSLQ), an association-based instrument designed to minimize potential subjective bias in participant reporting of self-location. Using this measure, we categorized a U.S. sample of 218 adults who had reported a strong experience of connection as head-locators or heart-locators and assessed them on self-construal, self-expansiveness, connectedness, and perceived qualities of connection. Head-locators reported firmer self-boundaries, emphasizing independence, rationality, and decision-making. In contrast, Heart-locators scored significantly higher on connectedness to both self and world, and on metapersonal self-construal, describing their connections as close, warm, caring, and authentic. These findings suggest that self-location functions as a somatic attentional stance that anticipates the experiential boundary between self and other: the head favors separation and autonomy, while the heart favors openness and expanded belonging.
The successor representation in high-risk drinking and alcohol-related contexts
Milena Philomena Maria Musial; Sam Hall-McMaster; Kanji Shimomura; Ayaka Kato; Erik Lukas Bode; Clarissa Grundmann; Claudia Ebrahimi; Kenji Morita; Samuel J. Gershman; Tanja Endrass
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The successor representation (SR) is a reinforcement learning strategy which has been suggested to underlie nuanced forms of habitual behavior, rendering it a candidate mechanism for mental health conditions thought to involve habitual control, such as addiction. However, paradigms used to assess habits in humans cannot detect SR use. Together with the fact that they are usually conducted in disorder-irrelevant contexts, this may explain why the evidence for a hypothesized shift from goal-directed to habitual behavior in addiction is inconsistent. Here, we tested whether individuals with high-risk (n=260) compared to low-risk drinking behavior (n=260) rely more on SR or a rigid goal-based dimension-reduced SR variant, particularly in alcohol-related contexts. An online multi-stage decision-making task performed in either a virtual bar or apartment context allowed us to dissociate (red)SR from model-based and model-free learning strategies by testing how well participants adapted their choices to different types of distal changes in the environment. Findings suggest that a particular type of SR, namely a (reduced) random-policy SR-like strategy, contributes to human behavior, but that high-risk drinkers do not differ from low-risk drinkers in their use of this strategy. Instead, both groups seem to rely less on what is likely a (reduced) random-policy SR strategy in alcohol-related contexts – and instead more on model-free control. Results suggest that the use of an adaptive, resource-efficient decision-making strategy is selectively downregulated in substance-related contexts. This study highlights the importance of considering contextual modulation and nuanced decision strategies in understanding habitual and goal-directed behavior in mental health conditions such as addiction.
Learning Children’s Conceptual Spaces using Deep Metric Learning.
Pablo Leon-Villagra; Isaac Ehrlich; Christopher G. Lucas; Daphna Buchsbaum
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Children learn to represent the world around them in meaningful categories that allow them to generalize past experiences. Understanding how these categorical representations develop is fundamental to cognitive science. However, capturing the structure of human conceptual knowledge is a challenging experimental task. The most prominent approach, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), usually requires participants to produce many similarity judgments, leading to long experiments. Moreover, the representations found by MDS are limited to the fixed set of experimental stimuli and have to be reconstructed for every new item. In contrast, we present a more flexible machine-learning method that can generalize to novel stimuli. This method uses a child-friendly task that allows researchers to uncover the development of categories with fewer participant judgments. We evaluate our approach on simulated data and find that it can accurately reveal representations even when trained on data generated by groups that categorize differently. We then analyze data from the World Color Survey and find that we can recover language-specific color organization when aggregating languages that only share the same number of basic color terms. Finally, we use the method in a developmental experiment and find age-dependent differences in how complex fruit stimuli are organized. These differences were consistent with participants' reasoning and additional experimental measures. Our results suggest that our approach is applicable in psychological tasks and opens the possibility of examining children's developing psychological spaces in new detail.
Psychological therapy for auditory verbal hallucinations: A qualitative assessment of voice-hearers’ experiences and preferences
Sanne Brederoo; Gerda van Ittersum; Francisca Goedhart; Ingrid Tewelde-Kampert; Wim Veling; Chris Geraets
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Background Psychological therapy for voice-hearing is increasingly recognized as an important component of care for people who hear voices. However, relatively little is known about voice-hearers’ experiences and preferences regarding psychological interventions for voice-hearing. The present study aimed to examine this in a transdiagnostic sample of voice-hearers. Methods An online survey was completed by 178 voice-hearers, who were recruited through multiple community-based and clinical channels. The survey assessed experiences with psychological therapy and discussing voices with therapists, asked about treatment preferences and goals, and experiences and wishes with regard to peer support. Results Three-quarters of respondents had previously sought help for voice-hearing, and about half reported having been offered psychological therapy. Among those who had followed therapy, overall satisfaction was moderate to high and respondents generally reported a positive relation with their therapist. With regard to treatment goals, out of eight options respondents prioritized reducing negative consequences and distress from voice-hearing over reducing voice frequency. Understanding voices and developing coping strategies were the most highly prioritized treatment foci out of nine options. Among reasons to decline psychological therapy were having no confidence it would be helpful, it not being the right time, and not trusting the therapist. Relatively few respondents had received peer support, but a larger proportion reported a current or past need for such support. Conclusions Respondents emphasized the importance of individualized care, a trusting therapeutic relationship, and shared-decision making. Incorporating questionnaires similar to the present survey at the start of psychological therapy may help facilitate shared decision-making and strengthen the therapeutic alliance.
Questionable mediated effect of a positive attitude toward AI on AI literacy: A comment on Wang and Niu (2026)
Kimmo Sorjonen
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Drawing on the covariance matrix reported by Wang and Niu, I reassessed the empirical basis of their mediation model linking a positive attitude toward AI to AI literacy. I demonstrate that the observed covariance structure can be reproduced by a theoretically different latent-variable model that does not rely on the directional mechanism proposed in the original article. In this alternative account, a positive attitude toward AI, AI self-efficacy, motivation to use AI, and self-rated AI literacy are conceptualized as indicators of a broader construct, core self-evaluation. The results illustrate a broader inferential problem in psychological research: multiple theoretically plausible models may provide equally adequate explanations of the same correlational pattern. Consequently, observational associations alone offer limited grounds for preferring one explanation over competing alternatives. Researchers should therefore routinely evaluate alternative models when drawing inferences about psychological mechanisms from nonexperimental data.
A mode-coupling theory of phonological organization
Sam Tilsen
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Phonological theories provide macroscopic descriptions of order in speech, but have not given much attention to how those descriptions might be derived from the relatively microscopic dynamics of the nervous system. This paper proposes a microscopically inspired theory of phonological organization in which the systems that govern articulatory actions (gesturals) are composed of internal subsystems (gestural excitations). In the preparation of speech, gestural excitations can transiently couple (phase- and frequency-lock) to a generic set of oscillatory coordination modes. In the execution of speech, a feedback-regulated competitive selection process gives coordination modes heightened activation, causing coupled gestural excitations to exert strong influences on control of the vocal tract. Phonological organization in speech preparation is conceptualized as a stochastic process in which gestural excitations couple to coordination modes, governed by probabilities derived from hypothesized constraints. The framework is used to interpret segmental, moraic, syllabic, metrical, and prosodic word-related patterns.
French Validation of the Team Flow Monitor: Factor Structure and Validity Evidence in Student Teams
Victoire Vallier; Nicolas Verger; Rebecca Shankland; Roxane Turgon; Quentin Hallez
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Teamwork is central to addressing tasks whose complexity exceeds the capabilities of any single individual, and the shared optimal experience known as team flow has been linked to collective performance. Validated instruments to measure team flow are, however, only available in Dutch and English. This research aimed to validate a French version of the characteristics subscale of the Team Flow Monitor (TFM). In Study 1 (N = 225), the scale was translated and adapted, and its factor structure, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity were examined. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the original structure of four facets (sense of unity, sense of joint progress, mutual trust, and holistic focus) loading on a second-order team flow factor (CFI = .971, RMSEA = .071), with excellent internal consistency. Scores correlated positively with work engagement and self-rated task performance and were unrelated to grit, a trait-level individual disposition that is conceptually distinct from the situational and collective nature of team flow. Study 2 (N = 92) examined the scale in student teams completing collaborative coursework. Team flow scores correlated strongly with perceived team performance and satisfaction with team performance (rs ≥ .68) and only weakly with perceived individual performance (r = .28), a difference that was statistically significant for the total score and for each facet, which supports convergent validity with group-level outcomes and discriminant validity with individual-level self-assessment. This research provides a reliable and valid French TFM, suitable for measuring team flow and its association with collective outcomes in French-speaking settings.
Quality of Life and the Case for Consent-Based Psilocybin Access – Questions on the Regulatory Framework and Cost
Janis Ancans
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Legal access to psilocybin almost always requires a medical diagnosis first, usually treatment-resistant depression (TRD) or severe PTSD, as though informed consent alone was not sufficient. This article makes two connected arguments. Extending the autonomy argument already accepted for terminally ill patients, competent adults who understand the potential benefits and risks of a psilocybin experience should be able to choose it for reasons of psychological wellness or existential anxiety relief, not only because a clinician has certified a qualifying illness, a right the legal literature calls “cognitive liberty”. Just as important, the cost of access is not fixed; it reflects the regulatory framework under which psilocybin is provided. No jurisdiction has yet completed medicines authorisation pathway; the furthest-advanced clinical programme, Compass Pathways' COMP360, met its Phase 3 primary endpoint and reported six-month durability data for TRD by July 2026, and its developer has since signalled an annual cost close to that of esketamine nasal spray, USD 50,000–65,000, or roughly USD 17,000–22,000 per dose. Meanwhile, Australia's narrower authorised-prescriber legal route for TRD, using GMP-manufactured but unregistered psilocybin, already costs AUD $20,000 per course. Three distinct non-medical routes cost far less. Truffles in the Netherlands, sold under food law with no diagnosis and no supervision required, and Colorado and Oregon's state-licensed psilocybin services, which require no diagnosis but do involve a supervising facilitator, cost up to $3,000 per session. Removing the diagnosis requirement while leaving this cost structure untouched risks replacing the regulatory barrier with the wealth-based one, unless expanded access is paired with public subsidy. Article also briefly reviews the safety evidence, the political origins of psilocybin's scheduling, and the double standard in how its risks are treated. A Canadian case illustrates the institutional and regulatory framework dysfunction, a dying man denied psilocybin for existential relief while approved for medical assistance in dying within weeks, before the article closes with policy recommendations addressing both access and funding.
Measurement Invariance of the Externalizing Construct by Racial and Disadvantaged Contexts in System-Involved Adults
Kendall Donovan Smith; Keanan Joyner; Edelyn Verona
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Externalizing psychopathology is shaped by environmental and contextual factors, particularly those tied to disadvantaged backgrounds. There is insufficient work examining how broader contextual variables affect measurement models of latent externalizing. The current research examined the degree to which indicators traditionally used to model externalizing are similarly indicative of the latent construct across racial and contextual factors (i.e., metric and scalar invariance), using data from two studies of system-involved adults (Study 1: Mage=36.5, 67% male; Study 2: Mage=32.1, 62% male). In both studies, metric invariance generally held but not scalar invariance as a function of race/ethnicity and community-level racialized contexts, particularly for drug use, antisocial behavior and criminal justice-related indicators. Results suggest that contextual factors influence not only externalizing level but affect the measurement of the construct itself.
“Puzzling, Yet So Refreshing”: Experiencing the Value of Neurodiversity Within an Inclusive Choir
Nicolas Petit; Géraldine Dessertenne; Fanny Aprile; Lucie Jurek
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The social challenges encountered by autistic people are increasingly understood as a double empathy problem: a mutual misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic individuals, rather than an autistic deficit. It is thus critical to cultivate inclusive spaces that foster mutual understanding, where autistic people can fit in while allowing the general population to experience high-quality neurodiverse contacts. Choral singing offers a promising medium to do so and to facilitate cross-neurotype dynamics, as it is thought to have evolved as a biological mechanism to foster social bonding. Accordingly, this qualitative study explored how 12 general population adult choristers experienced a 6-month neurodiverse choir shared with 8 autistic adolescents and 3 autism specialists. We used a two-stage qualitative design, first capturing individual experiences through a thematic analysis of an open-ended online questionnaire, and subsequently deepening our results through a discussion with a community stakeholder panel. The findings revealed an intrinsically demanding experience, especially emotionally and cognitively, counterbalanced by important benefits, as it was also described as joyful and powerful, encouraging personal growth among the choristers and a shift in their perceptions of autism. These findings support the neurodiversity paradigm and suggest that choral singing may support double empathy experiences, facilitating intergroup contact in the social majority, to reduce prejudice and thereby remove social barriers to the inclusion of autistic voices.
Teacher Help and the Development of Socioeconomic Ability Stereotypes: Longitudinal Evidence From Real Classrooms
Jonne Bloem; Iris Boer; Jellie Sierksma
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Teacher help is crucial for learning and boosts children’s development. Receiving help may also have unintended negative consequences as it may signal that recipients are not competent enough to solve tasks independently. Teachers often provide more help to children from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, and lab-based studies show that when help is distributed unequally it can reinforce negative ability stereotypes. In this preregistered study, we examined whether children (7-13 years) perceive differences in who receives help in their own classrooms and whether perceived SES-based differences in help lead to stronger SES stereotypes over time. At three time points across one school year Dutch children (N= 565, 65 classrooms, 49.5% boys, 49.5% girls, 1.1% other/prefer not to say; 65.2% native Dutch; mixed SES backgrounds) identified which classmates most often received help from their teacher and how much they endorsed ability stereotypes about SES groups. Across all time points, children perceived that teachers helped lower-SES classmates more than higher-SES classmates. This pattern emerged for two types of help, and was more pronounced among children from lower-SES backgrounds and older children. Moreover, perceived SES-based differences in teacher help at the start of the school year predicted stronger SES-based ability stereotypes halfway through the year, although this association was limited to one type of help. These findings suggest that everyday classroom practices intended to support children who need additional help may inadvertently shape which children and societal groups are seen as less capable. This has important implications for how SES-based stereotypes take root.
Competition, concurrence, and cooperation between external and internal attention
Sam Verschooren; Tobias Egner; Mariam Aly
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Attention can be selectively directed to both external sensory inputs and internally generated representations. The relationship between these external and internal attentional states is not fixed but varies between competition, concurrence, and cooperation. However, the conditions that allow for each of these relationships to occur remain poorly understood. We distinguish between the level of brain states and behavior and synthesize evidence for each of these relationships at both levels. Our review shows that shared, capacity-limited mechanisms and opposing computational modes (e.g., encoding vs. retrieval) often produce competitive dynamics, particularly in the presence of simultaneous and incompatible demands. At the same time, several studies have revealed partially independent substrates that permit concurrent selection of internal and external information, especially when controlled, intentional processing is not required. More recently, researcher have started exploring conditions under which external and internal can support or facilitate each other, enabling cooperative integration in the service of a single goal. We argue that task demands, degree of control, representational overlap, and the considered timescale jointly determine whether external and internal attention compete, co-occur, or cooperate, and we outline key directions for future work aimed at a more nuanced understanding of how these states jointly shape cognition.
Tools for Helping Identify Behavior Disorders: From Parsimonious Nomograms to Machine Learning Models
Yinuo Liu; Eric Arden Youngstrom; Caroline Bodary; Zhuoyu Shi; Jennifer Youngstrom; Ekaterina Stepanova; Robert L. Findling
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Objective: Disruptive behavior problems like Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Conduct Disorder (CD) are high burden conditions where accurate diagnosis is crucial for effective treatment. We evaluated probability nomograms and machine learning (ML) algorithms (logistic regression, LASSO, SVM, random forest) on accuracy, calibration, and generalizability for detecting current ODD or CD diagnoses. Method: Youth aged 5–18 receiving outpatient care were recruited from academic (n=622) and community (n=506) clinics. Predictors included demographics, comorbid diagnoses, mood and behavioral indicators. The criterion was K-SADS diagnoses of ODD/CD. Models were trained in the academic sample, using the community sample for external validation. AUC quantified accuracy, Spiegelhalter's z indexed calibration, and cross-site performance measured generalizability. Results: For ODD diagnostic prediction, the nomogram selected CBCL Aggression as the strongest predictor and reached AUC≈.70 in both samples. ML models achieved good discrimination (AUC≈.86) with good-to-moderate calibration in the academic sample, deteriorating to fair accuracy with severe miscalibration in the community setting. For CD diagnostic prediction, the nomogram built on CBCL Rule-Breaking showed good accuracy (AUC≈.82) in both samples. ML models showed near-excellent accuracy (AUC≈.88) in the academic sample but underperformed in the community sample (AUC=.73-.76), though LASSO, SVM, and random forest maintained good calibration. Conclusion: Across both disorders, nomograms demonstrated lower accuracy but strong cross-site stability, while ML using more predictors achieved superior accuracy that did not generalize. The nomogram offers a low-cost and parsimonious tool. Machine learning is best suited for well-resourced clinics where model training data closely resemble the new cases encountered in practice.
Mapping the Dynamics of Depressive and Anxiety symptoms in Coronary Artery Disease over two years: A Network Analysis
Stefana Vida; Heidi Hermans; Joris Mulder; Mihai Alexandru Constantin; Nina Kupper
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Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD), a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, negatively impacts psychological well-being. Depressive and anxiety symptoms are commonly reported by patients with CAD, but little is known about symptom interconnectedness in this population. Insight into this interconnectedness may improve our understanding of how comorbidity arises and persists. Therefore, our aim was to gain new insights into the comorbidity of anxiety and depression symptoms in patients with CAD by estimating psychological networks at multiple time points. Methods: 2241 patients who had undergone percutaneous coronary intervention (22.2% women; mean age = 65.0, SD= 10.3) were included. With five cross-sectional psychological networks measured at five timepoints over two years, the symptom-level dynamics of depressive and anxiety symptoms were studied. Besides the overall network structure, network communities, centrality measures and sub-group differences were explored. Results: The estimated Bayesian Gaussian graphical models showed predominantly positive associations, and symptoms were mostly connected within their own domain of depression or anxiety. Two symptom clusters remained relatively stable: Depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation consistently clustered together, while in the first month post PCI, fatigue, sleep disturbance, and appetite disturbance tended to co-occur. Fatigue, depressed mood, difficulty relaxing, and restlessness showed high connectivity and acted as bridging symptoms between different symptom groups. Conclusion: These findings suggest that both symptoms related to depression and to anxiety should be targeted within cardiac rehabilitation programs to reduce patients' psychological burden.
LGBTQIA+ Family-Making Through Assisted Reproduction (ART): A Narrative Review
António de Pádua Jesué Oliveira; Henrique Pereira
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Background: LGBTQIA+ people and couples increasingly pursue parenthood through assisted reproductive technologies (ART), yet the psychological, relational, and institutional processes involved remain dispersed across reproductive health, family studies, psychology, sociology, and LGBTQIA+ scholarship. Objective: This structured narrative review synthesizes recent literature on how LGBTQIA+ individuals and couples construct parental projects through ART, with attention to reproductive aspirations, route selection, relational negotiation, minority stress, institutional encounters, and family narrative construction. Methods: PubMed and Scopus were searched for publications from 2016 to 2026. After deduplication, 260 unique records were screened, 126 underwent refined relevance appraisal, and 49 articles were retained as the mapped corpus. From these, 17 index studies were purposively selected for in-depth discussion as they offered particularly rich evidence on psychosocial, relational, and institutional processes. The review followed a structured narrative synthesis approach guided by the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles (SANRA). Results: Three family-making domains structured the synthesis: lesbian couples’ donor conception, IVF, and reciprocal IVF pathways; gay fatherhood through surrogacy and thirdparty reproduction; and transgender, gender-diverse reproductive planning, including fertility preservation and institutional barriers. Across domains, LGBTQIA+ ART family-making involved six recurring psychosocial tasks: aspiration, feasibility appraisal, route selection, relational negotiation, institutional navigation, and narrative integration. Conclusion: ART is not only a set of reproductive techniques but a psychosocial and institutional context in which LGBTQIA+ parental aspirations are translated into reproductive pathways, negotiated through relationships, shaped by clinical and legal conditions, and incorporated into family narratives. These findings support cautious, pathway-sensitive, LGBTQIA+-affirmative fertility counselling.
The Entangled Loop: Emotion, quantum-like interference and hierarchy in the architecture of consciousness
Morten L. Kringelbach; Fernando Rosas; Ruben Eero Laukkonen; Shamil Chandaria; Yonatan Sanz Perl; Gustavo Deco
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Why does consciousness feel like something, and why is experience unified rather than fragmented? We propose that these properties arise from an entangled trefoil of emotion, interference-based inference and hierarchical orchestration, shaped by the thermodynamic constraint that living systems must remain far from equilibrium using limited energy. Emotion compresses actions into valenced signals of what matters, while a pleasure cycle schedules competing biological needs through predictive wanting and satiety organised around the true hedonic outcome of liking. Hierarchical orchestrating regions integrate and broadcast information through interference between classical coupled oscillators, shaped by the spectral gaps of the connectome driven by long-range exceptions to local cortical wiring. The architecture of the Entangled Loop consists of three inseparable strands, each continually constraining the other two, with the one operator linking computational possibilities to the arrow of time and energetic cost of running them. Evidence suggests that the same three signatures emerge independently in large language models trained on human language, but as shadows of the generating architecture rather than evidence of consciousness. The trefoil predicts a distinctive human vulnerability because our abundance of rare long-range connections promotes more computation for less energy while making the architecture more fragile. Neuropsychiatric disorders could therefore arise from perturbations entering through any strand and propagating through the others, while the more robust architecture of other species may help explain why animal models reproduce human psychiatric disorders poorly. Sustaining and restoring flexible entanglement in the Entangled Loop may provide mechanistic routes towards flourishing.
Questionable necessity effects on patient safety competency among nursing students: Re-examining Yang et al. (2027)
Kimmo Sorjonen; Bo Melin; Marika Melin
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Using Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), Yang et al. concluded that adequate levels of organizational support, patient safety culture, adverse event risk perception, professional identity, and self-efficacy constitute necessary prerequisites for achieving high patient safety competency among master's-level nursing students. However, NCA-derived necessity effects may arise solely from associations between variables rather than reflecting genuine necessity relationships. In the present reanalysis, we evaluated whether the necessity effects reported by Yang et al. exceeded expected levels attributable to correlation alone. All reported effects were found to fall within or below estimated ranges of spuriousness, indicating that they were not stronger than would be anticipated in the absence of true necessity. Accordingly, the evidence presented by Yang et al. does not provide robust support for the claimed necessity relationships. We recommend that researchers employing NCA routinely assess ranges of spuriousness and only interpret necessity effects as substantive when they exceed these benchmarks.
Higher Objective Physical Activity Attenuates the Association Between Daily Stress and Rumination
Alfiannisa Shelma Wikenza; Justin Hachenberger; Sakari Lemola
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Rumination is commonly experienced in response to stressful events and has been linked to adverse psychological outcomes. However, research has predominantly examined rumination as a predictor or consequence of psychological functioning, whereas less is known about factors associated with its day-to-day fluctuations. The current study addressed this gap by examining factors associated with rumination using an intensive longitudinal design. A total of 91 young adults (81,5% female; 14,1% male; 4,3% diverse or preferred not to disclose their gender; aged 18–30 years) participated in a 28-day experience-sampling study. Daily self-reported rumination, stress, and subjective sleep quality (SSQ), as well as accelerometry-derived total sleep time (TST), sleep efficiency (SE), and physical activity, were assessed. Multilevel analyses showed that daily stress was associated with greater rumination. Although physical activity was not directly associated with rumination, it moderated the association between stress and rumination. Higher-than-usual physical activity levels were associated with a smaller difference in rumination between stressful and non-stressful days. Better SSQ was independently associated with lower rumination, whereas TST and SE were not. Higher baseline depressive symptom severity was also associated with greater rumination but did not moderate the stress–rumination association. These findings highlight physical activity as a potential protective factor in stress-related rumination and demonstrate the value of examining rumination as a dynamic outcome in everyday life.
Asymmetry in self-comparisons: Focal self bias in comparative judgment
Jareef Martuza; Esra Aslan
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Logical symmetry implies that if X is better than Y, then Y must be worse than X. Does this hold when people compare different versions of themselves? Nine main and three supplemental studies (N = 9,207 US- and UK-based adults) reveal a “focal self” bias—the self that is the subject of comparative judgments is perceived more favorably than the referent or compared self, over and above the content of the selves. When participants compared their present selves to their past or future selves on morality, warmth, and competence, they generally rated whichever self was focal more positively (Studies 1A-C)—contradicting logical symmetry. The focal self bias also extended to role-based self-comparisons between personal versus professional selves (Studies 2A-B), demonstrating it can shape evaluations beyond temporal selves. This pattern persisted even when the same participants made both reciprocal comparisons (Study 3), suggesting that the opportunity to reconcile judgments does not eliminate the bias. Across studies, because focal selves were rated lower on negative attributes, our data favor a selectivity account over a valence-independent extremity account. We also found that self-enhancement is not necessary for the focal self bias, as it emerged also when participants compared other people’s selves (Studies 4-5B). Finally, in direct self-other comparisons, making a peer focal largely eliminated the better-than-average effect (Studies 5A-5B), suggesting focality can partly account for this classic effect. These findings extend comparison asymmetries from distinct entities to comparisons of the same person, suggesting that which self occupies the focal position systematically shapes evaluations.
What Do People Dream About? Themes and Emotions in 400,000+ Dream Reports Shared on Weibo (2018–2023)
Yanqi Lyu; Wuwei Tang; Huanyu Liu
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Dream research has traditionally relied on small samples and retrospective self-reports, which are vulnerable to memory decay. The present study combines big data with natural language processing to investigate dreams that users spontaneously shared on Weibo, a major Chinese social media platform. Using the keywords “dream of,” “dream about,” and “in a dream,” we collected posts from April of each year between 2018 and 2023 and, after five rounds of screening, obtained 418,961 dream reports. We analyzed the demographic characteristics of the posters, the thematic content of the dreams (via word-frequency analysis and a co-occurrence semantic network), and the emotional tone of the reports (via lexicon-based sentiment scoring). Women shared dreams more often than men; users aged 20–35 predominated; posting peaked in the early morning. Six broad themes emerged—family, school, romantic relationships, work, danger, and body—covering a broader range but occurring at lower frequencies than typical-dream themes assessed by questionnaire. Themes related to danger and death moved in the opposite direction to the national urban unemployment rate after 2019, suggesting that dreams may buffer waking emotional states. Negative emotion scores consistently exceeded positive scores, indicating that negative content dominates dream sharing. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the emotion-regulation function of dreams and outline directions for future research.
Does machine learning generalize across political change? Predicting approval of political violence four years later
Oskari Lahtinen
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This study examined whether approval of political violence could be predicted from individual characteristics and whether models developed in one political context would still work four years later. Logistic regression and XGBoost models using 18 demographic, political, and psychological predictors were developed in a Finnish adult sample collected in 2022 and applied without refitting to an independent 2026 sample. Cross-validated ROC-AUC was .676–.677 in 2022. Despite a decline in violence approval from 12.6% to 7.9%, discrimination remained similar or better in 2026 (ROC-AUC = .751 for logistic regression and .707 for XGBoost). The political distribution of violence approval, however, changed markedly. Midpoint-or-higher responses remained nearly unchanged in the left-party bloc (17.4% to 16.8%) but fell from 18.0% to 3.8% in the right-party bloc. Thus, models trained in 2022 continued to predict violence approval in 2026 even though its relationship with political orientation had changed substantially.
Individual differences in the computational processes that support face recognition
Fournier Raphaël; Paul Downing; Richard Ramsey
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Face recognition ability varies substantially across the population, yet the cognitive and computational processes that give rise to this variation remain poorly understood. Here, we combined approaches from experimental, differential and mathematical psychology to test how individual differences in face recognition ability relate to latent parameters of the decision-making processes involved in face recognition. Participants (N = 300) completed a face memory task with learned and novel faces, together with independent measures of face recognition ability (Cambridge Face Memory Test) and general object recognition ability (car recognition). We modelled task performance with an evidence-accumulation model that translates accuracy and response times into latent parameters, including drift rate (the signal-to-noise ratio of the evidence) and threshold (response caution). Higher face recognition ability was associated with greater drift rate discrimination between correct and incorrect response accumulators in the face memory task, for both learned and novel faces and to a similar degree, consistent with expertise effects in other domains. This association remained largely unchanged when accounting for car recognition ability, suggesting that it is at least partly tied to face processing itself. Higher face recognition ability was also associated with greater response caution, which may reflect better calibration to task demands. Although the associations were modest in size, these findings suggest that individual differences in face recognition ability are reflected in distinct computational mechanisms, namely more efficient extraction of information from faces and a more cautious decision policy. This approach enables a more explicit and computational basis for cognitive theories of face recognition to be developed, as well as for testing whether these mechanisms operate similarly across the full spectrum of face recognition abilities.
Adolescents’ Economic Circumstances and their Mental Health: Identifying Candidate Causal Mechanisms through Review and Expert Consultation
Thomas Steare; Kelly Rose-Clarke; Sara Evans-Lacko; Gemma Lewis; Praveetha Patalay
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Living in poorer economic circumstances is routinely associated with poorer mental health throughout the life course. In adolescents, explanatory theories have almost exclusively focused on the role that economic circumstances have on parenting behaviors, and the resources families can provide for their children, which in turn influence adolescents’ mental health outcomes. Through a systematic search of mediation studies and expert consultation we propose candidate causal mechanisms through which economic circumstances might impact adolescents’ internalizing mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression. Most of the candidate causal mechanisms we identified have not been considered in adolescent-specific theories of health inequalities to date and many have not been empirically investigated within mediation studies, indicating clear limits in current awareness of the processes through which economic circumstances affect adolescents’ mental health. We propose a conceptual model that highlights how economic circumstances may shape environmental and material factors, which we theorize in turn influences an interconnected set of behavioral, biological, psychological and social mechanisms linked to mental health outcomes.
Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation for Schizophrenia: From Circuit Dysfunction to Insight and Functional Recovery
Medhat Elsabbahy; Yasaman Mohammadi; Arash Khojasteh Zonoozi; danish Anwar; Muhammad Nasar Sayeed Khan; Kamonnet Wannasewok; Johannes Wancata
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Schizophrenia remains a major challenge in psychiatric practice, characterized by a heterogenous constellation of symptoms, including positive symptoms (e.g., hallucinations and delusions), negative symptoms (e.g., social withdrawal and diminished motivation), cognitive impairments, and frequently, lack of insight. Standard psychoeducation has served as a vital partner to psychological medicine for decades, trying to reduce the relapse rates by emphasizing medication adherence. However, many conventional models often rely on descriptive clinical phenomenology that fails to resonate with the patient’s subjective experience and rarely explain the neurological causes behind the hallucinations or illogical thinking. This disconnection can inadvertently reinforce stigma and fail to support the patient's remaining cognitive capacities to reinforce recovery. Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation (NIPE) emerges as a transformative paradigm, integrating cutting-edge insights from brain science into the educational dialogue. By establishing the explanation of symptoms in neurobiology and shifting the narrative from "mental illness" to "circuit dysfunction", NIPE aims to bypass psychological defenses, objectify the disorder, and foster a collaborative therapeutic alliance. This chapter presents the neurocognitive aspects of the psychoeducational content, the neurocognitive considerations that must be addressed when providing psychoeducation, and examples of NIPE for Schizophrenia, aiming to advance brain health literacy for practitioners who will support patients as active partners in recovery alongside daily functional restoration. Keywords: Schizophrenia; Neuroscience-Informed Psychoeducation; Psychoeducation; Neurocognition; Brain Health Literacy; Therapeutic Alliance; Patient Education
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; Amélie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe; Maxime Mauduy; Asil Ali Özdoğru; Robert M Ross; Bjørn Sætrevik
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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. Although 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 hypothesized 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.
Ulyssean Self-Control: Pre-commitment is effective, but choosing it freely requires good self-control
Hallgeir Sjåstad; Mathias Ekström
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Can pre-commitment strategies be a solution to self-control problems, or do they mainly help those who are already successful at regulating their behavior? In Study 1 (N=1,012), pre-commitment causally improved effort performance in an incentivized matrix-solving task. However, in Study 2 (N=1,010) participants with low (vs. high) self-control as a general trait were 35 percentage points less likely to choose the pre-commitment strategy, which in turn was associated with worse performance and earnings. Information about strategy effectiveness led to a small increase in uptake, whereas a “paternalistic” policy with forced pre-commitment led to superior performance. Study 3 (N=1,037) found that participants with high trait self-control were more likely to choose pre-commitment strategies across work, education, and health domains, mediated by higher future focus, strategy familiarity, and temptation avoidance. Pre-commitment is an effective strategy, but it is most often chosen by those who are already doing well: Individuals with good self-control.
Early intervention for young children with motor learning impairments: the approach and processes of Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity
George Horne; Antonina Pereira; Glenys Creese; Benjamin T Sharpe
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Early intervention is widely viewed as important to improve functional outcomes in children with motor learning impairments. According to existing recommendations, early intervention should be holistic and target different areas of development such as sensorimotor, attention, and communication skills. Currently though, no guidelines or examples describe how to do this. This study presents Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity’s early intervention services as an example. Produced as part of a critical realist ethnography, this article outlines how the charity integrates allied health and educational approaches to support children and their families. Our reflexive thematic analysis then identifies processes of family-led, collaborative, and flexible support that underly DVLCC service provision, and principles of care and pragmatism that underly these processes. This ethnography adds context to the charity’s preliminary positive research results and provides an example model of UK-based early intervention for future development and critical engagement.
Aging and Hearing Loss in Emotional Prosody Processing: Divergent Neural Adaptation and Behavioral Performance
Yi Lin; Yangfan Lu; Hongwei Ding; Yang Zhang
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Emotional prosody perception is vulnerable in later adulthood, yet the contributions of central aging and peripheral hearing loss remain unclear. Across two experiments, we combined event-related potentials (ERPs) , time-frequency analyses and behavioral measures to examine how aging and hearing sensitvity shape emotional prosody processing. Experiment 1 used acoustically matched speech and nonspeech stimuli in a passive oddball paradigm to assess preattentive processing. Experiment 2 examined explicit emotion identification and implicit stimulus judgment to evaluate goal-directed performance and its associations with neural responses. Aging was associated with reduced neural differentiation between emotions and lower behavioral efficiency, alongside enhanced P3a amplitude. Older adults also responded more slowly than younger adults during emotion identification. Hearing sensitivity showed no significant main effect on accuracy or reaction time, despite associations with delayed early neural processing and stronger theta- and alpha-band activity. Hearing-related neural effects were most evident in older adults and varied across emotions and stimulus types. Brain–behavior associations were selective: reduced mismatch negativity (MMN) was associated with slower responses during stimulus identification, whereas longer MMN latencies were associated with lower accuracy and slower responses during emotion identification. These findings indicate that aging and hearing loss have distinct yet interacting associations with emotional prosody processing, with neural responses not necessarily corresponding to behavioral performance. We propose an “asymmetric adaptation” account in which neural responses to degraded auditory input reorganize selectively across processing stages and contexts, potentially explaining this neural-behavioral divergence and informing more sensitive assessment of socioemotional communication in later adulthood.
Now I See Me, Now I Don’t: A Replication and Psychometric Exploration of the Invisible Face Illusion
Lucy Stafford; Catherine Preston; Paul Mark Jenkinson
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Current theories of multisensory integration explain how conscious feelings of body ownership arise, at least in part, from the integration of simultaneously felt and observed touch. The same principles apply to illusory ownership of another face and even to the experience of having an invisible body or body parts. D’Angelo et al., (2021) demonstrated how a sense of invisibility can extend to the face. However, no attempts have been made to independently replicate the so-called Invisible Face Illusion (IFI), and the underlying phenomenological components of the illusion experience remain unknown. The aim of this preregistered study was to replicate the IFI and explore its underlying psychometric components. Participants (n=152) viewed a video of an invisible face being stroked in- or out-of-synchrony with touches applied to their own face, and completed an IFI questionnaire after each condition. Separate exploratory factor analyses on the synchronous and asynchronous conditions found the same 14-item, two-factor model to be the best fit to the data, with the factors capturing 1) facial disembodiment and 2) feelings of touch referral. As expected, overall factor scores were significantly higher in the synchronous versus asynchronous condition, and significant increases were evident for eleven of the fourteen individual questionnaire items. This is the first study to replicate the IFI, suggesting that the illusion involves experiencing referral of touch on one's own face as arising from the invisible face, and a sense of disconnection or disembodiment from one's own face. We suggest possible therapeutic benefits of the IFI which require further exploration.
Identifying the Critical Period of Academic Burnout: A Computational Simulation Approach Based on Large-Scale Assessment Data
Xin Tang; Xiaofeng Wen; Jianxiao Jiang; Danhua Lin; Yiqun Gan; Yu Zhang
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Understanding student engagement and burnout has long been a central concern in educational research. While prior studies have extensively examined levels and correlates of them, far less is known about the timing at which students transition into amotivation (i.e., burnout) state from motivated state. In present study, based on Cox proportional hazards modeling and using large-scale data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we develop a computational simulation model to infer individual- and group-level distributions of academic burnout onset across study weeks. Results demonstrate systematic variation in the timing of academic burnout onset as a function of weekly study time, with longer study hours associated with an earlier increase in burnout risk. To facilitate practical application, we further implement an interactive ShinyApp that allows users to estimate academic burnout onset periods at the individual, classroom, and school levels. This study contributes a novel methodological framework for temporally locating motivational breakdown and offers a scalable tool for translating large-scale assessment data into actionable educational insights.
Polarity and the speed of scalar implicature processing
Michael Vrazitulis; J E Loy; Vera Demberg
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Scalar implicatures (SIs) such as the inference from 'some' to 'some but not all' are known to vary in processing cost. According to the Polarity Hypothesis (van Tiel et al., 2019; van Tiel & Pankratz, 2021), this cost depends on the polarity of the scalar term: SIs from positively polar expressions (e.g., 'some' implicating 'some but not all') are expected to be slower to compute than literal interpretations, while the reverse should hold for SIs from negatively polar expressions, sometimes referred to as indirect SIs (e.g., 'not all' implicating 'not all but some'). We tested this prediction in a sentence–picture verification experiment with 538 English-speaking participants. Each participant judged whether sentences containing weak or strong scalar terms matched a corresponding picture, allowing us to measure response times as an index of processing effort. Our results showed no clear evidence for the Polarity Hypothesis effect. Specifically, we found that the effect strongly varies across the different scales included in our experiment. We additionally conducted a meta-analysis pooling our estimate with all existing evidence so far: the pooled effect is small and in the predicted direction, but the study-specific estimates behind it vary widely in magnitude. Surprisingly, our results do also not clearly validate the traditional assumption of a B&N effect (Bott & Noveck, 2004), i.e., a general polarity-independent processing slowdown under SIs: a subsequent analysis including trial order revealed that the B&N effect was present in early trials of our study, whereas later trials do not show the effect. Overall, we conclude that polarity may influence the speed of scalar implicature processing, but that this effect is not robust across all types of scales.
Continuative Development of Traditional Psychology: Rethinking Inheritance and Innovation through Traditional Chinese Psychology
Xianglong ZENG
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Psychological research increasingly draws on resources inherited from historical traditions, with the potential both to advance contemporary psychological knowledge and to sustain and further develop those traditions. Existing methodological discussions have often emphasized fidelity to inherited meanings in reconstructing and transforming traditional resources. Yet when contemporary research substantially revises inherited responses, can such work still count as inheritance, and if so, where does the boundary between continuation and departure lie? Focusing on traditional Chinese psychology, this conceptual article identifies a shared developmental logic across theoretical, practical, and methodological cases that go beyond the reconstruction of inherited responses. On this basis, it conceptualizes continuative development as a mode of inheritance distinct from reconstructive transformation. Its central argument is that continuity lies at the level of inquiry rather than in the preservation of particular inherited responses. The inquiry itself may even develop to address new questions under changing conditions. What distinguishes continuation from mere influence or use of traditional resources is an intelligible developmental relation to an inherited inquiry. The article further argues that, compared with reconstructive transformation, continuative development opens a broader space for ongoing knowledge generation by allowing new answers, practices, methodological approaches, and questions to emerge beyond the historical repertoire. This also means that contemporary psychology need not treat inherited traditions only as repositories of existing intellectual resources, but can also feed back into and further develop those inquiries. In turn, such development may contribute to cultural continuity while enabling inherited traditions to generate new psychological knowledge that may extend beyond their original cultural contexts. In sum, the article articulates the principles and potential contributions of continuative development as a distinct, methodologically defensible research orientation and clarifies the relationship between inheritance and innovation in traditional psychology.
The emergence of language-specific biases in visual attention in pre-reading toddlers from two cultures
Christine Potter; Nadeen Kherbawy; Christopher Sepulveda; Sagi Jaffe-Dax
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Skilled adult readers show biases in their visual attention that reflect the direction of their native writing systems (e.g., English readers scan left-to-right while Hebrew readers scan right-to-left), but it not yet clear when these biases develop. We tested the hypothesis that language-specific patterns of behavior precede the ability to read by testing how toddlers (2.5-4 years) exposed to different writing systems allocated their attention in a picture naming task. Across two communities, children tended to name objects in the direction that matched their native language. Hebrew-learning toddlers labeled objects from right-to-left, while English- and Spanish-learning toddlers showed the reverse pattern, and language-specific tendencies strengthened with age. These results demonstrate that children have begun to discover directional regularities associated with their language even before they receive literacy instruction and illustrate how cultural conventions exert a direct influence on children’s attention from a very young age.
The Impact of Multilingualism on Self-esteem and Linguistic Identity
Subhangi Roy
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This study explores the effects of multilingualism on self-esteem and linguistic identity among individuals living in the UK. Although the cognitive advantages of multilingualism are extensively proven for children and adolescents, its impact on socio-emotional aspects, especially self-esteem and identity in adults, is inadequately investigated. The current study aims to fill this gap using a quantitative methodology, utilising data gathered from 50 participants representing diverse age, gender, ethnic, educational, and linguistic backgrounds, implementing the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and a Linguistic Identity Questionnaire (LQ). The primary argument put forward was that, multilingualism would improve self-esteem and foster a richer distinctive language identity. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, ANOVA, and independent sample t-tests were employed to investigate the relation among multilingualism, self-esteem, and linguistic identity, including differences among different language groups and sub-constructs of the assessments. The findings suggested no significant direct correlation between multilingualism and self-esteem; however, a noteworthy inverse relationship was identified between the ‘Language and Social Status’ sub-domain of linguistic identity and self-esteem, inferring that, individuals who associated higher social status to a language other than their native language experienced reduced self-esteem. These results indicate that societal perceptions of a language’s prestige can negatively impact self-esteem, especially for native speakers of languages deemed less socially valuable. The hypothesis that multilingualism improves self-esteem was not entirely proven; nonetheless, the study elucidates the impact of linguistic identification on self-esteem, especially for the subcategories that constitute Linguistic identity. The limitations encompass the restricted sample size and reliance on self-reported data. Future study may investigate these processes longitudinally with bigger, more varied samples to further understand the socio-emotional implications of multilingualism.
Revealing the latent geometry of dream content with language models
Daniele Gatti; Tomaso Vecchi; Pietro Pietrini; Emiliano Ricciardi; Giulio Bernardi; Luca Rinaldi
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Dreams provide a unique window into human cognition, as their content may reflect individual and collective experiences. Here, we use language models to analyze 21,607 dream narratives, representing each report as a vector in a high-dimensional semantic space that enables continuous comparison without predefined categories. We ask whether different sources of information are organized within the same representational space and across multiple levels of semantic representation; we also tested how dream representational geometries evolve over time. We find that dreams produced by different individuals, as well as by individuals of different genders, occupy distinct regions of this space, particularly in abstract semantic representations. Similarity among descriptions of dreamers also predicts similarity in their dream content. Finally, we show how the semantic geometry of dream content evolves over time, with its trajectory shaped by the cumulative history of past reports. Together, this study provides evidence for the semantic structure of dream content and its evolution over time.
A Critical Epistemological Audit of Early Evidence Syntheses in Generative AI Educational Research: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Tim Fütterer; Nina Peltzer; Peter Gerjets; Detmar Meurers; Tamara Powell Tate; Mark Warschauer; Valentin Emslander; Lisa Bardach; John hattie; Michael Sailer
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The rapid emergence of ChatGPT in education was accompanied by an equally rapid proliferation of meta-analyses synthesizing its effects on educational outcomes. We conducted a systematic epistemological audit of the first wave of these meta-analyses, evaluating both their methodological and reporting quality and the primary evidence they synthesized. We included meta-analyses published after the release of ChatGPT that quantitatively synthesized its effects on educational outcomes. Five meta-analyses comprising 87 unique primary studies met our inclusion criteria. We also reconstructed their quantitative evidence base and conducted exploratory three-level random-effects meta-analyses to examine effect magnitude, heterogeneity, and robustness, and how these varied with theoretically and methodologically relevant characteristics. The five meta-analyses generally searched multiple databases, specified eligibility criteria, and examined heterogeneity and potential publication bias, but showed limitations in independent screening and coding, preregistration, open data and code, and transparent reporting. The underlying primary evidence likewise showed methodological and reporting limitations and substantial conceptual heterogeneity. Among 69 classifiable primary studies, 79.7% assessed performance exclusively, whereas only 11.6% assessed learning exclusively. The reconstructed meta-analysis yielded a positive average effect (g = 0.83, 95% CI [0.68, 0.97]), but heterogeneity was substantial (I² = 94.06%; 95% prediction interval [−0.75, 2.41]), and estimates were markedly attenuated in sensitivity analyses addressing small-study and selection effects. Although positive effects remained among stronger studies assessing learning, increasingly stringent quality criteria rapidly reduced the evidence base, limiting the certainty and generalizability of conclusions about learning effects. Overall, our findings caution against interpreting a single pooled estimate as a stable general effect of ChatGPT on learning and highlight the need for more rigorous, conceptually precise, transparent, and reproducible research.
Statistics Anxiety and Data Literacy for Sustainable Development: Preliminary Psychometric Evaluation of the Indonesian Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale
Dina Nazriani; Anang Dwi Santoso; Vena Jaladara; Suri Mutia Siregar; Rahma Fauzia
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Education for sustainable development (ESD) emphasizes critical and systems thinking, and both depend on students' ability to read and interpret data such as Sustainable Development Goal indicators. Statistics anxiety is a documented barrier to this kind of data literacy, yet few multidimensional measures of it are available for Indonesian higher education. This study reports a preliminary psychometric evaluation of an Indonesian version of the 51-item Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS), in which items referring to outdated technology were updated. Data came from 100 undergraduate psychology students at Universitas Sumatera Utara. Each of the six subscales was analyzed with the Rasch rating scale model to examine item fit, rating scale functioning, dimensionality, reliability and separation, and differential item functioning (DIF) by high school track and entry cohort. Correlations with statistics course grades (n = 69) provided criterion-related evidence. Forty-five of the 51 items fit the model. Person reliability ranged from .71 to .86, and thresholds were ordered in every subscale, although respondents barely distinguished between the two highest categories of Worth of Statistics. Four items showed DIF by entry cohort, which appears to reflect whether students had already taken a statistics course. Anxiety subscales correlated negatively with course grades (ρ = -.28 to -.40). The Indonesian STARS shows promising measurement properties, but several items need review, and the results remain preliminary until back translation and expert review are completed. Keywords: statistics anxiety, Rasch model, data literacy, education for sustainable development, Indonesia
Moment-to-Moment Affect During Film-Induced Somatic Anxiety
Micah G. Allen
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A viral video of a dangerous stunt can make a viewer's palms sweat and heart race, even though they know they are safe. Such videos let us study emotion as it naturally unfolds, building, persisting and receding. Here we characterise the response to one such film moment by moment and present the open-source browser platform we built to do so. Viewers rate valence and arousal continuously on an affect grid embedded in the video. Each rating is stored with the frame on screen, the film pauses when viewing is interrupted, and participants are trained and their input checked. The film was a 13.5-min silent first-person recording of unsecured climbing. An exploratory sample (n = 21) informed preregistered tests in an independent confirmatory sample (N = 124). Arousal rose as the climb progressed, held a plateau for several minutes and then declined towards baseline, with valence most unpleasant during the plateau. This time course was highly reproducible across samples. Somatic anxiety increased substantially after the film (dz = 1.03), and participants with larger increases had rated it as more arousing and unpleasant. The film thus carries viewers through a reproducible, interoceptively charged emotional episode, and the platform can characterise other stimuli. Researchers can ask how the shift from a calm to an aroused state changes brain connectivity, interoception and emotion, and whether it is heightened in anxious people. Platform, data and reference time courses are openly available.
Quality of Life and the Case for Consent-Based Psilocybin Access – Questions on the Regulatory Framework and Cost
Janis Ancans
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Legal access to psilocybin almost always requires a medical diagnosis first, usually treatment-resistant depression (TRD) or severe PTSD, as though informed consent alone was not sufficient. This article makes two connected arguments. Extending the autonomy argument already accepted for terminally ill patients, competent adults who understand the risks of a psilocybin experience should be able to choose it for reasons of psychological wellness or existential anxiety relief, not only because a clinician has certified a qualifying illness, a right the legal literature calls “cognitive liberty”. Just as important, the cost of access is not fixed; it reflects the regulatory framework under which psilocybin is provided. No jurisdiction has yet completed medicines authorisation pathway; the furthest-advanced clinical programme, Compass Pathways' COMP360, met its Phase 3 primary endpoint and reported six-month durability data for TRD by July 2026, and its developer has since signalled an annual cost close to that of esketamine nasal spray, USD 50,000–65,000, or roughly USD 17,000–22,000 per dose. Meanwhile, Australia's narrower authorised-prescriber legal route for TRD, using GMP-manufactured but unregistered psilocybin, already costs AUD $20,000 per course. Three distinct non-medical routes cost far less. Truffles in the Netherlands, sold under food law with no diagnosis and no supervision required, and Colorado and Oregon's state-licensed psilocybin services, which require no diagnosis but do involve a supervising facilitator, cost up to $3,000 per session. Removing the diagnosis requirement while leaving this cost structure untouched risks replacing the regulatory barrier with the wealth-based one, unless expanded access is paired with public subsidy. Article also briefly reviews the safety evidence, the political origins of psilocybin's scheduling, and the double standard in how its risks are treated. A Canadian case illustrates the institutional and regulatory framework dysfunction, a dying man denied psilocybin for existential relief while approved for medical assistance in dying within weeks, before the article closes with policy recommendations addressing both access and funding.
Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy for Existential Distress in Serious and Life-Limiting Illness: Emerging Trial Evidence, Barriers to Access, and the Case for Individualized Eligibility
Janis Ancans
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Abstract Background. Existential distress and treatment-resistant depression are common and difficult to manage in patients with serious and life-limiting illnesses. Psilocybin-assisted therapy has shown early promise for these conditions, but access outside research settings remains narrow, inconsistent, expensive and often shaped by outdated eligibility rules. These include extremely limited lists of diagnosis- or just blanket age-based cut-offs, that are not grounded in evidence specific to palliative populations. Regulators slowly adjust to the state-of-the-art knowledge generated by psilocybin-assisted therapy, and overall, often present poor understanding of palliative populations specific needs. Objective. To review current and emerging clinical evidence for psilocybin-assisted therapy in serious and life-limiting illness, highlighted with the examples of the EU “Horizon Europe” funded PsyPal project and a Johns Hopkins-led trial in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and to examine the regulatory, informational, and financial barriers that shape access for palliative populations. Findings. Randomized trials in cancer-related existential distress report sustained reductions in depression and death anxiety. Furthermore, a majority of participants in the founding psilocybin studies rated their session among the most meaningful experiences of their life. Project PsyPal is currently the first randomized trial of psilocybin therapy in non-oncology palliative populations, enrolling patients with COPD, ALS, multiple sclerosis, and atypical parkinsonian disorders across four European sites with no upper age limit; a separate trial at Johns Hopkins is testing psilocybin for mood and hopelessness in ALS specifically. Real-world cohort data from Oregon's regulated program corroborate meaningful symptom improvement and low serious-adverse-event rates. Access, however, remains constrained by diagnostic and research-representation gaps, high out-of-pocket cost, and inconsistent regulatory pathways, illustrated by a Canadian patient refused psilocybin for existential relief who was approved for medical assistance in dying within weeks. Conclusion. Clinical evidence relevant fort to palliative and serious-illness populations is accumulating rapidly. Eligibility frameworks for psilocybin-assisted therapy in palliative care should be built on individualized clinical assessment rather than systematic exclusions, paired with funding mechanisms that prevent access from becoming a function of wealth alone.
My Personality—Wrapped: Protocol for a Measurement-Burst Design Study to Investigate the Development and Dynamics of Individual Differences Across Time
Amanda Jo Wright; Peter Haehner; Michael Dominik Krämer; Nicholas Poh-Jie Tan; Christopher James Hopwood; Wiebke Bleidorn
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People and their environments continuously shape one another across time. Understanding person-environment transactions is essential for describing, predicting, and explaining the dynamics and development of individual differences. Yet, progress on this has been constrained by two common limitations: study designs driven by practical rather than theoretical considerations and neglecting how person-environment processes unfold across multiple timescales. Here, we present the rationale and design of the My Personality––Wrapped (MPW) Study, a measurement-burst study designed to investigate how individual differences in personality, well-being, attitudes, social and interpersonal behaviors, and health develop and dynamically fluctuate alongside environmental influences across multiple timescales. Across 1 year, participants (Nmax = 1,230) completed baseline (T0) and post-study (T6) assessment batteries, five bimonthly surveys (T1–T5), and 15 pseudorandomly scheduled 1-week bursts comprising mobile sensing, experience sampling, daily, and weekly surveys. This intensive, multi-method study provides comprehensive cross-timescale data on psychological constructs and contextual experiences. The MPW Study is designed to advance the field’s understanding of temporal dynamics underlying individual differences by disentangling within-person processes from between-person differences, facilitating theory development and testing of multi-timescale person-environment transactions, and informing future theory-driven research on the dynamics of personality and well-being, social and health processes, and life disruptions.
The Same Memory Retrieved Differently: Competition Enables Flexible Generalization in Hippocampus-like Networks
Robby Ralston; Brandon Turner; Vladimir Sloutsky
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Hippocampus supports the retrieval of richly detailed episodic memories from sparse cues. However, an event can be detailed and also lead to generalization. To explain both phenomena, researchers have proposed multiple memory systems or distinct memory traces for specific and general content. In contrast, we argue that a single system can support both specificity and generalization. To do this, we present ATHENA, a formal framework that reinterprets cognitive memory models as recurrent neural networks. We show that many episodic memory models are single-step approximations of dynamic networks with competitive retrieval mechanisms, similar to Modern Hopfield Networks. Notably, under a cognitive interpretation, the intensity of the competitive process is a psychologically-meaningful parameter that shapes generalization in the network. Through simulations, we demonstrate that modulating this parameter during retrieval leads the same traces to produce qualitatively different forms of generalization over the same memory traces. We then extend our analysis to sequential memory, and show how the same competitive retrieval process can be combined with known hippocampal circuits to achieve more sophisticated forms of generalization. These results demonstrate the flexibility of single-system memory retrieval and highlight the interplay of specific and general mnemonic content.
Concordance of Parents’ Anger Responses are Linked with Parents’ and Adolescents’ Psychopathology Symptoms
Emma Ilyaz; Prakash Thambipillai; Amy Byrd; Salome Vanwoerden; J. Richard Jennings; Stephanie Stepp; Vera Vine
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Objective: Parents’ emotions shape children’s understanding of emotions and their management. Children of parents with borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which anger dysregulation is a cardinal symptom, are at elevated risk of psychopathology, which tends to onset in adolescence. The nature of anger dysregulation associated with parental BPD symptom severity and how it relates to adolescents’ psychopathology is not well understood. We characterized parents’ anger dysregulation multimodally and examined how concordance across emotion channels (e.g., subjective, and physiological) predicted both parent BPD symptoms and child psychopathology symptoms. Method: Participants were 162 parents (Mage =40.37 years; 93% women; 47% racial/ethnic minority) of young adolescents oversampled for emotion dysregulation (Mage=12.59 years; 47% women; 60% racial/ethnic minority). Parents’ BPD symptom severity was clinician-rated using semi-structured interview, and adolescents’ psychopathology symptoms were assessed by parent- and adolescent-report on a well-known, validated questionnaire. During a dyadic, parent-child conflict interaction, parents’ anger responses were measured in two ways, using respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA; low values indicating stress-like responding) and self-reported anger. Results: Using polynomial response surface modeling, we found that parental BPD feature severity (Model 1) and child psychopathology severity (Model 2) were each related to greater numerical misalignment between parental anger responses, primarily manifesting in this sample as a combination of low RSA and high subjective anger, or anger concordance. Conclusions: Findings help show which forms of parental anger dysregulation are related to psychopathology in parents and adolescents, which could have implications for understanding the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.
From the Inside Out: School Stressors Identified by Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) Students Experiencing School Non-Attendance
Jia Ying Sarah Lee; Dawn Adams; Chris Paradisis; Raechel Smart; Tiffany Westphal; Leah Heale; Kate Simpson
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Research into school non-attendance is expanding, yet the perspectives of young people, particularly neurodivergent students, remain underrepresented. Card-sorting tasks offer a promising, accessible method for capturing these perspectives. The Student Stress Investigation (SSI) uses a structured card-sort approach to facilitate young people’s self-report of school-related stressors. This study used the SSI to explore school-based stressors among 31 children and adolescents (mean age = 12.16 years) diagnosed with both autism and ADHD (AuDHD). On average, they missed 3.46 days of school per month. Participants first categorised stressors as relevant or irrelevant, then ranked relevant items from smallest to largest stressors. The most frequently identified major stressors were classroom environments that were too loud or quiet (35.5%), uninteresting tasks (32.2%), unpredictability (29.0%), school days being too long (29.0%), and being rushed (29.0%). Qualitative responses highlighted variability in how stressors were experienced. For example, some students reported that the classroom being too loud or quiet was a sensory-related stressor, while others reported it as having an impact on attention or executive functioning. These findings provide direct insight into the everyday school experiences contributing to stress and non-attendance among AuDHD students. The results underscore the value of self-report tools and highlight the need for targeted, individualised, and proactive adjustments to reduce stress that may in turn support an increased capacity to consider a return to school.
Consensus Embedding Geometry for Taxonomy Discovery in Psychological Domains
Daniel Steven Stutts; Jeffrey Humpherys; Ting Shen
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Psychological domains contain many constructs whose meanings are specified through natural-language definitions and examples. Organizing these vocabularies requires methods that connect semantic representations to interpretable categories and expose the effects of analytical choices. We present a researcher-guided framework combining construct prototypes, consensus similarity across embedding models, classical multidimensional scaling, and clustering in theory-guided feature spaces. Averaging model-specific cosine matrices produces a positive-semidefinite consensus kernel that accommodates different embedding dimensions. Global geometry supports broad organization, domain features support intermediate grouping, and local geometry supports finer subdivision. We demonstrate the framework on 224 abuse constructs represented by working definitions supplied by generative artificial intelligence and seven synthetic examples per construct. The resulting hierarchy distinguishes psychological domination from environmental violation and provides finer categories within each branch. Comparisons with single-model, definition-only, example-only, and direct-clustering alternatives identify the roles of representation and subdivision choices. The contribution is a reproducible workflow and stage-specific evaluation for exploratory taxonomy discovery. The case study establishes the dependence of its output on identifiable modeling choices, with category validity and cross-domain transfer remaining questions for further study.
Familiar Content Changes Performance and Processing in Matrix Reasoning in Early Adolescence
Paulo Guirro Laurence; Marcela M. Weiss; Elizeu Macedo
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Matrix-reasoning assessments commonly use abstract geometric figures, although familiar content may change both performance and processing. This within-participants study compared accuracy and gaze-defined patterns of visual exploration for abstract and contextual items requiring corresponding relational rules. Participants were 56 children and adolescents recruited from a public school in São Paulo, Brazil, aged 11 to 15 years. Each participant completed six abstract and six contextual 3 × 3 matrices while gaze was recorded. Trial-level transition matrices were constructed from fixation sequences across nine matrix cells and the response alternatives, and k-means clustering identified two recurring patterns. Contextual items were answered more accurately than abstract items, with 2.44 times higher odds of a correct response. Completion time, fixation count, and fixation duration were similar between conditions. Cluster 1 was characterized by localized transitions involving the final row and response alternatives, whereas Cluster 2 involved broader, more sequential exploration across the matrix. Contextual items had lower odds of Cluster 1 classification, indicating that representational format modestly altered the distribution of gaze patterns. A significant condition-by-cluster interaction further showed that Cluster 2 was associated with higher accuracy for abstract items, but no cluster difference was detected for contextual items. These exploratory findings suggest that familiar content changes how matrices are explored, indicating that abstract and familiar matrix items should not be treated as interchangeable.
What is there to explain about free will? An “easy problem” of consciousness downstream of agency
Nicolas Rouleau
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Free will is one of the most enduring problems in philosophy and cognitive science, yet what, exactly, requires explanation remains unclear. The most tractable target is the experience of free will – the vivid sense of self-authorship, control, and a felt capacity to have done otherwise. As with the scientific study of mystical experiences, this phenomenology can be investigated without resolving the metaphysical claims implied by its content. Here, I argue that free will is an “easy problem” of consciousness: a phenomenon that can be measured, manipulated, predicted, and mechanistically explained. Taking causal determinism as a working postulate, I consider whether prediction and reinforcement could generate the experience of controlling one’s own actions through causal misattribution and superstitious conditioning, without granting consciousness independent causal power. If the experience can be explained under deterministic constraints, the core scientific explanandum of the free will phenomenon has been addressed. Free will can then be distinguished from agency, which remains a causally consequential, graded capacity for goal-directed, adaptive, and self-regulating action across living systems, machines, and hybrids thereof.
Experiencing the Queer Collective Through Time: Exploring Perceptions of Cultural and Historical Continuity Among LGBTQ+ Emerging Adults
Kit Demetrius Greyson; Nic M. Weststrate; Kate C. McLean
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Objective. Using a pre-registered explanatory sequential mixed method design, we examined collective continuity, which until now has been studied in populations where its transmission is assumed to occur naturally via familial and cultural engagement. We examined collective continuity among LGBTQ+ emerging adults for whom access to the culture and history of the collective is not always available. Method. In Study 1, we examined associations across three measures of collective continuity, and their associations with LGBTQ+ identity and well-being in college and community samples of emerging adults (N = 246). Results. We found little association between the measures of collective continuity, modest associations between collective continuity and LGBTQ+ identity, and no relations between collective continuity and well-being. Method. Given the lack of empirical overlap in measures of collective continuity, in Study 2 we employed a qualitative interview approach (N = 8) to provide greater descriptive data on the phenomenon. Results. These analyses revealed a lack of collective continuity and highlighted unique factors that facilitate or forestall the development of collective continuity among LGBTQ+ people, distinguishing this process from other groups (e.g., ethnic, national) in important ways. Conclusion. Together, these findings provide the opportunity for theoretical refinement and expansion of collective continuity.
Health and Personality Contributions to Cybersickness in Virtual Reality
Jonathan Kelly; Taylor Doty; Sydney Hicks; Stephen B. Gilbert; Michael Dorneich
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Background Cybersickness reflects interactions between system (hardware and software) properties and user characteristics. Although motion sickness susceptibility is a known predictor, individual differences including transient and enduring health, psychological, and personality factors have rarely been examined and never simultaneously. Method Participants (N = 252) were exposed to one of five VR games. Cybersickness was assessed using self-reported symptoms (Simulator Sickness Questionnaire; SSQ) and tolerance (time in VR). Hierarchical regression models evaluated whether health, psychological functioning (affective state, psychological distress), and personality predicted outcomes after accounting for game, sex, and motion sickness susceptibility. Results Fatigue, pain sensitivity, and sex were key predictors of symptom severity: higher fatigue, greater pain sensitivity, and female sex were associated with higher SSQ scores. Motion sickness susceptibility and agreeableness predicted reduced tolerance. Final models explained 29.3% of variance in SSQ and 23.8% in tolerance. Conclusion Cybersickness reflected established stimulus and susceptibility factors as well as outcome-specific user characteristics: health-related factors and sex were associated with symptom severity; susceptibility and agreeableness were associated with tolerance. Application User state (e.g., fatigue), sex, motion sickness susceptibility, and tolerance-related individual differences should be considered in the design and deployment of immersive systems to improve comfort and support sustained VR use.
Seeing Through the Eyes of Experienced Practitioners: How online training can accelerate expertise development and improve decision quality of novice graduates
Karin S. Moser; Andrew Whittaker; Milou T. Brand; Denise Harvey
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The ability to make high-quality decisions in ambiguous, uncertain, and time-pressured work situations is crucial in many sectors. This can be challenging in fields with high turnover, such as most emergency services, and means that recent graduates and novices in the field are often put on the frontline early on without the chance to acquire in-depth experience-. While previous research has studied how experienced practitioners make decisions in real-life situations, including in the emergency services, we still know little about the processes that allow acceleration of expertise development for novices and how higher education training could contribute to this. This study used the example of child protection and social work education to examine whether decision-making training with video feedback from experienced practitioners could improve novice social workers’ decision quality, using an experimental study design (n=83 novice professionals), with a feedback and no-feedback condition respectively, and realistic child protection scenarios. Results showed an increase of decision-quality for both treatment and control groups, suggesting that the training alone already induced learning, even without expert feedback. However, consistent with our hypotheses, the treatment group with feedback showed significantly greater improvement in qualitative aspects of decision-making compared to the no-feedback control group, namely a better understanding of the risks involved and in assessing the quality of available information. We conclude that online training with expert feedback can be a promising and economically viable educational measure for improving decision quality and accelerating the expertise of recent graduates, namely in high-turnover fields such as child protection.
Selective maintenance of aversive memories as a mechanism of spontaneous recovery of fear
Isabel Berwian; Yongjing Ren; Sashank Pisupti; Jialing Ding; Seohyun Moon; Jamie C. Chiu; Deepta Chandrasekhar; Yael Niv
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Return of fear after exposure poses a significant challenge for treatment of anxiety dis- orders. In this study, we used computational modeling to test competing mechanisms underlying spontaneous recovery of fear over time. We fit computational models of a novel theory of spontaneous recovery—selective maintenance of aversive memories— to behavior from a fear conditioning and extinction task (N=316), and showed that they uniquely captured spontaneous recovery and quantitatively outperformed alternative models embodying theories from the literature. The results were supported across mul- tiple datasets, including a preregistered replication (N=355) and a sample with mental health symptoms (N=520). The selective maintenance modeling framework addition- ally offers mechanistic insights into overgeneralization and the development of anxi- ety. Indeed, in the symptomatic sample we found that symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder correlated with estimates of overgeneralization in the model. Through simu- lations, we further demonstrated that insights from our model can explain how targeted interventions such as retrieval cues and cognitive interventions can prevent the return of fear. These results highlight selective maintenance of aversive events in memory as a critical and testable target for improving anxiety treatments and preventing relapse.
Persecutory and Grandiose Thinking in Mental Disorder, Religion, and Politics: Common Causes, Processes, and (Dys)Functions
Ari Brouwer; Charles L Raison
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Persecutory and grandiose thinking (PGT) is evident in mental disorder, religion, and politics. This paper offers an interdisciplinary explanation of PGT with a focus on common causes, mechanisms, and functions. First, psychopathological and ideological variants of PGT are introduced and compared. Theories of stress-induced psychological and social change are invoked next to explain shifts towards PGT in individuals and groups. These include a Status Threat/Reward Model of psychopathological PGT and a relative deprivation theory of political violence. Potential functions and dysfunctions of PGT are considered next, with a focus on how persecutory and grandiose thinking may orient individuals towards mitigating social threats and gaining social rewards, respectively. Conditions for collective PGT are then explored, including systemic stress and exposure to redemptive ideological narratives. Finally, we consider how religious and political institutions regulate PGT.
Inconclusive prospective effects between fear of failure, academic buoyancy, and academic procrastination among Chinese primary school students: A reassessment of Fang et al. (2026)
Kimmo Sorjonen
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Fang et al. concluded reciprocal prospective associations between fear of failure, academic buoyancy, and academic procrastination among primary school students. However, significant cross-lagged parameters do not by themselves establish genuine prospective influence because similar estimates may arise through alternative statistical processes. Using simulated data that reproduced the sample size and correlation matrix reported by Fang et al., I examined whether their conclusions were robust across several defensible analytic specifications. The pattern of results depended strongly on analytic choice: some models suggested positive prospective associations, whereas others indicated negative or null effects. When estimates from all specifications were combined using meta-analytic methods, no overall effect reached statistical significance. Accordingly, the available evidence does not provide a firm basis for concluding that fear of failure, academic buoyancy, and academic procrastination exert reciprocal prospective influences on one another. In line with multiverse-analysis recommendations, conclusions should be drawn from the collective pattern across reasonable analytical alternatives rather than from a single model.
Predict to Resist: A Mixed-Method Evaluation of a Prediction-Based Impulse Control Intervention
Tilia Linthout; Lieke Reintjes; Pieter Van Dessel
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Impulsive behaviors often persist despite people’s intentions to act in line with personally valued goals. A recently developed intervention based on the Goal-Directed Predictive Processing (GDPP) framework aims to change such behaviors by helping people construct and practice inference chains in which personally relevant risk situations lead to predictions of goal-consistent behavior. The present study was designed as a replication and qualitative extension of a previous study testing this intervention. Ten Dutch-speaking adults with self-reported impulse control difficulties were allocated to a GDPP-based intervention condition or a waitlist control condition. Participants reported the frequency of their personally selected target behavior daily across baseline, training, and post-training phases. Participants in the GDPP condition also completed semi-structured interviews after the intervention. Single-case analyses showed heterogeneous response patterns. Two participants in the GDPP condition showed reliable reductions in impulsive behavior, but other participants did not, and reliable change was also observed in the waitlist control condition. The quantitative results therefore did not provide strong evidence for a uniform intervention effect. The qualitative results identified three main themes: intervention experience, perceived factors contributing to intervention effects, and perceived barriers to intervention effects. Participants described the rationale as recognizable and reported that the intervention increased awareness of impulsive and alternative behaviors, but also identified barriers such as mismatch between the rationale and the target behavior, persistent risk situations, insufficient repetition, motivational barriers, and strong craving. These findings suggest that GDPP-based impulse control interventions require further refinement and careful personalization before larger-scale efficacy testing. Keywords: impulse control; behavior change; goal-directed predictive processing; single-case design; qualitative methods
Personalized Impulse Control Training in Prison: A Mixed-Methods Proof-of-Principle Study
Tilia Linthout; Rune Verhoeyen; Emilie A. Caspar; Yannick Boddez; Pieter Van Dessel
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Purpose: Impulse control difficulties are relevant in prison settings, yet little is known about whether theory-based impulse control interventions can be implemented in detention contexts. This study examined the feasibility and preliminary effects of two personalized impulse control interventions in a Flemish prison: an intervention targeting goal-directed predictive processing (GDPP) and a go/no-go intervention. Design/methodology/approach: Six incarcerated men completed a mixed-methods study. Participants were assigned to either the GDPP condition or the go/no-go condition and completed daily paper questionnaires during three consecutive seven-day phases: a baseline, intervention, and post-intervention phase. Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively and through exploratory single-case analyses. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings: Participants in both conditions showed descriptive reductions in self-reported target impulsive behaviors. The reduction appeared larger in the GDPP condition, but the small sample and missing data preclude strong conclusions about comparative efficacy. Qualitative findings indicated that participants generally experienced the interventions as acceptable and meaningful. Several change processes were reported, including daily self-monitoring, perceived accountability, repeated researcher contact, awareness of alternative behaviors, and confidence in future behavior. Participants also identified barriers related to prison stressors, personal stressors, and limited opportunities to demonstrate change in detention. Originality/value: This study provides an initial test of the transferability of personalized impulse control interventions to a prison context. It suggests that GDPP-based training can be adapted for detention settings and highlights practical and methodological challenges for future controlled studies. Keywords: impulse control; prison; goal-directed predictive processing; go/no-go training; mixed methods; single-case analysis
The Perceived Utility and Scope of Ecological Momentary Assessment and Interventions for Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: A Needs-Based Dynamic Risk Perspective
Mirthe Luijsmans; Laurence Claes; Ruth Tatnell; Marlies Houben; Thomas Vaessen; Tom Smeets; Inez Myin-Germeys; Glenn Kiekens
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Background: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a serious mental health problem characterized by rapid within-person fluctuations in thoughts and urges. Yet, treatments rely on retrospective and static approaches for assessments and interventions. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMIs) may enable more dynamic support in real time. This study examined the perceived utility and scope of these new digital modalities from the perspectives of treatment-seeking individuals and mental health professionals. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 treatment-seeking individuals engaging in NSSI, after completing a four-week EMA period, and with 14 professionals who used EMA in treatment. Interviews explored experiences with EMA and perspectives on EMIs and were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Three themes were identified. First, EMA and EMIs were perceived as extending therapeutic support by enhancing awareness, reflection, and skill use in daily life. Second, participants emphasized that EMIs must be tailored to changing needs in function of changing risk. This informed the development of a Needs-Based Dynamic Risk and Intervention Model for NSSI, distinguishing needs and interventions through a traffic-light analogy across low (i.e., mental health promotion), moderate (i.e., vulnerability regulation), and high (i.e., behavioral interruption) risk states. Third, EMIs were viewed as valuable when embedded in blended care and implemented through shared decision-making, balancing system- and user-initiated support. Conclusion: Integrating EMA and EMIs into treatment has potential to provide needs-tailored support for individuals who self-injure. Future work should focus on empirically validating the proposed dynamic model and co-designing EMI components that address fluctuating needs in daily life.
Microdelays disrupt online learning
Asaf Mazar; Geoffrey Tomaino; Abubakir Siedahmed; Ahmad Abdolsaheb; Neil Thomas Heffernan; Ziv Carmon; Angela Lee Duckworth
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An ever-growing share of education happens on screens. We examine an overlooked feature of modern education: microdelays—brief loading lags that could hinder learners with slower internet connections. In two longitudinal quasi-experimental field studies, microdelays as short as 1-2 seconds predicted impaired learner engagement and achievement. When faced with microdelays, U.S. primary and secondary school students (N = 26,707) completed fewer online math assignments, took longer to complete assignments, were more likely to get distracted mid-task, and earned lower scores. Likewise, when aspiring coders primarily in Latin America (N = 55,184) experienced microdelays, they spent less time actively engaged, multitasked more often, completed fewer lessons, and were less likely to attain a key course milestone. Our results held across a range of model specifications, and leverage within-person variation in load times to support a causal interpretation. These findings identify microdelays as a hitherto-overlooked barrier in online learning.
Recovering Hierarchical Structures in Psychological Measurement
Alexander P. Christensen; Sydney Mckenna Goldberg; Ashley L. Watts; Luis Eduardo Garrido
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Psychological constructs are often organized hierarchically, making accurate identification of their narrowest dimensions essential to recover broader levels of organization. Existing network methods for this task are limited by either the resolution limit of modularity or the variability introduced by terminating community detection prematurely. We introduce Pairwise Resolution Iteration via Subgraph Modularity (PRISM), a community detection procedure designed to identify dimensions below the resolution limit without requiring a tunable parameter. We evaluated PRISM using 320,000 samples generated from second order factor models across 3,200 conditions that varied the numbers of first and second order factors, factor loadings, indicators per factor, sample size, skew, overlapping dimensions, population error, and correlations among second order factors. PRISM was compared with lower order Louvain and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) paired with several traditional dimensionality methods, many of which set the depth of the bass-ackward estimation procedure. Recovery was evaluated using dimensionality accuracy, bias, and structural accuracy. PRISM generally provided the most accurate and least biased recovery at both levels and maintained strong performance at smaller sample sizes and extreme skew. overlapping dimensions reduced performance across methods, and both network methods performed poorly when overlapping dimensions were combined with few indicators, weak first order loadings, and strong second order loadings. EFA paired with parallel analysis based on principal component eigenvalues was the strongest traditional alternative, particularly in exceptionally large samples. These findings support PRISM as a robust general procedure to recover each level of a hierarchical structure.
Effect of Exercise on Cognition, Memory, and Executive Function: A Study-Level Meta-Meta-Analysis Across Populations and Exercise Categories
František Bartoš; Martina Lušková; Kseniya Bortnikova; Karolína Hozová; Klara Kantova; Zuzana Irsova; Tomas Havranek
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Background: Physical exercise is widely promoted for cognitive enhancement, yet prior syntheses have been questioned due to methodological limitations. Objectives: This study evaluated the reliability of evidence supporting physical exercise for general cognition, memory, and executive function, and assessed efficacy across specific population-intervention combinations after adjusting for publication bias. Methods: This study is a study-level meta-meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We included systematic reviews with meta-analyses of RCTs evaluating exercise interventions against non-exercise controls in humans, identified in a meta-meta-analysis published in 2025. We extracted study-level effect sizes and synthesized the data using robust Bayesian meta-analysis which allowed us to evaluate evidence for and against the presence of the effect, between-study heterogeneity, publication bias, while accounting for model uncertainty. Results: We extracted 2,239 study-level effect estimates from 215 meta-analyses. After excluding suspected duplicates, 1,933 estimates from 201 meta-analyses were included in the overall analyses, which revealed extreme evidence of publication bias and between-study heterogeneity. Adjusted average effects were significantly smaller than unadjusted estimates for general cognition (SMD=0.208; 95% credible interval (CrI) [0.075, 0.318]), and executive functions (SMD=0.088, 95% CrI [0.000, 0.168]). For memory the adjustment differed between adjustment specifications (SMD=0.226, 95% CrI [0.169, 0.282] vs SMD=0.021, 95\%CrI [0.000, 0.217]). While broad prediction intervals spanned substantial negative and positive effects, subgroup analyses identified mostly consistent benefits for specific combinations, such as dance and exergaming for general cognition in non-healthy older adults. Conclusion: The primary limitations of the evidence are severe publication bias and extreme heterogeneity, which appear to inflate previously reported benefits. Consequently, broad claims of generalized cognitive enhancement from physical exercise appear premature. The results support a shift from blanket public health advice to recommendations tailored to specific population-intervention combinations.
Examining the psychometric properties of the Czech versions of Illinois Bully Scale
Štěpán Komrska; Alžběta Váňová; Martin Dolejš; Jaroslava Suchá
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Objectives: The main objective of the study was to adapt and verify the psychometric properties of the Illinois Bully Scale (IBS) in Czech adolescents. Methods: The analysis utilized quantitative data from 1,321 respondents, aged 12 to 14 years, who were enrolled in 7th grade of lower second- ary or grammar school. Descriptive and inferential statistics, including chi-square tests and Mann-Whitney U tests, were used to examine group differences. Results: The IBS demonstrated strong internal consistency and construct validity across all subscales (Victim: 0.84, Bully: 0.80, Fight: 0.79, total IBS: 0.87). Boys and elementary school students reported significant victim and bully experiences. The supplemental cyberbullying scale showed significant correlations with the IBS subscales, supporting its criterion-related validity. Conclusions: Adaptation of the IBS confirmed that it is a useful tool for assessing the frequency and experience of different types and severity of bullying. Its Czech adaptation allows for population screening as well as identification of severe cases and planning of interventions.
Masturbation Satisfaction: A Machine Learning Investigation of its Most Important Predictors
David Cornelius de Jong; Maximiliane Uhlich; Nantje Fischer; Laura Marika Vowels
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The subjective experience of solo masturbation has rarely been studied, and satisfaction with solo masturbation has been particularly overlooked. Studying masturbation satisfaction and its correlates may help clarify why individuals experience masturbation so differently. Moreover, understanding the correlates of masturbation satisfaction may help illuminate how and why solo masturbation is related to well-being. The goal of the present study was to identify the most important predictors of masturbation satisfaction using random forest, a machine learning algorithm that can model many predictors, non-linear associations, and complex interactions more effectively than traditional statistical approaches. Using data from a large representative U.S. national sample (N = 2,486), we developed random forest models that explained 35-46% of the variance in masturbation satisfaction. We used SHAP values to estimate the magnitude and direction of predictors’ contributions to predicting masturbation satisfaction. The most important predictors of masturbation satisfaction included experiential characteristics of the masturbation event (i.e., vividness of the sensory qualities of pleasure and orgasm, cognitive absorption, use of sex toys), sexuality-related dispositions (e.g., sexual desire, attitudes towards masturbation, motives for masturbating), and more general individual differences (e.g., life satisfaction and happiness, awareness of emotional responses). These constructs warrant attention in future investigations of masturbation and well-being.
An Idiographic Examination of Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors Using Ecological Momentary Assessment and Network Analysis
Hannah M Johnson; Eric Lee
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Body-focused repetitive behaviors are a class of behaviors including problematic hair pulling (i.e., trichotillomania) and skin picking (i.e., excoriation). Little research has examined how body-focused repetitive behaviors manifest at the individual level and how individuals may differ from group averages. The current study used idiographic observational methods to investigate the internal cognitive and emotional processes and functioning of individuals with body-focused repetitive behaviors. Four women participants with body-focused repetitive behaviors of varying severities participated in the study. EMA data were collected five times daily over two weeks. Individual contemporaneous network analyses were conducted examining the role picking/pulling had on functioning and internal states. Network structure differed markedly between participants. Each participant displayed different central processes including cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, shame, and distress intolerance. Findings support individualized assessment and case conceptualization of body-focused repetitive behaviors.
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; Amélie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe; Maxime Mauduy; Asil Ali Özdoğru; Robert M Ross; Bjørn Sætrevik
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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. Although 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 hypothesized that dissonance effects would be stronger for participants with higher individuallevel 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.
Beyond Weight Gain in Family-Based Treatment for Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder: A Response to Lock et al. (2026)
Laurence Cobbaert
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Family-based treatment for avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (FBT-ARFID) has recently been defended as addressing more than weight gain. This Commentary argues that therapeutic intent should be distinguished from demonstrated comparative benefit. In the primary randomized trial, FBT-ARFID showed its clearest advantage for weight restoration, while broader domains of ARFID symptomatology and psychological functioning did not consistently show between-group superiority. High treatment completion and absence of serious adverse events likewise cannot establish psychological, relational, sensory, or autonomy-related safety when these outcomes are not systematically assessed. These limitations are particularly consequential in ARFID, where sensory processing differences, fear of aversive consequences, low interest in eating, and neurodivergence may shape treatment needs and experiences. Future trials should incorporate direct child-reported outcomes, treatment burden, agency and participation, sensory distress, psychosocial functioning, adverse effects, reasons for discontinuation, and durability of change. If FBT-ARFID is to be understood as more than weight gain, its evaluation should be broader than weight gain too.
Mapping the Representational Basis of Object-Based Guidance: How Colour Availability Shapes Contributions Across the Hierarchy
Andrea Massironi; Emanuela Bricolo; Marco A. Petilli
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Previous research has shown that colour is one of the most robust attributes guiding attention during visual search and can dominate guidance, with its removal prompting substantial reweighting toward alternative features. However, naturalistic object search differs in several respects from the simplified displays and controlled designs typically used to investigate the role of colour: observers often do not know exactly how the target will appear, and even when its colour is preserved, many candidate objects may share that colour, reducing its diagnostic value and increasing the relevance of information that generalises across variations in appearance. Does colour retain the same importance under these more naturalistic conditions, and how does the relative contribution of other guiding information change when colour is unavailable? Here, we introduce a computational approach to characterising the representational basis of object-based guidance in natural scenes across multiple representational levels and examine how this profile depends on colour availability. Using eye-movement data from the Potsdam Eye-Movement Corpus, we related fixation-by-fixation object selection to cue-object similarity across multiple computational representational spaces, including layer-specific image representations from a deep convolutional neural network, category-level visual prototypes derived within the Vision Spaces framework, and distributional semantic representations derived from linguistic and scene-based spatial statistics. Image-based, category-level visual, and semantic information made complementary contributions to object selection in both colour and grayscale scenes, while cue-object colour similarity explained only part of this broader representational profile. Critically, removing colour altered the strength of some image-based associations but left the broader pattern of multilevel representational contributions largely preserved. These findings suggest that, in more naturalistic search scenarios, object-based guidance draws on target-relevant evidence across multiple representational formats and levels, with colour accounting for only a limited part of the information supporting guidance. At the methodological level, the computational framework introduced here allows us to characterise the representational basis of object-based guidance across perceptual and semantic levels and to track how the contributions of these representations vary across experimental conditions.
Visual search shifts weight up the visual hierarchy from attentional guidance to verification
Andrea Massironi; Emanuela Bricolo; Marco A. Petilli
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When searching for target objects among distractors, observers exploit information contained in the attentional template, a memory representation of target features that supports both search guidance and verification for target selection or distractor rejection. The good-enough framework proposes that, because guidance and verification serve distinct computational goals, the precision of the template varies within a given feature dimension: guidance relies on a coarser, relational code that optimizes the reduction of the search space to candidate target locations, whereas verification relies on a more precise, optimal code for target-identity decisions. However, in searches involving real-world, multidimensional stimuli, it remains unclear whether the representation in the template also varies along the depth of the visual hierarchy, from low-level visual features to more abstract information related to object identity. Here, we used a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to estimate target–distractor similarity at different levels of the visual hierarchy. We then manipulated this similarity in a target-present versus target-absent two-alternative forcedchoice (2AFC) task while recording eye movements. Guidance, operationalized as which of the two stimuli was fixated first and modeled as a function of their relative similarity to the target, was predicted primarily by low-level similarity, with a smaller contribution of high-level similarity. Verification, operationalized as dwell time on each distractor and modeled as a function of its similarity to the target, was also predicted by both low and high-level similarity, but showed a clear shift toward high-level similarity relative to guidance. Critically, the relative weight of high-level similarity nearly doubled from guidance to verification. Together, our findings reveal a shift in representational depth up the visual hierarchy. Beyond template precision, representational depth therefore constitutes a further axis along which template information is selectively exploited according to the computational demands of different epochs of visual search.
Music-Based Interventions for Cognition and Brain Health: the ARM framework
Psyche Loui; Jonathan E. Peelle; Jessica Adrienne Grahn
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Music-based interventions (MBIs) have shown promise in addressing cognitive, motor, and language impairments across neurological and neurodevelopmental conditions. Despite an increasing number of controlled studies that have assessed the potential rehabilitative effects of music, neural mechanisms underlying therapeutic benefits remain poorly understood. Here we present the ARM framework: a neurobiologically-informed model integrating three key systems: Auditory processing networks that encode temporal and spectral features; Reward circuitry activated by musical pleasure and prediction, and Motor systems engaged through auditory-motor coupling and rhythmic entrainment. We examine how specific MBIs leverage these systems to varying degrees and show how understanding these mechanisms is essential for predicting individual treatment response, personalizing interventions, and developing next-generation therapeutic approaches that optimize engagement of specific neural systems.
Intrusive and voluntary memory from a single system: A retrieved-context account of selective interference in the trauma-film paradigm
Jordan Gunn; Richard Henson; Emily A Holmes; Tommy Mcconnell; Deborah Talmi
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Memory theory must explain why interference can affect deliberate and involuntary remembering differently. Studies using distressing films show that a film reminder followed by an imagery-competing task such as Tetris can reduce later spontaneous memories of the film (intrusions) while leaving voluntary memory relatively intact. This selective interference effect is often interpreted through clinical theories of traumatic memory in which intrusive and voluntary remembering depend on different memory representations. We develop an alternative account in an emotional Context Maintenance and Retrieval (eCMR) model that predicts sequences of film and non-film recall events. Events become associated with context, a changing internal representation of experience. A film reminder reinstates film-associated context, so mental imagery generated during the subsequent task becomes associated with that context. During later retrieval, task memories compete with film memories cued by the same context, reducing film recall without weakening the original film associations. During deliberate recall, however, we propose that people pursue the goal of remembering the film by constructing and maintaining a retrieval cue that distinguishes film from task material. In simulations, sustained support from this cue was required to reproduce the selective-interference pattern across reminder and task conditions, protecting deliberate recall relative to involuntary retrieval. These results suggest that competitor learning and retrieval cueing can produce selective interference within a shared memory system, motivating tests in other memory tasks.
How perceived social, emotional, and behavioral skills differ across the life span
Christopher Napolitano; Christopher J. Soto; Madison Nicole Sewell; Heejun Roy Yoon; Brent Roberts
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We investigated age-related differences in perceived social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills and gender variations using a large cross-sectional sample (N=31,315, ages 10-70). Using generalized additive models (GAMs), we identified four key findings. First, modest, temporary negative age gradients emerged during early adolescence, consistent with the “disruption principle”. Second, despite this disruption, mean levels across all five domains—Self-Management, Social Engagement, Cooperation, Emotional Resilience, and Innovation—were positively associated with age, showing steep age gradients consistent with maturation during middle adolescence and early adulthood. Third, facet-level analyses uncovered significant heterogeneity in age-related patterns otherwise obscured at the domain level. Fourth, gender differences emerged: men and women varied in age-related patterns for Cooperation and Innovation, while non-binary participants—despite lower baseline levels—exhibited significantly steeper positive age gradients than male and female counterparts across several domains. Collectively, these results highlight both parallels and distinctions between SEB skill development and established personality trait principles. This comprehensive map informs future longitudinal research and the design of developmentally appropriate interventions across the lifespan.
Mental health of preadolescents in western Ukraine: feasibility and acceptability of a school-based psychosocial intervention during war
Oleksandr 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), post-traumatic stress disorder (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 explored 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 Children’s Revised Impact of Event Scale CRIES-8, 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: Our work provides preliminary evidence of the feasibility and acceptability of a school-based intervention designed to promote children’s psychological well-being and mental health during ongoing war, with positive perceived impacts reported by children, families, and school staff. Interventions incorporating mindfulness and self-compassion training may represent promising approaches for reducing trauma-related symptoms in children exposed to adversity. Larger controlled studies using standardized measures are needed to assess effectiveness before broader dissemination can be considered.
Preventing teacher and parental violence against children: A cluster-randomized controlled trial of a school-based intervention approach in Tanzanian primary schools
Eliud Kabelege; Katharina Mattonet; Lena Kolwey; Getrude Mkinga; Mabula Nkuba; Manuela Fritz; Faustine Bwire Masath; Katharin Hermenau; Janina Isabel Steinert; Tobias Hecker
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Background: Violence against children (VAC) at homes and schools remains highly prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. We tested the effectiveness of a preventive intervention addressing teacher and parental violence simultaneously. Methods: In this two-arm, cluster randomised controlled trial, 16 public primary schools in Morogoro, Tanzania, were randomly allocated (1:1) to receive either the Interaction Competencies with Children (ICC) programme or no intervention. Children (aged 8–15 years), their parents, and teachers were enrolled. The ICC intervention targeted teachers and parents focusing on non-violent behaviour management strategies and positive adult–child interactions. Interviewers at follow-up were blinded. The primary outcome was emotional and physical VAC, measured by children and adults’ reports at baseline and follow-up. All randomised participants were analysed. Missing data were estimated through multiple imputation. The trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT#06369025). Findings: In total, 410 and 427 children, 380 and 394 mothers, 253 and 246 fathers, and 244 and 235 teachers were assigned to the intervention and control condition, respectively. Participants were recruited between 15 April to 24 August 2024 for baseline and between 1 October 2024 to 21 February 2025 for follow-up assessment. Participants in intervention schools reported significantly greater reductions in emotional and physical violence by mothers (child report (CR): Cohen’s d = 0·227 for emotional violence (EV), 0·134 for physical violence (PV); adult report (AR): 0·343 for EV, 0·473 for PV), fathers (CR: 0·180 for EV, 0·215 for PV; AR: 0·222 for EV, 0·187 for PV), and teachers (CR: 0·089 for EV, 0·164 for PV; AR: 0·336 for EV, 0·607 for PV). No adverse events related to the intervention were detected. Interpretation: By leveraging the infrastructure of public schools, ICC offers an effective and scalable multi-sectoral model for VAC prevention.
MBB-AVR: a mind-brain-body dataset with dynamic affective states in immersive virtual reality
Antonin Fourcade; Anthony Buck Ciston; Lucy Roellecke; Jeroen de Mooij; Hector Leos; Arno Villringer; Sara Carletto; Francesca Malandrone; Michael Gaebler
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We present MindBrainBody-AffectiveVR (MBB-AVR), a multimodal dataset capturing continuous affective experience and both central and peripheral physiological responses during naturalistic emotional stimulation in immersive virtual reality. Forty-seven healthy adults (24 female, 22 male, 1 non-binary; age = 27.1 ± 5.4) viewed a 23-minute stereoscopic 360° video sequence, composed of computer-generated, language-free content designed to elicit high affective variability over time, presented via a head-mounted display (HTC Vive Pro Eye). While immersed, participants continuously rated their momentary valence and arousal using a previously validated rating tool with real-time visual feedback. Synchronized recordings include 64-channel EEG, ECG, respiration, photoplethysmography, galvanic skin response, and head and eye tracking with pupillometry. Participants additionally completed questionnaires including interoceptive sensibility and alexithymia. The dataset is organized following the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and includes extracted low-level audio and video features of the stimulus. It may support research on the temporal dynamics of affect, multimodal physiological correlates of emotion, and affective computing. The dataset is available at https://gin.g-node.org/fourcade_a/mbb-avr.
Increasing cerebellar beta rhythms shifts cerebral oscillatory signatures of context-driven language processing
Sandra Ambichler; Tessa Portier; Vitória Piai; Jana Klaus
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While there is growing consensus that the cerebellum is part of the cerebrally centred network underlying language processing, the direct nature of its contribution to comprehension and production remains unknown. In particular, while both processes require lexical access, production additionally involves motor processes linked to articulatory planning, which has fuelled the view that the cerebellum is primarily involved in motor control in language production. Cortically, both lexical access and articulatory planning are known to be driven by alpha-beta power decreases. To disentangle cerebellar involvement in language, this study investigated the modulatory effect of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) over the right cerebellum on context-driven language comprehension and production. In a cross-over, double-blind, sham-controlled within-participants design, 32 healthy volunteers received 20 minutes of 20-Hz tACS (2 mA peak-to-peak) targeting the right posterior cerebellum. Immediately afterwards, they performed a context-driven language task while EEG was recorded from 32 channels. In the task, visually presented lead-in sentences creating a constraining or unconstraining context were followed by a picture depicting the final word of the sentence. Participants were instructed to name the picture (production) or judge its animacy (comprehension). Responses became slower overall following active compared to sham tACS, and this increase was more pronounced in the comprehension task. In line with previous work, reliable context-related oscillatory power decreases were observed in response to the context manipulation, but exhibited a different pattern across tasks and stimulation conditions. For production, beta-centred power decreases following sham shifted to temporally and spatially extended alpha power decreases following active tACS. By contrast, alpha-centred power decreases following sham tACS in the comprehension task increased following active tACS. Increasing beta activity in the right posterior cerebellum thus affected early stages of context-driven language processing linked to lexical access in both language domains. The stimulation-induced spectral, spatial and temporal shifts suggest recruitment of alternative cortical resources as a consequence of cerebellar network modulation. This interpretation is consistent with the cerebellum functioning as a network node coordinating temporal dynamics across distributed language regions.
Effects of Stoic Training on Fear of Negative Evaluation and Responses to Social-Evaluative Stress: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Michael William Lewis; Charles Kalarchian; Alexander MacLellan
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Purpose: Stoic philosophy has influenced cognitive and behavioral therapies, but Stoic training has received limited empirical evaluation. This preregistered randomized controlled trial examined whether Stoic training reduced fear of negative evaluation (FNE), improved broader psychological outcomes, increased Stoic attitudes and behaviors, and altered subjective and cardiac responses to acute social-evaluative stress. Methods: Undergraduate students (M age = 19.16 years, SD = 1.05; 81% women) were randomized to eight days of online Stoic training or an active control involving literary-fiction readings. Ninety-eight participants completed pretraining and posttraining self-report assessments (Stoic training, n = 46; control, n = 52). Seventy-eight subsequently completed a modified Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), of whom 66 provided usable electrocardiography data for the preregistered cardiac analyses. Before speech preparation, participants in the Stoic condition completed a five-minute Negative Visualization exercise, whereas control participants waited quietly. Results: Relative to the active control, Stoic training was associated with lower posttraining FNE when controlling for pretraining scores, b = −2.77, p = .016, adjusted d = −0.50, and higher posttraining Stoic Attitudes and Behaviours Scale scores, b = 6.06, p = .038, adjusted d = 0.43. Exploratory subscale analyses suggested possible effects on Beliefs About Control and Beliefs About Happiness, although neither remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Between-condition effects on resilience, self-efficacy, and rumination were not significant. During the TSST, cardiac effects were contrary to prediction: Stoic training was associated with higher heart rate, b = 4.13, p = .038, adjusted d = 0.53, and lower heart rate variability, although the latter effect narrowly missed statistical significance, b = −0.17, p = .053, adjusted d = −0.49. Subjective distress and state-anxiety responses to the TSST did not differ significantly by condition. Conclusions: Stoic training led to significantly greater reductions in FNE and increases in Stoic attitudes than an active control, whereas broader psychological outcomes did not differ significantly between conditions. These findings provide initial evidence that brief Stoic training may modify a cognitive vulnerability relevant to social evaluation while engaging the attitudes and behaviors it is intended to cultivate. The unexpected cardiac effects may reflect the broader training, the acute Negative Visualization exercise administered before the stressor, or their combination, highlighting the need to disentangle the cumulative and acute effects of Stoic practice and determine how the timing and context of Negative Visualization influence responses to social-evaluative stress.
Acute Self-Reported and Objective Physical Activity Moderate the Association of Daily Stress with Affective Wellbeing and Self-Esteem
Justin Hachenberger; Malin Brueckmann; Usama EL-Awad; Elke Wild; Sakari Lemola
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Daily stress can have detrimental effects on affective wellbeing and self-esteem. Previous research suggests that both the general physical activity level and acute physical activity, may reduce the adverse consequences of stress. However, studies investigating these associations in the context of daily life have typically focused on either acute physical activity or the general physical activity level alone and have largely relied on self-reported measures, which may be subject to recall bias and difficulties in accurately quantifying the duration and intensity of daily physical activity. The present study addresses these limitations using a 28-day experience sampling design combined with ambulatory accelerometry to assess physical activity not only subjectively but also objectively via accelerometry. A total of 96 young adults (81.2% female; 14.6% male; 4.2% diverse or preferred not to report their gender) aged 18 to 30 years participated in the study, overall providing complete questionnaire and accelerometry data for 2,194 and 2,175 days, respectively. Multilevel analyses revealed that acute physical activity, but not the baseline physical activity level moderated the adverse association of stress experiences with state-levels of positive affect, negative affect, and self-esteem. The stress-buffering effect of acute physical activity was not moderated by the severity of depressive and anxiety symptoms at baseline. Overall, these findings extend existing evidence on the role of physical activity in potentially reducing the adverse consequences of stress by differentiating between acute physical activity and the individual’s baseline physical activity level, considering between-person moderators such as affective symptom severity, and including self-esteem as an additional outcome variable.
Looking into the scientist’s mind: The effects of disclosing scientists’ rationale on students’ scientific reasoning and epistemic beliefs
Katharina Düsing; Vanessa van den Bogaert; Till Bruckermann; Hannah Greving; Julia Cathérine Thomas; Miriam Brandt; Anke Schumann; Daniel Lewanzik; Christian Voigt; Ute Harms
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This study investigated the effects of systematically developed video variations on students’ scientific reasoning (SR) and epistemic beliefs (EBs). Drawing on a novel video development framework, we evaluated four video variations that differed in (i.) how scientific practices were presented—either in a cookbook style (focusing on declarative “what” information) or in a scientific reasoning style (integrating declarative, procedural, and epistemic knowledge) and (ii.) how scientists’ thought processes were presented—either as science-in-the-making (concurrent think-aloud insights) or as ready-made science (post hoc reconstruction of thought processes). In a pre–post design, 512 secondary students each engaged with a digital learning environment in which one of the video variations was embedded. Multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVAs) that were conducted to control for pretest performance revealed significant main effects of the presentation formats. The scientific reasoning style fostered more elaborated EBs regarding the source of scientific knowledge compared to the cookbook style. Presenting scientists’ thought processes as science-in-the-making improved EBs (again, regarding the source), whereas ready-made science led to higher SR performance in planning and conducting investigations. These findings demonstrate that fine-grained design choices in video representations of scientific practices support SR and EBs to different degrees. We discuss the implications for future research and for education.
Synchrony under uncertainty. The effects of auditory context on the perception of the temporal location of quasi-musical sounds
Anne Danielsen; Sabine Leske; Justin London
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Auditory perception and sensorimotor synchronization always occur within a specific auditory context, a fact that is often overlooked when they are studied in the laboratory. Here we address the question of how our perception of a given sound's temporal characteristics is modulated by the sounds surrounding it. Previous research has highlighted the importance of acoustic factors like attack and duration in defining both a sound's perceived temporal position ("P-center") and the temporal range in which it is heard as synchronized with another sound ("beat bin"). Our experiment investigated whether the same probe/target pair is perceived differently when situated in contexts of sounds with different acoustic features, from contexts of mostly clear, sharply defined sounds to contexts of mostly “muddy,” noisy ones. Our findings reveal that the P-center of the target sound shifts progressively later as the context becomes dominated by sounds with softer onsets, and the variability of P-center location—indicative of the width of the beat bin—also increases under such conditions. These results significantly advance our understanding of how sonic environments influence the perception of a sound's temporal characteristics, and shed light on its underlying neural mechanisms. The study offers new insights into the intricate nature of temporal perception in complex auditory environments and sets the stage for further exploration of the mechanisms underlying auditory processing and synchronization.
Consistency: A Critical but Often Overlooked Requirement for Causal Inference in Psychological Research
Lukas Junker; Michael P. Grosz
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Psychologists are often interested in specific causal quantities (“What is the effect of reducing social-media scrolling by 20 minutes on well-being?”) but tend to focus on vague questions (“Does ‘time spent on social media’ predict well-being?”). There is a mismatch between the causal effects researchers care about and the associations and correlations they compute. In this article, we highlight consistency as a foundational requirement for causal inference that can bridge this mismatch and make statistical estimates causally interpretable. Consistency shows how causal quantities are interpretable only when (a) the causal quantity of interest—the causal estimand—is described precisely enough that it does not bundle different versions of the treatment (e.g., passive scrolling, reading distressing news, or chatting with friends on social media) that have different effects, and (b) the way that the treatment variable changes in the data matches this causal estimand of interest. We clarify these requirements and illustrate how to state and assess them in settings common in psychological research, with a focus on indirect experimental manipulations and multidimensional constructs. Making this step explicit helps researchers articulate their estimands more transparently and is a prerequisite for other concerns such as confounding and model specification.
The Limits of Identifiability in the Self-Exciting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck Model
Hannah Pongratz; Constantin Gregor Meyer-Grant
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Evidence-accumulation models play a central role in the field of decision-making research, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding choice behavior and response times, including speed–accuracy tradeoffs (SATs). In this framework, the dominant explanation for SATs has long been that prioritizing speed lowers the boundary separation, meaning less evidence is needed to make a choice. Recently, however, an alternative account has been proposed according to which emphasizing speed induces a confirmation bias toward the currently favored option. Such a behavior can be formally captured by a self-exciting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. However, drawing on asymptotic arguments and extensive simulation studies, we demonstrate that under certain conditions, key parameters of the resulting evidence-accumulation model are not jointly identifiable. We explain the underlying cause of this identifiability issue, examine its practical consequences for model-based inference, and present potential strategies to resolve or mitigate it.
Attentional Experience, Autonomic Function and Network Dynamics During the ISAAA Observational Stage of Mindfulness Training
GAO JUNLING; Hank Leung; Kin Cheung Lee; Bonnie Wai Yan Wu; Qiqi Chen; Andrew Bakaki; Hin Hung Sik
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Objectives. To characterize attentional experience, pulse rate variability (PRV), and interpersonal pulse-rate networks during the observational stage of Interoceptive Sensitivity for Attentional–Autonomic Alignment (ISAAA) training. Methods. In an uncontrolled five-day meditation camp, 48 participants provided linked pre- and post-camp questionnaires. Post-camp wrist photoplethysmography recorded five minutes of rest followed by four five-minute practice blocks (n = 14). Exploratory analyses related three questionnaire scores to proportional rest-to-meditation RMSSD change (n = 12) and examined interpersonal pulse-rate networks (n = 14). Results. On the Toronto Mindfulness Scale (TMS), Curiosity increased by 2.70 points (95% CI [1.45, 3.95], dz = .63, p < .001, Holm-adjusted) and Decentering by 2.82 points ([1.80, 3.84], dz = .81, p < .001, Holm-adjusted); both remained Holm-significant across six alternative pre-post linkage reconstructions. RMSSD block means were lower during practice than at rest (50.36–68.80 vs. 96.70 ms), with no detected difference across practice blocks (p = .2773). Pulse rate showed no detectable change. Emotional Awareness correlated with the meditation/rest RMSSD ratio (ρ = −.68, p = .015, did not survive correction). Mean absolute interpersonal correlation was .070 at rest and .057 during the first practice block; no network comparison was significant. Conclusions. Stage 1 training was accompanied by increased curiosity and decentering. The physiological pattern is compatible with engaged observation, indicating a potential attention-autonomic correlation, while the baseline and processing need more data on a firm autonomic interpretation. Interpersonal networks provide an exploratory group-level perspective without establishing increased synchrony or social connection.
Real-time Associations Between Psychological States and Context in University Students with Suicidal Ideation: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study
Ana Portillo-Van Diest; Gemma Vilagut; Laura Ballester; Johan Bjureberg; Paula Carrasco; Raquel Falcó; Margalida Gili; Mathilde Husky; Glenn Kiekens; Francisco H. Machancoses
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Suicidal ideation (SI) is dynamic and linked to emotion regulation difficulties that may be reflected in associations between momentary psychological states and context. In a 2-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, 476 students reported passive daily SI, momentary psychological states (affect, stress, tiredness, concentration difficulties) and contexts four times per day. Multilevel network analysis compared contemporaneous, temporal, and between-person networks across three groups: one without SI or psychopathology (No-MD/SI), and two with low and high 14-day passive SI (Low- and High-SI). Low- and High-SI groups showed more temporally self-reinforcing negative affect and weaker affect-context connections. No-MD/SI students showed stronger positive affect recovery following negative affect. High-SI students spent less time with loved ones and were more likely to engage in conversation after stress than after positive emotions. Findings suggest that passive SI is associated with greater negative emotion rigidity and a shift in social connectedness from enjoyment to distress-driven coping.
Creating Online Cognitive Assessment Platform for Children’s Literacy and Math Skills: A Case Study Illustrated with the ACE Kids Platform
Vince S. H. Ngan; Jianhong Mo; Oscar Kwun Pok Wong; Melody Chi Ying Ng; Jana Chi-san Ho; Tomohiro Inoue; Catherine McBride; Urs Maurer
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Computerized versions of paper-and-pencil tests made behavioral assessments of children more automatic and precise. The COVID-19 pandemic further demonstrated the need for assessments to be offered online to allow for remote data collection. However, the design and implementation of computerized tests in an online environment come with various challenges. This article probes the issues, needs and challenges for the development of online assessment of reading and maths, and related cognitive abilities. The paper aims to inform researchers about logistical and technical considerations of developing a customized platform for online child data collection, including (a) technical considerations, (b) interface design, (c) data management, and (d) planning for validation against paper-and-pencil measures. These issues are illustrated with experiences gleaned from the development of an online assessment platform (ACE Kids platform), designed to deliver over 40 tests and questionnaires related to Chinese and English literacy as well as mathematics abilities in K3 – P6 children. The paper also highlights the unique challenges surrounding building online, self-directed biliteracy assessment involving a large assessment battery. Furthermore, we discuss features that improve the ease of use, instructional clarity, and retention of attention. We discussed the use of questionnaires to sample child usage experience during early stages of assessment development to optimize design. Finally, we give consolidated advice for the planning, development and data collection stages for such a customized assessment platform.
When Habits Dominate in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Tracking the Temporal Dynamics of Habitual and Goal-Directed Control
Chenyu Yuan; Yinqing Fan; Chaoyi Wu; Jingyi Zhang; Binxin Huang; Tingyue Bai; Trevor William Robbins; Tristan Bekinschtein; Zhen Wang
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Patients with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD) often struggle to suppress maladaptive habitual behaviours, yet the temporal dynamics of habit–goal arbitration remain unclear. Here we address this question using an intensive four-day training protocol followed by a time-resolved forced-response test, combined with computational modelling. OCD patients and healthy controls (HCs) showed comparable learning trajectories, indicating intact basic associative learning and perceptual–motor speed in OCD. Critically, when previously learned stimulus–response mappings were remapped, OCD patients exhibited a selective increase in habitual errors, but only within an early time window. At longer preparation times, differences disappeared. Computational model comparison showed that OCD patients were more likely than HCs to be best described by a habit model. Within this model, OCD patients showed reduced variability in habitual preparation latency, reflecting more temporally consistent, sharply tuned habit behaviour. Exploratory analyses linked greater symptom severity to more variable goal-directed preparation. Together, these findings suggest that precisely timed habitual responses are more likely to be expressed during early preparation in OCD. This early-expression bias offers a possible account of ego-dystonic compulsions as a biased race in response preparation, without treating the task as a direct test of competition between independent systems
A Critical Epistemological Audit of Early Evidence Syntheses in Generative AI Educational Research: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Tim Fütterer; Nina Peltzer; Peter Gerjets; Detmar Meurers; Tamara Powell Tate; Mark Warschauer; Valentin Emslander; Lisa Bardach; John hattie; Michael Sailer
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The rapid emergence of ChatGPT in education was accompanied by an equally rapid proliferation of meta-analyses synthesizing its effects on educational outcomes. We conducted a systematic epistemological audit of the first wave of these meta-analyses, evaluating both their methodological and reporting quality and the primary evidence they synthesized. We included meta-analyses published after the release of ChatGPT that quantitatively synthesized its effects on educational outcomes. Five meta-analyses comprising 87 unique primary studies met our inclusion criteria. We also reconstructed their quantitative evidence base and conducted exploratory three-level random-effects meta-analyses to examine effect magnitude, heterogeneity, and robustness, and how these varied with theoretically and methodologically relevant characteristics. The five meta-analyses generally searched multiple databases, specified eligibility criteria, and examined heterogeneity and potential publication bias, but showed limitations in independent screening and coding, preregistration, open data and code, and transparent reporting. The underlying primary evidence likewise showed methodological and reporting limitations and substantial conceptual heterogeneity. Among 69 classifiable primary studies, 79.7% assessed performance exclusively, whereas only 11.6% assessed learning exclusively. The reconstructed meta-analysis yielded a positive average effect (g = 0.83, 95% CI [0.68, 0.97]), but heterogeneity was substantial (I² = 94.06%; 95% prediction interval [−0.75, 2.41]), and estimates were markedly attenuated in sensitivity analyses addressing small-study and selection effects. Although positive effects remained among stronger studies assessing learning, increasingly stringent quality criteria rapidly reduced the evidence base, limiting the certainty and generalizability of conclusions about learning effects. Overall, our findings caution against interpreting a single pooled estimate as a stable general effect of ChatGPT on learning and highlight the need for more rigorous, conceptually precise, transparent, and reproducible research.
LLM-Generated Well-being Intervention Recommendations Are Sensitive to Psychological Profiles: A Proof-of-Concept Expert-Rating Study
Benjamin Kaveladze; Elizabeth Webb Lampe; Michael V. Heinz; Lisa Marsch; Andrew T. Campbell; Nicholas C. Jacobson
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Personalizing digital well-being interventions to fit the needs and preferences of individual users has been a longstanding challenge. Large language models (LLMs) may be well-suited for this task, using natural language reasoning to integrate heterogeneous user information into personalized guidance. We tested whether LLMs could generate intervention recommendations that were sensitive to differences across recipients’ psychological profiles. Across 178 undergraduate student profiles spanning 14 psychological measures, four LLMs recommended 10 scripted chatbot dialogues from a library of 222 options. Next, two experts rated the recommendations’ appropriateness for a given profile (1-10). For half of the profiles, raters saw recommendations generated for that student (matched condition); for the remainder, they saw recommendations generated for a different student (unmatched condition). As hypothesized, matched recommendations (M = 6.74) were rated as more appropriate than unmatched ones (M = 5.64, SMD = 0.50). These results provide evidence that LLMs can adapt their intervention recommendations to match psychological profiles. However, inter-rater reliability was poor (ICC = 0.22), and all LLMs showed substantial sensitivity to catalog order. As such, we stress the preliminary nature of the findings. Whether such tailoring translates into improved well-being outcomes for users remains to be tested.
Inter-lexical inhibition is present early and has a unique developmental trajectory: evidence from a novel version of sub-phonemic mismatch
John Baltazar Muegge; Keith Baxelbaum; Abigail Fergus; Bob McMurray
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Lateral inhibition is a key property of spoken word recognition and has been implicated as an important factor in novel word learning and a locus of difference for some language disorders. Work on the development of lateral inhibition has produced mixed results, however, suggesting that it may not be fully operative in young children and has a protracted developmental trajectory. Here, we posit that these results have less to do with a lack of inhibition at these ages and is more a product of limitations of the common paradigm used to index inhibition, the sub-phonemic mismatch task. We introduce a variant of sub-phonemic mismatch which is able to detect inhibition at these early age groups. 236 children from grades 2-5 were given a multisyllabic word (battleship) whose initial portion could contain acoustic cues towards a nonword (bettle-ship) or another lexical item (bottle-ship). Eye-movements made across these conditions revealed that children have robust lateral inhibition even at young ages. Importantly, the strength of this inhibition is largely stable across ages. Further exploratory analyses suggest that development does occur, but in the timing or duration of inhibition instead of its magnitude. A follow-up experiment with adults replicates and clarifies this finding, suggesting a novel framework for understanding inhibition.
Youth First Supports Adolescent Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial of a Teacher-Delivered School-Based Program in India
Peter L. Cooper; Katherine S. Leventhal; Gunjika Misra; Nandita Bhatla; Hari Shanker; Steve Leventhal
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Adolescents face intersecting challenges that increase their risk of poor mental health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where 90% of adolescents live. School-based wellbeing programs offer a promising, cost-effective prevention strategy, but evidence from large-scale, government-delivered interventions with long-term follow-up is limited. We evaluated Youth First, an in-school wellbeing program delivered by teachers in rural government schools in two districts of Bihar, India. We conducted a secondary analysis of a cluster-randomized controlled trial involving 70 schools. Sixty-nine schools provided baseline data from 5,445 Grade 7–8 students and were randomized to Youth First or standard education. Data were collected at baseline, 8 months, and 20 months. Primary outcomes were physical wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, and social and peer support; secondary outcomes included psychosocial and behavioral measures. Modified intention-to-treat analyses used mixed-effects difference-in-differences models with school and student random intercepts. Primary-outcome p-values were adjusted using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure; secondary analyses were exploratory and unadjusted for multiplicity. Youth First significantly improved social and peer support across multiple time points and cohorts after adjustment, with an additional effect on psychological wellbeing. Exploratory analyses found nominally significant effects on self-efficacy, empowerment, internalizing symptoms, and self-reported tobacco use, varying by grade and follow-up. Several effects persisted or emerged in the baseline Grade 8 cohort one year after program completion. Youth First improved several adolescent outcomes during exposure and showed some sustained or delayed effects when delivered by government teachers through school systems in participating rural schools in Bihar.
The effects of non-pharmacological school-based interventions on educational outcomes in children and young people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analysis
Dixiao Zhang; Dimitra Hartas; Olympia Palikara; Vasileios Sideropoulos
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Children and young people (CYP) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often face inequalities when accessing learning opportunities. The evidence base is mixed on the effectiveness of school-based interventions for CYP with ADHD on academic progress gains, improved attendance, and enhanced wellbeing. We conducted a meta-analysis to specify whether school-based interventions improve the educational outcomes of CYP with ADHD. Seven databases were searched until 2nd of October 2026. The review followed the PRISMA guidelines. Of the 2164 items identified, only 16 studies were included in our analysis as they met our inclusion criteria: a) CYP with ADHD aged 5-17 years old; b) school-based interventions; c) randomized controlled trials; and d) educational outcomes. Given the substantial heterogeneity across intervention types, the findings show an inconclusive pattern of what works and what doesn’t. Our main model demonstrated that overall school-based interventions showed a small effect on educational outcomes amongst CYP with ADHD. No significant moderators, such as intervention types and outcome domains, were detected. Future research should examine the broader contextual, educational, and environmental factors associated with better educational outcomes amongst CYP with ADHD, with the aim of developing more evidence-informed and targeted interventions.
What You Miss Won’t Move You: Awareness Connects Respiratory Change to Subjective Arousal
Norman A. S. Farb; Kyle Logie; Rose Amir Pour
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Does physiological arousal shape emotion only when consciously perceived? Existing paradigms confound detection with signal magnitude, rendering this question intractable. The Breath Change Awareness Task (BCAT) resolves this confound by orthogonally manipulating signal magnitude and detection. Across five studies of undergraduate and community samples (total N = 787), detected changes produced arousal scaled to magnitude; equivalent undetected changes produced no differential response. In a pre-registered laboratory study with physiological verification (Study 5; N = 206), belt recordings confirmed physical compliance, and arousal gating was stronger during interoceptive engagement than visual tracking. Self-reported interoceptive awareness (MAIA) predicted detection confidence but not objective threshold, reflecting a disposition toward bodily awareness rather than detection ability. Conscious detection gates interoceptive arousal transfer: physiological change moves us only when we notice it. Findings are based on self-reported arousal and predominantly undergraduate samples, and warrant replication with clinical populations and objective physiological measures.
Identity in Tune? School Identity Development Predicts Declining Preferences for Non-Mainstream Music Preferences Across Adolescence
Andrik Becht; Tom ter Bogt
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This pre-registered study examined within-person longitudinal associations between adolescents’ school identity and preferences for non-mainstream music. Media Delinquency Theory proposes that weaker school identity precedes stronger non-mainstream music preferences, whereas Music Marker Theory proposes reverse effects. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models were estimated among 900 adolescents (M age at T1 = 12.38 years, 50.1% female). Results provided limited support for Media Delinquency Theory: weaker school identity commitment predicted stronger preferences for heavy metal, whereas music preferences did not predict changes in school identity. Increasing reconsideration of school identity predicted lower preferences for heavy metal and goth music in middle adolescence. At the between-person level, weaker school identity commitment was associated with stronger goth preferences. Adolescents’ attraction to non-mainstream music became increasingly stable during adolescence.
Social and psychological consequences of sustained civic engagement: Insights from the 2024/25 Student Blockades in Serbia
Ana Ivanov; Neda Janićijević; Milica Manojlović; Matija Gvozden; Vojin Simunović; Sanda Stanković
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Objective: Student protest movements represent critical contexts for understanding how collective action shapes psychological development. This study examines the 2024/25 student blockades in Serbia, a unique, prolonged, nonpartisan, and leaderless mobilization unfolding across state universities under active government pressure and repression. Moving beyond purely political analyses, this research explores how participants made sense of their experiences, focusing on the intersections between collective engagement, identity transformation, social reconfiguration, and mental health. Method: Adopting a qualitative framework grounded in phenomenological principles, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews (60–90 minutes) with a convenient snowball sample of 20 active undergraduate and graduate students (11 women, MAGE = 22.15, SDAGE = 1.69). Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, supported by MAXQDA 2022 software. Results: The analysis identified three superordinate themes: (1) The Blockades as a Transformative Lived Space, reflecting changes in everyday routines and political subjectivity; (2) Reconfiguration of Social Relations through Collective Engagement, examining collective identity and moral commitment; and (3) Emotional Strain and Relational Buffering, reflecting experiences of anxiety, threat, and burnout, alongside resources that mitigated distress. Conclusion: The 2024/2025 Serbian student blockades constitute not only a political event but also an experience of sustained collective action that profoundly reshaped students' self-concept, social relations, and emotional functioning. Crucially, the interpersonal bonds that drive transformation also generate psychological strain, such as exhaustion and guilt. Acknowledging that the research team's shared socio-political positionality shaped these interpretations, the findings carry vital implications for universities, mental health practitioners, and civil society organizations.
When the brain can change: effects of neuroplasticity education on beliefs about brain-based mental disorders
Olha Guley; Elena Pasquinelli; Daniel Nettle
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Mental disorders are increasingly framed as brain-based, which can promote pessimism about recovery. We tested whether brief education about neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to change throughout life, can counter these beliefs. Across three preregistered vignette experiments with UK adults (Ns = 414, 411, and 418), participants viewed a brain-framed mental disorder after either a brief neuroplasticity video and text intervention or a matched control. The intervention increased the perceived possibility of recovery, but this effect was short-lived after a single exposure in Study 1 and more durable with a booster in Study 2. The effect in Study 3 was not significant, but a pooled analysis of data from Studies 2 and 3 confirmed the positive effect overall. The intervention did not affect perceived treatment efficacy, nor did it reduce desired social distance from people with mental disorders. In Study 3, higher familiarity with the disorder was associated with a higher perceived recovery and lower desired social distance. These findings suggest neuroplasticity education can increase public optimism about recovery from mental disorders, but changing treatment beliefs or social attitudes may require more targeted interventions.
Registered Reports as the default pathway for confirmatory publication
Marta Topor; Joshua Silberstein Bamford; Marina Bazhydai; Zhang Chen; Hu Chuan-Peng; Clare Conry-Murray; Thiago Leiros Costa; Antica Culina; Mario Dalmaso; Zoltan Dienes
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By rewarding speed, volume, and coherent positive narratives, traditional publishing incentivizes questionable scientific practices and analytic flexibility. The latter especially contributes to blurring the distinction between exploration and confirmation, which inflates the apparent strength of confirmatory claims. This systemic issue has gone unchecked for decades, leaving the scientific community with a body of scholarly literature that is unreliable and lacking validity. Registered Reports (RRs) address problematic publishing practices by requiring a priori registration of confirmatory tests, which is peer-reviewed before the research begins (stage 1). The editorial acceptance of a stage 1 plan establishes a commitment to publication regardless of research outcomes. Publication remains, nonetheless, contingent on a second peer review and editorial scrutiny (stage 2) to verify that the approved plan was followed, all deviations were transparently disclosed and justified, confirmatory and exploratory claims are clearly delineated, and the integrity of the design was maintained. Meta-scientific comparisons indicate that RRs reduce outcome-based publication bias and improve methodological rigor without compromising perceived novelty. By making accepted RR protocols and their review history citable research outputs, RRs also strengthen recognition for peer-review work. In this perspective, we argue that RRs should become the primary mode of confirmatory publication moving forward.
Self-Identity and Trauma- and Stressor-related Psychopathology: A Systematic Review
Kari Ellen James; Blake M McKimmie; Fiona Maccallum
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Across the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in the role self-identity may play in the development and maintenance of trauma- and stressor-related psychopathology. Shaped by foundational theoretical models, this interest has led to an expanding yet heterogeneous body of literature dominated by a focus on event centrality and characterized by overlapping concepts and conceptual ambiguity. This systematic review aims to synthesize this literature to enhance conceptual clarity and guide the field’s development. 36 studies (77.8% traumatic stress, 22.2% prolonged grief) representing 7,488 individual participants met inclusion criteria. Three overarching self-identity constructs were identified through a synthesis of the literature: self-consistency, self-complexity, and self-identity processing. Greater self-consistency and self-complexity were generally associated with less severe traumatic stress and prolonged grief symptoms. There were too few studies to draw meaningful conclusions about self-identity processing. Notably, almost all studies employed cross-sectional correlational designs, limiting any conclusions about causal relationships. Further, most studies relied on self-report and so are vulnerable to motivational reporting biases. And while many constructs reflected proposed theoretical mechanisms, integration with broader models and literature was limited, constraining cumulative theoretical development. Culturally relevant self-construal emerged as a potentially important moderating factor, underscoring a need for more cross-cultural research. Limitations of the current review notwithstanding, we hope that providing greater conceptual clarity regarding theoretically important but less-studied aspects of the self will provide a useful framework for guiding future research and theory development, and, ultimately, improve outcomes for those living with these conditions.
Beyond validity: Empirical investigations of the statistical power of da in Recognition Memory
Adva Levi; Caren M. Rotello; Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein
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Recognition memory relies on sensitivity measures to identify memory effects (i.e., differences in sensitivity). Alas, all commonly used sensitivity measures (d′, A′, Percent correct, and Pr) have been shown to be confounded with response bias, raising serious validity concerns for the literature. da, a signal-detection measure grounded in the Unequal-Variance Signal-Detection model, has been proposed as a bias-independent alternative. Yet, establishing da as the gold standard for measuring memory effects requires demonstrating not only that it produces low rates of false discoveries, but also that it has sufficient statistical power to detect genuine differences in sensitivity. The low false discovery rate has been established with both simulated and large-scale experiments (Levi, Danino, et al., 2026; Levi, Rotello & Goshen-Gottstein, 2026). Here, we examined the estimated power of da using empirical data from 960 online participants who completed a recognition task under two sensitivity conditions (repetition manipulation). We used resampling techniques to test power levels for multiple sample sizes and found that da achieved significance rates comparable to those of the commonly-used measures, regardless of the statistical test or effect size. The typical 80% power threshold was achieved with approximately 48 participants. Together with our previous findings, these results establish da as a valid and statistically powerful measure, thus confirming the recommendation to adopt da as the measure of choice in recognition memory research.
A Benchmark for Gaze-Based Target Detection in Immersive Virtual Reality: Effects of Eccentricity, Size, and Speed on Observation and Detection Dynamics
Arwa Leilah Adib; Margaret E. Sereno; David Schwarz
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Virtual reality enables studying active visual search and gaze behavior under naturalistic, free-viewing conditions while preserving experimental control. However, free head-eye coordination, extended 3D space, dynamic target trajectories, and headset-specific field of view and eye-tracking constraints mean that findings from traditional 2D paradigms cannot be assumed to generalize to immersive environments. Interpreting gaze-based outcomes in VR requires bench-marks that establish how basic target properties influence detection. We used target eccentricity, size, and speed as benchmark predictors of visual detection in an immersive VR coin-foraging task. Using in-headset eye-tracking, participants guided a gaze-controlled avatar to collect coins that varied in gaze-relative eccentricity, size, and speed. We modeled gaze-based observation probability, observation latency, dwell time, gaze-coin angular distance, and saccade dynamics. Observation probability was analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression, whereas latency was analyzed with a censoring-aware Cox framework that retained never-detected coins. Eccen-tricity and size showed the clearest benchmark effects. Peripheral and small coins were less like-ly to be detected. Speed’s role was more nuanced. Although slow coins were detected more of-ten in a binary model, this advantage did not persist in a censoring-aware survival analysis, suggesting that speed influenced the opportunity for observation more than momentary salience. Consistent with this interpretation, slow coins produced longer dwell times, and gaze-coin an-gular distance and saccade measures indicated that target properties shaped both the geometry and effort for acquisition. These findings establish a feature-based benchmark for gaze-based de-tection in immersive visual search and demonstrate the importance of modeling missed targets as censored detection opportunities.
A Person-Centered Analysis of Change in Supports for Child Welfare-Involved Families and Caregiver and Child Outcomes
Qiong Wu; Lenore M McWey; Melissa Radey; Ming Cui
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Families involved with the U.S. child welfare system are overwhelmingly lower-resourced and often experience multiple hardships, which can adversely affect mental health. Research indicates that public, private, and child welfare system supports may individually shape caregiver and child well-being. Conversely, loss or insufficiency of support is linked to more family hardship and worse parent and child mental health. With data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being II, we used a person-centered approach to examine longitudinal configurations of public, private, and child welfare system supports over three years and caregiver and child outcomes. Results revealed distinct patterns of family supports over time, and that public and private supports tended to be stable, but child welfare system supports were likely to change over time. Mean difference comparisons across classes generally revealed that parents with strong private safety nets reported better mental health outcomes for themselves and lower behavioral problems for their children compared to those with high public and low private supports. Findings from this study have practical implications for supporting families involved with the child welfare system.
The Structure and Content of Meaning in Speech Reflects Mental Health
Luke Leckie; Alicia Meuret; Thomas Ritz; Olivia Losiewicz; Michelle G. Craske; Jacob G. Foster
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Mental health shapes the progression and content of thought. Studies have linked depression, anxiety, and stress with repetitive negative thoughts, but it remains unclear whether these disturbances are reflected in the structure of an individual's speech. We introduce an approach to quantify the structure of thought as expressed in language, applying it to memory recountings from 82 individuals across six psychotherapy sessions. We model each recounting’s semantic progression with contextual embeddings, and use persistent homology to identify loops of meaning, as recountings circle back upon themselves. More loops are associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and negative affect, and with negative self-referential language, implicating them as geometric markers of negative fixation and rumination. Semantic content also relates to mental health. However, neither semantic structure nor content mediate therapeutic improvement. These findings reveal that the semantic structure of speech offers a quantitative window into thought disturbances in depressive and anxiety disorders.
Digital Stress: Theoretical Conceptualizations, Empirical Findings, and Tasks for Future Research
Leonard Reinecke; Frank M. Schneider; Alicia Gilbert
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Over the past decade, mobile Internet-enabled digital devices have provided ubiquitous access to media content and communication, resulting in unprecedented levels of “always on” media use. As a consequence, many users feel stressed and strained by the new demands of digital media use. A fast-growing field of research has addressed such forms of “digital stress” and its psychological implications. The present chapter provides a review and theoretical integration of the state of digital stress research. After an introduction to the basic psychological mechanisms underlying stress reactions based on the Transactional Model of Stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), the chapter reviews and synthesizes existing definitions of digital stress. It then summarizes and systematizes key empirical findings regarding the central predictors, boundary conditions, and effects of digital stress. The review concludes with a discussion of recent developments, open questions, and future challenges for the field of digital stress research.
The Influence of Victim Gender and Professional Identity on Perceptions of AI-Generated Image Abuse
Matthew Richard Ivory; Sophie J Nightingale
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Artificially-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (AI-NCII) is a form of gender-based violence and sexual abuse. Modern AI tools enable the easy creation of highly realistic NCII, with the potential to cause very real and profound harms to those depicted. Although victim characteristics, such as gender and sexual activity, are known to influence third-party judgements, less is understood about how victims from stigmatised or marginalised groups are judged and how these characteristics influence victim blame and perceptions of harm. In this preregistered vignette study, participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario describing a transgender or cisgender sex worker or office worker who was the victim of AI-NCII creation and subsequent sharing. The ideal victim framework and expectancy violations theory were used to interpret who was blamed and perceived as harmed, and why. Results revealed that sex workers were blamed more and perceived as less harmed than office workers. It was also observed that while transgender victims were blamed more by men than women, they were perceived as experiencing comparable levels of harm to cisgender victims. The findings suggest when victims do not conform to expected norms or are perceived to engage in behaviours inconsistent with ideal victim expectations, public sympathy may be reduced. Future interventions should therefore prioritise education about victimisation and challenge the expectations and beliefs that shape judgements of victims, rather than place responsibility on victims to conform to an ideal or reduce the visibility of their identities.
Do breadth and dose indices of exercise adherence measure the same thing? It depends on how unrecorded sessions are coded
FERNANDO GIMENO MARCO; Estela Prad Lucas
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Adherence to prescribed exercise between supervised sessions is routinely quantified with composite indices built from weekly self-reports, yet whether two reasonably constructed indices agree or diverge can hinge on decisions that are rarely scrutinized. Using weekly records from a community-based chronic-pain exercise program (14 participants, 173 person-weeks), we compared a breadth index (how many prescribed components were performed) with two frequency-based dose indices (uncapped and capped). Between persons, the indices ranked participants almost identically; within persons, however, their agreement proved highly sensitive to a single, usually invisible coding decision—whether components marked as performed but left unquantified are read as zero days. Naive zero-coding implied that breadth and dose capture different things within persons (correlations near .25), whereas activity-compatible scenarios moved these correlations to .41–.76. Rather than defend one imputation, we recommend reporting a bounded sensitivity analysis that brackets the plausible range, and we translate the findings into concrete guidance for designing exercise diaries and tracking apps so that participation and dose are recorded unambiguously.
Using Language Models to Predict Values, Personality, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life From Ideal-Life Descriptions
Joffrey Fuhrer; Théo Desbordes
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Does the way we picture our ideal life reveal what we value, who we are, and how we thrive? In a preregistered study (N = 273), we tested whether free-form descriptions (median 109 words) and seven-keyword lists of one's ideal life predict a broad battery of psychological constructs: the Big Five, the ten Schwartz values, social dominance, political orientation, meaning in life, and subjective well-being. Using regularized linear probes on embeddings from transformer large language models (LLMs), inspired by model-interpretability research, we find that ideal-life narratives predict most constructs above chance in both conditions (mean r = 0.24 for free-form, mean r = 0.12 for keywords). This free-form advantage was concentrated on constructs people rarely name outright, such as achievement, benevolence, conformity, and emotional stability, implying that part of the signal lies in the manner of the telling rather than in the referents alone. Nineteen of the 24 constructs were recovered from roughly 120 words of text, a far broader battery than earlier language-based work, which has relied on much longer samples and focused on personality and well-being. Our approach offers an open, privacy-preserving alternative to zero-shot commercial LLMs, with comparable accuracy, no API cost, and freely released data and code.
A Two-Stage Scaffolding Model of Color and Luminance Development: Retinal Waves, Global Impoverishment, and Luminance-Grounded Object Representations
David Henry Peterzell
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How does the visual system construct object representations that are robust to the removal of color? I propose a two-stage scaffolding model. In Stage 1 (prenatal), retinal waves establish spectrally non-selective spatiotemporal contrast sensitivity, the necessary structural foundation of the visual system, before any visual experience occurs. Because the wave-generating circuitry encodes only contrasts in firing rate with no access to spectral information, this foundation is necessarily achromatic: whatever circuits retinal waves entrain, they are trained on a signal that carries no chromatic content. In Stage 2 (postnatal), the globally degraded neonatal visual signal, low spatial resolution, low contrast sensitivity, and immature chromatic processing, all coupled through shared photoreceptor immaturity, forces the first object representations to be built on luminance structure, the only dimension with sufficient fidelity under maximal front-end degradation. Together, these two stages explain why normal observers recognize objects in grayscale as readily as in color: luminance structure was the foundation of object representations from the beginning. The model also explains why late-sighted individuals who gain sight after dense congenital cataracts show disproportionate reliance on color: they retain the prenatal structural scaffold (intact retinas generating normal retinal waves) but lack the postnatal experiential scaffold (years of globally impoverished visual experience that normally grounds object representations in luminance). The model generates testable predictions that distinguish it from color-specific developmental accounts, and several can be evaluated on existing computational architectures without new patient data.
Fleeting Attention While Scrolling: Dwell Time and Exposure in Social Media Feeds
Douglas A. Parry; Philipp K. Masur
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Social media feeds expose users to rapidly changing streams of content, but relatively little is known about how long individual posts remain available for processing during user-controlled scrolling. We analyzed high-resolution behavioural logs from a fully interactive, simulated Instagram-like platform, to characterize dwell time and identify factors associated with variation in exposure duration. Preregistered analyses included 43,921 post-viewing episodes from 1,102 participants. Exposure was typically brief and highly variable, with the median dwell time lasting only 0.93 seconds. Mixed-effects models showed little evidence that visual complexity, valence, arousal, thematic content, presence of a face, social reinforcement, or measured individual characteristics were associated with dwell time. Instead, dwell time declined substantially across the browsing sequence and was considerably longer for posts encountered on profile and explore pages than in the main feed. These findings characterize social media browsing as a sequence of heterogeneous, often momentary exposures and demonstrate the value of simulated platforms for studying scrolling behavior at high temporal resolution.
Color cues, developmental coupling, and the limits of the late-sighted model: A commentary on Vogelsang et al. (2024)
David Henry Peterzell
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Vogelsang et al. (2024) report in Science that congenitally blind individuals who gain sight late in life rely disproportionately on color cues for object recognition, unlike normally sighted controls. They propose that this pattern reflects the adaptive value of neonatal color immaturity: because typical infants experience a period of degraded chromatic input, they develop object representations grounded in luminance rather than color. The theoretical account, however, rests on an incomplete engagement with the developmental literature. Decades of research indicate that color and luminance sensitivity are developmentally coupled through shared photoreceptor immaturity: the same front-end bottleneck that degrades chromatic input in neonates simultaneously degrades luminance and spatial processing. If this coupling is real, there is no luminance-first window, because the bottleneck lifts for both dimensions together. The account's central premise is therefore undermined not by arguing independence, but by showing that color and luminance do not develop in the sequence the account requires. I further identify methodological concerns: a small and unusual sample, a fixed order confound in the primary behavioral task, a computational model implementing a binary switch rather than the gradual chromatic cascade of normal development, and a color sensitivity test using non-equiluminant stimuli, leaving open the possibility that luminance rather than chromatic contrast sensitivity drove performance. Together, these issues require qualification of the conclusions of Vogelsang et al. and reconciliation of the proposed account with classical findings in infant visual development. This broader question remains important, but the answer is unlikely to hinge on color alone.
Choosing Stimuli Wisely by Using Individual Differences: A Step-by-Step Tutorial for the One-Stimulus-Per-Factor Principle in Vision Science and Optometric Assessment
David Henry Peterzell
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Given that data collection time in vision research and clinical assessment is limited, investigators and clinicians must select stimuli that maximize diagnostic information with minimum redundancy. This article proposes that analyzing individual differences—through factor analysis (FA), principal component analysis (PCA), and multidimensional scaling (MDS)—offers a principled approach. The covariance structure of individual variation reveals the minimum number of independent factors underlying a visual function, and therefore the minimum number of stimuli needed for efficient, non-redundant characterization. I term this the One-Stimulus-Per-Factor Principle: one well-chosen stimulus per factor is both necessary and sufficient. A complementary rule governs discovery: at least two to three stimuli per expected factor are needed to establish the factor structure. Converging evidence from luminance and chromatic contrast sensitivity, stereoscopic disparity, motion, hue scaling, face recognition, perceptual organization, and other domains shows that the dimensionality of individual variation is often lower than dense sampling suggests—and sometimes higher than sparse clinical testing captures. The approach also tests construct validity, revealing whether behavioral measures index the mechanisms investigators assume. These findings carry implications for clinical instruments across contrast sensitivity, color vision, stereopsis, and visual field assessment, many of which either oversample a single factor or undersample the full factor space. The same framework clarifies psychiatric applications—including contrast-sensitivity changes in depression, schizophrenia, and ADHD—by separating retinal-neural deficits from optical contributions such as higher-order aberrations and from attentional lapses, and it extends to oculomotor biomarkers. The article develops the Principle as a step-by-step tutorial, with a worked example.
Comparative Optimism for Getting Infected With COVID-19: An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis and Critical Reflection on Research Practices
Lars König; Frank Renkewitz
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Comparative optimism (believing one’s own risk is lower than others’) has been widely studied. Nonetheless, important methodological features have largely remained unrecognized. Focusing on a single event (contracting COVID-19), we estimated the average effect, tested moderators with attention to measurement artifacts, and appraised methodological quality. We synthesized 135 effect sizes from 50 studies (38 articles; sample sizes summing to 88,935, not necessarily unique participants) using a multilevel model with random effects for study, article, and nationality. We then examined moderators at both aggregated and individual-participant levels. Although, on average, comparative optimism was observed (d = 0.334, 95% CI [0.225, 0.444]), true effects varied substantially, and the meta-analytic prediction interval ranged from −0.371 to 1.040. Strikingly, this substantial heterogeneity was observed despite our efforts to control for various potential sources of heterogeneity during data collection. Measurement format was the most consistent moderator, with indirect assessments yielding larger adjusted effects than direct assessments, whereas longer response scales were not consistently associated with smaller effects. Effects were larger in samples collected in 2021 than in 2020, but this exploratory finding was sensitive to one article. The association with national collectivism was unclear in the primary model. Individual-participant analyses showed no clear overall associations for age, gender, or education. Response distributions indicated that nearly half of participants reported lower personal risk than others, more than one third reported equal risk, and about one sixth reported higher risk. Small-study and selection-model analyses suggested possible selective reporting. In sum, although we observed an average comparative optimism effect for contracting COVID-19, the generalizability of the effect and its measured correlates is limited by substantial heterogeneity and the influence of measurement choices and study context.
Scroll and Snack: Daily Life Exposure to Healthy Food Content on Instagram Boosts Cravings for Healthy Snacks
Monique Caroline Alblas; Matthias Burkard Aulbach; Lena Jeremias; Veronika Pavlovova; Leonardo Pimpini
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Background: Food content pervades social media, yet how everyday exposure shapes momentary craving and snacking in daily life remains unclear. We tested whether experimentally adding unhealthy (H1) vs. healthy (H2) food content on top of participants’ Instagram feeds increased craving for and intake of unhealthy and healthy snacks, relative to adding art content (control). Method: In this preregistered randomized controlled field trial, 116 healthy-weight young adults (Mage = 22.46 years, 79.3% female) completed a 10-day smartphone ecological momentary assessment protocol (five prompts/day; five baseline, five manipulation days). Participants were randomly assigned to follow existing preselected Instagram accounts featuring unhealthy food, healthy food, or art (control); the number of additional accounts was 5% of those already followed. Outcomes (craving, consumption) were modeled using multilevel linear mixed models. Results: Manipulation checks confirmed expected shifts in food-related Instagram content. Against H1, added unhealthy content increased neither craving for (p = .194) nor intake of (p = .867) unhealthy snacks. Supporting H2, healthy food content increased craving for healthy snacks relative to both the control and the unhealthy condition (p < .001), but not healthy snack intake (p = .061). Conclusions: Curating a healthier Instagram feed may increase the desire for healthy snacks, but this effect, possibly due to the short duration of the manipulation, did not extend to intentions and/or intake. In conclusion, food craving may thus be used as early intervention target in future weight loss intervention, whereas changing actual intake likely requires longer or personalized exposure.
Rumination under the microscope: causal discovery and inference of the effect of rumination on depressive symptoms in an N-of-1 time series
Pedro Henrique Ribeiro Santiago; Alyssa Sawyer; Mark Kohler; Lisa Jamieson; Carly Sutherland
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Depression is one of the most prevalent and disabling mental health conditions worldwide, with an estimated 5.7% of adults currently experiencing depression, around 332 million people globally. Rumination, a repetitive pattern of thinking that involves comparing one’s circumstances with how one would ideally like them to be without engaging in problem-solving, is the cognitive vulnerability most strongly associated with depression. Despite the evidence, there are no studies that have employed causal discovery and inference to investigate whether rumination has a causal effect on depressive mood using N-of-1 psychological time series data. To address this gap, this study conducted a secondary analysis of publicly available data on an American Latino Female diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) who reported on her feelings 4 times per day over 39 days. To conduct causal discovery, the Vector Autoregressive Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model (VAR-LiNGAM) algorithm was used. To conduct causal inference, the g-formula, implemented via a Monte Carlo simulation, was used to estimate the Contemporaneous Effect, the 1-lag Structural Direct Effect and the 1-lag Total Effect of rumination on depressed mood. The findings indicated that high rumination was associated with a 15.6-point increase in depressed mood contemporaneously and a 1.7-point increase in depressed mood approximately 4 hours later. This evidence further substantiates the importance of interventions designed to reduce ruminative thinking and, consequently, improve depressive symptoms.
Beyond Initial Crisis Recognition: Suicide-Risk Responses of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Across 14-Turn Ukrainian-Language Conversations
Hryhorii Kuzyk; Oleg Salamon; Liliia Andreieva; Kateryna Drozdova
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Nine deployed conversational systems mostly recognised the crisis, but it disappeared from their behaviour once the conversation moved on. We ran 16 scenarios in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as 14-message conversations (48 dialogues): crisis signals alternated with distraction, turn 13 introduced a new person at risk, and turn 14 was sent a day later. Coding was binary, as in the previous study, with clinical verification; two crisis-contour specifications were tested separately. New crisis signals drew a reaction in 87, 95, and 76 of 96 responses, respectively; the crisis stopped being mentioned mainly at an everyday message. The new person at risk drew a reaction in 44 of 48 responses; after a day, 29 retained crisis content. All 14 turns drew a 'yes' code in 4, 7, and 0 of 16 conversations. Reacting to the new person did not guarantee correct allocation of roles and actions. Both contour specifications produced safety-relevant errors. Neither hypothesis was supported: the systems behaved differently, and the same rule, introduced as a single package, did not stabilise their behaviour. Recognition, retention, and reconfiguration at a transition are distinct properties; the weakest is retention of the prior state and tracking of each person's trajectory.
Beyond the Child: Reframing Autism Research Through a Contextual, Transactional, Developmental Model
Judah Koller; Yonat Rum
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Heterogeneity in autistic development is usually attributed to variation in child-level characteristics. We argue that it is better understood as the output of a process. The child and family system continually calibrates the balance between environmental demands and available capacities, and those calibrations accumulate. When demand exceeds capacity, families lower demand, often through accommodation, or raise capacity through scaffolding and support. Each calibration changes what the system brings to the next encounter. Iterated across daily life and developmental transitions, this process pulls trajectories apart, producing what has been termed chronogeneity. The components of this account are established, but they have been invoked separately, and the field still largely models the child alone. This leaves basic questions unanswered, including why children who start in similar places diverge, why the same response helps in one family and constrains in another, and why divergence concentrates at developmental transitions. This paper is the first to specify a family-system mechanism that accounts for all three, and to establish that it cannot be described without three interlocking elements. Context defines the demands the system faces. Transactions are the operations through which calibration occurs. Development is how each calibration alters the terms of the next. The model identifies the fit between demands and capacities, rather than focusing on the child alone, as what assessment should measure, what intervention and policy should target, and what outcome measures should index, and it generates testable predictions about when and why trajectories diverge.
White matter differences in adults with developmental language disorder
Noelle Abbott; Sophia Banel; Gabriel J Cler
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Developmental language disorder is a highly common yet underdiagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder which impacts receptive and/or expressive language abilities and cannot be attributed to another etiology such as hearing loss or a lack of early exposure to language. There is very little research into the brain differences that characterize developmental language disorder, especially in adult populations In this study, we used diffusion MRI to determine whether adults with DLD show differences in white matter microstructure of the brain when compared to adults with typical language. Participants included 23 adults identified as meeting criteria for developmental language disorder, as well as a group of 26 adults with typical language. White matter microstructure was examined with fractional anisotropy via diffusion tensor imaging and precise biophysical models of intra-axonal signal fraction and orientation coherence via the Standard Model of diffusion imaging, using tractometry to evaluate microstructure differences along white matter tracts. Analysis showed reduced myelin integrity in DLD in the corpus callosum, but increased myelin integrity in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus. It is yet unclear whether differences exist in childhood and are retained into adulthood, are a result of different language environments during childhood, or are a result of behavioral and neural compensation.
Social Media Usage Profiles: A Multidimensional Approach Using Cluster Analysis
Myriam; Elena Bernabéu; Carlos Marchena Girárldez
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The heterogeneity of problematic social media use (PSMU) has led to the study of differentiated user profiles, although most research is based on correlational designs rather than multidimensional approaches. The integrated examination of compulsivity, emotional regulation, psychological distress, and usage patterns stays limited. The present study aimed to identify empirical clusters of young people based on psychological, emotional, and behavioural variables related to social media use, and to compare their characteristics to better understand the heterogeneity of the phenomenon. A total of 530 young people participated (67.5% women; M = 19.70 years), completing measures of problematic use, emotional distress, digital compulsivity, emotional regulation, and time spent using social media. Hierarchical and k-means cluster analyses (k=3) were conducted, complemented by ANOVA and post hoc tests. Validity and discriminative capacity indicators (R²) were calculated. Three profiles were identified: a profile characterised by compulsive use (PCU), defined by the highest levels of consumption and compulsivity; a profile characterised by the highest levels of emotional distress despite moderate levels of consumption, termed the pattern associated with psychological distress (PAD); and a functional profile (FP), distinguished by low consumption, fewer symptoms and better emotional regulation. The most discriminative variables were problematic use (R² = .66) and compulsivity (R² = .49), whereas emotional regulation appears to act as a possible protective factor. These profiles may help to guide more precise preventive interventions.
“I’m Asking This Price Because…”: When Negotiation Rationales Win Concessions but Cost the Relationship
Hannes M. Petrowsky; Yannik A. Escher; Alice Lee; Daniel Robert Ames; David D. Loschelder
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Negotiators often face a tension between claiming value and preserving the relationship with their counterpart. Rationales, the explanations negotiators attach to their offers (“I’m asking this price because…”), are assumed to ease this tension by making an assertive offer more persuasive and acceptable. The evidence is limited, however. Prior work examined a few rationales in isolation, with mixed results, and has not asked, across the rationales negotiators use, whether those that win concessions are the same ones that preserve relationships. We integrate various types of rationales in an overarching taxonomy and propose that a rationale conveys two kinds of information at once—about the negotiation (e.g., limits) and about the negotiator (e.g., motives). This information can move economic and relational outcomes in opposite directions. Across six studies (Ntotal=2,833), we identify six types of rationales negotiators commonly use (Studies 1a–c) and then test, in three preregistered experiments, how sellers’ rationales affect buyers’ counteroffers (Study 2), their impressions of the seller (Study 3), and why (Study 4). The most common rationale, sellers praising the product, neither helped nor hurt. Rationales citing financial constraints or appealing to sympathy won larger concessions but damaged the relationship with the counterpart. Only rationales citing market constraints appeared to avoid this trade-off. Mediation analyses indicated that economic benefits operated via limit perceptions and sympathy, whereas relational costs operated via perceived manipulativeness and disliking. Our results suggest that rationales work best when they inform counterparts about the negotiator’s situation without inviting negative inferences about the negotiator’s motives.
The contribution of retrieval processes to behavioural markers of event segmentation
Qiying Liu; Jordan Gunn; Tobias Sommer; Deborah Talmi
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Event segmentation divides continuous experience into discrete events. Previous research suggests that poorer temporal order memory and higher temporal distance ratings for pairs of items that were encoded across a boundary, compared to those encoded within the same event, serve as behavioural markers of event boundary perception. Four pre-registered experiments challenge the widely accepted interpretation that these effects depend solely on processes that occur during the encoding of event boundaries. We found that temporal order memory and temporal distance judgments depend critically on associative and reconstructive memory at retrieval, specifically memory for each item's event-defining source and for the order of those sources. Retrieval processes determined both the magnitude and direction of effects typically attributed solely to encoding processes. We outline a new retrieved-context model variant that distinguishes object- and event-based contextual evidence for temporal judgments. Our findings suggest that greater caution is required when interpreting behavioural markers of event segmentation.
Can Knowledge of the CO₂ Emissions of Food Increase Meat Tax Support?
Hellen Temme; Mattis Geiger; Philipp Sprengholz; Cornelia Betsch
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Purpose Climate policy acceptance and sustainable behavior partially depend on accurate CO₂ estimates and perceived policy effectiveness. We tested whether seeding, an intervention in which people learn accurate CO₂ values for representative foods that serve as anchors for estimating other foods' emissions, can increase carbon numeracy (i.e., the ability to estimate carbon footprints of foods without explicit calculations). Method Two pre-registered experiments examined whether increased carbon numeracy also enhances perceived effectiveness and acceptance of a value-added tax (VAT) reform on food and food choice. Study 1 (N = 974) tested whether seeding increased the effectiveness and acceptance of a VAT increase for meat. Study 2 (N = 1,023) extended this by explaining the policy mechanism. Food choice was assessed by asking participants to select a food box (vegan, vegetarian, or meat-based) in a lottery. Results Both studies found that seeding improved carbon numeracy (ηp² = .55−.58, p < .05). However, neither seeding nor policy explanations significantly increased policy acceptance or food choice, although explaining the policy increased perceived effectiveness (β = .21−.24, p < .05). In both studies, perceived effectiveness (r = .31−.41, p < .001) and policy acceptance (r = .30−.49, p < .001) were significantly related to selecting a non-meat food box. Exploratory analyses revealed that perceptions of a potential price change were the strongest predictor of policy acceptance (β = -.47, p < .001). Conclusion These findings suggest that VAT policy changes could require both explaining environmental benefits and addressing perceived personal costs.
Beyond the Big Five: Disintegration as a Predictor of Daily Depression, Anxiety, and Rumination
Ljiljana B. Lazarevic; Maja Ribar; Josip Razum; Goran Milas
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The Big Five personality traits, particularly Negative Emotionality, are well-established correlates of internalizing symptoms. However, less is known about whether Disintegration, a proposed basic personality trait reflecting proneness to psychotic-like experiences and beliefs, accounts for additional individual differences in internalizing experiences in everyday life. The present study examined the incremental contribution of Disintegration beyond the Big Five to daily depression, anxiety, and rumination. A sample of 156 psychology students completed measures of Disintegration and the Big Five, followed by seven days of daily diary assessments (916 observations). Multilevel models were used to examine associations between personality traits and daily internalizing experiences. When all six personality traits were considered simultaneously, Disintegration was uniquely associated with higher daily depression (β = .25), anxiety (β = .24), and rumination (β = .17), alongside Negative Emotionality. Adding Disintegration to the Big Five increased explained variance by 10.25% for depression, 7.79% for anxiety, and 2.69% for rumination. Sensitivity analyses excluding potentially overlapping symptom-related content supported the robustness of the associations with depression and anxiety. These findings suggest that Disintegration contributes to explaining between-person differences in everyday internalizing experiences beyond established personality dimensions, extending evidence for its incremental validity to repeated daily assessments.
A Network Perspective on Cyberbullying: Examining School Social Environment and Bullying Behaviors
Gabriel Baník; Mária Dědová; Kristína Dědová; Veronika Mihalikova
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This study examined the complexity of cyberbullying and its relationship with traditional bullying, school climate, and social support using network analysis. The sample consisted of 1,269 participants (359 boys), including 770 emerging adults and 499 teens, with a mean age of 18 (SD = 2.5). We measured 11 forms of cyberbullying across different roles (victim, aggressor, defender, bystander), five factors of school climate, social support (from parents, friends, teachers), and traditional bullying roles. Undirected weighted network models revealed strong interconnections between various types of aggressive behaviors and cyberbullying victimization. Unauthorized sharing of personal media showed negative relationships with online verbal attacks, while online group exclusion strongly associated with social isolation. The bystander role positively related to both verbal aggression and victimization. Defenders in cyberbullying were more likely to be victims of personal information exposure and verbal attacks, and strongly associated with defending in traditional bullying. School climate and social support demonstrated weak connections to cyberbullying, with student-student relationships, fairness in school, and parental support showing the most direct interconnections. Network comparisons revealed subtle structural differences between genders and between teens and emerging adults. Findings suggest prevention programs should focus on strengthening school relationships while supporting student defenders who may become targets themselves.
Same Displays, Different Judgments: Numerical Ratio Effects in Quantity and Valence Tasks
Duru Başak Özbek; Melike Sefikoglu; Özce Cinoğlu; Merve Bulut; Ezgi Gür; Hakan Cetinkaya; Seda Dural
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Numerical ratio reliably predicts performance in explicit non-symbolic quantity comparison, but whether it also predicts performance when the same objects are judged by their valence remains unclear. We examined this question in 156 participants assigned to one of four instructions: select the group containing fewer or more bacteria, or select the group depicted as good or bad. All groups viewed the same paired displays, making numerosity relevant to quantity judgments and irrelevant to valence judgments. Mixed-effects models assessed the relationship between numerical ratio, defined as the smaller numerosity divided by the larger numerosity, and response times and accuracy. As ratio approached 1, responses became slower and less accurate in the quantity task. In the valence task, neither response times nor accuracy showed a reliable relationship with ratio. The average ratio slopes differed significantly between quantity and valence judgments for both outcomes. These findings indicate that the behavioral expression of numerical relations depends on whether quantity is relevant to the required judgment.
Making AI-mediated decisions culturally repairable
Hadi Mohamadpour; Soomaahey Heysieattalab; Jean-Claude Dreher
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Artificial intelligence increasingly influences high-stakes decisions, from employment and education to healthcare and public services. When such judgments are disputed, affected people may receive an explanation without being able to reach an authority empowered to change the outcome or remedy its consequences. We introduce cultural repairability: the institutional capacity to review an AI-mediated decision, correct the outcome and downstream records, provide meaningful restoration, and learn from failure through procedures people can understand and use. The framework addresses a visibility–accountability asymmetry: people are exposed to judgments about their standing but lack effective means of obtaining an answer or remedy. Culture matters because exposure, legitimate authority, and appropriate restoration may be understood differently across settings. Language accessibility also determines whether review mechanisms are usable in practice. We identify three measurable cultural mechanisms: the meaning of exposure, the credibility of review, and the meaning of restoration. We further distinguish affected people’s appraisals from institutional actors’ responsibility and capacity to respond. Four falsifiable propositions specify how reviewer authority and audience shape responses to repair, and how these effects vary with cultural orientation, institutional history, and the form of restoration. They predict whether people appeal or withdraw, how they recalibrate trust, and whether they remain willing to engage. The resulting Repairability Principle establishes a common floor of substantive review, correction, restoration, and prevention of recurrence, while allowing people to choose how restoration is delivered. Cultural repairability therefore shifts global AI accountability from whether procedures appear acceptable to whether institutions can correct harm in practice.
Toward scalable identification of adults with developmental language disorder: Validation, participant profiles, and recruitment considerations for an online screener
Iris Mendoza Luna; Noelle Abbott; Gabriel J Cler
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Purpose: This study evaluated the feasibility of an online adaptation of the Fidler diagnostic protocol for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in adults. Specifically, we examined (1) comparability of computerized versus face-to-face administration, (2) test-retest reliability, (3) agreement between two- and three-task scoring equations, (4) effects of demographic and cognitive factors on scores, and (5) the relationship between self-reported diagnoses and screener performance. Method: Over 5,000 adults completed a language and medical history survey, and 526 subsequently completed an assessment over videoconference involving following auditory directions, spelling irregular words, and defining words (modified from Fidler et al, 2011). A subset (N = 53; 25 DLD, 28 with typical language development) then completed an in-person session comparing face-to-face and computerized administration of the following directions task, along with nonverbal IQ testing. Participants were recruited between 2022 and 2025 via online postings and flyers. Results: No significant effect of administration modality on following directions task performance or Fidler scores was observed. Test-retest reliability was high (r = .91). Scores derived from the two- and three-task weighted equations from Fidler et al (2011) were highly correlated (r = .98), though the three-task equation produced lower (i.e., more typical) scores for participants with DLD-range profiles. Age, gender, and early bilingualism did not significantly influence scores. Although several self-reported diagnoses and concerns were higher among the group identified as DLD than the TD group, overall discriminative accuracy of self-report screening items was low (AUC range: 0.45–0.65). Conclusions: Online administration of the Fidler protocol is comparable to the original face-to-face version and demonstrates adequate test-retest reliability, supporting its use as a scalable tool for identifying adults with DLD. Practical recommendations for recruiting and screening adults with DLD are discussed to facilitate future research with this population.
Cultural Congruence of Visual Binomial Collocation Sequences and Gullibility
Scott Altsuler
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This study aims to discover how visual representations of common word sequences in language can increase or decrease a viewer’s gullibility and trust based on how well the ordering of the stimuli matches the common ordering in the viewer’s culture. My primary research question is “How does the cultural congruence of the horizontal arrangement of objects in an image with its respective language's normative binomial collocation sequences affect the viewer's processing of subsequent questions?” This paper hypothesizes that, when shown images that are in a culturally fluent arrangement, participants will be in a state of greater gullibility. Alternatively, when shown images arranged in a culturally disfluent manner, the viewer will engage in higher-level reasoning and be more skeptical. We randomly assigned participants to one of three groups – the control group, the culturally fluent group, and the culturally disfluent group. In the culturally fluent group, participants were shown visual representations of binomial collocation sequences arranged left to right, as they are commonly spoken in English. In the culturally disfluent group, participants were shown collocation sequences arranged opposite to the cultural norm. After viewing the images, participants were tested on tasks that assess intuitive vs. systematic reasoning and measure their gullibility. The data do not support our hypotheses that if the participants are shown culturally fluent visual representations of collocation sequences, then they exhibit more intuitive reasoning, and that those shown culturally disfluent stimuli exhibit more systematic reasoning, nor does it support that this change prompts more face-value acceptance of inherence in culture. The data do indicate, however, that participants prefer viewing two associated stimuli rather than individual pictures.
Lexical features reveal distinct developmental patterns in valence and arousal
Serena Maria Stagnitto; Serena Lecce; José Antonio Hinojosa; Daniele Gatti
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Affective word meanings are often treated as stable lexical properties, although their organization may change across development. Using representational content analysis, we examined how semantic and form-based lexical information predicts valence and arousal judgments from childhood to adulthood. Across two experiments, Spanish affective ratings from children aged 7, 9, 11, and 13 years were modeled within and across age groups and compared with adult judgments. Semantic representations were the strongest predictors of both dimensions, but valence and arousal showed distinct developmental patterns. Valence remained comparatively stable across childhood and showed strong correspondence with adult judgments already at age 7. Arousal, despite being systematically predictable within each child group, showed weaker cross-age generalization, with semantic transfer declining as developmental distance increased. Moreover, semantic information predicted word-specific age differences more accurately for arousal than for valence. Child-adult correspondence in arousal shifted from negative at age 7 to positive at ages 11 and 13, suggesting increasing similarity in lexical-affective mappings across development. These findings indicate that developmental variation in arousal does not reflect an absence of systematic organization in younger children but rather age-related differences in how lexical meaning relates to activation. Overall, affective lexical development combines a relatively stable evaluative structure with a more flexible organization of arousal.
Biased Motive Inferences of Online Outrage Undermine Cross-Partisan Conversations
Chen-Wei Yu; William J. Brady
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Moral outrage spreads widely in online political discourse, but how do people understand others’ outrage expressions? Across three studies (N = 1,855), including behavioral experiments and a field study, we discovered that partisan-biased motive inferences underlie the divergent effects of online outrage expression: While people typically inferred that their in-partisans’ motives for expressing outrage were to raise awareness or inspire action, they tended to infer their political opponents’ motives were to shame or troll. These motive inferences were linked to greater political sectarianism and lower willingness to have a conversation about politics with the outrage expressor. In a fourth study (N = 720), we developed an intervention that changed people’s motive inferences, which improved willingness to have a conversation about politics. These findings highlight the role of motive inferences in shaping contemporary online political discourse filled with strong emotions, and suggest key levers to foster civil interactions among cross-partisans.
Impacts of voice pleasantness and familiarity on enjoyment and engagement with spoken narratives
Carolyn McGettigan; Hannah Jones; Victor Rosi; Emma Soopramanien; Amrita Bains; Saloni Krishnan
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Recent experimental reading research has found that situational enjoyment of texts plays an important role in predicting both comprehension and motivation to continue reading. Here, we used narrative listening to test whether these findings generalise to spoken narratives, and to further investigate how different aspects of the narrator’s voice affect the experience and outcomes of listening. In Experiment 1, participants heard spoken book excerpts produced by a highly-naturalistic synthesised voice. After each excerpt, participants rated their enjoyment of the excerpt, answered a multiple-choice content comprehension question, and finally chose whether to wait to hear more of the narrative (or skip to the next one; a measure of motivation). Replicating the findings from reading research, we found that greater enjoyment was associated with increased probability of both correct comprehension and waiting. In Experiment 2, participants heard the same book excerpts, now narrated by 2 different synthesised voices that significantly differed in perceived pleasantness. Here, we found higher enjoyment for excerpts read by the more pleasant-sounding voice, but no effects of pleasantness on comprehension or waiting. In Experiment 3, we harnessed personalised voice cloning to show that both enjoyment and waiting were increased when listening to personally-familiar narrators (self, friend), compared with unfamiliar narrators. Our findings offer mechanistic evidence for the rewarding role of voice identity perception in spoken language processing, and present interesting implications for how personalised narrators could improve engagement with spoken book language.
The role of neuroscience for psychological causal explanation
Beate Krickel; Markus Werkle-Bergner
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Psychology provides causal explanations of behavior but it remains contested whether such explanations are scientifically legitimate without grounding in neuroscience. Two prominent arguments have been put forward to argue for the dependence of psychology on neuroscience: the classical causal exclusion argument argues that higher-level causes are excluded by lower-level causes; According to a more recent line of argument, variables and relations postulated by psychological models must correspond to variables and relations in neuroscientific models – otherwise the psychological model can only provide how-possibly explanation but not how-actually explanation. In this article, we defend the independence of psychological causal explanation. Based on an interventionist account of causation, we argue that a psychological model is causally explanatory when it identifies variables that serve as points of intervention. Still, we show that neuroscience sometimes has a crucial role for validating psychological models: when a psychological model identifies points of interventions that cannot be intervened on at the psychological level.
The effect of unconventional gender role advertisements (femvertising) on female purchase intentions and brand attitude: attitudes towards motherhood and culture: Korea vs. UK
Erin Lim; Adrian Furnham; Alastair McClelland
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This study examined the impact of culture and attitudes towards motherhood (ATM) on the effectiveness of traditional/non-traditional gendered advertisements. Korean and British participants viewed either traditional or non-traditional female portrayals in adverts and rated them for purchase intention and brand attitude. They also completed the Attitudes towards Fertility and Childbearing Scale (AFCS) containing three subscales: Fertility, Hindrance, and Social Identity. The results showed that there was a significant difference between cultures on ATM with more negative attitudes in Korean participants. However, there was no interaction effect between culture and advert type on advertising effectiveness, but main effects of culture and advert type were found. Favourable attitudes towards motherhood significantly positively correlated with the effectiveness of traditional adverts, but not non-traditional adverts except for Hindrance with PI.
The Same Memory Retrieved Differently: Competition Enables Flexible Generalization in Hippocampus-like Networks
Robby Ralston; Brandon Turner; Vladimir Sloutsky
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Hippocampus supports the retrieval of richly detailed episodic memories from sparse cues. However, an event can be detailed and also lead to generalization. To explain both phenomena, researchers have proposed multiple memory systems or distinct memory traces for specific and general content. In contrast, we argue that a single system can support both specificity and generalization. To do this, we present ATHENA, a formal framework that reinterprets cognitive memory models as recurrent neural networks. We show that many episodic memory models are single-step approximations of dynamic networks with competitive retrieval mechanisms, similar to Modern Hopfield Networks. Notably, under a cognitive interpretation, the intensity of the competitive process is a psychologically-meaningful parameter that shapes generalization in the network. Through simulations, we demonstrate that modulating this parameter during retrieval leads the same traces to produce qualitatively different forms of generalization over the same memory traces. We then extend our analysis to sequential memory, and show how the same competitive retrieval process can be combined with known hippocampal circuits to achieve more sophisticated forms of generalization. These results demonstrate the flexibility of single-system memory retrieval and highlight the interplay of specific and general mnemonic content.
When Different Relational Experiences with AI Become Visible in Conversation: Linguistic and Dyadic Evidence from Naturalistic ChatGPT Interactions
Nadine Nicole Schmitt; Lennart Seizer; Fanny Alexandra Dietel; Lea Grimm-Keßler; Björn Schuller; Johanna Schuller
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People may experience large language models (LLMs) as therapeutically allied, emotionally close, or socially substitutive, but whether these relationships become visible in conversations is unknown. We distinguished what users discussed, what unfolded relationally, and how they experienced the AI relationship. We linked self-reports from 94 adults to donated, personally meaningful ChatGPT conversations using 21 outcome-blind frozen topics, blinded triple annotation of 500 sequences, and participant-grouped machine learning frozen before outcome access. Digital Therapeutic Alliance (DTA) and AI Attachment were related but showed different conversational correlates. Validation (R²_CV = .423) and uptake (R²_CV = .260) were recoverable out of sample, yet, neither formed a generalizable DTA signature. Conversely, a post-registration multivariate analysis identified a distributed Social Substitution fingerprint beyond conversation length and 21 topics (ΔR²_CV = .070) and improved prediction in 98% of repetitions. Ruptures were rare and consistently repaired; their association with DTA was fragile. Thus, different human–LLM relationships leave different—and sometimes no readily observable—conversational traces.
The Associations between Social Network Size and Preschool Children’s Visual Perspective-Taking and Non-Verbal Cue Understanding
Esmee Miron Aalders; Stephanie Wermelinger; Moritz M. Daum
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Exposure to diverse communicative environments fosters a broader, more flexible repertoire of communicative behaviour. Children’s social networks may constitute a meaningful, yet underexplored, factor contributing to environmental diversity. In a cross-sectional study, we examined whether social network size in preschool children (N = 128, Mage = 4.06, SDage = 0.29) is associated with their communicative behaviour indicated via three aspects: visual perspective-taking, non-verbal cue understanding, and theory of mind (ToM). We ran two different types of analysis: first, the conventional weekly contact threshold to operationalise social network size. This analysis revealed no significant associations with the outcome variables. Second, we conducted a data-driven grid search to identify the contact frequency threshold that best predicted each outcome. The results suggest distinct candidate thresholds across the three communicative behaviours assessed, indicating that each behaviour is associated with a different relevant level of contact frequency. Visual perspective-taking was positively associated with social network size calculated using a threshold of approximately monthly contact. For non-verbal cue understanding, the best-fitting threshold was about four interactions per week, at which social network size was negatively associated with task performance. We found no significant associations between social network size and children’s ToM. The findings show associations between children’s social networks and pragmatic communication behaviour, but these associations are sensitive to how social network size is operationalised.
Associations Between Global Emotion Beliefs and Three Stages of Emotion Regulation in Everyday Life
Valentina Bianchi; Imogen Smith; Felicia Semple; Amy S G Lee; Eeske van Roekel; Peter Koval
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Everyone experiences emotions, but people vary in their orientations to and beliefs about emotions. Research has linked global beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of emotions with psychological functioning and well-being, but the mechanisms through which those beliefs shape people’s well-being remain unclear. Ford and Gross (2019) proposed emotion regulation as a candidate mechanism, such that emotion beliefs influence whether people initiate emotion regulation (identification), which strategies people use to regulate their emotions (selection), and how successfully people are able to implement their selected emotion-regulation strategies (implementation). We tested predictions based on Ford and Gross’s (2019) framework in everyday life in a seven-day experience sampling study (Australian community sample recruited in 2024; N = 326; 80% female; MAge=26.11, SDAge=8.52). At the identification stage, neither controllability nor usefulness beliefs were associated with initiating emotion regulation. In terms of strategy selection, stronger beliefs about the usefulness of negative emotions were associated with greater use of situation selection and lesser use of expressive suppression, as predicted. Finally, at the implementation stage, controllability beliefs did not moderate the hedonic effects of any regulation strategy, whereas usefulness beliefs about negative emotions predicted a weaker positive association between cognitive reappraisal and negative affect, and believing positive emotions to be more useful predicted a stronger inverse association between rumination and positive affect. Our findings suggest that individual differences in global emotion beliefs may play a smaller role than theorised in daily emotion regulation processes.
Effects of a Web-Based Debiasing Intervention on Brazilian Psychologists’ Accuracy on Major Depressive Disorder Diagnostic Tasks: A Randomized Training Intervention
Kalil Maihub Manara; Eric A. Youngstrom; Joshua A Langfus; Clarissa Marceli Trentini
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This randomized experimental study evaluated a web-based debiasing intervention designed to improve clinical judgment in the assessment of adult major depressive disorder (MDD) in Brazil. The intervention, adapted from prior work on pediatric bipolar disorder, taught Bayesian probability estimates and other debiasing strategies. Brazilian psychologists (N = 535) were assigned to either the intervention or an active control condition featuring a brief educational video, and were assessed post-intervention (n = 299). Outcomes were decision-making errors and diagnostic accuracy in response to vignettes, which depicted diagnostic challenges that could elicit cognitive biases. Assignment to intervention was associated with significantly fewer decision-making errors and greater diagnostic accuracy. Intervention effects were stronger for the vignette involving diagnostic risk estimation, as supported by intervention-by-vignette interaction effects. Intervention effects across vignettes were not statistically significant when only categorical diagnostic tasks were considered. Years of clinical practice and postgraduate training were largely unrelated to outcomes, and decision-making errors were not associated with treatment decisions. Overall, findings provide preliminary evidence of the transferability of this brief, web-based debiasing intervention to a distinct clinical and cultural context, although effect sizes were substantially attenuated compared with those observed in the original intervention.
PRELIMINARY FRAMEWORK FOR A DYNAMIC SOCIO-ACOUSTIC MODEL OF SPEECH PERCEPTION
Meghan Sumner
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Listeners store detailed acoustic information and access social information cued by variation fast and early. Yet, how we understand all we understand remains an open question. I propose a Dynamic Socio-Acoustic Model that frames perception as a continuous, multidimensional tracking system where speech variation functions as primary cognitive information. This listener-driven model includes the fluid topological stretching of cognitive space, an acoustic exemplar space that is untethered to linguistic units and allows for multidimensional cross-context categorization. Listeners maintain a sub-lexical, macro-exemplar landscape where incoming acoustic-kinematic trajectories drive real-time resonance. Rather than matching signals to static templates, listeners construct ad-hoc categories on the fly, dynamically scaling an active grid in response to immediate environmental contrasts. By uniting continuous sensory tracking with fluid, experience-dependent spatial restructuring, this framework offers an ecological account of perception and memory that rethinks structural variation from a hurdle into a pathway to social meaning.
Beyond Initial Crisis Recognition: Suicide-Risk Responses of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Across 14-Turn Ukrainian-Language Conversations
Hryhorii Kuzyk; Oleg Salamon; Liliia Andreieva; Kateryna Drozdova
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Nine deployed conversational systems mostly recognised the crisis, but it disappeared from their behaviour once the conversation moved on. We ran 16 scenarios in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as 14-message conversations (48 dialogues): crisis signals alternated with distraction, turn 13 introduced a new person at risk, and turn 14 was sent a day later. Coding was binary, as in the previous study, with clinical verification; two crisis-contour specifications were tested separately. New crisis signals drew a reaction in 87, 95, and 76 of 96 responses, respectively; the crisis stopped being mentioned mainly at an everyday message. The new person at risk drew a reaction in 44 of 48 responses; after a day, 29 retained crisis content. All 14 turns drew a 'yes' code in 4, 7, and 0 of 16 conversations. Reacting to the new person did not guarantee correct allocation of roles and actions. Both contour specifications produced safety-relevant errors. Neither hypothesis was supported: the systems behaved differently, and the same rule, introduced as a single package, did not stabilise their behaviour. Recognition, retention, and reconfiguration at a transition are distinct properties; the weakest is retention of the prior state and tracking of each person's trajectory.
Likert Versus Visual Analogue Scales in Ecological Momentary Assessment: Initial Evidence That Likert Scales Come With Reduced Capacity to Sustain Attentiveness
Esther Ulitzsch; Dominik Vollbracht; Lijin Zhang; Alberto Jover Martínez; Benjamin Domingue; Jonas M B Haslbeck; Tanja Lischetzke; Leonie V. D. E. Vogelsmeier
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Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) prompts participants to report on their current emotions, cognitions, or behaviors multiple times per day across several days, yielding rich, high-frequency data. However, the high frequency of measurement can burden participants, leading to disengagement in the form of non-compliance or careless/insufficient effort responding (C/IER), which compromises the validity of conclusions drawn from EMA data. To minimize these effects, it is crucial to understand how EMA design factors influence respondent disengagement. This study investigates how response format, a comparatively subtle design choice, affects C/IER as an important but hard-to-detect aspect of disengagement. We re-analyzed data from two experimental EMA studies, in which surveys were administered either in a Likert or a visual analogue scale (VAS) format in between-subjects designs. Each dataset was analyzed with one of two state-of-the-art confirmatory mixture modeling approaches to examine whether response format affects (a) the overall level of C/IER and (b) its associations with two fatigue- and attention-related contextual factors: the cumulative number of EMA study days and time of day. Across datasets and analytical approaches, we found indications that Likert scales yield up to 3 percentage points higher rates of C/IER than VASs, though the temporal patterns varied across studies. In Study I, differences were observed in overall C/IER levels, with parallel increases across EMA days. In Study II, initial C/IER was comparable between formats, but the Likert format showed a steeper increase over time. Implications for EMA design are discussed.
Assessing User-Subjective Experience with Conversational Agents for Behavioral and Mental Health Interventions: Design and Psychometric Evaluation of CUE-Chat
Esther Mertens; Janis Butz; Jean-Louis van Gelder
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While AI-conversational agents are increasingly integrated into behavioral and mental health interventions, standardized instruments to assess their performance remain scarce. To address this gap, we developed an instrument to measure user-subjective experience with AI-driven agents in the healthcare domain. We focused on user perception due to its direct contribution to intervention effects, and on healthcare given that the rapid adoption of AI-agents in this domain continues to outpace the development of validated evaluation instruments. Across four studies, we developed and tested the Chatbot User Evaluation instrument (CUE-Chat). First, we identified relevant assessment domains and items through literature review, existing instruments, input from AI-driven agents, and the research team’s domain expertise. Following this, we requested feedback on draft subscales, definitions, and items from expert and laypeople panels. We then tested the structure of the instrument’s concept version. Finally, we conducted a psychometric evaluation and finalized the instrument. CUE-Chat consists of four factors: Perceived Efficacy (4 items), Usability (4 items), Intelligence (4 items), and Safety and Risk Management (4 items). Reliability and validity of the total score and each subscale was good to excellent (Cronbach’s α = .73-.92; Ω = .74-.93). Predictive validity was strong with all scales predictive of users’ overall rating of an AI-agent’s performance. We conclude that CUE-Chat’s strong psychometric properties are promising, and that it is particularly useful for researchers integrating AI-driven agents into behavioral and mental health interventions in both developmental and evaluative stages.
Trait or Bias? Why item keying is indispensable when comparing language model responses across languages
Qing Li
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Psychological scales designed for humans are increasingly administered to language models, and differences between their responses in two languages are read as evidence of cultural tendency. Such comparisons presuppose that the two language versions measure the same thing. This study tests that premise. Three established social orientation scales were administered to four models built by United States and Chinese developers in Chinese and English under two temperature settings. Responses were then decomposed, using a psychometric model that separates a latent trait from a directional response bias, into the component that tracks what the instrument is meant to measure and the component that does not. The cross-linguistic difference is not one quantity. On scales with balanced keying, every estimate showed a higher trait and a lower bias under Chinese prompting, the bias moving further than the trait in most conditions. Because the two components run in opposite directions, they offset one another on scales containing no reverse-keyed items, where they also cannot be separated. A difference reported on such a scale therefore does not establish that models differ in the construct, only that they answered differently. Two further manipulations show that the difference is produced by item wording, though not by negation, and that the stability of a model identifier over four weeks varies by an order of magnitude between vendors. We set out three checks that would make cross-linguistic comparison interpretable: balanced keying, decomposition to the item level, and a contemporaneous control whenever collections are compared across time.
Interpretability in the Limit: How Can Understanding Machines Help us Understand Human Language?
Najoung Kim; Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
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In the coming years, interpretability research will uncover a vast set of machine constructs: causally efficacious representations and processing mechanisms underlying the use of language and other intelligent behavior in AI systems, including LLMs. Assuming that interpretability will be as successful as can be reasonably hoped for (interpretability in the limit), how can the discovery of machine constructs shape linguistics and cognitive science? First, we provide several axes of analysis that can help scientists conceptualize the internal mechanisms discovered in machines. Even under the assumption that interpretability in the limit guarantees that all constructs are causally implicated in a system's behavior, scientists may want to consider several additional properties, including constructs' theoretical status, domain status, ontological status, and complexity. Second, we argue that scientists should prioritize recurrent constructs, meaning those that surface across a diversity of models converging on behaviors of interest while varying on other axes such as architecture, training data, objective function, language, and modality. Finally, we provide three routes for how machine constructs can inform linguistic and cognitive theories, emphasizing that all of these routes treat machine constructs as hypotheses, where additional theorizing and experimentation by domain experts are required. We conclude with several recommendations that can be implemented now for improving the long-term success of this program.
Making good decisions with counterfactuals
Ma Ricky; Scott Mueller; Thomas Icard; Tobias Gerstenberg
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Making a good decision often requires knowing something counterfactual: whether a person would be better off if we acted than if we didn't. Formal work shows how both experimental and observational data ought to be combined to inform good decisions. Here, we ask whether people's intuitions follow this normative standard. In three experiments (N = 354), participants decided whether or not to act based on observational and experimental data. Participants performed better than chance but far from optimally. Trial-by-trial feedback about the consequences of their choices, including what would have happened had they chosen otherwise, didn't improve performance. The breakdown was at the inference step: participants' estimates of whether a person would benefit from the treatment, be harmed by it, or be left unaffected were almost unrelated to normative predictions. Yet, participants' decisions followed coherently from those (incorrect) estimates. Experts in statistics, economics, and data science made better decisions than novices, but their counterfactual inferences were no more accurate. Counterfactual reasoning is critical for making good decisions from experimental and observational data, but its logic doesn't come naturally to people.
Breaking Common Ground through Reciprocal Misalignment
Siham Abu Ali; Tatiana Philippova; Isaac Fradkin
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Establishing shared meaning is widely considered the normative, almost ubiquitous trajectory of linguistic interaction, while moments of misalignment are typically viewed as temporary interruptions that individuals attempt to repair. However, it is not uncommon to experience communication breakdowns that actively escalate rather than resolve. This raises a fundamental question: does interaction inherently lead people toward shared meaning, or is semantic alignment a reciprocal, socially contingent process? We conducted four experiments using a novel multiplayer word association task, where participants generated semantic associations while interacting with either human or simulated partners varying in semantic typicality. Our results show that, in general, social interaction motivates individuals to produce more conventional associations to support alignment. However, this tendency depended on partner’s behavior: when interacting with an atypical or difficult-to-align-with partner, individuals actively reduced their own typicality and tendency to match partner’s associations, effectively sacrificing semantic alignment. Such ‘reciprocal misalignment’ persisted even when participants were incentivized to maximize alignment. Our findings suggest that semantic misalignment may reflect a reciprocal, socially-motivated modulation of identity and differentiation, rather than solely a failure of coordination. This work sheds light on the interactional mechanisms underlying interpersonal distancing, communication breakdowns in neurodivergence, and potentially broader patterns of social polarization.
Inconclusive prospective effects between technology acceptance, classroom distraction, and academic engagement among Chinese high school students: A reassessment of Li and Chen (2026)
Kimmo Sorjonen
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Li and Chen concluded reciprocal prospective associations between technology acceptance, classroom digital distraction, and academic engagement among high school students. However, significant cross-lagged parameters do not by themselves establish genuine prospective influence because similar estimates may arise through alternative statistical processes. Using simulated data that reproduced the sample size and correlation matrix reported by Li and Chen, I examined whether their conclusions were robust across several defensible analytic specifications. The pattern of results depended strongly on analytic choice: some models suggested positive prospective associations, whereas others indicated negative or null effects. When estimates from all specifications were combined using meta-analytic methods, no overall effect reached statistical significance. Accordingly, the available evidence does not provide a firm basis for concluding that technology acceptance, classroom distraction, and academic engagement exert reciprocal prospective influences on one another. In line with multiverse-analysis recommendations, conclusions should be drawn from the collective pattern across reasonable analytical alternatives rather than from a single model.
“Oh No, the Robots Are Here”: AI identity labels, social uptake and sanctioning in mixed human–AI communities
Sara Major; Aleksandar Tomašević; Ana Vranić; Darja Cvetkovic; Dušan Vudragović; Boris Stupovski; Marija Mitrovic Dankulov
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Social media users can now encounter autonomous AI accounts that post, reply and vote alongside other users. In a longitudinal field experiment, we examined how labelling these accounts relates to whom people answer and how they evaluate AI contributions. YSocial is a Reddit-like hybrid platform for social media simulation, where people interact with language-model agents. On it, 36 participants discussed popular culture with 72 AI accounts powered by an uncensored language model over 21 experiment days. The AI accounts kept persistent personas and remembered previous exchanges. They were visibly labelled in one community and unlabelled in the other. Among 2,143 human replies, Bayesian models estimated that the probability of replying to an AI-authored post or comment was 3.5 percentage points higher in the hidden-label community, given the same earlier posts and comments available in the thread (95% credible interval 0.5–6.5). In both communities, participants were more likely to reply to an AI account after it had replied to them and less likely after they had replied to it. The gap in criticism, including polite disagreement, between replies to AI and human accounts was 13.3 percentage points larger in the visible-label community (95% credible interval 5.1–21.4). The toxicity difference was uncertain. Visible labels were associated with less engagement with AI contributions and more criticism of them.
Impact of social affiliation and musical agency on movement and interpersonal coordination in adolescence
Martin Hartmann; Alessandro Ansani; Iballa Burunat; Marc Thompson; Pedro Neto; Joshua Silberstein Bamford; Patti Nijhuis; Rita Mustonen; Matias Hämäläinen; Toivo Niemi
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Dancing together to music is a common social activity in which movement coordination emerges from the interplay of interpersonal relationships and a shared musical environment. While previous work on dyadic dance movement has focused on individual differences, third-party judgments of synchrony, and disentangling partner- from music- driven coordination, relational and situational determinants of coordination have received less attention. This motion capture study investigated how social affiliation and agency over the music influence movement characteristics and social coordination in young people. A total of 164 adolescents danced in dyads with both a friend and a stranger, and to self- and researcher-selected music in a counterbalanced design. Extracted kinematic features included head and hand movement magnitude, movement complexity, fluidity, interpersonal distance, mutual orientation, and synchrony. Results showed greater, more complex and less fluid movements when participants danced with friends compared to strangers. Head and hand movement magnitudes were larger for self-selected than researcher-selected music, but only when self-selected music followed researcher-selected music. Friends also exhibited higher interpersonal synchrony, danced closer, and looked more towards each other than strangers. These findings shed light on how social and contextual factors shape dance behaviour in adolescence.
Registered Report: Does the valence-dominance model apply to deepfake faces? Validation and its impact on deepfake detection
Gianmarco Convertino; Mara Stockner; Michela Marchetti; Danilo Mitaritonna; Luca Corvitto; Luca Maiano; Lorenzo Papa; Irene Amerini; Giuliana Mazzoni
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Artificial Intelligence has given rise to increasingly more realistic fake contents such as deepfake faces, hardly distinguishable from real faces. However, evidence has shown that social evaluations of real faces are also able to impact the detection of deepfake faces. The present study aimed at applying for the first time the valence-dominance model for face evaluation on deepfake faces. Moreover, the impact of its thirteen attributes on deepfake detection performances was investigated. Specifically, 311 participants categorised 120 faces (50% real, 50% deepfake created ad hoc by Diffusion Model technology) and rated faces in regards to one of the attributes. Principal Component Analysis was applied in order to validate the valence-dominance model on deepfake faces, and a Brunswikian lens model was applied to understand how each attribute contributes to a face being judged as deepfake. Results replicated the valence-dominance model on real faces as well as on faces categorized by participants as deepfake, but not on actual deepfake faces. Finally, the indirect effects of the Brunswikian model revealed caringness and intelligence to impair detection of deepfake stimuli, whilst weirdness was revealed to be a positive indirect predictor, being positively associated with higher detection accuracy of deepfake faces. Our results shed, for the first time, light into the differential cognitive processing of deepfake faces and their social evaluation whilst also providing novel insight into underlying mechanisms associated with deepfake detection. Interdisciplinary implications regarding the theoretical and applied contribution are discussed.
Maturational constraints on tracking of temporal attention in infant language acquisition.
Tineke M. Snijders; Katharina Menn
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Children are active learners: they selectively attend to important information. Rhythmic neural tracking of speech is central to active language learning. This chapter evaluates recent research showing that neural oscillations in the infant brain synchronise with the rhythm of speech, tracking it at different frequencies. This process predicts word segmentation and later language abilities. We argue that rhythmic neural speech tracking reflects infants’ attention to specific parts of the speech signal (e.g., stressed syllables), and simultaneously acts as a core mechanism for maximising temporal attention onto those parts. Rhythmic neural tracking of speech puts a constraint on neural processing, which maximises the uptake of relevant information from the noisy multimodal environment. We hypothesise this to be influenced by neural maturation. We end by evaluating the implications of this proposal for language acquisition research, and discuss how differences in neural maturation relate to variance in language development in autism.
Ongoing thought varies around individualised defaults in an experiential state space across contexts and depressive symptoms
Clara Wakonigg Alonso; Sian Panton; Dominique Makowski; Giulia Poerio; Theodoros Karapanagiotidis
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Ongoing thought varies continuously, yet previous research has shown that people engage in a small set of recurring thought patterns that are consistent across contexts and individuals. However, it remains unclear whether individuals show idiosyncratic, stable configurations, akin to a default experiential state from which momentary experiences deviate. We combined an emotional-induction task with Multidimensional Experience Sampling of ongoing thought in the lab and daily life. Dimensionality reduction revealed five dominant population-level patterns of thought, forming orthogonal axes of a shared experiential space. Within this space, thought patterns were more similar within individuals than between, supporting person-specific signatures. Position within this space carried psychological meaning: depressive symptom severity predicted both the intensity and frequency of negative intrusive thought in daily life. Default thought patterns were then estimated as each participant's geometric median across daily-life experiences and we assessed how affective contexts displaced thought from these defaults. Positive and negative stimuli shifted thought away from default thought patterns in systematic context-dependent ways, and these shifts varied with depressive symptom severity. Together, the findings suggest that default thought patterns define stable regions within an experiential space, while emotional states and individual differences relate to how momentary experience is displaced from these defaults.
From Impulse to Goal-Consistent Action: Testing an Intervention Targeting Predictions About One’s Own Behavior
Tilia Linthout; Pieter Van Dessel; Marie Vandenbogaerde; Yannick Boddez
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Abstract Impulsive behaviors, such as unplanned snacking, doomscrolling, or angry reactions, often persist despite people’s intentions to act differently. Across two preregistered studies, we tested a novel intervention designed to strengthen people’s predictions that they will act in line with their goals in tempting situations. In Study 1, adults with self-reported impulse control difficulties recruited online (N = 68) completed either this prediction-based intervention or a comparison intervention that included go/no-go training. The prediction-based intervention produced stronger expectations of impulse control improvement. Study 2 used daily smartphone assessments over three weeks (N = 30; 21 repeated measurements per participant). Participants receiving the prediction-based intervention reported larger reductions in impulsive behaviors during and after the intervention period than participants receiving go/no-go training or waitlist control. Limitations include reliance on self-report and short-term follow-up. These findings provide preliminary evidence that interventions targeting predictions about one’s future action may support impulse control behavior change in daily life. Keywords: impulse control, impulsive behavior, goal-directed predictive processing, inferential theory, self-regulation, behavior change
A Three-Domain Framework for Trust in Digitally Mediated Social Life
anonymous; YUAN SHEN; Ke Shen; Jinliang Qin
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Digital technologies increasingly mediate information access, social interaction, and institutional participation, raising the question of how trust in digital systems is organized in relation to trust in people and institutions. Across three independent samples of Chinese young adults, we tested a three-domain framework of trust in digitally mediated social life and developed a concise measure distinguishing interpersonal trust, institutional/rule trust, and digital system trust. Study 1 (N = 1,495) identified a three-factor structure using parallel analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Study 2 (N = 1,333) confirmed this structure: the three-factor model outperformed a unidimensional model and all pairwise-collapsed two-factor alternatives, although the three domains remained strongly correlated. Study 3 (N = 901) provided evidence consistent with measurement invariance across gender and initial nomological differentiation. Learning-oriented digital engagement was more strongly associated with institutional/rule and digital system trust, everyday/relational engagement with interpersonal and digital system trust, and digital information judgment with institutional/rule trust. Sensitivity analyses reproduced the primary patterns. Together, the findings support a three-domain framework in which digital system trust is strongly interconnected with, but not reducible to, trust in people or institutional arrangements.
Navigating Autistic College Students’ Career Development: A Capability-Oriented Perspective on Agency and Advocacy
Yilun Jiang; Karly Ball Isaacson; Bradley E. Cox; Brett Ranon Nachman
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Autistic college students navigate career development through their interests and strengths, while encountering deficit-oriented assumptions about autism. Research on autistic students’ career development usually focuses on career support and skill development, while limited studies have examined how they pursue career pathways from a strengths-based perspective. Drawing on a secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews from a national mixed-methods study (n = 36), we examined how autistic college students in four-year U.S. colleges navigate career development. Applied thematic analysis identified three themes: participants developed purpose-driven career goals through long-standing interests, lived experiences, and community exposure; navigated judgments about capability and professional fit across academic and career contexts; and assembled career support across career centers, faculty, and autism support groups. Our findings highlight autistic participants’ capability to explore career pathways that reflect their interests and goals and suggest an agency-beyond-advocacy interpretation, in which agency refers to broader forms of action through which students shape their career development and advocacy represents one important form of agency. Finally, we offer suggestions for universities and employers to develop resources more tailored to autistic students’ career goals and needs.
The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves
Logan Barrett
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When people imagine the voice they want, they often name a singer. Using gendered singing voice as a model system, I asked whether that choice externalizes an idealized self. Participants (N = 2,536) described masculine and feminine singing voices, placed their current and ideal voices on a feminine–masculine dimension, and named the singer they would ideally sound like. Cisgender and gender-diverse participants drew on statistically equivalent concepts of vocal gender. The perceived gender of the named singer tracked participants’ ideal voice more closely than their current voice, ideal-self proximity predicted the choice beyond popularity and gender homophily, a result that replicated in a held-out test set, and the ideal-over-current advantage held when singers were re-rated by five language models or scored from their recorded acoustics, and in an independent text corpus. The correspondence operated at the level of gender category: within category, the chosen singer’s acoustic femininity did not track the ideal voice. It was also largely independent of distress: singing-related gender incongruence was associated with the chosen singer only weakly, and not detectably once gender identity was controlled. Chosen singers are better understood as representations of a desired self than as indices of distress.
Individual Differences in Spillover During Naturalistic Reading
Cui Ding; Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox; Lena A. Jäger
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Spillover---the influence of previous words on the processing of current words---is widely reported in reading studies, yet population-level findings are mixed. We argue that spillover is neither noise nor a uniform phenomenon; it may reflect systematic individual differences in how processing difficulty carries over across words. We analyze six naturalistic eye-tracking-while-reading datasets and estimate individual-level spillover effects of preceding-word length, frequency, and surprisal using Bayesian hierarchical models. Because studying individual differences requires reliable measurement, we first assess the cross-context reliability of these effects across experimental sessions and reading tasks, operationalized as correlations between individual-level estimates from two measurement contexts. The measured reliability differs across sources and depends on experimental design and signal-to-noise ratio, being strongest for word length and weaker for lexical frequency and surprisal. Crucially, we find that individual differences in spillover vary systematically with reading fluency. Low-fluency readers exhibit greater spillover from low-level lexical properties, such as word length and frequency, whereas high-fluency readers show more pronounced spillover from higher-level contextual difficulty, such as surprisal, which may help explain why population-level spillover findings are mixed. Finally, spillover is related to skipping and regression rates, indicating that some spillover effects may reflect idiosyncratic patterns of gaze behavior. Overall, our findings suggest that population-level effects can obscure divergent reader profiles, motivating theories and models of reading beyond the "average reader".
Negative evaluation bias in person perception is linked to interpersonal dysfunction
Richard Rau; Amina Aissaoui; Johannes Zimmermann
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Negative evaluations of unfamiliar others have been documented in personality pathology, but it remains unclear whether they reflect a broader perceiver tendency linked dimensionally to interpersonal dysfunction. In a community sample assessed in 2026 (N = 590; n = 226 with close-other reports), we measured a generalized bias toward evaluating unfamiliar others negatively across four standardized person-perception tasks combining personality ratings and adjective selections with vignette and video targets. Stronger negative evaluation bias was associated with greater interpersonal-problem severity when problems were reported by participants themselves (r = .14) and especially when reported by close others (r = .34). Exploratory analyses showed a self-reported shift toward high-agency problems but no corresponding close-other pattern or systematic association with communion. In secondary analyses, negative evaluation bias showed a positive but imprecise association with overall personality-functioning impairment and the expected pattern of lower self-certainty and, conditional on self-certainty, higher certainty about others. These findings support viewing negative evaluation bias as a broader perceiver-level correlate of interpersonal dysfunction, including difficulties apparent beyond the perceiver’s own perspective. Generalizability to more severe personality pathology remains to be established.
Distribution across Age of Raw and Scaled Intelligence Scores - the DARSIS model
Y Cramer
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On heavily g-loaded subtests of intelligence tests, the mean raw score rises steeply in childhood and levels off in late adolescence. How the entire raw score distribution changes with age is far less well documented, even though norm tables of standardized tests contain exactly this information. This study shows that the relationship between age, raw score and scaled score follows a regular, mathematical pattern that is shared across tests, constructs, countries and decades. Using digitized norm tables from 60 subtests of 19 intelligence tests normed in five countries between 1984 and 2020, the scaled score belonging to a given raw score is modeled as a continuous function of age with three coefficients that are common to all subtests and a single ’difficulty’ parameter p per raw score. The model, termed DARSIS (Distribution across Age of Raw and Scaled Intelligence Scores), explains between 90% and 99.9% of the variance in the norm tables, with root mean square errors between 0.07 and 0.38 standard deviations, roughly half of which is attributable to rounding in the published tables. Leave-one-test-out cross-validation yields nearly identical results. Errors are smaller around the mean of the norm tables and for higher levels of performance, but do not depend on age or on the year of standardization. The model gives a parametric form to the mental growth curves described in the early literature on absolute scaling and can be regarded as a strongly restricted special case of the location-scale models used in modern continuous norming. Applications are discussed: norms for above-level testing, extended norms for the upper and lower tails, a reduced parameter space when norming new tests with item response theory, and the computation of reference ages.
Temporal choice dynamics track opponent-dependent adaptation in autism
Tahmineh Godazgar; Rana Ghamari; Abolfazl Nadi; Atiye Sarabi-Jamab
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Autism spectrum disorder involves differences in social communication, interaction and behavioral flexibility, yet conventional single-response Theory-of-Mind tasks rarely capture the trial-by-trial dynamics of social adaptation. We examined how autistic and non-autistic young people organized recent choice history, how they adjusted it across opponents, and how these patterns related to task performance. Twenty-seven autistic children and adolescents and 24 healthy controls completed the same two-choice hide-and-seek task under social and non-social framing against artificial opponents of graded sophistication. We compared aggregate performance, Bayesian model-based estimates of latent strategy use, and model-free history kernels measuring how current choices depended on recent self-actions and opponent actions. History kernels showed that autistic participants switched away from their previous choice more strongly against every opponent, whereas controls added lag-2 and opponent-coupled structure when the opponent adapted to them and reconfigured their kernels across opponents more. Within the same dataset, replaying participants’ kernels against empirically fitted opponents reconstructed accuracy (r = .86) and the direction of the group difference against the first-order opponent, against which switching provided less benefit than against the zero-order opponent. Against the first-order opponent, controls were more often described by first-order opponent modelling (influence learning) and autistic participants by heuristic policies. These findings suggest that autism-related differences in repeated interaction are expressed in how choice history is organized and reconfigured across opponents, beyond categorical differences in inferred strategies.
Charting Expectations About Economic Gains and Losses Across Adulthood
Sebastian S. Horn; Alexandra M. Freund
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Expectations about changes of one’s economic situation impact motivation and decision making. Yet, little is known about how people think about economic changes across adulthood. In this study, participants (N = 1,045) aged 18–88 years from Germany and Switzerland charted their expectations about (a) normative income and wealth trajectories for average adults of different ages, (b) their personal past, present, and future trajectories, and (c) anticipated trajectories with and without active investment. Participants also reported their motivational gain, maintenance, and loss-avoidance orientation for financial goals. Normative economic expectations of all age groups followed an inverted-U pattern of gains into midlife followed by losses in older adulthood. Bayesian multilevel models showed that participants differentiated income and wealth, with an earlier peak and steeper decline for income than wealth. In contrast to normative expectations, personal expectations differed markedly by age, with older participants judging their economic development less favorably than younger participants. These judgments covaried with motivational orientation. All age groups expected future active investment to improve their economic prospects, but older adults anticipated smaller benefits and even losses under active investment. Participants’ normative judgments corresponded well to representative income and wealth data (German Socio-Economic Panel; Swiss Household Panel), suggesting that adults of different ages hold shared and relatively realistic expectations about age-graded economic gains and losses. At the same time, the findings highlight substantial age-related differences in personal expectations.
The Emergent Structure of Memory Phenomenology Depends on Whether Memories Are More Episodic or Semantic
Tabatha Blaney-Gale; Jordan Poppenk
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Phenomenological characteristics are central to theoretical distinctions among modern memory constructs. The scene construction framework proposes that episodic remembering involves the construction of coherent scenes, such that the structure of phenomenology may reflect the engagement of the hippocampus and related regions during recall. However, most phenomenology research relies on instruments with content and scoring schemes that embed theoretical assumptions into their measurements. Here, we explored whether phenomenological characteristics emerge from self-reported memory experiences as anticipated by episodic memory theory. We solicited memories from a large online sample, following each response with a novel questionnaire designed to evaluate the phenomenology of individual memories. We used folded bottom-up factor analyses to examine and validate the global latent factor structure of participants’ memory experiences. Consistent with Tulving’s declarative memory framework, our analyses produced five stable dimensions: imagery, autonoetic consciousness, mental time travel, relational memory, and semantic memory. In order, these dimensions reflect multi-modal perceptual reexperiencing, personal meaning, sense of reliving, detailed spatiotemporal context, and conscious use of semantic knowledge during recall. The semantic memory dimension has no clear predecessor, suggesting the strategic use of general knowledge during recall is a distinct and previously uncharacterized aspect of remembering. This factor structure generalized across memories elicited by recent and remote episodic prompts. However, distinct versions of mental time travel and relational memory emerged in response to the semantic prompt, suggesting these dimensions of memory are context-sensitive rather than fixed. While our findings validate the link between episodic memory and its theorized phenomenological elements, they also invite broader investigation of how phenomenology may vary across different classes of memory.
When Are Less Precise Predictions More Credible?
Eitan David Rude; Amin Shiri; Felipe M. Affonso; Hal Hershfield; Craig R. Fox
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People expressing uncertain values frequently offer point predictions or intervals of varying widths (e.g., “I’d say your investment will be worth $6,000” versus “I’d say your investment will be worth $5,000–$7,000”). Interestingly, prior research has drawn conflicting conclusions concerning the credibility of more versus less precise predictions. We resolve this inconsistency by identifying a key moderator: the perceived nature of uncertainty. Specifically, we find that under epistemic (“knowable”) uncertainty, predictions are seen as conveying experts’ degree of confidence, and more precise predictions are seen as more credible. Under aleatory (“random”) uncertainty, however, predictions are seen as conveying experts’ assessments of the degree of outcome variability, and less precise predictions are seen as more credible (provided they are within reasonable bounds). These results inform literatures on both the communication of uncertainty and the interpretation of confidence intervals.
Expertise Diversity Enhances Information Sharing in Wiki settings: Evidence from Sequential Collaboration
Maren Mayer; Joachim Kimmerle
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Online collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap rely on sequential collaboration, where contributors iteratively revise a shared product over time. While previous research has examined wikis for computer-supported collaborative learning and sequential collaboration for numerical judgment tasks, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying information sharing in such settings. The present study bridges research on computer-supported collaborative learning, group information sharing, and cognitive models of sequential collaboration. Drawing on a computational model of sequential collaboration, we tested the prediction that higher variation in contributors' expertise facilitates the integration of information into a shared product. In an experimental study with 413 participants we demonstrate that information accumulation increased throughout the sequential chain but at a decreasing rate. Consistent with model predictions, higher expertise variation significantly increased the likelihood that information was incorporated into the shared text. Contrary to expectations, expertise variation did not affect the timing of information inclusion across chain positions, nor did it increase information deletions. These findings demonstrate that predictions derived from a cognitive model of numerical judgment formation generalize to information-sharing contexts. More broadly, the results suggest that diversity in contributors' knowledge can improve collaborative knowledge construction in sequential environments. This research adds to evidence that sequential collaboration is an effective mechanism for integrating distributed knowledge in online collaborative systems.
Can personality be deliberately changed? Effects of a randomized, placebo-controlled intervention on character strengths and Big Five personality traits
Lisa Wagner; Valentina Vylobkova; Sonja Heintz; Jessie Sun; Fabian Gander
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The promise of intentional change in adult personality traits attracts broad interest, even as convincing evidence remains scarce and methodologically challenging. In a preregistered randomized placebo- and waitlist-controlled study with N = 3,434 adults, we tested whether an eight-week online training of a self-selected character strength produces short- and long-term changes in character strengths (states and traits) and Big Five personality traits. Participants in the intervention condition increased targeted strengths states more than both placebo and waitlist control conditions. However, intervention and placebo participants experienced similar gains in targeted strengths traits, extraversion, and agreeableness, as well as similar decreases in neuroticism relative to the waitlist condition. Thus, some effects may result from non-specific aspects of the structured activity. Informants did not observe any between-condition differences in strengths trait change. These findings underscore the importance of using rigorous control conditions in research on volitional personality change.
Is Guessing to Blame? Comparing Two Accounts of Attenuated Monitoring Accuracy in Recognition-Based Metamemory Judgments
Franziska Magdalene Leipold; Constantin Gregor Meyer-Grant
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The relative accuracy of prospective metamemory monitoring is typically assessed through the association between judgments of learning (JOLs) and subsequent memory performance. In recognition paradigms, however, manifest correlations can vary across task structures, and prior work insinuated that such differences may reflect guessing processes rather than differences in underlying monitoring ability. We formally derived model-implied predictions for the manifest JOL–recognition correlation under two competing theoretical frameworks: the two-high-threshold model (2HTM), which explicitly allows for guessing, and signal detection theory (SDT), which does not. We tested these predictions in an original experiment that manipulated response bias. The observed difference in the manifest JOL–recognition correlation between conditions was well accounted for by the 2HTM under a single latent correlation, whereas SDT clearly failed to do so. These findings suggest that guessing contaminates manifest correlations commonly used as proxies for monitoring accuracy, and that adequately modeling the underlying process can recover the latent association those proxies are meant to capture.
Visual Deprivation Alters Parent-Specific Autonomic Tuning During Infancy
GIULIA CAPPAGLI; Marta Guarischi; Guido Catalano; FEDERICA MORELLI; gori monica; Sabrina Signorini
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Parents' touch regulates infants' physiology, and vision may be essential for identifying social partners, but whether the absence of visual feedback affects this physiological effect has never been tested. We examined whether visual deprivation alters infants' autonomic responses to affective touch from a parent versus a stranger. Eighteen infants aged 8–13 months (9 with peripheral visual impairment, 9 sighted) received slow stroking (3 cm/s) on the right shin while the parent or an unfamiliar adult sat in front of them as the apparent source of touch. Typically developing infants showed a larger heart-rate deceleration during parent than stranger touch. Infants with visual impairment did not differentiate between adults and showed higher heart-rate responses than typically developing infants in the parent condition (Group × Parent Identity interaction). Visual experience may help link affective touch to its social source. The small, clinical sample limits generalizability, and replication is needed.
Techno-Optimism Reduces Willingness to Address Climate Change
Jonas M B Haslbeck; Maien S. M. Sachisthal; Fabian Dablander
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Technological innovation is essential for mitigating climate change, but so are wider socio-economic transformations as well as lifestyle changes. Techno-optimism, the belief that technological innovation alone is sufficient to address climate change, may reduce public willingness to engage in climate action. Here we use a structural causal model to estimate the causal effect of techno-optimism on willingness to contribute 1\% of one's monthly household income to address climate change using a large, population-weighted sample from the Netherlands (N = 23, 395). We find that being a techno-optimist reduces the probability of being willing to contribute by 18.7% (95% CI: 15.6, 20.7). In addition, we find that the causal effect is much smaller for respondents on the political right, where overall willingness is already very low. We close by discussing the importance of adequately framing the role of technology when discussing climate change mitigation.
Neural Racing Accumulator Model Estimation With Lightweight Monotonic Flows
Malte Lüken; Stefan T. Radev; Lourens Waldorp; Andrew Heathcote
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Race models describe speeded decision-making as a race between competing runners that accumulate evidence in favor of available choice options. Their parameters can be estimated through the model likelihood that combines the probability and cumulative density functions of each runner. However, estimating parameters of complex race models whose runners have intractable densities with (hierarchical) Bayesian inference has been challenging: Numerical density approximations tend to be slow and amortized neural posterior estimation methods require complex network architectures that can be expensive to train and, in classical settings, tie the trained estimator to a specific prior distribution and generative model. We propose a flexible neural estimation method that decouples training from the choice of prior distribution or model parameterization. We train a small neural network together with a monotonic neural spline flow to simultaneously learn the runners' conditional probability density and cumulative density functions. We then combine both functions to efficiently estimate race model likelihoods that can be used in combination with modern samplers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on both tractable and intractable versions of the popular racing diffusion model. Based on our results, we argue that, when flexibility in choosing prior distributions or model parameterizations is needed, learning the model likelihood with lightweight neural density estimators is advantageous.
fMRI hyperscanning reveals widespread neural coupling during natural conversations
Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo; Lily Tsoi; Sebastian Speer; Zaid Zada; Shannon M. Burns; Emily B. Falk; Diana Tamir
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Conversation is one of the most powerful tools that people have for building and maintaining social connections. How does conversation bring two minds together? Here we tracked the neural dynamics between dyads during real-time conversation using fMRI hyperscanning, where both people were scanned simultaneously, to explore whether and how conversation aligns brains. Dyads engaged in natural, free-flowing conversation as they co-constructed the content of their dialogue. In a control condition, partners read aloud scripted dialogue from another dyad’s conversation, preserving the turn-taking structure while removing the co-construction. To examine neural alignment, we compared whole-brain intersubject correlation between partners in each condition, assessing both synchronous and predictive neural dynamics. Results showed that naturalistic conversation led to significant widespread neural alignment across brain regions implicated in attention, audition, affect, executive control, and social cognition, compared to scripted conversation. Temporally refined analyses showed that during naturalistic conversation, relative to scripted conversation, both speakers and listeners anticipated each other within a short temporal window, with brain activity preceding their partner’s in the same neural systems. These findings show that live, turn-taking conversations align neural activity well beyond passive or asynchronous communication, providing a foundation for future research examining how spontaneous, co-constructed dialogue allows people to communicate effectively.
The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 2026 Update
Stephen V. Faraone; Alison E. Pritchard; Mark Bellgrove; Jan Buitelaar; Li Yang; Luis Augusto Rohde; Brooke S. G. Molina; David Coghill; Jeffrey H.Newcorn; David W. Goodman
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Background: In the 5 years since the publication of the original ADHD International Consensus Statement, a great deal of new evidence has emerged. This updated consensus statement reflects the current state of the science with respect to ADHD, with a goal of reducing misconceptions and stigma around the disorder. Methods: Studies eligible for inclusion were published between January 1, 2021 and July 1, 2025 and were either: 1) large cohort studies of 2000 or more participants, or 2) meta-analyses of at least 5 studies or 2000 participants in which publication bias was considered. Eligible studies were summarized and consolidated by theme. Manuscript contents were reviewed and approved by 118 authors from 29 countries and 6 continents. Results: Two hundred and fifty empirically-supported statements were generated from these studies, offering readers an up-to-date understanding of the most robust findings in the areas of prevalence, how genes and environmental factors shape ADHD, psychiatric and somatic comorbidities, cognitive and neurological differences among individuals with ADHD, functional outcomes, and treatments for the disorder. Conclusions: Many of the conclusions of the original Consensus Statement are supported, but this update adds important nuance to some findings as a result of more recent evidence. It also highlights a few areas in which the balance of findings has shifted in the last 5 years, providing a transparent overview of the current scientific state of the field.
Developing an adolescent self-report measure of social media experience: Insights from cognitive interviews
Jo Hickman Dunne; Louise Black; Jade Davies; Frederick Jones; Molly Anderton; Pratyasha Nanda; Felicitas Beissel; Lauren Burke; Reihaneh Farzinnia; Margarita Panayiotou
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Despite a rapid increase in research exploring the relationship between adolescent social media use and mental health, the field is hindered by poor quality tools that lack the validity and precision to assess this relationship. The current study presents findings from cognitive interviews that aimed to refine a multidimensional measure of adolescents’ social media experiences relevant to their mental health and wellbeing. We conducted 20 individual, paired or group interviews with 35 adolescents aged 11-16, across three rounds of interviews, testing 83 of a possible 107 items. Through iterative testing, issues relating to comprehension; inapplicability and assumptions within items; and items not addressing their intended experience, were identified and addressed. The interviews also highlighted two wider conceptual issues: (1) the impact of parental restrictions on adolescents’ experiences, and (2) difficulties in responding to items about abstract, identity-based experiences. In addition, the interviews supported an understanding of preferred response options and format. Findings from this study informed specific revisions to measure items to enhance validity, as well as broader considerations for assessing adolescent social media experience. Our study also reinforces the importance of cognitive interviewing in refining adolescent measures more broadly. We identify the need for the development of a set of general recommendations to guide item writing for adolescents, and further work to understand optimal response label options and wording for longer recall periods. Development of such guidance, alongside the greater use of cognitive interviews to pre-test measures, is crucial for improving instrument validity in the field of adolescent mental health.

SocArxiv

Inequality of CO₂ Emissions. Carbon Footprint, Socioeconomic Correlates, and Adoption of E-Technology
Andreas Diekmann; Felix Ries; Tom Behringer
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We estimate the carbon footprint of the German resident population from the first wave of the German Longitudinal Environmental Study (GLEN), a large register-based probability sample, using a comprehensive module that measures housing, mobility, diet, and consumption at the individual level. Emissions are strongly right-skewed, averaging 8.6 tons of CO₂ equivalents per capita (9.7 including public infrastructure), and roughly two-thirds of the population emit below the mean. A person at the 90th percentile emits 3 times as much as one at the 10th. The four sectors contribute to total emissions as follows: Mobility 3.6 tons, housing 2.2, diet 1.6, and consumption 1.2. A source decomposition shows that inequality is overwhelmingly driven by mobility. This sector accounts for more than 40 percent of emissions but nearly 80 percent of total footprint inequality. A large part of the amount and variance of mobility is due to flights. Emissions rise with income (elasticity 0.22) and education, while environmental concern and Green Party preference are associated with lower footprints net of sociodemographic characteristics. The adoption of low-carbon technologies, such as heat pumps, solar energy, and electric cars, increases with income and favors homeowners. Finally, we discuss the distributional implications for carbon pricing.
Organisational Knowledge Brokerage in Science Diplomacy: The Making of AI Governance at UNESCO and the European Union
Adam McCarthy; Alice Naisbitt; Pedro Dos Santos Maia; Barbara Riberio; Kieron Flanagan; Philip Shapira
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We examine how expertise, evidence and authority are organised in the international governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and what this reveals about the practice of science diplomacy. Science-diplomacy scholarship has become increasingly attentive to the political character of expertise and to the ways knowledge is mobilised within international governance. Yet less attention has been paid to the organisational practices through which such knowledge is brokered within governance processes. Drawing on documentary analysis and 23 semi-structured interviews, we compare UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the EU AI Act. Through an abductive analysis, we develop Organisational Knowledge Brokerage (OKB) to explain how a contested object such as AI is made workable for governance. We identify four connected practices through which this occurs: stabilising the governance object, legitimising expertise, building authority and operationalising governance. These practices took different forms under contrasting institutional mandates and governing capacities. UNESCO worked through global intergovernmental standard-setting and implementation support, while the EU combined supranational regulation with expert advice and Member State coordination. Across both cases, OKB also produced a cross-cutting process that we term normative translation, through which contested values acquired practical meaning in definitions, assessments and procedures. We show how this brokerage allowed each organisation to establish workable and revisable settlements around AI under conditions of technological uncertainty and dispersed authority. The article therefore develops a practice-oriented account of science diplomacy as organisational work through which knowledge, values and institutional authority are assembled for collective action in international technology governance.
Conceptualising EU foreign policy change
Nikki Ikani
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This is chapter 4 from the monograph "Crisis and Change in European Foreign Policy". The book centralizes a set of questions: What happens to European foreign policy arrangements after a crisis hits? Is EU foreign policy changed as a consequence and if so, how and by whom exactly? And crucially: do things actually change? While policy changes on a national level after a sudden crisis have been investigated, little has been done to find out how those processes work exactly within the EU. In this book, Ikani studies the decision-making processes of the European Union, to find out which factors determine if and how the EU decides to change its foreign policy course after crisis. After explaining some of the theory, the book addresses five recent crises, as well as the policy changes that were made as a result: the Arabic uprisings, the Ukraine crisis of 2013/2014, the 'security crisis' that followed, the disinformation crisis, and the 2015 refugee crisis. Based on these cases Ikani created an analytical framework that students and researchers can use when looking to study policy changes in a different context. For example, if they want to know what the impact of the current war in Ukraine might be on European defense policies. But it can also be used to study how a worldwide crisis such as the COVID pandemic will effect domestic and foreign policies.
What Does Living in Extreme Poverty Look Like? Exploring Lived Realities in Rural Uganda
Lukas Neuwirth; Khamisi Musanje; Mathias Kayanga; Martin Mabunda Baluku; Karen Schelleman-Offermans
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This qualitative cross-sectional study explored how extreme poverty is experienced in rural Uganda’s Busoga region. Thirty-two semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with adults screened for severe deprivation using the $2.15/day threshold and Multidimensional Poverty Index criteria. Transcripts were analysed via hybrid thematic analysis. Participants reported experiencing pervasive scarcity, unsafe housing, constrained water and sanitation, food insecurity, and limited healthcare. These conditions produced experiences of chronic stress, emotional fatigue, diminished agency, blocked aspirations, irregular livelihoods, and strained relationships alongside fragile community support. Narratives indicated these psychological, behavioural and social patterns were consequences of financial scarcity, suggesting a self-perpetuating poverty cycle.
What is edtech used for: homework, teaching, or play? A cross-national edtech popularity index
Lulu Shi; Basak Bozkurt
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Digitalisation in education is so far described through broad indicators such as market growth, venture capital investment, infrastructure provision, or device availability in schools and homes. While useful, these measures reveal little about for what purposes digital technologies are used in education, and how these purposes vary across national contexts and time. This article addresses these gaps by developing an education app popularity index based on daily top-200 education app rankings across twelve countries between 2017 and 2023: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Drawing on app metadata, education apps are categorised according to the services and functions they offer to understand for what purpose they serve. The ranking is then aggregated to analyse category prominence over time and across countries to understand popularity of education apps by category. The study makes three contributions. First, it provides a granular account of what educational apps offer, showing that the educational app landscape is not dominated by a single type of service but consists of a heterogeneous mixture of tutoring tools, management platforms, parent-facing communication apps and a range of apps supporting infomal learning. Second, it shows the popularity of different types of digital education services and how and their popularity shift over time. Third, it shows that these patterns vary across country contexts. Differences across countries point to that edtech usage is not only driven by individual preferences but by distinct institutional arrangements and cultures. Lastly, this study also advances a methodological approach for understanding the realities of edtech deployment by using Google Play Store data, the world’s largest app market in terms of content volume.
Empirical evidence of negative attitudes to Rroma, Sinti, and Yenish in Switzerland
Didier Ruedin; Anaïd Lindemann; Lisa Stalder
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We provide empirical evidence of negative attitudes to Rroma, Sinti, and Yenish in Switzerland, people who are commonly associated with an itinerant way of life. A large-scale representative survey was implemented in Switzerland in 2019 (N=3,004), including two survey experiments with split samples to vary whether, for the same behaviours, the descriptions refer to an itinerant way of life or not. The survey reveals negative attitudes and limited knowledge of Rroma, Sinti, and Yenish in Switzerland. Negative attitudes to these communities are partially a reflection of a negative evaluation of the perceived impact of an itinerant way of life. Given that most Rroma, Sinti, and Yenish do not actually pursue an itinerant way of life, raising awareness in the majority population may help reduce negative attitudes.
Understanding climate actions: The cost-impact trade-off
Gian Luca Pasin; Eva Vriens
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Why do individuals commit to some climate actions but not others? Although concern about climate change is widespread, stated willingness to act often falls short. In a preregistered between-subjects survey experiment with UK respondents (N = 900), we randomly assigned participants to one of four climate actions that differ in personal cost and environmental impact: reducing meat consumption (high cost, high impact), reducing car use (high cost, moderate impact), reducing food waste (low cost, moderate impact), and reducing plastic waste (low cost, low impact). After receiving standardized information about their assigned action, participants reported their stated commitment to adopting it, their compensatory green beliefs, their expectations about others' commitment, and the share of others who would need to adopt the action before they would do so themselves (i.e., individual threshold for behavioural change).} We found that participants correctly perceived differences in the cost of the action, but misjudged environmental impact, substantially underestimating the impact of high-impact actions like dietary change and overestimating the impact of limiting plastic waste. \hl{Consistent with the reasoning behind the low-cost hypothesis}, low-cost actions elicited higher and more homogeneous \hl{stated} commitment, lower and more homogenous thresholds for \hl{behavioural change, and greater potential for social tipping}. On an individual level, we also found indications that actions that are perceived to be more costly are positively associated with compensatory green beliefs. Finally, individuals exhibited a systematic ``better-than-average'' bias, though this bias disappears among low-commitment individuals facing high-cost actions. \hl{Objective environmental impact added little once cost was taken into account, although actions that participants perceived as more impactful elicited higher commitment. In terms of policy, our results suggest that low-cost actions are a promising target for norm-based interventions, whereas high-cost, high-impact actions such as reducing meat consumption call for measures that lower their personal cost.
The Double Darkness of Dark Patterns
Marijn Sax
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Dark patterns are as omnipresent as they are annoying. In the European Union, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and Digital Services Act (and in the near future, possibly, the Digital Fairness Act) regulate dark patterns. In this article, I argue that the conceptual treatment of dark patterns in the literature is problematically imprecise. Descriptive and normative considerations are often not clearly distinguished and the use of key influence concepts–e.g., deception, manipulation–also tends to be imprecise. I argue that we need to appreciate the inherent conceptual entwinement of descriptive and normative elements in a plausible concept of dark patterns. To that effect, I propose that the “dark” in dark patterns refers to two distinct–but intrinsically linked–senses of dark, one of which is descriptive in nature, and one of which is normative. I call this the double darkness of dark patterns. By embracing dark patterns’ double darkness, we can also theorise more systematically how dark patterns undermine autonomy. This, in turn, is very helpful because both the UCPD and DSA safeguard autonomy without defining or theorising it. Instead, these pieces of legislation indirectly operationalise autonomy by specifying normative influence-types (e.g., deception, manipulation, coercion, undue influence, harassment) which can “distort” or “impair” decision-making. The double darkness approach helps explaining how both senses of darkness can be systematically linked to the normative influence-types so central to legal interpretation, thereby providing more conceptual clarity specifically for legal and policy discussions of dark patterns.
Do Daughters gain from Hypogamy and Sons from Hypergamy? Parental Heterogamy and Children’s Educational Outcomes
Manuel T. Valdés; Nadia Steiber
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Prior studies have abundantly documented the effect of parents’ educational attainment on their children’s academic outcomes, but research on the impact of parents’ educational mating pattern remains limited. In this study, we investigate whether women have an educational advantage when raised in hypogamous (the mother is more educated than the father) rather than hypergamous families (the father is the more educated parent), whether men experience a similar advantage when raised in hypergamous rather than hypogamous families, and whether these advantages vary with the prevalence of hypogamous families relative to hypergamous ones. We use data from four waves of the European Union Statistics and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, yielding a sample of 50,746 individuals residing in 28 European countries and born between 1956 and 1995. Our results show that women benefit from being raised in hypogamous families, a positive effect on their educational attainment that did not diminish as hypogamy became more prevalent relative to hypergamy. Men from hypergamous families experience a similar advantage, but this effect waned as hypergamy declined relative to hypogamy. Beyond contributing to research on the influence of parental mating pattern on children’s outcomes, our findings have relevant implications for research on the gender gap in education.
Fear Capital
Armando Garcia
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This article examines fear as a social, economic and political relation. It argues that fear is a form of capital, a social affect that can be amassed, circulated and redistributed to secure legitimacy, expand coercive power and normalise surveillance. It asks why one of the world's safest societies has come to legislate as though besieged, and answers through a genealogy of the Icelandic state's own pacification projects. Against the myth of Nordic exceptionalism, I argue that Iceland is not an exception to the security state but a least‑likely critical case of securitising practices. Taking my cue from Mark Neocleous' theory of pacification, the article interprets bordering and policing as the continual fabrication of social order against a succession of adversaries: the masterless labourer, the “wayward” woman, the communist and the disgruntled worker and, most recently, racialised persons and non‑European immigrant populations. This succession can be unearthed through the state's information records, from the parish ledger and the alien register to wiretaps and official pronouncements. Across these episodes I identify three modalities of fear capital. Fear is fabricated when moral panics become means of discipline and control, and emulated when foreign threat designations are enacted at home. These two modalities are realised when fear yields budgetary allocations, police powers and electoral gains. The article explains how a society with marginal violent crime has come to govern through the fabrication, emulation and vicarious consumption of fear.
Lessons learnt? The EU and the Arab uprisings
Nikki Ikani
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A reboot of the Arab Uprisings has become more likely in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic. In order to assess whether the European institutions are currently better able to anticipate an event such as the Arab Uprisings, this paper contends one must first investigate in depth what made the Arab Uprisings so surprising, and to whom. Hereto, this paper unpacks this surprising nature of the Uprisings and the performance of the EEAS, INTCEN and DG NEAR, challenging some of the extant explanations in this literature. To this aim and following previous research, it dissects surprise into three elements. By unpacking who was surprised (the spread of the surprise), on what (the scope of the surprise) and to what degree (the dissonance of the surprise), it complements the extant literature which prioritizes the explanation of their ‘surprisingness’ over an in-depth investigation of the characteristics which made the Arab Uprisings so surprising. It subsequently probes which factors negatively affected the EU’s performance, preparing the field for the learning of specific lessons.
Born to Govern or to Extract? Party types across administrative levels in Colombia
Juan Sebastián Lara-Rodríguez
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Political parties and corruption research relies predominantly on political spectrum, overlooking the organisational attributes that shape whether parties constrain or facilitate corrupt behaviour. This paper proposes a typological framework that classifies parties by their organisational origins — traditional, personalistic, ethnic, rebelorigin, and neo-Pentecostal — and examines how these are related to corruption across mayoral, gubernatorial, and presidential administrative levels. Drawing on prosecutorial records from Colombia’s Attorney General covering 2011–2020, I construct a composite corruption indicator for 1,122 municipalities across three local and two presidential elections. The empirical strategy combines municipality and two-way fixed effects, spatial econometric models, and a regression discontinuity design exploiting close elections. The results show that rebel-origin parties and citizen-signature movements consistently reduce corruption, whilst traditional and personalistic types remain statistically indistinguishable; ethnic parties appear insignificant in the main classification, but the sensitivity analysis reveals that once parapolitically captured parties are reassigned, genuine indigenous parties significantly reduce rent-seeking. This relationship varies across governmental tiers: party structure binds at the municipal level, church-based accountability operates at the gubernatorial level, and armed-group networks override party type at the presidential level. Voter turnout is positively associated with municipal corruption, consistent with clientelistic mobilisation. These findings demonstrate that how parties are built matters for understanding corruption in multi-party democracies.
How Do Unconditional Cash Transfers Break the Poverty Trap? Identifying Pathways of Behavioral, Economic, and Psychosocial Transformations through Lived Experiences in Rural Uganda
Lukas Neuwirth; Khamisi Musanje; Karen Schelleman-Offermans; Mathias Kayanga; Martin Mabunda Baluku
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This longitudinal mixed-methods study (n=32) investigates the mechanisms through which Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) alleviate extreme poverty in rural Uganda. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted at three timepoints (baseline, n = 32; one month after, n = 32; one year after, n = 11), alongside economic data and standardized psychological measures, we explored changes in lived experiences, examined individual differences and reconstructed personal trajectories following a combined UCT and behavioral micro-intervention. Findings reveal that, for all participants, UCTs initiated a similar three-stage pathway of change. First, they alleviated material scarcity, leading to a state of basic sufficiency that reduced stress, restored cognitive bandwidth, and fostered future orientation. Second, they served as start-up capital for future-oriented investments and microenterprise development. Finally, as participants engaged in their investments, they initiated an upward spiral of self-reinforcing processes that facilitated poverty graduation. Nonetheless, UCTs demonstrated varying effects. For some, they served as economic relief, while for others, they initiated a cycle of multidimensional transformation. These individual differences were explained by the varying degrees to which participants progressed along this pathway and how strongly underlying processes were activated. Eight psychosocial processes emerged as key drivers of transformation; (1) removing scarcity; (2) goal setting and action planning, (3) experiencing positive emotions; (4) improving self-concepts; (5) developing psychological capital; (6) improving social capital; (7) psychological needs fulfillment and (8) behavioral activation. Our results suggest that UCTs must be understood as interventions that directly engage the psychological, social and behavioral dimensions of poverty. However, future research is needed to replicate and expand our findings.
What do culture vouchers really buy? Evidence from France's ‘pass Culture’ policy uses
Abel Aussant
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Over the last decade, states throughout Europe have begun implementing universal culture vouchers for young adults to boost cultural participation. Little is known about the effects of these large-scale subsidies, specifically whether they are an effective means of widening participation. This article addresses this question by looking at the French ‘pass Culture’, a €300 stipend for cultural consumption offered to all 18-year-olds since 2021. This study examines whether the intensity of voucher use is associated with higher cultural participation, and whether this association varies across cultural practices. The empirical investigation relies on the statistical analysis of a large-scale survey (N = 5,010) of young people aged 18 to 21 that documents both cultural participation and ‘pass Culture’ use. While the voucher is not associated with participation in institutional highbrow cultural activities like museum visits, theater, or opera attendance, it is positively correlated with engagement in commercial popular culture consumption, including cinema and comic book reading. This is consistent with the view that financial barriers are not the primary obstacle to consumption in cultural capital-intensive activities. However, financial constraints do appear to be associated with non-participation in popular cultural life. The article then discusses the theoretical implications of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between cultural consumption, cultural policies, and social inequalities.
How is Social Status Distributed? A Conjoint Experiment on Social Status Judgements in Great Britain
Jonathan Mellon; Jack Bailey; Geoffrey Evans
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Social status is a core aspect of societal inequalities, yet its determinants and distribution remain understudied. We investigate the factors that shape social status judgments in Great Britain using a conjoint survey experiment with 7,680 respondents making 30,720 status assessments. Drawing on the extant literature, we test economic (occupation, income, wealth, education), cultural (leisure activities and supermarket choice), and ascribed (gender, class background, and ethnicity) factors as determinants of social status. Income has a substantial positive effect on status judgments, as do pro-social occupations (teaching and healthcare). Cultural capital, measured through leisure activities and supermarket preferences, plays a major role in status assessments. We also find that housing wealth, private schooling, higher education, and being White British all increase perceived status. We also contribute to understanding what factors distribute the most status by combining our experimental estimates with data on the prevalence of status predictors in the British population. We find that economic factors, particularly income and wealth distribute the most status. Cultural factors distribute less status, with ascribed characteristics like ethnicity and gender distributing the least status across the whole population, despite sizeable individual-level status penalties for ethnic minorities. Finally, we show that while women, ethnic minorities, and people from working class backgrounds have lower status descriptively in the population, the causes of this lower status differ with ethnic minorities and those from working class backgrounds suffering direct ascribed penalties, whereas women’s lower status derives almost entirely from their worse economic situation (particularly lower income). Our findings support multiple sociological theories of status, demonstrating the importance of occupation, economic resources, cultural capital, and racial hierarchies in status judgments. However, economic factors dominate the distribution of status across society.
Japan measures workplace stress but rarely acts on it: fix the response loop, not the test
Ryutaro Nakagawa; Nami Yamamura
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Since 2015, Japanese law has required every workplace with 50 or more employees to screen workers for psychological stress once a year. A decade on, the program's effect on mental health remains unproven. We argue that this is not a failure of measurement but of response. The evidence is consistent: completing the stress survey, receiving individual feedback, or attending a physician interview does not by itself improve distress; the only component linked to better outcomes is improvement of the psychosocial work environment, and that step is carried out after only a small minority of assessments. By average annual hours Japan now sits in the middle of the OECD, yet the incidence of very long working weeks remains high and is masked by that average, and the country's suicide rate is among the highest in the comparison. Across countries these structural indicators track outcomes only weakly, which is reason to distrust ecological arguments and to anchor causal claims in individual-level cohorts. We draw on the logic of infectious-disease surveillance, where the speed of the detection-to-response loop matters more than the precision or frequency of measurement, to reframe what a useful stress-monitoring system should optimize. Raising the frequency of individual screening, or lowering its cost, targets the wrong bottleneck. The lever is a fast, low-cost path from a detected problem to a change in the work environment. This is a framework proposal; its central prediction, that closing the loop raises the rate of environmental action, is testable and should be tested.
Wealth, inequality and deforestation: a scale-dependent relationship
Elodie Adam; Leland Werden; Melissa Chapman
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Understanding how wealth and economic inequality shape global land-use change is both a long-standing and urgent challenge. While existing empirical evidence largely relies on either national-scale metrics of wealth and inequality or small-scale case studies, few analyses combine global scope with local-scale data. Here we do so, linking local wealth and local inequality to satellite-derived deforestation and its proximate drivers for 27,657 household survey clusters across 52 countries. We find that local wealth, rather than inequality, is the stronger predictor of forest loss, but the direction of this effect is not uniform: depending on the country, a one-standard-deviation increase in local wealth is associated with anywhere from a 19% decrease to a 36% increase in the expected deforestation rate, with no discernible effect in most countries. The share of tree cover loss due to permanent agriculture tends to be higher in wealthier clusters, while the share due to shifting cultivation tends to be higher in areas with lower wealth. We further identify clusters with high wealth, low inequality, and low deforestation, to understand the environmental and socioeconomic drivers of these "triple-win" clusters. Triple-win areas tend to cluster spatially, suggesting that district-level analysis is key to identifying policy levers and institutional structures that can reconcile human development with environmental protection.
The Impact of Maternal Preconception Health on Long-Term Child Health and Developmental Outcomes: A Scoping Review
Catherine Stewart; Katie Harron; Jennifer Hall
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The preconception period is a critical window during which maternal health and behaviours can influence pregnancy and offspring outcomes. However, preconception care remains limited, and existing research has largely focused on short-term pregnancy or neonatal outcomes. This scoping review aimed to synthesise evidence on the associations between maternal preconception health and long-term health, developmental, and educational outcomes in children. Primary studies were eligible if they examined the independent effect of maternal preconception health on child health and developmental outcomes assessed after age 1 year and up to 18 years. Five databases (MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science) were searched. Data were extracted using a standardised form and summarised descriptively. Studies were mapped by type of preconception exposure and child outcome. From 9,539 records identified, 186 studies met the inclusion criteria. Preconception BMI was the most frequently studied exposure (n=130) while neuro/cognitive development (n=83) was the most common outcome. Higher preconception BMI was consistently associated with adverse long-term outcomes, including higher offspring BMI and poorer cognitive, behavioural, and developmental outcomes. Pre-existing maternal physical and mental health conditions were also linked to poorer child health and developmental outcomes. Evidence for preconception smoking, alcohol, and substance use was limited but suggested potential harms, while diet quality and supplementation were generally associated with beneficial outcomes. These findings highlight the preconception period as a key opportunity for intervention to support positive outcomes for children and underscore the need for higher-quality, long-term research to inform policy and practice.
Gender and long-term trends in educational attainment, income and returns to education in Norway
Liza Reisel; Adrian F. Rogne; Sara Seehuus
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This study addresses the economic returns to education among men and women in Norway, during five decades of changing and widening gender disparities in educational attainment. We ask how gender differences in educational attainment and returns have contributed to change and persistence in the gender income gap, and whether young men have started trailing behind due to women’s relative gains in higher education. Analyses based on Norwegian register data show that while rising real incomes have contributed to a narrowing relative income gap, the absolute gap has decreased more slowly. In the past decade, both real incomes and the gender income gap have stagnated. While both men and women in Norway have increased their education levels, women’s gains have been mainly in higher education, while men’s gains have disproportionately been in vocational upper secondary education. Contrary to the situation in the US and other liberal market economies, income growth among younger cohorts of men with vocational education in Norway has recently outpaced every other group, resulting in a decreasing college premium. Women’s relative gains in higher education are partly offset by their lower incomes at all education levels, and the relatively strong income growth among men with vocational degrees.
Safe (felt) by design: Understanding cyclists’ needs for traffic guidance at roadworks – A mixed-methods study on behaviour, perception, and infrastructure requirements
Frederik Hilden; Peer-Benedikt Degen; Robin von Elm; Angela Francke
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Introduction: Urban construction sites frequently disrupt cycling infrastructure and create safety risks for vulnerable road users. Despite regulatory frameworks for temporary traffic management, cyclists often encounter unclear or unsafe guidance around roadworks. Empirical evidence on how cyclists actually respond to such conditions remains limited. This study investigates cyclists’ behaviour, routing decisions, and safety perceptions at urban construction sites. Method: A mixed-methods design combined behavioural observations and a nationwide survey. Observational data were collected at four construction sites in Hamburg, Germany using inductive loop sensors and video recordings, capturing 146.168 bicycle passages. Behavioural interactions were coded to identify compliance, routing choices, and conflict-avoidance strategies. In addition, a web-based survey of 1,071 cyclists across Germany examined perceived safety, behavioural adaptation, and infrastructure preferences at roadworks. Results: Observational analysis identified substantial deviations from designated traffic guidance: 42% of 790 coded cyclist interactions involved non-compliant behaviour, such as riding on sidewalks or against the intended direction. Route choice was primarily influenced by motorized traffic volume and pavement quality. Cyclists frequently selected routes that maximized perceived safety and riding comfort rather than following formal guidance. Despite frequent non-compliance, cyclists often adopted cooperative strategies, including speed reduction and conflict avoidance with pedestrians. Conclusions: The findings highlight a gap between formally regulated traffic guidance and cyclists’ safety perceptions and behaviour. Temporary infrastructure that lacks clarity, comfort, or protection can lead to widespread deviations from prescribed routes. Practical applications: Temporary traffic management at construction sites should prioritize intuitive guidance, surface quality, and physical separation from motorized traffic. Incorporating cyclist needs into roadwork design can reduce conflicts and improve safety for vulnerable road users.
Who stops answering? Breakoff, smartphone use and educational bias in a web survey
Alžbeta Ľudmová; Martin Kreidl; Barbora Hubatková; Martin Lakomý
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Survey data collection has been moving towards the online self-administered mode (CAWI), which is usually seen as an effective answer to falling response rates and rising fieldwork costs. This mode, however, comes with drawbacks of its own, especially when respondents use a smartphone to fill out the survey. Related major challenge is a higher tendency of these respondents to break off, i.e. to end the interview before completion. Breakoff matters most when it occurs non-randomly and compounds existing biases, such as those based on age or education. To find out whether it does, we used questionnaire data and paradata from the CAWI component of the first wave of the second cycle of the Czech Generations and Gender Survey (2020–2022; N = 5,468, 244 breakoffs). Treating each of 118 unfiltered questionnaire items as one unit of analytical time, we analysed progression through the questionnaire using Cox regression supplemented by Kaplan–Meier survival curves. Younger respondents broke off somewhat more often than older ones, though the difference was not statistically robust. The education gradient was both steeper and more persistent: 7% of the least educated broke off as compared with 3% of the most educated, and device only partly explained this gap, leaving education and device to operate as largely independent processes. The gap was, however, concentrated on small screens - among smartphone users, breakoff rose from 4% among the most educated to over 11% among the least educated, while on larger devices it stayed flat at 3–4%. Breakoff thus adds to, rather than merely reflects, the educational bias of self-completion samples. Keywords: breakoff; web surveys; smartphone; device effects; survival analysis; paradata; representativity; Generations and Gender Survey
Overcoming inertia: Addressing barriers to managing coastal legacy waste in a changing climate
Isabel Cotton; James J. Porter; James S. Robinson; Rhys H.S. Kelly; Ute Kelly; Megan Clinch; Rhys E. M. Jones; Deborah P. Dixon; Patrick Diamond; Suzy O’Hara
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Climate change will increase the number of legacy waste sites (older waste sites without pollution control mechanisms) that are at risk of coastal flooding and erosion in the UK and worldwide. Whilst the need to adapt to coastal change is well documented, the combined risks of coastal change and legacy waste has received less attention. Through interviews and workshops with policy stakeholders, this paper explores current perspectives on the barriers to managing coastal legacy waste in England and Scotland. Both the interviews and workshops reveal a high awareness of the potential risks from coastal legacy waste. However, limited sources of funding, alongside knowledge gaps on the nature of pollutant risk, many competing priorities at a local authority level, and a lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, is creating an inertia that frustrates the proactive management of the issue. Using Moser and Ekstrom’s (2010) adaptation planning cycle as an analytical framework, findings reveal that managing legacy waste is unable to progress beyond the first stage of adaptation planning due to these systemic barriers. Overall, findings indicate the urgent need for a long-term strategy designed at a national level that provides sufficient resources and capacity-building for proactive local governance.
Social complexity is not correlated with wartime trophy-taking in a cross-cultural sample
Kiran Basava
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The taking of body parts from enemies during war has been widely recorded across cultures through human history. Qualitative research on trophy-taking suggests it was prevalent among small-scale societies to demonstrate warriors’ military skill and increase status, as well as chiefdoms and early states to display leaders’ monopolization of violence and intimidate external populations. Two sets of analyses were conducted to quantitatively test relationships between trophy-taking practices and social complexity in historical societies. For the first, a dataset was built using ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources for 110 societies to test whether trophy-taking was more likely at intermediate levels of social complexity. For the second set of analyses, data on headhunting practices were analyzed using a dataset of Austronesian-language speaking societies and the Austronesian language phylogeny. The results for both the global and Austronesian analyses did not support a consistent relationship between trophy-taking practices and social complexity. This work assembles a novel dataset of trophy-taking practices for a global sample of societies, and adds to efforts to study patterns of violence and human social complexity with quantitative methods and comparative historical data.
Heterogeneous Effects of Local Government Financing Channels on Industrial Structure: Evidence from Provincial-Level Panel Data in China
Liangkun Shi; Huanqi Wu; Hanfei Yang
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Local government financing channels provide an essential perspective for understanding the investment decisions of local governments and their economic effects. In China, broadly defined local government debt includes two categories: statutory debt and the debt incurred by local government financial vehicles (LGFVs). This paper uses provincial-level panel data from 2016 to 2025, constructs a data-driven industrial structure index, and estimates a two-way fixed-effects model controlling for the overall debt scale. The empirical evidence suggests that the different financial channels on industrial structure are associated with different and opposing changes in industrial structure. When the debt composition shifts toward LGFV debts, the share of relatively high-productivity efficiency industries increases, particularly that of the tertiary sector. In contrast, when the debt composition shifts toward statutory debt, the share of relatively low-production efficiency industries increases, particularly that of the secondary sector. Therefore, the composition of local government debt, rather than its scale alone, is relevant to changes in regional industrial structure.
Policy Brief: Recomendaciones para la atención en salud mental a pacientes y cuidadores de enfermedades raras – huérfanas en Colombia
Nolly Nataly Castañeda-Ibáñez; Mayerli Andrea Prado-Rivera; Juliana Valentina Morris Camacho; Luz Victoria Salazar Ceballos
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En los últimos años, Colombia ha construido un marco legal y operativo para las enfermedades raras-huérfanas que incluye su reconocimiento, registro y creación de mesas técnicas. Así mismo, ha incorporado disposiciones para el apoyo a cuidadores de personas con enfermedades crónicas y dependientes. Y, adicionalmente, ha fortalecido la atención en salud mental mediante su inclusión en el Plan Decenal de Salud Pública y normas recientes como la Ley 2460 de 2025. Estos avances constituyen una base institucional para articular una respuesta integral que conecte el diagnóstico y tratamiento de enfermedades raras - huérfanas con la disponibilidad, acceso y calidad de la atención en salud mental para pacientes y cuidadores. Sin embargo, la implementación de esta articulación es fragmentada y limitada por restricciones de financiamiento. El problema central es que no existe una oferta accesible, estandarizada y coordinada de servicios de salud mental dirigida a pacientes con enfermedades raras - huérfanas ni a sus cuidadores. Desde el diagnóstico, que suele ser una experiencia emocionalmente devastadora, los pacientes y familias enfrentan la incertidumbre, falta de información y ausencia de protocolos de acompañamiento psicosocial. Estos impactos se manifiestan de forma diferenciada en la salud mental de los pacientes y sus cuidadores, lo que se traduce en necesidades específicas de atención, continuidad del cuidado y el bienestar general. La fragmentación institucional, la escasez de especialistas, los déficits en formación del primer nivel y la falta de datos estructurados agravan estas brechas, mientras que obstáculos económicos y logísticos, especialmente en zonas rurales, limitan el acceso a servicios de atención en salud mental y de apoyo al cuidador. Esta combinación de factores configura un problema de salud pública que requiere intervenciones integrales y sostenibles. Con base en la revisión del marco normativo vigente, este Policy Brief propone algunas recomendaciones a la política pública orientadas a fortalecer la atención en salud mental de pacientes y cuidadores de enfermedades raras - huérfanas en Colombia: 1) incorporar explícitamente la salud mental en las rutas y listados para enfermedades raras - huérfanas; 2) financiar e implementar intervenciones en primer nivel, telepsicología, neuropsicología y telepsiquiatría para el acceso equitativo; 3) crear programas integrales de apoyo a cuidadores, incorporando un enfoque diferencial y de género; 4) articular registro y vigilancia con indicadores de salud mental; y 5) establecer centros de referencia y gobernanza intersectorial con participación social y académica.
Archaeologies of Indigenous Foodways and Collective Capacities
Molly Carney
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Recent archaeological scholarship has embraced food security and food sovereignty frameworks to connect past foodways to present-day crises. However, these studies require critical examination of the colonial origins and ideological foundations of these frameworks, which emerged from industrialized western economic paradigms that do not align with Indigenous worldviews. Drawing on food studies scholarship, I argue that archaeologists must move beyond the uncritical adoption of food security and sovereignty frameworks to embrace culturally grounded paradigms developed by and for descendant communities. This paper advocates for reframing North American archaeological investigations of foodways through Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte’s concept of collective capacities: webs of relationships among humans, non-human beings, and landscapes organized together to support responses to change and continuance. As a linking tool, collective capacities help archaeologists carry out the material and analytical work that Indigenous Food Sovereignty movements call for. An archaeology of collective capacities shifts our focus to understanding how food systems functioned as relational infrastructures of care, responsibility, and reciprocity that sustained communities across millennia. In this contribution I outline an archaeological framework identifying key material signatures of collective capacities. Applying this framework to the Pend Oreille Valley in northeastern Washington State, I demonstrate how paleoethnobotanical and archaeological data from the last 1,500 years reveal Indigenous food systems were sustained through active management, coordinated labor, and intergenerational knowledge transmission across climatic and sociopolitical changes. I also consider how contemporary practices of reciprocity and relationality mirror the archaeological record of stability and stewardship. By centering culture-specific terminology and philosophies, an archaeology of collective capacities offers a methodological and theoretical approach that supports, rather than imposes frameworks upon, past societies while documenting the enduring systems that enabled communities to thrive across deep time.
Competency Restoration Timeliness in Washington Under Trueblood 2018-2026
Sudhanshu Rai
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Objective. A federal court found Washington State's competency-restoration system unconstitutional in 2015 because defendants who had been found incompetent to stand trial were made to wait months in jail for a psychiatric bed. The State did not appeal that part of the injunction, and the Ninth Circuit left it undisturbed in 2016. The system did not turn around until after years of escalating enforcement culminating in a contempt finding and a $100 million fine. We ask whether that timing reflects sustained federal-court enforcement, and what drove it. Methods. We built an open monthly panel of Washington's Trueblood court-monitor data (January 2018-May 2026; 1,033 rows) and analyzed statewide inpatient restoration timeliness as an interrupted time series against a 7-day admission standard, alongside a jail-based-evaluation comparator on a looser clock. Results. The system was non-compliant for six years (annual median waits 28.0-63.5 days; compliance rarely above 30%, and 6% in March 2023 when the median wait peaked at 97 days). It then improved sharply, to a median of 5.0 days and 90.4% average compliance, a level that has held over 26 months of continued oversight. The gain concentrated in bed-dependent services: restoration admission and inpatient evaluation both moved sharply, while the bed-independent comparator's median wait moved +0.0 days on the raw median split and a small but statistically significant −1.3 days on the regression estimator. Coding by Washington's Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) attributes an average 90.8% of restoration delays to bed availability, though almost all of that coding predates the turnaround. All facilities improved; demand rose, not fell, and the completion metric counts hospital admission, case dismissal, and jail release identically (Limitations). Conclusions. The improvement coincided with sustained Trueblood enforcement; this single-jurisdiction design supports association, not causation. The open, re-executable panel offers an independent compliance monitor complementary to the state's own.
Extractive conditionality: Participation and datafication in the Netherlands
Marijke Roosen
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Research on welfare conditionality has shown how access to social assistance is tied to behavioural and informational obligations. It has paid less attention to what recipients’ compliance produces for welfare institutions. This article develops the concept of extractive conditionality to describe arrangements in which activities and information provided under conditions of material dependency are transformed into institutionally usable resources. Drawing on an interpretive case study of Dutch social assistance, the analysis combines autobiographical testimony with policy documents, official evaluations and investigative journalism. It identifies two dimensions of extraction. First, activation requirements mobilise recipients’ time and activity even when they do not facilitate durable labour-market exit. Second, disclosure requirements generate information that can be standardised and reused for purposes such as organisational oversight and risk classification. These processes are extractive when recipients have little control over how their compelled contributions are subsequently used. The article further develops the hypothesis that this institutional productivity may help reproduce conditional arrangements despite their limited success in reducing welfare dependency. It shows how policies may fail to achieve their stated objectives while continuing to generate organisational capacities. The concept redirects analysis from what conditionality demands towards what compliance produces, who can use these outputs and how they may contribute to the persistence of conditional welfare.
The Digital Undertow of Penal Supervision: An Ethnography of Electronic Monitoring in Belgium
Marijke Roosen
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Electronic monitoring (EM) relies on digital systems to supervise people in the community, but these systems also organise the work of monitoring officers. This article examines how digital monitoring systems shape officers’ everyday work and decisions, and how these practices give meaning to penal supervision. It draws on 74 days of observation and 22 interviews with control-room officers in Belgium, conducted between 2014 and 2017. Using a strong sociomaterial perspective and the concept of the digital undertow, the analysis connects three aspects of supervision: the recording and potential scrutiny of officers’ activities, their assessments of monitored individuals, and their emphasis on rule-following. The findings show how telephone exchanges, software records and organisational expectations together shape what requires attention, and which responses count as responsible work. Officers interpret compliance as preparation for reintegration, while accurate and traceable actions become ways of demonstrating professional responsibility. These practices involve judgement and negotiation, even when officers describe their decisions as required by rules. The article contributes to research on digital penal work by showing how the practical organisation of information connects assessments of monitored individuals to standards of professional competence. It identifies processes through which institutional values acquire meaning in everyday supervision.
Spiritual Healing Methods in Los Angeles: the Cultural Heritage and Western Representation of Alternative Medicines
Scott Altsuler; Eric Heller
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Throughout the United States of America, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become increasingly popular over the past fifty years. These include any practices that stem from tradition and spirituality rather than practices that are derived from empirical evidence. With many popular spiritual healing practices originating from specific traditions across the world and across a wide range of time, there is much to explore about the mechanisms through which culturally specific spiritual healing practices adapt to Western consumerist culture. In the current study, we examine the cultural origins and development of CAM, mostly the use and popularization of Reiki, Yoga, and ayahuasca. We interviewed six spiritual health practitioners in the greater Los Angeles area to understand the modern CAM practitioner’s perspective on how spiritual healing methods have taken hold in Western culture, how they align with the original practice’s tradition, and how they have adapted to modern consumer culture. This study explores how Los Angeles’ cultural emphasis on individuality and marketability has cultivated an environment for its population to disseminate and recontextualize traditional spiritual healing methods to fit contemporary mental health demands.
The LINGACON Multilingualism Assessment Standard (L-MAS): Definitions, Thresholds, and a Review of Survey Practice
Areg Hovhannisyan
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How many languages does a person speak? The question bears on human linguistic capacity, global connectivity, and language education policy, yet we found no standardized protocol for measuring it. In the course of constructing a global estimate of ALPS (Average Language a Person Speaks) for the 237 jurisdictions in the LINGACON scope (Hovhannisyan, 2026a), we found that existing data sources use at least six distinct and mutually incompatible methods for assessing multilingualism, from self-reported repertoires and census repertoire items to home-language questions, expert aggregation, first-language distributions, and inference from education statistics. These methods measure different constructs at different thresholds, and their results cannot be compared directly. For entire regions, among them the Arab states, Latin America, and most of Asia, we found no standardized, comparable repertoire data. We present a taxonomy of current measurement approaches, document their biases and incompatibilities, describe three under-documented sources of error and non-comparability (the diaspora residual, the linguistic concealment effect, and the dubbing–subtitling asymmetry), and propose a standard: the LINGACON Multilingualism Assessment Standard (L-MAS), a five-level measurement framework that ranges from a single survey question (Level 1, minimal marginal cost) through a national audit with tested proficiency (Level 4) to a longitudinal tracker of change over time (Level 5). If Level 1 were adopted by the five major cross-national survey programs, some 100–110 countries, holding about three-quarters of the world’s population, would have comparable multilingualism data within one round of each program, provided the Asian Barometer continues to field in China and India. The full L-MAS specification is freely available at l-mas.com.
Assessing the Trust Crisis in European Security: A New Approach to Measuring Unthinking Trust
Tobias Wille; Anton Peez
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Trust between the United States and its European allies appears to be in crisis, but our knowledge of the exact extent and consequences of this crisis is limited. To address this knowledge gap, we propose a novel approach for measuring deep, unthinking trust in public opinion. We conceptualize unthinking trust as the unquestioned expectation that others will reciprocate cooperation. We qualitatively capture this expectation through open-ended responses in a survey, which we then systematically code, creating a quantitative measure of unthinking trust. We apply our approach to study how recent breaches of trust affect unthinking trust among the German public in two key NATO allies, the UK and the US. Our findings show that a vignette reminding German respondents of Brexit and its aftermath significantly reduces unthinking trust in the UK. A comparable vignette reminding respondents of recent US behavior toward its European allies does not measurably affect unthinking trust in the US, presumably due to salience effects. Furthermore, we find that the Brexit treatment significantly affects respondents’ policy preferences, making them more wary of multilateral security cooperation and, surprisingly, of a national strengthening of defense. A mediation analysis shows that the mechanism of unthinking trust contributes to these effects.
Issue Accountability Among Public Meeting Commenters
Alexander Sahn; Tyler Simko
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Standard theories of accountability suggest politicians respond to voter preferences for fear of electoral sanction, yet many voters are ill-informed about policy actions. One solution to this tension is that a small group of highly engaged citizens, an issue public, may generate the conditions for accountability. We test this claim by tracking over 7,000 members of the public who submit comments on land use policies in San Francisco, CA. We measure commenters’ expressed preferences on proposed agenda items, survey them following the decision, and observe subsequent political activity with administrative data. We show that over three-quarters of commenters accurately recall their past positions, but most do not learn the subsequent policy action and rarely update their political attitudes. However, we find that a subset of anti-development voters are more likely to contribute to ideologically aligned candidates when they do not see their preferred policies enacted; yet pro-development commenters do not.
Participatory Narrative Inquiry as an Aligned Approach for Understanding and Addressing Queer Impostor Phenomenon with Bisexual+ Femmes
Devin Madden; Timnit Berhane; Christine Marie “Lovely” Luis Torres Nunez; Alana López; Daniel Eisen; Jean M. Breny; Talina Corvus
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Queer impostor syndrome, as it is colloquially called, is a clear nod to the well-researched concept of impostor phenomenon (IP). Bi+ people experience a disproportionate burden of mental distress and are at the forefront of community dialogues about feelings of queer impostorism, but those discussions are lacking from scientific literature. There is a need for more research with bi+ people for bi+ people, and participatory methods are critical for ensuring responsiveness to this marginalized populations’ needs. This equity-driven study leveraged participatory narrative inquiry to elevate the voices of bisexual+ femmes who self-identify with experiences of queer impostorism as it relates to their sexual identity. Twelve bi+ femmes from New York City shared and analyzed their stories and the stories of their research cohort to characterize QIP for bi+ femmes. This paper details the participatory narrative inquiry process, a community-engaged research approach that asks participants to analyze their own stories and data to yield richer, more resonant results and strategies to bring research-to-action. This manuscript offers researchers insight, through the case study of this research project, into a less traditionally considered qualitative method that allows for meaningful engagement across the research lifespan and may be particularly well-suited for bisexuality research.
The Subnational Fertility Transition in Italy (1871-1971): A Century of Fundamental Change
Riccardo Omenti; Nicola Barban; Michail Raftakis
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The Italian fertility transition has drawn sustained interest from historical demographers, thanks to rich archival sources, especially parish records, and a well-established scholarly tradition. Yet no study has offered a comprehensive account of how the transition unfolded subnationally across the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on extensive yet underutilised data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), we present annual total fertility rate (TFR) estimates for all Italian provinces covering the historical period 1871–1971, using an established Bayesian modelling framework. Combining convergence analysis with measures of relative dispersion and variability, we examine whether provincial fertility differences widened or narrowed over the transition. We further investigate urban-rural fertility trajectories within Italy’s nine most populous provinces. The results reveal a geographically uneven transition: northern and central provinces led the fertility decline, while southern provinces lagged behind, resulting in divergence across provinces. Nonetheless, urban–rural differences narrowed substantially in northern and central provinces and remained negligible in southern provinces. These findings underscore the spatial heterogeneity of Italy’s fertility transition, displaying the co-existence of increasing provincial disparities with diminishing urban-rural differences in the areas leading the fertility decline.
Enhancing Dementia Awareness and Specialized Nurse Training in the Gulf: A Policy Roadmap for Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia
Sukant Khurana; Sanampreet Kaur; Mohammad Saddam Khan; Gaurav Deepak Patel; Prajwal Anand; K. Vijaya Lakshmi; Ahmad; Brooks Robinson
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The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are projected to see more than a threefold increase in dementia by 2050, due to a rapidly aging population. However, health care systems across Oman, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia are still skewed towards acute rather than chronic care. Nurses are the primary dementia caregivers, but they often are not specialists. This situation is exacerbated by non-standardized curricula, heavy reliance on expatriate workforce, linguistic and cultural barriers, high workforce turnover, limited career incentives, and low public and institutional awareness, which delays diagnoses.This study synthesizes available regional and international evidence on dementia related nurse training and workforce preparedness in the GCC and develops evidence-informed policy recommendations for strengthening dementia education and workforce capacity. We propose several regional recommendations including accredited certification, compulsory continuing professional development, multidisciplinary care teams, and awareness-raising initiatives. Coordinated investment in specialized nurse training and workforce policy is important to prepare GCC healthcare systems for the region’s growing dementia burden.
The Grumpy Meme and Irritability Ecology: How Low-Intensity Negative Affect Spreads, Survives, Sediments, and Becomes a Workplace Climate
Koichi Hiraoka
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Research on negative affect in organizations has largely focused on relatively visible phenomena such as anger, aggression, abusive supervision, workplace bullying, and incivility. Yet much of everyday organizational life unfolds between overt anger episodes, when no one is shouting but employees still monitor facial expressions, short replies, sighs, silence, or reduced responsiveness and conclude that someone appears grumpy. Such low-intensity signals may alter whether people approach, speak, seek advice, or share information. To theorize this domain, this paper distinguishes Irritability, Grumpiness, and the Grumpy Meme, and introduces Irritability Ecology as an integrative framework. Irritability refers to a relatively low-intensity internal affective state that need not be externally expressed. Grumpiness refers to socially perceivable expressions through which others infer that a person appears to be in a bad mood. The Grumpy Meme refers to a socio-affective transmission process in which perceived grumpiness alters another person’s affect or behavior and is subsequently re-expressed in another interaction. Thus, irritability may exist without observable grumpiness, while perceived grumpiness does not necessarily demonstrate underlying irritability. The paper argues that low-intensity negative affect may survive in workplaces because it is inexpensive to express, highly repeatable, difficult to sanction, and often protected by ambiguity regarding both the event and the actor’s intention. Repeated expressions may accumulate through Affective Sedimentation, creating background vigilance, mood-reading, and eventually a workplace climate. A two-axis model of anger and irritability is proposed, yielding four affective climate types: Calm–Stable, Quiet Tension, Eruption–Recovery, and Pervasive Anger–Irritability. The paper further introduces Affective Non-Transmission as the capacity to experience negative affect without automatically transferring it to others, and connects this capacity to post-conflict relational repair. Irritability Ecology is therefore not a weaker version of Anger Ecology. Whereas Anger Ecology examines the visible fire of workplace affect, Irritability Ecology examines the ambient climate that persists between fires. The framework shifts attention from identifying “grumpy people” to examining how low-intensity negative affect is expressed, transmitted, sustained, sedimented, interrupted, and repaired within organizational environments.
When Execution Is Cheap: Specification, Evaluation, and Rent Capture in AI-Enabled Work
Babu George
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As artificial intelligence lowers the cost of executing well-specified tasks, economic value may shift toward defining desired outcomes and evaluating machine-generated outputs. This paper examines the conditions under which that shift creates economic rents and identifies who may capture them. It separates defining success into four activities: eliciting intent, selecting among admissible specifications, ratifying a choice, and validating outputs. Two models clarify the underlying mechanisms. The first shows that gains from cheaper execution approach a ceiling determined by evaluation cost, which makes evaluator attention more consequential as generation becomes inexpensive. The second shows that generating more candidates increases the marginal value of proxy fidelity, linking abundant output to specification overfitting and Goodhart-type failures. These mechanisms indicate where value may concentrate without determining who receives the returns. Rent requires inelastic supply, exclusion from the created surplus, and the absence of cheaper substitutes. These conditions are most likely when specifications scale across many executions, ratification carries liability, trust institutions certify judgment, organizational systems control codified knowledge, or concentrated model providers set influential defaults. The analysis further distinguishes machine-checkable evaluation against a stated specification from a principal’s assessment of fit to purpose. The former is increasingly commoditized; the latter remains tied to authority, attention, and accountability. The paper develops six testable predictions and a factorial experiment examining evaluation costs, specification fidelity, authority drift, and psychological ownership. Cheap execution relocates bottlenecks, while institutions and market structure determine whether specification, evaluation, default setting, or scarce execution inputs generate rents and who captures them.
The prestige precedes the prize: Top-journal papers and new federal grants
Haining Wang
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Evaluators and scientists treat a top-journal paper as a step toward the next grant. We asked whether it is one. We linked 2.19 million last-authored papers by 1.07 million US scientists, 2014–2021, to new lead-investigator awards from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, defining top journals as the 5% most cited in their topic and year. The design rests on timing and on holding the scientist fixed: if a top-journal paper brings grants, the advantage should open after the paper. Top-journal papers were followed by a new award twice as often as other papers (55.3 against 26.3 per 1,000), yet the difference was as large two years before publication. For the same scientist, award rates after a top-journal paper and another paper differed by −0.3 per 1,000 (95% confidence interval −8.0 to 7.4), an upper limit at 25% of the difference between scientists. Researchers' small lead over matched researchers was similar before and after their first top-journal paper (3.1 and 3.3 per 1,000). Within three years, journal prestige worked mainly as a record of accumulated advantage, and the funding gap should not be read as the return on one more top-journal paper.
Exploring Nonlinear Associations Between AI Comment Volume and Retail Investor Sentiment
Yuze Tang
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Artificial intelligence comment generators have proliferated in online stock forums. However, how AI comment volume associates with retail investor sentiment, and whether this association is conditional on market volatility and annual AI comment density, remain under-explored. Using weekly data from the East Money Stock Forum and the Shanghai Composite Index spanning May 2019–October 2024 in China, this paper proposed a two-detector ensemble for AI comment detection, then investigated nonlinear associations between AI comment volume and retail investor sentiment under three tiers of market volatility and six annual AI comment densities. Our generalized additive model (GAM) results show that AI comment volume exhibits a weak, net-positive nonlinear association with mean retail investor sentiment, and a very weak net-negative nonlinear association with sentiment divergence. We find no statistically significant pairwise differences in these associations across low-, medium- and high-volatility levels. For annual AI comment density, statistically significant cross-density differences are observed for sentiment standard deviation in multiple year pairwise comparisons, whereas only one comparison yields significant differences for mean sentiment. Collectively, our findings indicate that merely considering the number of AI comments provides limited information regarding the sentiment of retail investors.
Une approche dynamique de la réception des pré-annonces pharmaceutiques dans les réseaux sociaux - Le cas des vaccins contre la Covid-19 sur twitter
Olivier Caron; Christophe Benavent
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à 90 %. Cette préannonce est à la fois une information et un signal stratégique porté par une entreprise intéressée au succès de son produit. Que deviennent alors le message et son émetteur dans la conversation publique ? Les travaux sur la transmission sociale établissent qu’un message se transforme à mesure qu’il circule et s’assimile aux préoccupations du milieu qui le reçoit. À partir de ce cadre, de l’amplification sociale du risque et du Persuasion Knowledge Model, nous étudions les préannonces d’efficacité de Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna et AstraZeneca sur le Twitter francophone, comparées à des événements où les mêmes entreprises font l’actualité sans être à l’origine de la nouvelle. Deux temporalités apparaissent. Le contenu du débat se transforme presque immédiatement, puis se réinscrit dans des préoccupations préexistantes, comme l’obligation vaccinale ou l’actualité politique. Le jugement de l’entreprise apparaît plus tard : les utilisateurs passent surtout du relais du message à l’évaluation de son émetteur, sans hausse nette de la négativité des jugements déjà exprimés. Cette bascule est absente lorsque l’entreprise est seulement l’objet de l’information. Une préannonce met en circulation deux objets : un message et celui qui le porte.
The geopolitics of academic publishing: the case of Kazakhstan
Eva Hartmann; Aikerim Bektemirova
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Abstract Publications in Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed journals have become the global benchmark of academic excellence. This article examines how Kazakhstan has placed this new ‘gold standard’ at the centre of its academic publishing policy, which has become a key part of its university reform agenda since 2010. Using a Gramscian lens on power and knowledge, we show how the government employs this policy to position itself between the West and Russia in a shifting geopolitical context. The adoption of this benchmark not only changes how Kazakhstan's academic community relates to the broader academic world. It also significantly reshapes the hierarchy within Kazakhstan’s academic community. We argue that this has profound implications for the societal role of universities and academic research and their ability to address local challenges. Our study makes both empirical and theoretical contributions to the growing literature on the geopolitics of knowledge, highlighting the interplay among local, national, and global dynamics.
Climate Change and the Socio-Political Foundations of Welfare
katharina.zimmermann@uni-hamburg.de
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As climate change and decarbonization become central sources of political conflict in Europe, welfare states are increasingly invoked as institutions capable of cushioning transition costs, managing distributional conflict, and stabilizing democratic legitimacy. The article identifies three perspectives in which this expectation appears: green-growth approaches expect welfare institutions to secure the social conditions of low-carbon accumulation; social-democratic and labour-oriented approaches seek to renew class compromise through just transition policies; and post-growth or sustainable-welfare approaches ask whether welfare can be reorganized around needs, sufficiency, and planetary boundaries. Despite their differences, all three perspectives rely on a shared assumption: that the welfare state can provide socio-political stability under ecological constraint. This article problematizes this assumption by reconstructing the historical foundations of welfare-state stabilization. It argues that twentieth-century welfare capitalism functioned as a form of socio-political glue: it mediated the tension between capitalist market inequalities and democratic claims to equality by making market dependence bearable, class compromise plausible, and bounded solidarity legitimate. Yet this glue was fossil in character. It depended on sustained growth, fossil-energy regimes with underpriced social and ecological costs, institutionalized labour relations, nationally bounded solidarity, and the externalization of social and ecological costs. Climate change unsettles each of these stabilizing mechanisms. It strains the growth-dependent balance between commodification and decommodification; reconfigures class compromise by politicizing fossil-dependent forms of production, consumption, status, and deservingness; and destabilizes closure and containment by making externalized costs return materially, politically, and morally. The article therefore argues that climate change should not be understood only as a new generation of social risks to be absorbed by existing welfare institutions. More fundamentally, it challenges the welfare state’s historically established capacity to process risks, conflicts, and legitimacy claims in familiar ways. Rather than presuming which form of “green glue” should replace the fossil compromise, it calls for a more systematic analysis of the democratic conflicts through which competing projects of welfare-state stabilization are negotiated: who should be protected, who should pay, which losses count as legitimate, which ways of life remain publicly recognized, and through which democratic procedures new forms of socio-political glue can be built under ecological constraint.
Why the Left Leans Socialist and the Right Leans Capitalist: Class, Coalitions and Where the Link Breaks
Kaushik E
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Political labels are often assumed to map neatly onto economic systems: the left is expected to favor socialism and the right capitalism. This paper asks why that pattern exists and why it breaks down in some countries. It first examines four explanations for the pattern: historical origins, class interest, core values, and coalition bundling. It then compares cases, including Sweden, China, the United States and India, where party labels and economic policy diverge. The paper argues that the link between political stance and economic policy is contingent rather than necessary, and that it varies with a party's voter base, a country's history, and its state capacity. The findings suggest that left-right labels are an unreliable guide to actual economic policy.
KONTINUITAS DAN REKONTEXTUALISASI UJUNGAN GUMELEM: RITUAL, REPERTOAR TUBUH, DAN LEGITIMASI WARISAN BUDAYA PADA 2026
Dwi Scativana Isnaeni
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Ujungan merupakan praktik budaya yang berkembang dalam masyarakat agraris di wilayah Gumelem, Kecamatan Susukan, Kabupaten Banjarnegara. Dokumentasi akademik mengenai Ujungan telah berlangsung sekurang-kurangnya sejak 1999 dan berkembang melalui kajian mengenai ritual meminta hujan, pertunjukan, perubahan fungsi, makna filosofis, terminologi budaya, serta iringan gamelan. Artikel ini bertujuan membaca kembali dokumentasi tersebut untuk menjelaskan bagaimana Ujungan mempertahankan unsur-unsur identitas praktik sekaligus mengalami perubahan konteks sosial, performatif, dan kelembagaan. Penelitian menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif interpretif melalui analisis dokumen historis dan budaya. Sumber dipilih berdasarkan keterverifikasian identitas bibliografis, keterkaitan langsung dengan Ujungan, lokasi, periode dokumentasi, dan fokus kajian. Gumelem Wetan dan Gumelem Kulon diperlakukan sebagai lokasi yang berbeda, sedangkan Ujungan di Pelana, Banyumas, dan Kasepuhan Cibadak digunakan sebagai pembanding regional. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa kontinuitas Ujungan tidak terutama terletak pada ketidakberubahan bentuk, melainkan pada keberulangan sejumlah relasi antara ritual, air dan hujan, penggunaan tubuh, aturan pertarungan, otoritas pengendali, musik, dan tindakan sosial setelah konfrontasi. Dokumentasi 1999, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, dan 2026 memperlihatkan bahwa unsur-unsur tersebut bertahan dengan konfigurasi yang tidak selalu sama. Penetapan Ujungan sebagai Warisan Budaya Takbenda Indonesia pada 2026 menambahkan konteks legitimasi kelembagaan, tetapi tidak dapat diperlakukan sebagai bukti otomatis keberlanjutan. Artikel ini mengusulkan konsep kontinuitas berlapis melalui rekontextualisasi untuk memahami Ujungan sebagai praktik ritual-performatif yang dapat berubah tanpa kehilangan seluruh hubungan dengan sejarah, komunitas, dan pengetahuan tubuh yang menopangnya.
Does Crop Diversification Improve Rural Household Income in Bangladesh?
Imran Hossain
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This paper examines whether crop diversification improves household income among rural farming households in Bangladesh, using data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2022. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with division fixed effects and robust standard errors, the study finds that diversification has a strong and stable positive effect on crop sales income, but not on total household income once household characteristics are controlled. This suggests that diversification operates primarily through the agricultural income channel. The findings carry practical implications for agricultural extension policy in Bangladesh.
Urban Typology is Not Destiny: The High-Modernist Tower and Slab as a Global Outlier in Singapore
Reuben Xianwei Wang
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In global architectural literature, the mid-century high-modernist tower-and-slab block is widely pathologized as a failure of top-down social engineering. Anti-modernist critics routinely embrace architectural determinism, blaming concrete geometry for social decay. This paper challenges that consensus by examining Singapore, where high-modernist public housing constructed by the Housing & Development Board (HDB) shelters over 80 percent of citizens in safe, equity-building estates. Building on Katherine Bristol’s critique of the "Pruitt-Igoe myth," I demonstrate that building typology possesses marginal agency; the global demise of the high-rise slab resulted from welfare state retrenchment, fiscal starvation, and municipal abandonment. In Singapore, the typology succeeded due to a unique political-economic triad: radical land nationalization, captive domestic capital, and sovereign geographical enclosure. I adopt an object-oriented ontology and James Scott's notion of metis to argue the built form not as an empty vessel but being instrumental constructs that whose users will always develop new Métis and practical knowledges on how to maximise the utility of an urban form. I exemplify the Singaporean architects adapted the slab through vernacular inventions like the open-air "void deck." Ultimately, typology is not destiny but should be understood instrumentally.
Standpoint Theory and the Enactment of the Social Relation of Comradeship through Social Research
Ioana Cerasella Chis
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This paper discusses the ethico-political impetus for seeking to establish the social relation of comradeship with socially marginalised research participants of projects concerned with social justice and countering structural oppression. To this end, the paper explores Olufemi O. Táíwò’s (2020) distinction between liberal and constructive approaches to Standpoint Theory, before considering the social relations of allyship and comradeship through the context of a project that examined structural disablement and precarious work in the UK. In light of this analysis, I call on other social researchers to consider the necessity of enacting the social relation of comradeship with socially marginalised participants as a way of affirming mutual recognition, strengthening emancipatory research, and producing socially useful dialogic knowledge.
Developing and Evaluating UTAUT-Informed YouTube-Based Lessons for Grade 11 Oral Communication During Emergency Remote Teaching
Jo Michael Llamelo
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This study reports the development and evaluation of YouTube-based lessons for Grade 11 Oral Communication at a private senior high school in the Philippines during emergency remote teaching in Academic Year 2020–2021. As part of my master’s thesis, I analyzed a UTAUT-informed survey of 26 students' attitudes toward YouTube through frequency-based thematic coding and translated its conclusions into nine lesson features, each assigned a theoretical basis in the affective filter hypothesis, the principles of multimedia learning, or the multimedia cone of abstraction. The resulting lessons combined a course-specific YouTube channel, short videos arranged in topic playlists, teacher narration with humor and familiar references, asynchronous access without mandatory downloading or live streaming, and supporting modules. Three expert jurors and 13 student users rated the lessons with instruments adapted from the Department of Education's rating sheet for non-print learning resources. Jurors (M = 4.63) and students (M = 4.62) rated the lessons favorably on a five-point scale, and their comments pointed to refinements in audio consistency, on-screen text, pacing, and technical smoothness. A later reanalysis of the same survey supports most features but shows that some parameters rested on designer judgment and that the supplementary role of the lessons and the cost of access were not carried into design. The study provides a transparent account of how students’ attitudes toward YouTube were translated into lesson features and how the resulting lessons were received.
Who Does Prevention Reach? Psychosocial Risk Assessment under Brazil’s Regulatory Standard 1 (NR-1)
Iara Teixeira
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Employers who assess psychosocial hazards can report an improved workplace average while some workers become more exposed. Brazil's Regulatory Standard 1 has required employers to manage work-related psychosocial risk factors since May 2026, and employers are now producing their first inventories. The standard already requires them to identify exposed groups, involve workers, and monitor preventive measures. International guidance supports subgroup analysis but says less about how to verify whom a preventive measure reached. Drawing on regulatory documents and research on organizational inequality and workplace interventions, this policy analysis proposes a record that links exposure evidence to the working condition an employer decides to change, the workers each measure reaches, and the distribution of subsequent change. The record also addresses uncertainty, measurement comparability, confidentiality, and workforce turnover. Regulators and employers in countries that mandate psychosocial risk assessment can judge prevention by the overall reduction in exposure and by its distribution.
Making Place for Health and Good Life: Tourism at the Intersection of Philosophy and Public Health
Fulvio Longato; Patrick Rina; Christian Josef Wiedermann
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Tourism is increasingly promoted as a resource for health, and destinations market the well-being their landscapes are said to afford; yet the notion of well-being invoked where tourism and public health meet requires further specification, as the fields that converge there do not necessarily use the term in the same sense. The conceptual analysis clarifies well-being by distinguishing its psychological dimensions from its philosophical characterisation in terms of human flourishing, and frames health from a salutogenic perspective. Human flourishing and salutogenesis intersect particularly through meaningfulness and the ways persons engage with what places make possible. Drawing on the phenomenology of the tourist experience and on the literatures of therapeutic landscapes and restorative environments, the paper argues that places contribute to health through multiple and potentially interacting pathways involving characteristics of settings, activities and experiences, and their social and environmental contexts. Embodied pathways further show the interconnection of experiential and bodily dimensions of health. The paper draws out implications for public health and participatory destination design. Alpine tourism destinations provide a suitable context in which these relationships can be examined empirically.
A preference for long-distance friendships, even in the absence of those friendships, can foster collective action
Kristopher M Smith; Anne Pisor; Bertha Aron; Kasambo Bernard; Paschal Fimbo; Rose Kimesera; Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
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Long-distance friendships can build interdependence and trust, which can foster collective action across distance around shared goals. However, social norms, resource availability, and limited time can prevent the formation of long-distance friendships. Here, we examine whether simply having a preference to form long-distance friendships – independent of having those friendships themselves – is associated with participation in collective action across distance. We call this preference long-distance orientation (LDO). We developed an initial measure of LDO through ethnographic research in Tanzanian fishing communities and refinement in two online US samples (n = 200, n = 300) before deploying it in a larger study of coastal Tanzanian communities. In Tanzania (n = 777), we examined associations among LDO, long-distance friendships, long-distance trust, and participation in fisheries management, where management requires collective action across communities. People with greater LDO had greater participation independently of long-distance friendships and trust, while also having greater long-distance friendships and trust. Long-distance friendships and trust were independently associated with greater participation in fisheries management. These findings suggest multiple, potentially overlapping pathways linking long-distance sociality to collective action: (1) preferences for forming relationships, (2) realized relationships, and (3) trust in people living elsewhere. LDO therefore shows promise as a construct for understanding variation in long-distance sociality and cooperation, but further measurement refinement and cross-cultural research are needed to establish its nature and scope.
Domestic and Family Violence Training Programs for Primary Healthcare Workforces: A Scoping Review
Bibek Chauhan; Shauna Fjaagesund; Amy Homes; Katrina Andrews; Gregory Nash; Chrystie Myketiak; Kylie Roberson; Sara Richards; Florin Oprescu
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Purpose Domestic and family violence (DFV) is prevalent, and primary healthcare professionals may be well placed to identify and support victim-survivors; however, limited training and organizational support can constrain safe responses. This review mapped DFV training programs for primary healthcare workforces, including targeted groups, content, delivery, and evaluation. Methods A scoping review was conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute framework and reported according to PRISMA-ScR. PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO were searched for peer-reviewed studies published from 2016 to 2026. Eligible studies evaluated the characteristics, implementation, or outcomes of DFV workforce training in primary healthcare. Of 1,262 records identified, 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Results Training most often targeted general practitioners (n = 11) and nurses or midwives (n = 9); administrative staff (n = 4) and practice managers (n = 3) were less frequently included. Common content included DFV identification and inquiry, disclosure response, referral, risk assessment, and safety planning. Face-to-face workshops predominated, often supplemented by mentoring, case discussion, role-play, and implementation support. Evaluations mainly assessed short-term knowledge, confidence, and preparedness; sustained practice and organizational outcomes were assessed less often. Conclusions DFV training may improve primary healthcare professionals’ knowledge, confidence, and preparedness to support victim-survivors, but predominantly short-term and self-reported outcomes limit conclusions about sustained clinical change. Evidence gaps remain in organizational readiness, workforce agency, long-term implementation, and inclusion of non-clinical staff.
The Emotional Meaning and Sociocultural Implications of 'Eojunggan-hada' in Korean Society: An Exploratory Study
Heeju Lee
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This study explores how the Korean expression 'eojunggan-hada' (being in-between) extends beyond simple linguistic ambiguity to reflect issues of personal identity and social belonging. Unlike previous Korean linguistics research that focused on linguistic ambiguity and mitigation expressions, this study defines 'eojunggan-hada' as a way of being positioned at the boundaries of identity and belonging, analyzing its sociocultural implications. A survey of 111 respondents revealed that participants frequently experience being in-between in daily life (mean 3.44), perceiving it more as a product of social structural conditions (mean 3.46) rather than personal character traits (mean 3.22). Notably, daily experience of in-betweenness showed a strong positive correlation with attributing it to one's personality (r = .64, p < .001), suggesting that the more frequently people feel in-between, the more they blame their own character for it. Qualitative analysis of open-ended responses confirmed that being in-between functions simultaneously as discomfort and survival strategy. This study conceptualizes 'eojunggan-hada' as a boundary emotion formed within Korea's unique collectivist culture and relational pressures, proposing that it represents not individual indecisiveness but rather a way of existence created by social structures.
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.
Automated Essay Scoring with GPT Models: A Comparison with Human Ratings of IEP Written Products
Daniel Murcia
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This study explores the integration of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Automated Essay Scoring (AES) into classroom writing assessment within an Intensive English Program (IEP). Using a corpus of 46 multi-draft capstone essays written by international students in an Academic Literacies course, the study evaluates the performance of two OpenAI models (GPT-4.1-mini and GPT-5.1) against rubric-based human instructor scores. Essays were scored twice by each model under controlled temperature settings to evaluate linear association, systematic bias, inter-model consistency, and performance-band agreement. Findings reveal that while both LLM scores maintain moderate positive correlations with human ratings (r = .44 for GPT-4.1-mini; r = .49 for GPT-5.1), both models exhibit systematic negative bias, scoring essays an average of 13 points lower than the human instructor. However, the two models demonstrate strong inter-model consistency (r = .84) and an exact band-level agreement of 87%. Qualitative analysis of the holistic comments shows that LLMs focus on global discourse features but lack sensitivity to local, process-oriented classroom constructs. The results suggest that uncalibrated zero-shot LLMs serve better as formative diagnostic tools than autonomous grading systems. Keywords: Automated essay scoring, Large Language Models, GPT-5, L2 academic writing, multi-method validity, formative assessment.
Globalization Unravelling? ASML and the Geopolitics of Europe-China Tech Decoupling
Naná de Graaff; Jaša Veselinovič; A.G. Tyler
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This article investigates the geopolitical dynamics driving Europe’s emerging technological decoupling from China. Focusing on the semiconductor industry and the Dutch semiconductor firm ASML, it examines how technonationalism emanating from the US has shaped a small European member state’s policy response amid intensifying US-China rivalry. The article analyses how national security arguments and US strategic influence aimed at undermining China’s advances in high-tech has reshaped the Dutch semiconductor export control regime in a way that seemingly contradicts both ASML’s corporate interests and Dutch long-term economic interests. Moreover, cutting the dependency ties of China to one of the few chokepoint industries and tech firms in the EU arguably undermines its commitment to ‘technological sovereignty’. We explain these puzzling outcomes through the inherent contradictions within technonationalism and the tensions between state and corporate actors strategizing around different national security and profit-oriented interests. As such, we argue that the case of ASML offers a useful prism through which to study the ongoing ‘geoeconomic’ shift in the global political economy in which the alignment of the geopolitical and capital logics characteristic of neoliberal globalisation is coming apart, with state and corporate actors attempting to realign these logics into different configurations.
Decolonising Water Diplomacy: Concepts, Debates, and Practice
Mohsen Nagheeby
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Water diplomacy is commonly presented as a practical response to tensions over shared waters. It brings together negotiation, technical expertise, international water law, basin institutions, and practices of cooperation and peacebuilding. Yet the terms through which water diplomacy is often organised — security, cooperation, neutrality, development, expertise, and peace — are not politically innocent. They are shaped by histories of empire, unequal treaties, colonial borders, geopolitical asymmetries, donor agendas, and knowledge hierarchies. This article introduces decolonising water diplomacy as an emerging orientation that does not reject diplomacy, law, science, or cooperation, but asks how their assumptions, procedures, and outcomes are historically produced. It defines water diplomacy, situates it in relation to water security, water peace, critical hydropolitics, water justice, and decolonial thought, and explains what a decolonial perspective adds in practice. The article argues that decolonising water diplomacy does not simply add justice to existing approaches; it asks how peace, security, and cooperation are defined, whose histories and knowledges they privilege, and how they might be reworked toward historical responsibility, epistemic justice, recognition, dignity, and more accountable forms of peace.
Social Prescribing and community activities for people living with chronic pain: A Realist Synthesis
Leila Heelas; Daisy Fancourt; Karen Barker; Alexandra Bradbury; Ann Livingstone; Alexandra Burton
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Chronic pain is associated with significant physical and mental health burden to individuals and society. Social determinants of health are associated with an increased prevalence of chronic pain and disability. Social prescribing is an intervention designed to address social determinants of health; however, little is known about how social prescribing can support people living with chronic pain (PECP). To investigate the mechanisms and contexts by which participation in social prescribing and/or community activities lead to health and wellbeing outcomes in PECP. A realist synthesis was conducted in November 2024 and updated in March 2026. Context-mechanism-outcome configurations (CMOCs) were produced and mapped to the Multi-Level Mechanisms of Leisure Framework to identify potential psychological, biological, social and behavioural mechanisms. A programme theory was developed to illustrate how and why social prescribing interventions lead to health and wellbeing outcomes in PECP. Of 9761 studies, 35 were included. Four sources explored social prescribing link worker models and thirty-one investigated individual community activities. 15 overarching CMOCs were identified including seven psychological, three biological, three social and two behavioural mechanisms. The CMOCs highlight how creative, cultural and leisure activities, social prescribing pathways and volunteering, lead to intended and unintended outcomes (such as pain resulting in reduced participation in volunteering). This synthesis provides evidence for how social prescribing interventions lead to improved health and wellbeing in PECP and can be used to inform non-clinical service provision, especially where access to pain services is limited.
Unionization in Higher Education: An Industry-Level View
Joseph van der Naald
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This research note presents estimates of union membership and collective bargaining coverage in the higher education industry using data from the Current Population Survey. The paper analyzes the extent of union membership and collective bargaining coverage from 1983-2025, both in the industry and among faculty specifically, and estimates of the variation in union membership by employment sector, race and gender for 2024. Using a 10-year span of data, the paper also estimates union wage premiums in the industry and among faculty. This note finds union membership and bargaining coverage has remained stable over the past four decades, but documents notable gendered and ethnoracial disparities in both measures in 2024. Faculty and industry collective bargaining results in earnings premiums ranging between 4% and 5%. The findings present quantitative estimates of unionism and its material effects for higher education workers that complement recent research published by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.
Compensatory Input Versus Unequal Gains: Why Schooling Does Not Necessarily Equalize Socioeconomic Achievement Gaps
Jan Skopek
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Recent research has failed to provide clear-cut evidence that schooling equalizes social gaps in achievement. This stands at odds with the dominant view of compensatory input, which holds that even unequal schooling equalizes learning because it compensates for the even more unequal learning inputs children would receive in its absence. I test the previously neglected mechanism of unequal gains from schooling, which could counteract compensatory input and thus explain why studies often fail to find equalization. The unequal gains hypothesis posits a Matthew effect whereby learning gains from schooling depend on children’s prior skills, so that students from higher (lower) socioeconomic backgrounds benefit more (less) from schooling because of their, on average, higher (lower) skills at school entry. Because both mechanisms can operate simultaneously, assessing the equalizing power of schooling requires accounting for achievement prior to schooling. Using data from the newborn cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), I first replicated earlier findings from Germany on the beneficial but non-equalizing effects of school exposure on student achievement—scientific literacy and vocabulary—in Grade 1. Second, after accounting for children’s achievement before schooling, I found evidence of unequal gains counteracting equalization; net of these unequal gains, school exposure did level out learning gaps by social background, although only in the domain of scientific literacy. The findings underline the importance of incorporating prior achievement into studies of school equalization.
Modeling Cooperation as Information Flow: Ripple Structures and Behavioral Digital Twins
kazutaka hayashi
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Recent advances in articial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, have signicantly improved performance in language understanding, vision, and reasoning. How- ever, a fundamental limitation remains: current AI systems still lack an explicit under- standing of the logical structure by which humans make decisions within specic situations and relationships. This limitation is not merely a shortage of intelligence, but a missing layer of context-dependent decision logic. This study proposes a theoretical framework and methodological protocol that redenes human cooperation as an observable information ow rather than a psychological or moral phenomenon. We model cooperative propagation as Ripple structures, which are directional causal chains of actions in which A helps B and B in turn helps C, and we introduce the concept of a Behavioral Digital Twin, dened as a map- ping of decision logic derived from situation, relationships, and action history. We further present a non-interventional observational protocol for capturing naturally occurring coop- erative behaviors through naturalistic observation environments, and outline a validation framework for future empirical work. All behavioral events remain voluntary; the proto- col introduces observation infrastructure without prescribing or incentivizing actions. All gures and examples in this manuscript are conceptual illustrations intended to clarify the- oretical constructs. This work aims to provide a foundational layer connecting AI research, social systems research, and Web3 governance.
Flourishing and Health in Kenya. Philosophical Perspectives and Empirical Insights.
Maike Ritzer; Steffen Flessa
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Numerous studies have demonstrated positive associations between broader dimensions of wellbeing and health. However, evidence from Kenya on this association is scarce and mostly focused on broad evaluative measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction. This study draws on conceptualizations of wellbeing from Sub-Saharan African philosophical literature as motivation for examining various specific dimensions of wellbeing in the Global Flourishing Study and analyzing their association with subsequent health in Kenya as a case study, using a longitudinal panel design. Data were drawn from waves 1 (2023; n=11389 individuals) and 2 (2024; n= 7698 individuals) of the Global Flourishing Study. The data are representative of the general population in Kenya. Linear regression models with a lagged dependent variable are used to test the association of wave 1 wellbeing indicators with subsequent physical and mental health at wave 2. The findings indicate that several dimensions of wellbeing - including livelihood security, satisfaction with personal relationships, meaning and purpose, agency and freedom to pursue what is most important in life - are positively associated with subsequent self-rated physical and mental health in Kenya.
The Impact of U.S. Tariffs on European Public Opinion: Evidence From a Natural Experiment
Joseph Noonan
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How do tariff escalations shape public attitudes in targeted countries? This registered report examines how the second Trump Administration's April 2025 tariff escalation affected European public opinion. Leveraging the announcement's timing during the fieldwork of Standard Eurobarometer 103.3 as an unexpected event, I compare respondents interviewed before and after. Drawing on theories of external threat, in-group identity, and cooperative reciprocity, I test whether the escalation strengthened pro-EU sentiment, worsened views of the United States, and shifted cooperation preferences. I find that it reduced favorable views of the United States, while effects on EU attachment and cooperation preferences were small and non-significant. The decline in favorable views of the United States is concentrated in the most negative response category, indicating that negative views intensified. These results suggest that economic threats from an ally can sharpen antagonism toward the threatening actor without producing broad in-group consolidation or shifts in trade cooperation preferences.
Accountability Gap Behind Predatory Publishing in Philippine Academia
Jeconiah Dreisbach
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The mandate of the Philippines’ Commission on Higher Education ties faculty promotion in state universities and colleges to research publications. This commentary argues that the policy's emphasis on publication volume, unmatched by a corresponding verification mechanism, has created conditions in which predatory journals, conferences, and award bodies can thrive. Rising demand for indexed journal publications has already produced unsolicited offers to acquire legitimate, non-profit university journals, commercializing a system meant to signal quality. The threat extends beyond obviously fraudulent venues: recent evidence of paper mines (Barnett & Byrne, 2026), in which openly available datasets are mass-mined into formulaic, artificial-intelligence-assisted manuscripts that pass peer review in ostensibly legitimate journals, shows that volume-based incentives corrupt the research record even when every formal quality marker is present. Reading the Philippine case alongside this global pattern suggests that whitelisting indexed venues is necessary but insufficient. Accountability requires Philippine authorities to complement indexing criteria with a national research integrity framework, institutional verification of authorship, conference, and data provenance, and financial support that does not make ethical publishing contingent on personal wealth.
Rails, Risks, and Resilience: A Dynamic Spatial Equilibrium Analysis with Catastrophic Natural Disaster Risk
Daisuke Adachi
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We develop a dynamic stochastic spatial model in which catastrophic disasters temporarily reduce regional productivity and disrupt the transportation network, applied to Japan's Tokai Trough Earthquake (TTE) risk and the Chuo Shinkansen (CS) maglev train project. Productivity-recovery and network-disruption are estimated on the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, and the model qualitatively reproduces the observed slow population decline and wage overshoot in the affected regions. The population-weighted welfare cost of TTE risk is 4.96\% of permanent consumption, of which 97\% flows through the migration option-value channel, representing a spatial-spillover mechanism where even far-epicenter zones lose welfare because their fallback destinations also become riskier. As the CS plays a role as insurance against transport-network disruption, it delivers welfare gains of 0.83\% under TTE risk versus 0.63\% in the risk-free benchmark, resulting in a 0.19 percentage-point redundancy premium. Overall, our framework extends dynamic spatial analysis beyond perfect-foresight counterfactuals to reveal spatial welfare spillovers and a redundancy value of infrastructure under catastrophic risk.
Does Governing Cost Parties Attention on Facebook? Incumbency, Coalitions and Engagement in Europe, 2010 to 2020
Tristan Hotham
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Governing parties tend to lose votes, and junior coalition partners often lose more. Does governing also cost parties attention on social media? I use 660,307 posts from 109 official party pages in 16 European countries, collected through CrowdTangle and covering January 2010 to September 2020, and code each party's place in the national cabinet from ParlGov, with corrections. Fifty-six pages changed status during the period, through 49 entries into government and 43 exits. I compare each party with itself in and out of government, relative to other parties in the same country and month. While in government, a party's posts drew about 18% fewer likes, comments, shares and reactions than the same party's posts in opposition (95% CI 4% to 30%), with the same estimate for the head of government's party and for junior partners. The difference between them lies in volume. The head of government's party posted somewhat more and kept its total engagement, while junior partners posted about 15% less and drew about 25% less in total, an estimate whose interval includes no change. The cost builds with time in office: in its first year the head of government's party drew no less than in opposition, and in its third and fourth years about 40% less. Leaving government did not restore engagement within the two years I can observe. Governing parties' posts were shared less and drew fewer angry reactions. I find no difference between populist and other parties. Event studies around entries and exits are noisy, and parties that entered government had usually gained attention in the year before, so I treat the results as descriptive rather than causal.
When AI Performs Journalism: Delegation and Journalistic Roles in Collective News Production
Claudia Mellado
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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly involved in selecting, interpreting, and generating news content. This conceptual article examines what that involvement means for journalistic role theory and news production. Building on the journalistic role performance framework, we argue that AI can materially shape role performance without possessing a corresponding role conception or perception. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of the architecture of delegation to explain variation in this relationship: the arrangement by which content-shaping operations are assigned to AI, normative orientations are translated into technical instructions, and outputs are incorporated into news. Role performance should align less closely with normative orientations as AI takes on broader, more discretionary, and more consequential functions, and more closely when those orientations guide its use and outputs are substantively reviewed and traceable. These effects are role-specific because their direction and magnitude depend on how each operation affects the practices through which particular roles become manifest. Depending on these conditions, delegation may amplify or displace roles or alter their combination, and may produce performances that were neither intended by journalists nor meaningfully encoded in organizational instructions. We further argue that, as AI-mediated performances become routinized and organizationally rewarded, they may feed back into professional culture and reshape normative orientations.
Do Populists Win on Facebook? The Engagement Premium of Populist Parties in Europe, 2010 to 2020
Tristan Hotham
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Do populist parties get more attention on Facebook than other parties, and is that true everywhere? I use 669,760 posts from 112 official party pages in 17 European countries, posted between January 2010 and September 2020, with 186,939 posts from 74 party leaders as a second sample. I classify parties as populist, far right or far left using the PopuList, an expert classification, year by year, and add vote shares and government membership from ParlGov. I compare each post with posts by other parties in the same country and month. A typical post by a populist party received about 2.5 times as many likes, comments, shares and reactions as a post by another party of the same size and government status. Populist radical left parties had the largest premium (about 5.4 times), populist radical right parties about 2.3 times and other populists about 1.5 times. I find no premium for far-left parties that are not populist, and no separate premium for Euroscepticism. The premium differs a lot between countries: it was large in Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Hungary and France, and I cannot detect it in Slovenia, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Finland, Greece or Switzerland. Bigger audiences account for more than half of it. Populist pages had about 1.9 times the page likes of other parties with the same vote share, but at equal page size a premium of about 1.5 times remained. Populist posts drew a higher share of angry reactions (4.4% against 2.7% of interactions). I find no detectable change in the premium after Facebook’s January 2018 News Feed change. Also available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23270349
What Does a Satellite Campaign Do? Momentum, the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn on Facebook in the 2017 General Election
Tristan Hotham
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Satellite campaigns, organisations that campaign for a party without being part of it, became a visible part of British elections in 2017. The best known was Momentum, formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. I ask what Momentum's Facebook page did that Labour's own pages did not. I compare all 153 retrievable posts from Momentum's page in the month before the 2017 general election with 278 posts from the Labour Party page and 144 from Corbyn's page, each hand coded for 154 features. The party page ran a campaign for votes: 85% of its posts asked for a vote, 66% made a pledge and 80% used the party slogan. Momentum asked for a vote in 12% of posts. Instead about half its posts asked people to help on the doorstep, volunteer or sign up to campaign, against 3% to 7% on Labour's pages, and it used humour in a quarter of its posts. Corbyn's page was close to the party page overall, but on all eleven reliably coded features where it differed significantly from the party page, it differed in Momentum's direction: less policy, fewer calls to vote, more news clips and more attacks on the opposition leader. On the Labour side of the 2017 campaign, the leader's page sat between a formal party campaign and a satellite that asked its followers to campaign. Version 2 (2026) replaces the 2021 working paper. It reanalyses all codes with formal tests, corrects for multiple comparisons and reports which codes were reliably measured. Also available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23296711
Resilience in a Discordant Security Culture: Georgia between Institutional Continuity and Political Realignment
Mariam Bibilashvili
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Challenging the common understanding in the relevant literature, this study reconceptualizes resilience to hybrid threats as a politically mediated process rather than purely a matter of institutional capacity-building. To examine how policy frameworks and political rhetoric interact to shape resilience, it traces Georgia’s security culture in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war. Through intertextual discourse analysis, the article cross-examines the institutional architecture of digital resilience, encompassing cybersecurity (systemic), media regulation (protective) and media literacy (empowerment) measures, with the government’s shifting rhetoric (2023–2025), while interview data provide contextual insights. The analysis reveals a discordant security culture manifested in fragmented governance and discursive struggle over resilience. Although formal policy frameworks normatively align with the West and consistently identify Russia as the principal security threat, governmental rhetoric portrays the same Western actors as sources of foreign interference and prioritizes political autonomy over cooperation while still invoking commitments to the constitutionally enshrined Euro-Atlantic trajectory. This dichotomy between institutional design and political discourse results in strategic ambiguity. It suggests that in hybrid regimes formal frameworks may function symbolically to signal external alignment, while practice is determined by short-term political calculations and discretionary authority, leaving institutions and societies vulnerable to evolving forms of foreign interference.
Chapter 2: Surprise, Revisited: An EU Performance Evaluation of the Arab Uprisings
Nikki Ikani
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Most actors and commentators across the West were caught by surprise when anti-government protests started in Tunisia and then spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the winter of 2010-2011. The events became known as the Arab Spring, the Arab revolutions or, as will be used in this volume, the ‘Arab uprisings’. This sense of surprise when the uprisings started applies to the institutions of the European Union and its major allies in the region – the United States, France and the UK, with their dense network of contacts, embassies and intelligence operatives. Nor, as will be discussed below, did any of the big NGOs or mainstream media working and reporting on the Middle East and North Africa emit clear warnings on the prospect of such an event. Even once the protests started in Tunisia in the third week of December 2010, the rapidly growing discontent in both Tunisia and Egypt initially went largely unreported in Western media as well as in reporting from the big NGOs, some of whom were at the time largely focusing on the impasse in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This volume, amongst others, asks to what extent and when ‘being surprised’ is to be expected, and when it indicates failures in intelligence collection, analysis, communication, or receptivity. In this chapter it will be argued that only after investigating in detail which characteristics of the Arab uprisings were particularly surprising to the European institutions and to what extent, and whether these degrees of surprise were spread evenly across analysists and decision-makers, it is possible to properly explain why the Arab uprisings were so surprising. In keeping with the aims of this volume, this subsequently serves to identify to what extent the surprising nature of the Arab uprisings, and any potential errors made in anticipating this event by the European Union, were excusable given the complexity and diagnostic difficulty of the Arab Uprisings, or whether they point to broader structural problems and shortcomings in the European intelligence-policy nexus.
Leaves instead of ballots: The Colombian formal and informal governance of coca
Juan Sebastián Lara-Rodríguez
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Colombia produces more coca than ever, yet scholarship remains anchored in security frameworks that overlook how institutional configurations shape this illegal crop. This article treats coca cultivation as a governance outcome, arguing that the interaction between formal institutions — political parties and electoral processes — and informal entities — criminal and rebel armed groups — determines where coca takes root. Drawing on a municipality-level panel covering the national territory from 2011 to 2023, and employing fixed effects, spatial Durbin models, and a difference-in-differences leveraging the 2016 peace settlement, the analysis reveals that no party or coalition bears a significant association with coca once municipal heterogeneity is absorbed. What persistently predicts cultivation is electoral fraud risk and armed group presence, specially the ELN guerrilla. The latest peace accord caused coca expansion rather than contraction. These findings suggest that phasing out coca demands strengthening democracy and extending the rule of law to plantation clusters.
AI Swarm Intelligence Must Be Studied as a Sociotechnical Phenomenon
Wenchao Dong; Luiz Felipe Santos Vecchietti; Lukasz Olejnik; Signe Riemer-Sørensen; Jonas R. Kunst; Meeyoung cha; Daniel Thilo Schroeder
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The emergence of coordinated autonomous AI agents is fundamentally altering human belief systems and public discourse at scales and speeds that outpace existing characterization methods. This paper argues that AI swarm intelligence, the coordinated influence of autonomous agents on human populations, represents a phase shift that cannot be understood by simply scaling single-agent analysis. Instead, it must be analyzed as a sociotechnical system where societal impact emerges from the tight coupling of individual agent capabilities, multi-agent coordination, and population dynamics. Because the shift from single- to multi-agent systems corresponds to a psychological transition between single- and multiple-source influence, we propose a unified framework and evaluate these systems across operational, individual, and population-level dynamics. We identify concrete research agendas and call on the community to build the evaluation methods, countermeasures, and governance approaches needed to address the long-term societal impact of these coordinated autonomous AI populations. AI assistance disclosure: Claude (Anthropic) was used solely to polish the language of the manuscript. No other AI assistance was used.
Early climate change coverage in news media: A comparison of East and West Germany from 1950-1978
Viktoria Cologna; Alexander A Kaurov; Mike S. Schäfer; Naomi Oreskes
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Press coverage of climate change provides a historical window into how different societies perceived climate change at a given time in a given place. For historically significant emitters such as Germany, reconstructing such news coverage provides important insights into public awareness on the issue. We present the first systematic and comparative analysis of early climate change reporting in East and West Germany between 1950 and 1978. We constructed and validated a corpus of relevant articles through keyword searches, manual screening, and large language model-assisted validation, resulting in a final sample of 122 articles, which we analyzed qualitatively. Our analysis identified four roughly chronological discursive phases: 1) observed glacier melting and the greenhouse effect hypothesis; 2) a perceived end of warming due to decreasing temperatures; 3) growing scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and model uncertainties; 4) increasing attention to the risks of climate change. Human-caused climate change was first mentioned in 1957 and then discussed more extensively in the 1960s and 70s. Despite profound ideological differences, the content and development of the four discursive phases were similar in East and West Germany. However, West German coverage focused more strongly on the impacts on future generations and renewable energy, and gave space to minority skeptical voices, whereas East German coverage focused more strongly on climate modification. This analysis sheds light on the beginnings of climate change reporting in Germany and historically contextualizes awareness of the issue in one of the countries that bears legal and ethical responsibility for addressing climate change.
Embattled Identities: Masculinities and Organizational Behavior in the Iranian Sphere of Influence
Vanessa Zorrilla-Muñoz; Manuel Cuerno; Ines Juaristi
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Most research on masculinities in armed conflict and tension focuses on violence and militarization, overlooking how care (Communion) and dominance interact within masculine identities under chronic insecurity. Using data from the Towards Gender Harmony (TGH) project, this study compares gender self-constructions and care stereotypes between Western liberal democracies and societies under Iranian geopolitical influence or chronic conflict, focusing on the integration versus separation of care and dominance in masculine identities. Gender self-concepts (Communion, Dominance, Agency, Weakness, and Precarious Manhood Beliefs, PMB) were analyzed via t-tests and k-means clustering (k = 4); care stereotypes were examined using Bipolar Class Analysis (BCA) to identify latent cognitive structures (construals) regarding the compatibility of communion and agency traits. The Iran & Conflict group scored higher on Communion, Dominance, Agency, and PMB, and lower on Weakness, and showed a distinctive Provider-Protector cluster profile (high Communion, Dominance, and Agency) absent in the Western sample; PMB behaved as an underlying structural condition rather than a profile-specific trait. Male-only analyses replicated and often intensified these differences, except for Weakness, suggesting that difference was driven by the female subsample. BCA also revealed greater heterogeneity in caregiving stereotypes within the Iran & Conflict group. These results show that caregiving and dominance can integrate into a coherent model of protective, provider masculinity under chronic insecurity, challenging simplistic associations between masculinity and violence and highlighting configurations that legitimize male authority through protection and provision. The study contributes to theorizing masculinities and informs interventions on gender norms in conflict-affected regions.
Unequal Parenting across Childhood: How Class Differences in Parental Control of Screen Use Reverse with the Child's Age
Abel Aussant; Andreas Roaldsnes
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Research usually treats class differences in parenting style as constant throughout childhood. We show instead that they can reverse with the child's age. Our case is parental control of children's screen use, for which expert advice is restrictive when children are young and divided when they are adolescents. We draw on an original survey of 20,670 Norwegian households with children aged 3 to 17 to estimate class differences in time limits, control of content and the negotiation of rules at each age. We find that better-resourced parents are stricter than others with young children, but more permissive with adolescents. The composition of the resources available to the household shapes the pattern: income and education have different, complementary associations with parental control. The observed reversal across childhood suggests that the advantage of well-resourced families in child rearing lies less in a fixed repertoire of practices than in adaptability, a capacity to adjust as the appropriate practice changes with the child's age.
Are EU Kidding Me? Notes from a Poorly Drafted Social Media Ban
Michael Veale
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In September 2026, the European Commission published a proposed EU KIDS Act, responding to the demand for restrictions and further design obligations applying to digital services accessible to children, including social media. This Article argues that regardless of what one believes about the merits of this policy direction, the EU KIDS Act is not the legislative text we need. The scope and drafting are little short of chaotic, full of holes, enormous ambiguities, and unintended consequences. Recitals contradict articles. The use of scope borrowed from other pieces of legislation not designed for this purpose brings services into scope that should not be subject to the relevant provisions, like book-recommendation websites, music services, or exercise trackers. The infrastructural requirement for assurance of age and parental responsibility attestation simply omits enormous issues of complex families and childhoods. Complex design obligations are written in ways that can be plausibly interpreted as implicitly prohibiting entire swathes of products, such as voice assistants. This Article outlines these issues, and many more. The Commission should withdraw this proposal and reissue a workable and realistic text.
FUBU-CAPITOL: A Large-Scale Twitter Dataset on the U.S. Capitol Attack and Stop the Steal Discourse (2020–2023)
Michael Kreil; Tristan Stöber; Daniel Thilo Schroeder
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The January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol emerged from a broader online discourse around election denial, Stop the Steal mobilization, and contested interpretations of political violence. To facilitate computational study of these dynamics, we introduce the FUBU-CAPITOL dataset, a large-scale, multi-dimensional research corpus of 69.42 million Twitter statuses authored by 6.65 million users and collected between December 2020 and April 2023. The source corpus was captured continuously in near real time, preserving statuses before they were deleted, edited, or removed by moderation, and is enriched with a directed social contact graph of 39.48 million edge rows and annotations from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct covering sentiment, conspiracy and misinformation stance, toxicity, moral emotion, ideology, partisanship, mobilization, and related dimensions. From this source corpus we derived a textless, de-identified public release that retains one row for every deduplicated status, 60.29 million internal status relationships, categorical and numeric annotations, and coarse temporal information, while excluding tweet text, original post and user identifiers, handles, profile fields, exact timestamps, reverse mappings, and the randomization seed. This design allows the corpus to be shared under current data-protection and platform-access constraints without redistributing platform content. To request access to raw data for collaborative research under ethical and legal safeguards, contact fubu.dataset@gmail.com.
Under what conditions does complexity become unmanageable? A capacity threshold for megaprojects
Matthias Huemmer
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Purpose. Project complexity research describes complexity in rich dimensional detail but rarely states the condition under which it stops being manageable. This paper states one and derives what remains possible past it. Design/methodology/approach. Conceptual theory elaboration from the delivering organization’s standpoint, building on requisite variety, organizational information processing and bounded rationality, illustrated with a worked calculation and a documented revision series from a public inquiry. Findings. Complexity becomes unmanageable from within at a point of no return: when the capacity demanded of a governance level exceeds the information-processing capacity available to it, set by its binding constraint, to the degree that the level can no longer remove its overload with its own means. Past it the feasible response set collapses to three moves, deceleration, external capacity and requirement reduction, because every other method consumes the missing capacity. In megaprojects the threshold falls early, because both sides of the balance are fixed before work begins. The Elbphilharmonie's public record shows the predicted signature: revisions moved both ways before contract award and one way after it. Research limitations/implications. The threshold is stated as a testable claim, not a measured constant. Five propositions with falsification conditions follow. Originality/value. Not a new inventory of complexity but a threshold within the inherited mechanism, and the identification of the translation of requirements into demanded capacity as the operation where complexity becomes subjective and manageable.
Arriving, staying, emptying: settlement condition and the management of Kurdish memory in Central Anatolia
Ramazan BOZTEPE
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Research on Kurdish memory in Turkey often treats internal migrants as a single analytic category. This article asks whether the way memory is managed varies with a participant's settlement condition: arriving in a new place, staying in a place that others are leaving, or growing up after the move. It draws on 24 semi-structured interviews conducted in Central Anatolia between May 2024 and June 2025 with Kurdish and Kurdish-Alevi participants. Using an exploratory, single-coder typology, it identifies eight patterns of memory management and shows how they distribute across three settlement conditions. Participants narrating arrival describe concealment, domestic enclosure and the dissolution of communal ritual under apartment living and urban renewal. Participants who stayed describe a different problem, visibility without anonymity in small towns, and the thinning of memory as villages and streets empty. Second-generation participants describe reading inherited silence and turning it into documentation. Borrowing the idea of simultaneity from transnational migration research and applying it analogically to domestic village-city ties, the article argues that memory is managed less by migration status than by the position from which a place is narrated. The findings are exploratory and not statistically generalizable.
Creationism as a Mediating Construct Between Religiosity, Scientific Epistemology, and Science Attitudes: A Secondary Analysis of the Science Attitudes Dataset
Christopher Ryan Deraney
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Since publication of the original analyses in Ideological Mosaic: Examining Political and Religious Factors in Science Attitudes (Deraney & Ault, 2025), a secondary exploratory reanalysis of the original dataset using additional statistical procedures and a revised conceptualization of the Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey, EALS, (Short & Hawley, 2012). The purpose of this reanalysis was not to replace the original findings, but rather to investigate whether the EALS contained multiple theoretically distinct constructs that were obscured by the original composite score (Deraney & Ault, 2025). Keywords: Science Attitudes, Conservatism, Ideology, Religiosity, Scientific Epistemology, Young- Earth Creation, and Politics.
Is there a niche for the NAP in mature climate policy frameworks? An analysis of flood risk management in England and its alignment with adaptation policies
Andrew Russell; Aakash Dipak Patel; Isabel Cotton
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The National Adaptation Programme (NAP) in England is a wide-ranging, statutory, 5-yearly plan that, within the Climate Change Act 2008, has a requirement to develop adaptation objectives to manage climate risks. Since NAP1 in 2013, it has been repeatedly assessed as inadequate by many stakeholders. Here, we investigate how and why it has failed, and assess whether there is a niche for a NAP in a well-developed environmental risk management policy space. We conducted a survey (n=112) that collected quantitative and rich qualitative responses, alongside 4 interviews, with flood risk management (FRM) professionals from England to examine how well the NAP has integrated into this sector, and which policy gaps the NAP could fill. The results indicate that the NAP is much less important to FRM professionals than other relevant strategies and policies, and that its goal or ambition was articulated poorly compared to other policies or plans; the NAP ranked second-bottom for both criteria out of 12 relevant strategies and policies presented. The factors seen as inhibiting adaptation integration were: fragmented governance; avoiding big decisions; and funding alignment with protection rather than resilience measures. Arbitrary targets linked to infrastructure (eg. number of properties better protected) were seen as a barrier to working towards a resilient society. There was significant support for using progress measures more relevant to communities, that cut across policy silos and that apply a wider, resilience-focused interpretation of risk management (eg. saving lives, reforming funding approaches, greater social equity, ensuring insurance availability).
Digital Doubles: How does AI-generated imagery affect human engagement with biodiversity conservation?
Maya Mukherjee; Diogo Veríssimo; Amy Hinsley
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1. Wildlife images created by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are rapidly growing in quantity and sophistication. Viewing these AI images could influence how people perceive and understand the real natural world, affecting their reactions to real wildlife imagery and potentially in direct wildlife interactions. 2. In this study, we look at how people donate money for conservation purposes to real and AI-generated birds, as well as whether they can accurately discriminate between images in these categories. We further investigate how participant moderating factors and perceived artificiality (i.e. how much an image looks AI-generated) affect these outcomes. 3. Using the contingent valuation method to assess willingness-to-donate, we found that participants award AI-generated and real bird images donation amounts that are not statistically discernible. However, greater perceived artificiality of an image was associated with higher donation amounts. No demographic factors significantly influenced donation behaviour. 4. We also found that participants were able to correctly identify AI vs real images. A nature relatedness score measuring how connected participants were to nature being the only factor to positively predict ability to accurately choose between real and AI images. 5. These findings indicate the potential risk of AI-generated imagery replacing real nature imagery and experience, with artificial representations of wildlife being valued equally to real biodiversity. Conservationists must focus on promoting nature relatedness and real-life, direct nature experiences to combat AI-generated misinformation and decreased understanding of ecological realities.
Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) for Coding Open-Ended Survey Responses: A Total Survey Error Framework
Laone Maphane; Gabriele Durrant
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Open-ended questions are commonly used in survey research to supplement closed-ended questions by capturing respondents’ views, reasons, and priorities in their own words. However, coding these responses for analysis remains time-consuming and difficult to standardise. Recent advances in automated coding, especially through large language models (LLMs), have renewed interest in using open-ended responses at scale, but their evaluation is often difficult and framed mainly in terms of classification accuracy and agreement with human coding. This paper develops a Total Survey Error framework for evaluating automated coding of open-ended survey responses as part of survey measurement and data production. Model outputs are assessed using existing human-coded data as a high-quality operational benchmark, with the evaluation examining six complementary dimensions, such as processing agreement, measurement validity, prevalence distortion, coding density, response-form sensitivity, and operational reliability. The framework is applied to data using open-ended survey responses from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). The paper aims to inform how automated coding systems, including LLMs, can be assessed in practice, and what issues survey researchers should consider when evaluating their suitability for open-ended survey coding, and how improved coding may enable wider use of open-ended questions in large-scale quantitative surveys. Keywords: automated coding; large language models; measurement validity; open-ended survey responses; survey data quality; Total Survey Error
Where Silicon Samples Go Wrong: Item-Level Coefficient Distortion in LLM-Simulated Chinese Public Opinion
Mingkun Cui; Shenghao Xiong
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Do regressions fitted to survey responses simulated by large language models return the coefficients human data would? We used four 2026 models to generate responses to the full attitude-item bank of two Chinese General Social Survey waves, conditioning on 1,000 respondents’ demographic profiles per wave and requesting each person’s most likely answer. For 10 items analyzed in both waves, we compared human and simulated coefficients on the human-anchored scale, with Holm adjustment across 240 tests. The 28 supported differences concentrate in three patterns: an inflated income gradient in perceived fairness, an urban–rural gradient in premarital-sex morality where the human coefficient is near zero, and an overstated sex difference in gender-ability beliefs. Marginal fit does not locate these distortions. Standardizing each source by its own standard deviation changes 33 test decisions, showing why regression validation requires a declared outcome scale.
Passive Behavioral Tracing: A Non-Interventional Fairness Protocol for Cooperative AI
kazutaka hayashi
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Emerging AI governance regimes, including the EU AI Act's post-market monitoring obligation and the NIST AI RMF's measure function, require ongoing fairness monitoring but leave open which statistics should satisfy it. Interventional audits (A/B tests, counterfactual procedures, adversarial probing) manipulate the system, and often the people, under audit, and are episodic where monitoring is continuous. This article argues that a useful part of that monitoring can be done passively, and proposes Passive Behavioral Tracing (PBT), a protocol that audits fairness in AI-mediated cooperative systems using only behavioral traces the system already records. PBT formalizes four constructs computable from ordinary logs (consistency of treatment, parity across naturally occurring groups, proportionality to contribution, and drift over time) and combines them into two indicators, PBT-Ethics and PBT-Coop. A Monte Carlo study with released code shows that the constructs form two families: reciprocity and parity register unfair treatment whether it has always existed or began recently, while consistency and drift respond to change, and only drift locates when the change happened. This distinction carries regulatory weight: unfairness present since deployment implicates a system's design, while unfairness with an onset points to a dateable change, and the two call for remedies that a single score cannot separate. The study also shows the protocol's limits: mild, sustained unfairness against a small group is often missed. All results come from a stylized synthetic model; PBT is a specification validated in principle and complementary to interventional audits, not a finding about any operating system.
An Empirical Study on How Private College Counseling Perpetuates Structural Disadvantage A Mixed-Methods Study Combining Survey, Interview, and Social Media Content Analysis
Alayna ellahi
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Abstract Equitable access to higher education is widely regarded as a cornerstone of social mobility, yet the rapid growth of an independent educational consulting (IEC) industry has introduced a market-driven layer of college admissions guidance available only to families who can pay for it. This study investigates whether private college counseling functions as a neutral support service or as a mechanism of structural disadvantage that converts economic capital into institutional advantage, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural and social capital. Using a triangulated, mixed-methods design, the study combines a 20-respondent Likert-scale survey of students and parents, semi-structured interviews with six purposively sampled respondent groups (student and parent users and non-users, school-based counselors, and private consultants), and an original content analysis of eight social media acceptance posts from a private counseling agency, coded against a seven-theme promotional codebook. Findings converge across all three methods: 82% of survey respondents reported that private counselors reveal "unspoken" admissions criteria unavailable to public-school peers; 65% identified fee-based, unadvertised opportunity-brokering as a distinguishing service; and interviews revealed overwhelming cross-group consensus — among both users and non-users of private counseling — that the practice constitutes an unfair structural advantage rather than a neutral commercial service. The content analysis found that aspirational imagery and institutional-legitimacy signaling appeared in 100% of coded posts, empirically confirming the marketing mechanisms respondents described. The study concludes that, absent structural reform — expanded public counseling capacity
Urban Human-Canine Conflict Mitigation: A 2023 Pilot Study on Stray Dog Population Management in Chembur, Mumbai
Ojus Wankhede
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This study investigates the urban stray dog population in Mumbai, Maharashtra, and proposes actionable policy recommendations to mitigate human-canine conflicts. A mixed-methods retrospective pilot study was utilised, incorporating a March 2023 community survey (n=91) in the Chembur area, alongside site visits to local Non-Governmental Organisations and semi-structured interviews with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials. The survey revealed that 61.53% of respondents supported the relocation of stray dogs, whereas only 21.97% supported neutering. The findings indicate a pressing need for enhanced infrastructural capacity within the Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme. Core policy recommendations include the systematic expansion of sterilisation drives, the integration of private veterinary practitioners into mass vaccination campaigns, and the strict enforcement of the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023.
The sociolinguistic labor of incarcerated people
Gabriella Licata; Robert Tyler; Mesro Coles; Anthony Habib Watkins; Brian Asey Gonsoulin
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Through participatory action research, we draw on interviews with 40 incarcerated students to examine how linguistic practices are shaped by institutional power in carceral environments. We argue that the magnitude of surveillance under incarceration produces sociolinguistic labor: the effortful management of one’s communicative repertoire. Our analysis identifies a distinctive form of dual-direction sociolinguistic labor, whereby incarcerated individuals are required to extend their repertoires both toward stigmatized vernaculars to gain social capital and toward hyperstandardized registers for institutional capital. We examine this dynamic across educational, social, and procedural domains, with particular attention to boardspeak—an emotionally-constrained, bureaucratic register through which rehabilitation is performed and assessed at a Board of Parole hearing. By situating these practices within broader critical linguistic theories and perspectives, we show incarcerated people self-surveil and create, prompting varying levels of sociolinguistic labor and innovation that are mediated by race, ethnicity, ability, socioeconomic class, and in-group membership. These findings demonstrate how high-stakes, surveilled environments intensify the stakes of language use and reshape the boundaries of communicative agency.
The Intersection of Fascia, Fascism, and Language: Reframing Neurodivergence as an Adaptive Response to Environmental Stress
Isha Sarah Snow
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This theoretical paper argues that global autism prevalence data are better read as a map of social ecology than as a map of biology. Diagnostic prevalence reflects the interaction of neurodevelopmental variation, distress, recognition and diagnostic access, and I argue that identified rates rise where relational buffering weakens, institutional demands intensify, and diagnostic systems are primed to read difference as dysfunction. The argument integrates three domains that are rarely analyzed together. First, fascia is treated as a body-wide communication network that densifies under chronic stress, and I propose, as a hypothesis, that the cell danger response (Naviaux, 2014, 2025) may link sustained social threat to physiological rigidity. Second, language is treated as regulatory infrastructure: drawing on Jackson et al. (2019) and Fricker’s (2007) concept of hermeneutical injustice, a dominant diagnostic language shapes how bodily states are interpreted, governed, and pathologized. Third, fascism, which shares its etymological root with fascia in the Roman fasces, is used as a conceptual analogy for systems in which control replaces communication and feedback is suppressed. Apparent anomalies in prevalence across India, Spain, Japan, Australia, and the Nordic countries are examined, and a testable prediction is stated for each. The paper distinguishes established findings from its own hypotheses throughout. The paper concludes that the aim is less distress, not less autism, which shifts intervention upstream toward environments that restore co-regulation and tolerate difference.
GLCI (Global Linguistic Connectivity Index): How Connected Is the World?
Areg Hovhannisyan
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Eight billion people speak more than seven thousand languages. If two of them meet by chance, how likely is it that the one listening understands the one speaking, without a translator? We estimate about one chance in nine. Greenberg (1956) defined this probability for a single population as an index of communication; we compute it for the world. The data come from an audit of individual language repertoire compiled from hundreds of census, survey and reference sources, mapped onto a common conversational threshold (level A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, CEFR) and a common individuation standard (ISO 639-3, the language codes of the International Organization for Standardization). That audit, reported with ALPS (Average Language a Person Speaks) in Hovhannisyan (2026a), covers 237 jurisdictions and 8.16 billion residents; connectivity is computed for the 216 with language-level data, which hold 8.09 billion, while the other 21, with 69 million residents, have a national ALPS value but no language rows. The audit is extended with a directional table of intelligibility between related languages, which covers 591 language pairs, most of them assessed and few measured. The resulting index, the Global Linguistic Connectivity Index (GLCI), is the probability that a randomly drawn listener comprehends a randomly drawn speaker. GLCI is 0.1129 (95% interval 0.1083–0.1176); the interval covers only row-level, sampling-type uncertainty in the input shares, and single modelling choices move GLCI between 0.096 and 0.134 (§6.1). Within a single jurisdiction the probability is 0.6284 (0.5907–0.6660), a pair-weighted figure dominated by India and China; across two jurisdictions it is 0.0747 (0.0711–0.0788), and because 91% of pairs span two jurisdictions, the lower value governs. Connectivity is concentrated: nearly a third of cross-jurisdiction pair mass lies below 0.01, and the median pair sits at 0.022. It also rests on one language. English carries 39.2% of global connectivity and 61.9% of the connectivity between countries. In a simple model relating repertoire to connectivity, which languages are learned matters far more than how many. At a mean repertoire of four languages per person, GLCI is 98%, 58% or 15% depending on the allocation rule, that is, chiefly on which languages are learned and also on where. Compared with a dataset that other researchers built from Ethnologue, the LINGACON estimates agree closely on first languages (r = 0.951). On the full layer, leaving out the intelligibility term that the other dataset lacks, they are 1.45 times higher, and the difference lies mainly in the coverage of acquired languages.
The ALPS Index: A Global Estimate of the Average Number of Languages a Person Speaks
Areg Hovhannisyan
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How many languages does the average person speak? The question has an established qualitative answer, that "probably more than half of the world's population is bilingual" (Grosjean, 2012), but no quantitative one at global scale. We audited individual language repertoire in 237 jurisdictions with 8.16 billion residents. Survey, census and reference sources were mapped onto a common conversational threshold (CEFR level A2) and a common individuation standard (ISO 639-3), graded on a seven-band evidentiary scale, and treated for twelve documented biases of census and survey instruments. The resulting index, ALPS (Average Language a Person Speaks), is the population mean of individual repertoire size. The global population-weighted value is 1.568 languages per person. Its grade band, 1.42 to 1.70, reflects the evidentiary grade of the sources, not sampling error. The alternative specifications we could compute place the figure between 1.53 and 1.60; an adjustment for the ages of survey respondents lowers it by at least 0.041; the value documented by official and survey instruments alone is 1.48. As a mean, the figure limits the share of people who speak two or more languages to no more than 57% (42%–70% across the band). The unweighted mean across jurisdictions (1.87) is well above the weighted mean: individual multilingualism is concentrated in smaller populations. Group-level linguistic diversity and individual repertoire are only moderately associated (r = 0.43). A direct arithmetic test locates incomplete domestic bridging: in ten jurisdictions holding 38.9% of the audited population, mean repertoire is below the level that complete bridging through the largest first language would require; in three of them (India, Ethiopia and Côte d'Ivoire, 19.8%) the shortfall exceeds the jurisdiction's band. The audit synthesises existing sources and involves no new fieldwork. Its central limitation is that source quality is distributed inversely to linguistic diversity. For each specification choice whose effect can be computed, we report the value the alternative would produce; the choices whose effect cannot be computed are named.
Unmade Ground: Displacement, Dispossession, and the Erosion of Spatial Memory Among Kurdish Forced Migrants
Ramazan BOZTEPE
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Forced displacement does not merely relocate people; it dismantles the material infrastructure through which place becomes memory. Drawing on 80 semi-structured interviews with Kurdish participants in their region of origin (n=25), Central Anatolia (n=25) and Western Europe (n=30), this article examines how the destruction, abandonment and transformation of inhabited space unmakes collective and intergenerational memory. Using Cernea's (1997) Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction model alongside Malkki's (1992) critique of sedentarist assumptions about place, the analysis identifies four interlinked processes: urban redevelopment, rural demographic hollowing, diaspora gentrification, and the institutional foreclosure of access to common and sacred land. Participants describe memory as materially anchored, carried in streets, soil and threshold spaces, so that narrative transmission alone cannot repair its loss. The article argues that spatial memory loss is a distinct impoverishment risk inadequately addressed by existing frameworks, extends Cernea's model by specifying the memorial stakes of lost access to common property, and proposes the concept of inherited spatial memory: attachment to places the second generation has never physically inhabited.
Who protects Science Diplomacy from being weaponised? The role of domestic policies
Eva Hartmann
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Many researchers have voiced concerns about the weaponisation of policy-relevant international research collaborations. But why does this pose a problem? This contribution develops a Neo-Gramscian notion of science diplomacy to explain how processes of weaponisation risk undermining the mediation role of scientific research, its capacity to integrate diverse perspectives and values, and, consequently, its ability to mediate between conflicting norms, values and interests. Drawing on Nicos Poulantzas’s state theory, the article further elaborates the concept of mediation and illuminates the role of national parliaments as an important mediator between academia and civil society, more generally, and the government. The empirical study explores parliamentary deliberations of the UK National Security Bill in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It shows how the parliamentary scrutiny failed to curb the significant expansion of governmental authority justified in the name of security, with important consequences for how academics engage with other governments as part of science diplomacy. The findings shed light on the significance of public policy and domestic political struggles for international politics. In the context of an ongoing crisis of multilateralism, domestic political dynamics have become even more important.
Who Manufactured Pseudo-History Theories? The Emergent Collective Creation of Historical Narratives on the Chinese Internet
ZY Liu; Di Yuan
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This paper examines the formation, expansion, and functions of pseudo-history theories (伪史论) on the Chinese internet from the perspective of cultural economics, and proposes the analytical concept of “Emergent Collective Creation.” This concept refers to the process whereby a large number of relatively independent content producers, acting on the basis of their respective local motivations and in the absence of any unified overall plan, generate a collective narrative system that exceeds the original planning and control of any single participant through imitation, competition, the recombination of arguments, and the migration of topics. The paper first investigates relevant figures who possess formal academic credentials or publishing experience and analyzes the pathways through which early pseudo-history resources entered public circulation. It then takes as examples the extension of pseudo-history theories from ancient Greece and Rome to other civilizations, historical figures, and issues concerning Chinese dynastic history, exploring how competition for traffic, content imitation, and the selective recombination of historical materials drive narrative expansion. Finally, using online controversies surrounding the film The Penghu Naval Battle as a case study, it analyzes how pseudo-history theories have been deployed by different participants in conflicts over historical identity and in online opinion confrontation, and discusses possible links between controversial historical discourses and public trust in academic authority. The paper argues that even dispersed individual actions lacking unified coordination may, through indirect interaction, produce collective narrative outcomes and enable pseudo-history theories to move from a form of content competition for traffic into ideological contention. Because this study relies primarily on publicly available online materials, publications, and media reports, and lacks internal platform data as well as continuous records at the creator level, the mechanisms identified remain exploratory explanations whose chains of transmission, causal relations, and actual effects await further verification.
Agreement under abstention: an agreement–abstention–conflict triple and sharp bounds for Fleiss' kappa
Maikel Yelandi Leyva Vázquez; Alexis Matheu Pérez; Bastián Gutiérrez Vargas
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Raters in agreement studies are often allowed to abstain, for example by answering "can't tell" or "unsure". Abstentions are usually deleted or recoded, and each treatment carries an untested assumption about why raters abstained. We show how to report Fleiss' kappa without such an assumption. Assigning the abstentions to categories changes both the observed agreement and the category totals that determine chance agreement, so the extremes of kappa require optimising the two jointly. A dynamic programme gives the exact extremes over all such completions for two or three categories, with completions that attain and thereby certify them; closed-form bounds enclose them for more categories. A budget interval and tipping points grade conclusions by how far the missing ratings must depart from a reference predictive model. The shares of agreeing, abstaining and conflicting rater pairs, (pA, pU, pC), serve as an intuitive summary. Under independent sampling of units the sample extremes converge to the population identified set, and an exploratory unit bootstrap supports a three-outcome decision: adequate, inadequate or undetermined. In simulations at 2–10% abstention, estimator errors depended on the mechanism; the budget interval contained the complete-data kappa in 97–100% of replicates under random abstention but 44–51% under value-dependent abstention, and population decisions were undetermined in 43–76% of replicates. In crowdsourced weather-sentiment labels, listwise deletion declared agreement adequate where the three-outcome decision was undetermined; in safety ratings of chatbot conversations, listwise estimates fell on both sides of the interval.
Are Women Comedians Less Funny?: Empirical Analysis of Gender Differences in 1-on-1 Competitive Comedy
Yuhei Yamaguchi
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"Is there a difference in funniness between men and women?'" This study addresses this question. The perception that "women are less funny than men" is widespread, and some studies have indeed shown that men have a better sense of humor. In addition, in industries dominated by men, the presence of women tends to be relatively low. In the comedy industry, where men make up the overwhelming majority, women comedians are thus exposed to a double stereotype of this kind. We examined whether, under such a double stereotype, women comedians are able to be as funny as men comedians. We collected and analyzed data on a total of 3,925 matchups from a television program in which comedians compete directly over funniness in one-on-one contests. The results showed that, although a simple statistical model makes men comedians appear funnier, an analysis using a model that accounts for individual funniness revealed no significant difference in funniness between men and women. Although concerns remain about the generalizability of the findings, the results call into question existing research on gender differences in sense of humor, as well as the associated stereotypes.
The EU’s Biotech Industrial Policy: Between Competitiveness and Geoeconomics
Jaša Veselinovič
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This contribution examines the European Union’s emerging biotechnology industrial policy in the context of intensifying US–China technological rivalry, focusing on the relationship between competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and corporate power. The proposed EU Biotech Act seeks to strengthen the sector through regulatory simplification, public financing, strategic projects, and enhanced intellectual property protection. However, its competitiveness-oriented approach obscures the geopolitical and distributional implications of biotechnology policy. The EU’s reluctance to localise production or restrict global interdependencies is driven by the integration of European pharmaceutical multinationals into global value chains and their dependence on US markets and Chinese biotechnology ecosystem. Consequently, strategic autonomy tends to be framed as synonymous with the global profitability of pharmaceutical corporations rather than broader societal resilience. By situating the Biotech Act within debates on intellectual monopoly capitalism, this short reflection questions whether extending intellectual property rights and reducing regulatory barriers will reinforce an increasingly extractive pharmaceutical business model. It ultimately calls for reconsidering the social purpose of EU industrial policy and whether biotechnology sovereignty should prioritise corporate competitiveness or pharmaceuticals as a public good.
A Sociolinguistic Inquiry into Vietnamese Swearing: Regional Variation and Cross-Cultural Parallels
Hàng Hỷ Vinh
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This exploratory, pilot-scale study investigates the Vietnamese swearing construction built from an obscene verb, a kinship term and a second-person pronoun (địt mẹ mày, đụ má mày 'fuck your mother', mả cha mi 'your father's grave') through two questions: how kin-directed swearing differs across regions and which part of the construction reveals the speaker's region (RQ1); and why Vietnamese swearing targets kin and women, viewed against the full repertoire of swearing themes in Vietnamese and neighbouring languages (RQ2). It combines eight Vietnamese dictionaries (1651–2021) and comparative dictionaries of Mường, Cham, Teochew and Cantonese with an online convenience-sample survey of 50 young speakers across four regions, a small Quốc ngữ prose corpus, and a thematic comparison with ten other language communities. For RQ1, the dictionaries show no regional boundary in the verb before 1931, whereas the survey finds a clear North/South split in both the verb and the word for "mother"; regional information is asymmetric, with Southern and Central forms acting as strong markers while standard-compatible forms (địt, mẹ) and online abbreviations (đm, vkl) spread across all regions. For RQ2, sex and kin dominate the free lists; the mother-directed sexual formula occurs in Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Hindi and English but is absent from Japanese, so it cannot be attributed to Confucian heritage alone. Kin-directed swearing is rated more offensive than self-directed swearing and triggers more active responses; swears that deny the hearer's descent (đồ con hoang, cả họ nhà mày) are the heaviest and the least mitigated among friends. Young respondents name affection for kin, not family face, as the main reason; we read this as a contemporary synchronic reinterpretation of templates whose diachronic origin lies in honour-based lineage norms. Taken together, the target of kin-directed swearing is the hearer's legitimate standing within the lineage. Results describe young, internet-using speakers and should be read as hypothesis-generating.
Impact of Social Media Platforms on Youth: An Anthropological Study
Sivakumar A
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Social media has become a ubiquitous sociocultural phenomenon, transforming how young people communicate, socialize, and construct identities. This anthropological study examines social media use among young people aged 18–25 in urban and semi-urban areas of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, South India. It explores usage patterns, self-identity expression, maintenance of social relationships, digital literacy, and the influence of gender, education, and socioeconomic background on digital participation. It also considers how young people perceive social media’s everyday effects on their social and cultural lives. A mixed-methods design was adopted. Quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire administered to 60 youth respondents, while semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants. The questionnaire demonstrated high overall reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.91), and its individual scales showed acceptable to high reliability. Content validity was reviewed by experts, while exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess construct validity. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests of independence; qualitative data were analyzed thematically using NVivo. Findings indicate that social media is embedded in young people’s everyday lives: 73.3% reported using platforms more than once daily. WhatsApp (93.3%), Instagram (88.3%), and YouTube (81.7%) were the most widely used platforms. Entertainment (90.0%) and maintaining contact with friends (85.0%) were the leading purposes, followed by information seeking (63.3%) and identity expression (35.0%). Digital literacy levels were low for 23.3% of respondents, medium for 48.3%, and high for 28.3%. Differences were particularly evident in advanced skills, including evaluating information and managing privacy. Hypothesis testing found significant associations between digital literacy and frequency of use (p = 0.048; Cramér’s V = 0.324), digital literacy and platform diversity (p = 0.047; Cramér’s V = 0.283), gender and identity expression (p = 0.037; Cramér’s V = 0.331), and gender and platform choice (p = 0.041; Cramér’s V = 0.326). Other hypothesized relationships were not statistically significant. The qualitative analysis identified five themes: curated identity performance, digital kinship and connectivity, stratified digital competencies, gendered digital surveillance, and ambivalent impression perceptions. The study contributes to digital anthropology by illustrating how global platforms are locally adopted in South Indian contexts, how social relationships are sustained in digital spaces, and how digital literacy may function as cultural capital. It offers recommendations for educators, parents, policymakers, platform designers, and young people to promote more equitable and beneficial digital participation.
Instrument Revision and False Change in Repeated Surveys: A Typology and Diagnostic Protocol for Secondary Users
Iara Teixeira
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Repeated surveys revise their instruments between rounds and document each revision item by item. Such documentation records what changed but not what the change does to a trend, so secondary users can mistake an instrument effect for change in the population. This article proposes a typology that classifies revisions by their consequence for the information in the released data (removal, redistribution, stimulus change, and misidentification), links each type to its identification status and remedy, and puts it into practice through a five-step diagnostic protocol: comparing source instruments, screening against a reference distribution of unmodified trend items, classifying the revision, choosing an estimand, and auditing metadata. Applied to the 2024 European Working Conditions Survey, the protocol shows that a filter and a self-labeling question placed before the discrimination battery leave the 2015 to 2024 contrast identified only as a lower bound; six of seven grounds fell below every unmodified reference item, and the observed decline would be real only if the new instrument retained more than 60 percent of reports. A new cyberbullying item redistributed reports from the adjacent bullying item, and the data bound the comparable change between odds ratios of 0.75 and 0.98. Changes in item order and response coding left a pace-of-work battery unresolved, while a minor stem change produced no detectable break. The metadata audit found nine variables labeled with the stem of a different question, in both data editions, and a harmonized trend variable that omits one of the two items its label combines. Comparability should be established from the source instruments and the released data before substantive analysis begins.
Remembering without institutions: legal-political memory, oral transmission, and diaspora identity among Kurds in Turkey and Europe
Ramazan BOZTEPE
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Drawing on 80 interviews across three sub-samples — the Kurdish-majority region of Turkey (n=25), Central Anatolia (n=25), and the European diaspora (n=30) — this article examines how legal-political memory of forced displacement is transmitted across generations. Using an inductively developed 11-category thematic coding framework, we find a sharp geographic gradient in informal oral transmission (64% Region, 40% Central Anatolia, 16.7% diaspora), with an inverse rise in institutional/archival memory in the diaspora (50%, versus 16–20% in Turkey; suggestive rather than conclusive once corrected for multiple comparisons). Spatial displacement is narrated concretely in the region of origin but gives way, in the diaspora, to an abstract negotiation of layered belonging. We suggest that memory transmission without institutional archives relies on embodied domestic channels vulnerable to migration's ruptures — a vulnerability diaspora communities compensate for through new institutional infrastructures rather than reconstruction. The article offers a comparative, exploratory account of how a stateless-nation diaspora reconstructs continuity across ruptured contexts.
Visual Resistance Assemblages: Recurring Multimodal Configurations in Kenya’s Gen Z Finance Bill Protests
Castro Chebukosi
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Social-media protest communication is increasingly multimodal, combining language, imagery, typography, sound, performance and platform-specific features. While existing research has demonstrated how such resources produce meaning within individual artefacts and genres, comparatively less attention has been given to how functionally related multimodal configurations recur across heterogeneous artefacts within the same protest corpus. This study addresses this corpus-level problem through a qualitative multimodal analysis of 72 protest artefacts published or circulated on X during Kenya’s June–July 2024 Finance Bill protests, analysed through multimodal social semiotics and cross-artefact comparison. The analysis identifies five recurring configurations: Constitutional Legitimation, Distributed Agency, Comparative Fiscal Information Design, Visual Witnessing and Collective Identity, and Satirical Recontextualization. These configurations are not treated as mutually exclusive artefact categories; rather, they represent recurring relationships among heterogeneous semiotic resources that retain comparable communicative functions despite variation in genre and surface realisation. The study proposes the concept of Visual Resistance Assemblages (VRA) as a descriptive analytical unit for identifying such corpus-level recurrence. The findings demonstrate how constitutional discourse, distributed participation, comparative fiscal reasoning, collective representation and satirical recontextualisation were organised through heterogeneous multimodal resources. VRA complements existing multimodal, assemblage-oriented and digital activism approaches by shifting attention from multimodality within individual artefacts to recurring multimodal organisation across protest corpora.
Sobre el Estado de Naturaleza como un uso meta teórico en el derecho y la política: excesos y tensiones
Ángel Gutiérrez Escobedo
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La relación entre Derecho y Política se disuelve cuando, desde la teoría de la primera, se confunden sus respectivas autonomías operativas con las descripciones propias de una distinción que se excluye a sí misma de lo observado. Durante la presente investigación, se argumentará en contra del principio teórico que sustenta dicha confusión, porque la separación entre Estado de Naturaleza, Sociedad o Legalidad/violencia, son puntos de apoyo insostenibles para sustentar teóricamente el problema de la nomo-génesis. Identificamos el origen de dicha paradoja, a saber, ¿por qué existen las leyes?, en la traducción contemporánea de distintas tesis contractualistas pues el planteamiento original encontraba fortaleza en concepciones sustancialistas ya contradictorias para el presente. Sugerimos, reconfigurar dicho punto de partida para propiciar nuevas perspectivas del derecho que no aseguren su preferencia o necesidad desde la amenaza del Sin-Derecho.
Manufactured Desire： How Social Media and Influencer Agencies Sexualise and Monetise Pregnant Influencers
Yuting Qin
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This article examines how pregnant influencers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, are sexualised and monetised through the interlocking practices of the platform, influencer agencies and influencers themselves. Taking the 2024 controversy around the appearance influencer YīLìXiǎoShāZi and the # 孕妇摇 (Pregnancy Swing Dance) challenge as its point of departure, the study combines visual analysis of top-ranked Douyin posts, in-depth interviews with an influencer, an influencer agency employee and a platform employee, and sentiment analysis of 4,874 user comments. This article interprets platform monetisation structures and influencer agency production routines as organising influencers’ embodied labour into standardised production roles and measurable commercial attributes. It proposes the “factory of desire” as a framework for understanding how platforms, influencer agencies and influencers mutually enable and constrain the commodification of pregnant bodies. Interviewees described unwritten rules through which sexualised content can remain visible under mainland China's restrictions on pornography: perceived emphasis on skin exposure in automated moderation, a grey zone known as 擦边 (cābiān, "skirting the boundary"), and appeals framed around "pregnancy beauty". The analysis suggests that these commercial and regulatory conditions can encourage pregnant influencers to reproduce porn chic conventions, while constraining their subsequent commercial options. Within the sampled comments on videos criticising the sexualisation of pregnancy, disgust had the highest average model score; these findings describe this selected discussion rather than public opinion as a whole.
Buying Books, Buying Diversity? Public Procurement Theory and the Brazilian State as Book Buyer
Marcel Felipe Machado Lopes; Paula Roméro Cajaty Lopes
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Governments are among the largest single buyers of books, yet public procurement research rarely asks what state purchasing does to the diversity of the market it buys from. This article examines federal book procurement in Brazil using item-level electronic invoice (NF-e) data published by the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU). The data cover 60 months between October 2021 and September 2026 and R$21.9 billion in purchases, 96.7% of which were made by a single buyer, the National Fund for Education Development (FNDE). Drawing on Stirling's variety–balance–disparity framework, we build five indicators of bibliodiversity: supplier concentration (Herfindahl–Hirschman index), the share of the four and eight largest suppliers, supplier evenness, title evenness, and territorial inequality among suppliers. The results describe a market with high variety but low balance. A median of 280 suppliers invoice the federal government each month, yet the four largest take a median 68% of value, and two publishers, FTD and Moderna, account for 45% of the whole series. Concentration is episodic rather than trending: 13 of 60 months exceed the HHI threshold of 2,500, with no significant monotonic trend. Territorial inequality is extreme and stable (median Gini 0.93), with São Paulo-based emitters taking 93% of value. Title diversity falls when supplier concentration rises (Spearman ρ = −0.61) and has declined sharply since mid-2025. We read these patterns against transaction cost, principal–agent, competition, strategic-procurement and institutional theories. We argue that, in markets for unique cultural goods purchased without price competition, the locus of competition moves from the tender to the pre-selection stage, so programme design rather than tendering rules becomes the main lever for diversity. We derive five propositions and discuss the data-quality limits of invoice-based procurement analytics.
Generalised Conversational Implicature in Kenyan Generation Z Digital Protest Discourse: Q-, I-, and M-Heuristics in the 2024 Finance Bill Protests on X
Castro Chebukosi; Bernard Kodak; Jane Ombati
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The June–July 2024 Finance Bill protests in Kenya produced a distinctive corpus of digitally mediated political communication in which Gen Z-associated protesters on X (formerly Twitter) relied on omission, shared background knowledge and stylistic markedness to construct political meaning beyond the literal content of their posts. This study examines how such strategies generated Generalised Conversational Implicature (GCI), applying Levinson’s (2000) Q-, I-, and M-heuristic framework to a purposively sampled corpus of 72 protest artefacts retrieved from X in June 2026. Using thematic and pragmatic coding, the analysis shows that condensed slogans, mobilisation language and constitutional citation generated Q-heuristic implicatures through informational economy; shared political, cultural and generational knowledge generated I-heuristic implicatures; and marked linguistic, visual and performative choices generated M-heuristic implicatures, extending Levinson’s lexical account of markedness into a multimodal register. The three heuristics frequently layered within single artefacts, and thematic coding further revealed six protest-specific inferential patterns beyond Levinson’s original typology: anti-co-optation, constitutional-sovereignty, trauma-memory, care-based, data-activism and digital-network patterns. The study demonstrates how GCI analysis can be extended to fast-paced, multimodal, digitally networked political communication when its categories are made explicit and their limits are clearly bounded.
Watchdog Capture and the Social Licensing of Child Harm: A Case Study of Common Sense Media and OpenAI
Travis Gilly
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This paper examines a structural failure mode in the validation chain that legitimizes consumer artificial intelligence products marketed to or used by minors: a child safety advocacy organization that arrives at each crisis after journalists and litigants have already exposed it, or plays the harm down when it arrives first, and that enters endorsement, development, and funding relationships with the firm whose product produced the harm. It documents a twenty-three year response pattern at Common Sense Media (CSM), a United States based organization that reports reaching more than 150 million users and 1.4 million educators worldwide each year, across three crisis cycles: YouTube Kids during the Elsagate incidents of 2017, video game loot boxes between 2017 and 2019, and generative artificial intelligence chatbots between 2023 and 2026. The paper situates the pattern within Carpenter and Moss’s (2014) account of corrosive capture, regulatory intermediary theory, and the social license literature. It argues that CSM’s September 2025 endorsement of OpenAI’s parental controls as “a good starting point,” controls that contemporaneous reporting described as developed by OpenAI with CSM, and CSM’s January 2026 ballot measure merger with OpenAI, which dropped provisions from CSM’s original ballot initiative that had tracked its vetoed bill, together constitute a transfer of social license rather than a substantive safety remedy. It then examines the October 2026 risk assessment in which CSM’s Youth AI Safety Institute, funded in part by the OpenAI Foundation, rated ChatGPT for Teens an Unacceptable Risk on the strength of a parental notification mechanism that CSM had helped develop and had endorsed at launch. CSM’s own October 2025 review had already tested that mechanism, recorded parental alerts arriving more than twenty-four hours after a tester discussed suicide, and recorded the account bypass, yet described the product as meaningful progress and kept it rated for teens thirteen and up for a further 349 days. Archived copies of CSM’s ChatGPT rating page show that the product carried a thirteen and up label from October 2023 and a Moderate risk rating from August 2024 through at least September 2025, so that the rating available to parents on the day a sixteen year old user died after extended use of ChatGPT was Moderate. The October 2026 findings were authored for the public by the former newspaper columnist who had documented the bypass three days after launch, without reference to that earlier reporting. The paper proposes public record indicators for detecting watchdog capture in other consumer safety intermediaries.
Unequal Geographic Coverage of Air-Quality Monitoring across Wealth Groups in Delhi
Saishha Vikram Agarwal
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Air-quality monitoring networks are the basis for measuring and reporting urban pollution, but their value depends in part on how well they represent the populations they are intended to serve. The study examines whether Delhi's air-quality monitoring network provides equal geographic coverage across wealth groups. It combines the locations of current air-quality monitoring stations with the Relative Wealth Index (RWI), which provides estimates of relative wealth for small geographic areas. Delhi's population is divided into five population-weighted wealth groups, and the distance from each location to the nearest monitor is calculated. Residents in the poorest wealth quintile live, on average, 7.58 km from the nearest monitor, compared with 4.69 km for the richest quintile. The difference of 2.89 km is positive even after accounting for spatial clustering (95% spatial-block bootstrap interval: 1.60 to 4.28 km). Monitoring coverage is also higher among the highest-wealth residents: 45.7% of the poorest quintile lives within 5 km of a monitor compared with 67.3% of the richest quintile. The results show that Delhi's monitoring network provides unequal geographic coverage across wealth groups. The study contributes theoretically by framing monitoring-network representativeness as an equity question. Practically, it contributes by suggesting that future network expansion consider population-weighted accessibility and coverage of lower-wealth populations along with conventional technical siting criteria. The results do not, however, show that monitors were deliberately placed to favor wealthier areas, nor do they establish that greater distance necessarily causes less accurate pollution measurement.