I checked 4 preprints servers on Saturday, April 18, 2026 using the Open Science Foundation API. For the period April 11 to April 17, I found 222 new paper(s).

MetaArxiv

Exploring team composition using administrative data: evidence from a large UK university
Noam Tal-Perry; Lara Abel; Agata Czech; Diego Kozlowski; Becky Ioppolo; Vincent Larivière; Steven Wooding
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Bibliometric studies examining the relationship between research team size and structure and research outputs typically define teams through co-authorship. In this paper-in-progress, we explore how research teams are structured using universities’ internal administrative data. By integrating datasets on grants, paid staff, contracts, and studentships from one large UK research-intensive university, we reconstruct research teams active between 2010-2023. Data processing and assumptions were iteratively refined through semi-structured interviews with staff across diverse roles and departments. We model team size as a function of discipline, principal investigator (PI) grade as a proxy for seniority, and year using a multilevel Bayesian negative binomial model. Results show that average team size varies across disciplines, tends to increase with seniority, but has overall remained static over the years. This study establishes the methodological basis for future research on research team size, structure, and composition on what we refer to as the “meso” scale.
Facilitating multilingual research publishing: Translations of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
Alex O. Holcombe; Marton Kovacs; Malgorzata Lagisz; Bjørn Sætrevik; Pietro Pollo; Dmitry Kochetkov; Rasmus Pedersen; Dunja Mićunović; Befkadu Mewded; Saeed Shafiei Sabet
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Contributorship refers to indicating who did what in a project, going beyond a simple list of authors. In scholarly journal articles about a project, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has become a popular way to provide individual contribution information, often with accompanying machine-readable metadata. While CRediT is used by hundreds of scientific journals, the official version of CRediT exists only in English. To support scientific publishers and researchers writing in other languages, we have created translations of the fourteen CRediT roles and their descriptions into thirty-six languages. To ensure high quality, at least one speaker fluent in the target language drafted the translation, with additional involvement of a second fluent person. Because hundreds of scientific journals publish non-English work, the use of our translations could improve the recognition of the associated researchers’ contributions. We have contacted relevant publishers and academic organizations to make them more aware of CRediT, of our translations, and of contributorship generally. To conclude, we discuss the potential for CRediT and other ontologies to be applied more broadly, for example to facilitate greater recognition of people who are not co-authors but are named in Acknowledgments sections.
The Cost of Access: Citation Disparities and Financial Burdens in Companion Open Access Orthopedic Journals
Haneef Khan
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Introduction: Companion open access (cOA) journals have become prevalent in orthopedic surgery, yet citation impact, financial burden, and demographic patterns associated with cOA publishing remain poorly characterized. This study aimed to quantify APC costs and revenue, compare citation rates between traditional and cOA journals, and examine whether gender, geographic origin, or career stage influence cOA publication likelihood. Methods: A retrospective bibliometric analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2024 in 34 orthopedic journals (17 traditional-companion pairs) was conducted using the Scopus API. Author gender was inferred via name-based algorithm; geographic origin was classified by World Bank income categories. Citations were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U tests, t-tests, and negative binomial regression. Logistic regression identified independent predictors of cOA publication. APC data were obtained from OpenAPC and publisher websites. Results: Of 63,994 articles analyzed, 47,960 (74.9%) were in traditional journals and 16,034 (25.1%) in cOA journals. Traditional articles received significantly more citations (mean 23.95 vs. 10.73; p<0.001), persisting after multivariable adjustment. LMIC authors were more likely to publish in cOA venues (aOR 1.273, p=0.0003), while gender showed no independent association (aOR 0.971, p=0.492). Mean APC was $918.40, with total estimated revenue of $15.6 million over the study period. Conclusion: cOA orthopedic journals generated over $15.6 million in APCs while producing articles with substantially fewer citations than traditional journals. LMIC authors were disproportionately represented in cOA venues. This raises concerns about the value and equity of the current cOA model and highlight the need for greater transparency in editorial transfer criteria and fee structures.
aggreCAT: An R Package for Mathematically Aggregating Expert Judgments
Elliot Gould; Charles T. Gray; Aaron Willcox; Rose E O'Dea; Rebecca Groenewegen; David Peter Wilkinson
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Structured elicitation protocols, such as the IDEA protocol, are used to elicit probabilistic judgements from multiple domain experts about uncertain events across fields including ecology, biosecurity risk assessment, and metascience. Individual expert judgements must subsequently be mathematically aggregated into a single group forecast. While the simplest case involves combining a set of point-estimates from multiple individuals, this process is further complicated when judgements include uncertainty bounds, or when elicitation is conducted across multiple rounds. This paper presents aggreCAT, an open-source R package that provides 29 aggregation methods for combining individual expert judgements into a single probabilistic estimate, accommodating designs ranging from single-round point estimates to multi-round three-point elicitation. The package follows tidy data principles, enabling straightforward integration with existing R workflows for application at scale. Methods range from unweighted arithmetic combinations to performance-weighted schemes and Bayesian models, with weights derived from uncertainty intervals, shifts in judgements between elicitation rounds, and breadth of expert reasoning. We provide worked examples illustrating the mechanics of representative aggregation methods, a general workflow for batch aggregation across multiple forecasts and methods, and built-in functions for evaluating and visualising forecast performance against known outcomes. aggreCAT fills a substantive gap in open software for mathematically aggregating expert judgement, and is intended to support researchers and decision analysts in rapidly and rigorously synthesising outputs from structured elicitation exercises.
What do early career researchers value in academic jobs? Evidence from a mixed-methods study in the UK
Noam Tal-Perry; Lara Abel; Tomos Robinson; Allison Beggs; Mollie Etheridge; Molly Smih; Yingjie Li; Becky Ioppolo; ARRC - Debbie Birkett; Marie Collier
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When making academic job choices, early career researchers (ECRs) must balance intrinsic motivations, such as research interest and autonomy, with extrinsic factors including job security, salary, and locations. Understanding these trade-offs is essential to design effective policies which reduce precarity in academic careers. Here, we report a mixed-methods study undertaken to develop a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on academic job preferences in the UK. The study comprised five phases: a scoping review (104 studies), focus groups and interviews with ECRs (n = 10), expert consultations (n = 4), an online structured prioritisation exercise (n = 134), and iterative think-aloud pre-tests (n = 13). The resulting DCE included seven attributes: autonomy, contract length, development opportunities, location, research culture, research interest, and salary. Attribute importance varied by gender, caring responsibilities, visa status, and career stage. The study provides a transparent framework for designing preference elicitation tools and offers policy-relevant insights into how ECRs evaluate academic employment conditions.
Improving Replicability in Neuroimaging using DevOps Frameworks
Petra Kis-Herczegh; Niall Bourke; Hajer Karoui
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The growing scale of neuroimaging datasets in contemporary neuroscience has intensified challenges in data management, processing standardisation, and reproducible workflows. DevOps practices from software engineering offer promising solutions to enhance reproducibility as neuroimaging research scales. This narrative synthesis examined DevOps integration in structural neuroimaging workflows through systematic searches of IEEE, Scopus, PubMed, and ArXiv (2016 - 2025), following PRISMA guidelines with AI-assisted data extraction. Analysis of 38 studies identified four key themes: automated pipelines and containerisation; quality control frameworks; deep learning integration with scalability challenges; and multi-site harmonisation. Studies demonstrated technical advances in reproducible, version-controlled workflows, yet highlighted significant adoption barriers, including requirements for computational expertise, institutional infrastructure limitations, and cultural reluctance towards transparent automated practices. Based on this evidence, we propose a four-domain implementation framework: (1) Technical Readiness (containerisation, version control), (2) Methodological Rigour (automated quality control and validation), (3) Open Code Transparency, including reproducible deep-learning pipelines and community-driven maintenance, and (4) Cultural and Institutional Support (training, collaborative practices, sustained funding). Successful DevOps adoption requires continuous improvement across all domains with commitment and support from researchers, institutions, and funding bodies. This synthesis provides evidence-based guidance for modernising neuroimaging workflows while strengthening scientific rigour.
A data-conscious checklist for the reviewers of 'omics studies who champion open science
Iva Veseli; A. Murat Eren
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Access to data underlying published findings remains unreliable across life sciences, even in high-profile journals, which slows the progress and erodes trust in the scientific record. We propose a simple Data Availability Checklist for peer reviewers that targets the most common failures in data sharing and can be adopted immediately within existing review workflows.
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.
Fragile Evidence for an Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings: Comment on Borjas and Breznau
Katrin Auspurg; Josef Brüderl
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Borjas and Breznau ("Ideological bias in the production of research findings." Science Advances 12, eadz7173 (2026); hereafter referred to as B&B) recently reported that researchers' ideology influences their empirical findings. Although we were able to reproduce B&B's numerical results, our reanalysis shows that the reported association is not robust. Specifically, the association hinges on a coding error. Data from four teams that contradict the ideology hypothesis were excluded from the analysis due to idiosyncratic variable coding. Correcting this error renders the ideology effect no longer statistically significant. Also, B&B employed a different outcome variable and weighting scheme to that used in a previous paper based on the same data. These two analytical decisions further contribute to the observed ideology effect. Correcting the coding error or using the same specification as in the previous paper renders the ideology effect indistinguishable from zero. Therefore, we conclude that B&B do not provide robust evidence of ideological bias in this context. Instead, the reported association appears to be a statistical artefact resulting from questionable modelling decisions.

PsyArxiv

Manipulating Subjective Socioeconomic Status and its Downstream (non) Effects: Two Direct Replications with Extensions
Lily Green; Samantha James-Brown; John Protzko
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Subjective socioeconomic status (SSES) is someone’s perception of their standing compared to others. Previous work has shown manipulating SSES with false comparative income feedback reduces people’s attitudes toward taxation and makes them more conservative (Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2014). In two preregistered studies, across 936 American adults, with Study 2 drawn to be nationally representative of the U.S. population in terms of income, we were able to replicate the effect of the false feedback procedure on making people feel they have high SSES. We fail to find empirical support for causal effects on attitudes towards tax-based redistribution, conservatism, prosocial intentions (Study 1), belief in social mobility, sense of control, parents’ approval for opportunistic hoarding behaviors (Study 2). This suggests the correlations between SSES and those constructs are unlikely to be causal. Future research can further tweak the false feedback procedure to explore causality between SSES and other constructs of interest.
Effects of an Academic Beliefs Intervention on High School Students’ Academic Anxiety
Xuming Li; Yu Zhang
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Academic anxiety has emerged as a global concern in education. Yet, the role of academic beliefs has long been overlooked in efforts to understand and alleviate such anxiety. This study developed and tested an academic beliefs intervention (ABI) against both an active control (cognitive-behavioral therapy, CBT) and a control group in a cluster-randomized controlled trial (n = 220). Our results showed that both ABI and CBT significantly reduced students’ academic anxiety at post-test, with only ABI showing sustained effect at the one-month follow-up. Mediation analysis further revealed that the effects of the ABI on academic anxiety were mediated by changes in zero-sum competitive belief. Moreover, among students with high levels of academic anxiety, the ABI significantly decreased zero-sum competitive belief, strengthened growth mindset and belief in multiple intelligences, and produced a reduction in academic anxiety. These findings highlight the critical role of academic beliefs in shaping academic anxiety, underscoring the value of systematically fostering adaptive academic beliefs into everyday educational practices to sustainably alleviate student anxiety.
From visual appearance to material categories
Chenxi Liao; Filipp Schmidt; Jacob Raleigh Cheeseman; Masataka Sawayama; Roland Fleming; Bei Xiao
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Materials from distinct categories share common image features but also exhibit unique characteristics. How do humans recognize materials despite their enormous appearance variations? Using generative neural networks, we create both prototypical and ambiguous materials that morph between categories. To capture the richness of material representation, we characterize how people judge materials using cross-material morphs through three behavioral tasks: material categorization, material property rating, and visual similarity judgment. We find that morphing smoothly modulates perceptual scales of material appearance. Despite this smooth variation, participants can reliably identify the prototypical materials within given appearance ranges, indicating a strong association between material categories and their visual characteristics. Material properties structure the perceptual space, where the salient dimensions--particularly rigidity--strongly correlate with perceived material categories. In contrast, analyzing image embedding derived from a self-supervised deep learning model reveals that learning visual similarities alone is insufficient to reproduce human perceptual space of materials. Together, our results suggest that material representation is more than visual similarities and may require learning material properties that structure relationships among materials within and across categories. Visual features might be used flexibly and task-dependently to support multiple levels of material perception, ranging from discrimination to material property inference to categorization.
“If you’re one star, you’ve missed the bar” How ability grouping can perpetuate achievement inequality
Jellie Sierksma; Eddie Brummelman
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In educational contexts around the world, children are often grouped based on their presumed ability. Such ability grouping is believed to benefit all children’s learning, but research shows that it may harm children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Why? We propose a model that offers an underappreciated explanation: essentialism—the idea that groups possess a shared and stable underlying essence. Ability grouping leads both children and teachers to think about ability in fixed and categorical ways (e.g., “Those in the blue group are whiz kids”), creating a culture that discourages children from disadvantaged backgrounds, starting in early childhood. The model identifies ways to implement ability grouping without fostering essentialism (e.g., avoiding group labels, creating heterogeneous groups), thus creating more equitable educational contexts.
The Strength of Target Representations Drives Mnemonic Discrimination at Extended Delays
Brock Kirwan; Samuel Chipman
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Mnemonic discrimination, or the ability to distinguish between similar remembered experiences, is critical for episodic memory and is dependent on the computational process of pattern separation. Prior work with tasks that place high demands on mnemonic discrimination such as the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) has focused on short retention intervals and it remains unclear how mnemonic discrimination evolves over longer delays. To address this gap in understanding, we examined MST performance at delays ranging from a few minutes to seven days in two experiments. Consistent with prior forgetting literature, both recognition of repeated items and discrimination of similar lures declined with delay. In the immediate delay condition, the similarity of lure stimuli to targets drove discrimination performance, with more similar lures eliciting false alarms and less similar lures eliciting correct rejections, as reflected in the lure discrimination index (LDI). This graded relationship was attenuated or absent at delays longer than one day. However, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses revealed preserved discrimination across delays and target-lure similarity levels. Additionally, we observed an inversion of the typical confidence-accuracy relationship for lure trials at longer delays, with low-confidence responses more likely to be correct especially for high-similarity lures. Together these findings reflect the influence of the strength of target representations on lure discrimination: strong target representations lead to high-confidence correct rejections of low-similarity lures but also to high-confidence false alarms to high-similarity lures. As target representations weaken over extended delays, false alarms to high-similarity lures become less likely while low-similarity lures were more likely to be called “new”. This is the first demonstration of how mnemonic discrimination in the MST changes over extended delays.
Human texture synthesis: Observers reproduce chromatic and achromatic contrast differently in glossy vs. matte textures
Benjamin Balas; Adam Kalina; Molly Setchfield
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Texture synthesis models that are capable of generating new texture patterns from a small sample have been widely applied to a range of questions in human texture perception. Human observers are capable of various forms of texture completion as well, but aside from investigations of simple filling-in phenomena, the nature of human texture synthesis has not been widely studied. Here we used an explicit texture completion task to determine the extent to which naive observers exaggerated or reduced chromatic and achromatic contrast in images of natural glossy and matte textures. By measuring contrast in CIELab space, we found that participants exaggerated chromatic contrast along the blue-yellow axis for glossy textures, but reduced contrast along the achromatic axis for matte textures, both considered relative to drawings of contrast-negated versions of the same patterns. These outcomes could not be explained low-level properties of the images, as we found that these results were not evident when scrambled versions of the original stimuli were used. We discuss these results in terms of natural color statistics and the possible discounting of shadows in natural images.
Flexible self-control: The role of motivation and regulatory flexibility during goal pursuit
Kaitlyn M. Werner; Elliot Berkman
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People who are intrinsically motivated are more likely to achieve their goals – but why is this the case? Consistent with recent theorizing, we propose that intrinsically motivated people are more likely to use strategies flexibly based on their goals and situational demands. Across three domains, participants (N = 2,939) reported their motivation for pursuing a target goal, their ability to use strategies flexibly when managing temptations, and several indicators of proximal and distal goal attainment. Findings indicate that regulatory flexibility was robustly associated with better goal attainment – people who use strategies flexibly were more likely to resist momentary temptation, made greater subjective progress on their goal, and engaged in more goal-congruent behaviours (healthy food intake, adaptive financial behaviours) and less goal-incongruent behaviours (unhealthy food intake, financial strain, procrastination). When considering motivation, intrinsically motivated people were more likely to use strategies flexibly, which in turn predicted better goal attainment. Conversely, extrinsically motivated people were less flexible, which in turn predicted less goal attainment. Although some variation emerged in the academic domain, findings held when controlling for goal-specific covariates and replicated across both meta-analytic and mega-analytic approaches. Together, these findings suggest that intrinsically motivated people may exhibit better self-control because they can flexibly adapt their strategies to the situation at hand.
Profile Shape Over Trait Content: Evidence for Holistic Heuristics in Personality-Based Collaborator Selection
Abdelhadi Elbguir; Mehdi Moussaid; Fatimaezzahra Benmarrakchi
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When selecting collaborators on the basis of personality, do people evaluate candidates trait by trait or respond to holistic profile features? In a preregistered experiment (N = 253), participants selected four-person teams from 19 personality profiles under creative, analytical, or neutral task framings using a conditional logit discrete-choice paradigm. Despite a validated manipulation, the preregistered hypotheses were not supported: task framing did not significantly alter trait weighting or team composition after false discovery rate (FDR) correction. However, exploratory analyses revealed that holistic profile features were the strongest predictors of selection. Within-profile trait variability (OR = 0.23) and distance from an ideal prototype (OR = 0.18) dwarfed individual trait effects. These configural heuristics operated alongside a stable ideal-collaborator prototype anchored by Emotional Stability (OR = 1.78) and pervasive similarity-attraction across all five personality dimensions (ORs = 1.12–1.33). Qualitative data suggested a dissociation: participants reported strategic, task-driven selection while their choices reflected heuristic defaults. These exploratory findings, which require replication, indicate that personality-based collaborator evaluation may be governed by holistic cognitive shortcuts rather than deliberate trait calibration.
Social expectations and homeostatic dynamics shape momentary social craving
Shawn A Rhoads; Kannon Bhattacharyya; Kaustubh R Kulkarni; Xiaosi Gu
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Social craving motivates people to seek connection, yet its momentary dynamics remain poorly understood. Existing accounts emphasize homeostatic regulation of social need, but do not specify how external social cues and expectations could rapidly shape desire for contact. We developed a social craving paradigm that selectively and reliably characterized social craving across three samples, including a U.S.-representative cohort and test-retest cohort. Social craving was best captured as a latent state driven by social cues and expectation violations and regulated around a person-specific setpoint. Higher chronic loneliness was linked to down-shifts in the craving setpoint and greater sensitivity to expectation violations. These findings formalize social motivation, learning signals, and homeostatic control within a single framework and identify a social craving phenotype linked to persistent social distress.
Do not use inferential statistics to evaluate quality of matching
Stefan L. Frank
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Quantitative research in bilingualism often involves between-group comparisons in the presence of on one or more potentially confounding variables. There is no risk of confounding if the potential confounders are matched between groups. But when is a variable sufficiently matched? A common approach to assessing the quality of matching is to apply inferential statistics to the variable(s). In this paper, I argue that this approach is theoretically and practically problematic, and that there is no purely quantitative, objective alternative. Matching quality can only be evaluated by a comparison of the sample distributions, informed by expert knowledge about the research topic.
Gender expression varies within diverse gender identities and sexual orientations
Brooke Elyse Kadel; Eleanor J Junkins; D. A. Briley; Jaime Derringer
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Psychological scientists typically consider gender using limited categorical identities that erase meaningful variance. Much like taking a median split is discouraged for methodological reasons, we must adopt valid and accurate assessments of key constructs to avoid reification of convenient heuristics. These categories do not capture human experience. Even within a social gender category, gender expression varies continuously as assessed by any common psychological instrument or behavioral proxy. Yet, the extent to which gender expression differs in magnitude (i.e., means) and spread (i.e., variance) across an inclusive set of gender identities has not been tested. This study examines patterns of variation in dimensional measures of gender expression within and between diverse gender identity categories. Using a convenience sample of adults oversampled for diverse gender identities and sexual orientations (N=1,409), our results revealed variance in gender expression within categorical gender identities and overlap in gender expression between categories, with less pronounced differences between sexual orientation categories. These results illustrate the importance of recognizing gender as complex spectra to better represent diverse personal experiences. In contrast to notions of identity conformity within certain social groups, we find that individuals holding similar identities are just as likely to differ from one another in their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, regardless of the identity.
Appraising epistemic ethical expectations when researching with children and young people in education.
Sarah MacQuarrie; Alexandra Hennessey; Anna Sanders; Lily Verity
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This critical commentary examines the multifaceted challenges of obtaining informed consent in psychological research involving children. Traditional consent models i.e., relying on proxy consent such as school and parent/guardian consent methods often fail to account for children's agency, voice and their evolving capacities, cultural contexts, and the power dynamics inherent in adult-child relationships. Drawing upon researcher experiences and integrating perspectives from existing literature, the paper critiques traditional consent models that often overlook children's agency and the socio-cultural contexts influencing consent processes. It highlights the limitations of standardised consent procedures, the role of proxies and the impact of institutional ethics boards. The commentary advocates for a more nuanced, participatory approach that recognises children as active contributors to research, emphasising the need for culturally sensitive, iterative consent processes that align with ethical best practices.
Suicide Prevention in Viktor Frankl’s Work
Élison Silva Santos
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This paper examines the contributions of Viktor Frankl to clinical psychology in the domain of suicide prevention. A narrative bibliographic review was conducted, analyzing both the historical context of Vienna during the interwar period and the development of Frankl’s thought over nearly seven decades of clinical and theoretical work. The findings suggest a consistent emphasis on meaning in life as a central protective factor against suicidal ideation. Frankl’s theoretical and clinical contributions are examined in relation to his direct experience with high-risk populations, including his work in psychiatric institutions and his observations during extreme conditions such as concentration camps. The paper argues that the search for meaning constitutes a fundamental dimension in understanding and preventing suicide, reinforcing the relevance of logotherapy and existential analysis for contemporary clinical practice.
Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history
Joseph M. Saito; Timothy F. Brady
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Visual representations that are actively held in mind are often systematically distorted by new visual stimuli, prompting claims that memories are vulnerable to unwanted integration with new perceptual inputs when they recruit shared sensory representations. Here we challenge this vulnerability perspective by showing that individuals rationally adapt the degree to which memory and perception are integrated based on their recent history of being mutually informative. Across three experiments, we show that the exact same pairs of remembered and perceived stimuli are more likely to be perceived as similar and elicit larger memory biases when preceded by other pairs that were similar as well. These adaptive modulations in integration with stimulus history do not depend on corresponding changes in sensory strength, implying a separate, higher-order mechanism beyond sensory recruitment. These findings are consistent with the predictions of normative cognitive models that have successfully characterized biases across visual perception and memory.
Logotherapy in Suicide Prevention: Obscured Worldviews and the Flirtation with Death
Élison Silva Santos
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This paper examines the role of worldview (Weltanschauung) in the emergence and maintenance of suicidal ideation, proposing that distortions or obscurations in an individual’s worldview may significantly impair their capacity to perceive meaning in life. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, the study articulates how core principles, freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning in life, interact with the noetic dimension of human existence in the context of psychological suffering. The paper advances the argument that suicidal ideation is often not solely the result of psychopathology or external stressors, but also reflects a disruption in the individual’s capacity to apprehend meaning, particularly under conditions of existential “darkness.” In such states, cognitive, emotional, and physiological factors may converge to narrow perception, reinforcing hopelessness and impairing decision-making. Within this framework, worldview is conceptualized as a dynamic psychological structure shaped by biographical, relational, and cultural influences, which can either facilitate or obscure the perception of meaning. A clinical case illustration is presented to demonstrate how early relational deprivation, affective dependency, and traumatic experiences may contribute to the development of a distorted worldview, increasing vulnerability to suicidal ideation. At the same time, the case highlights the central role of self-transcendence in recovery, illustrating how the rediscovery of meaning often emerges through relational connection, responsibility, and engagement with values beyond the self. The paper suggests that suicide prevention requires not only the assessment of risk factors and symptomatology, but also a careful exploration of the individual’s worldview and their capacity for meaning-making. By emphasizing the noetic dimension and the human potential for self-transcendence, this study contributes to a more integrative and meaning-centered approach to clinical practice in suicide prevention.
Cognitive Sovereignty: The Authorship Problem in AI-Assisted Thought
Amir Konigsberg
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The rapid integration of large language models into everyday cognitive tasks has created a need for conceptual frameworks adequate to the cognitive consequences of delegating thinking to AI systems. Existing constructs in psychology and also in epistemology, including critical thinking, metacognition, intellectual autonomy, and epistemic agency, each address related phenomena but none adequately captures the specific capacity threatened by habitual AI-assisted cognition, which I define as the ability to remain the genuine author of one's own understanding. This paper introduces cognitive sovereignty as a distinct construct, defined as the capacity to (a) notice when one's thinking is being displaced, (b) maintain a meaningful connection to how one's beliefs and judgments are formed, and (c) distinguish between genuine reasoning and the subjective impression of having reasoned. I trace the concept's philosophical lineage, engage with the extended mind objection, differentiate cognitive sovereignty from adjacent constructs through systematic comparison, and present a growing body of empirical evidence that motivates the construct. The paper argues that cognitive sovereignty names a phenomenon that existing constructs individually fail to capture and that its articulation is a prerequisite for empirical research on AI's impact on human thinking.
Patterns of Student Cognitive Offloading to AI in Higher Education
Liudmila Piatnitckaia; Valentin Corneloup; Babette Bühler; Nađa Terzimehić; Enkelejda Kasneci; Franck zenasni
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Generative AI is increasingly woven into students’ everyday academic practices, yet the extent of cognitive offloading, and at what cognitive levels remain insufficiently understood. This study aims to characterize the cognitive nature of naturalistic student - AI interactions and to quantify the extent and types of offloading involved. We analysed 3,047 ChatGPT messages from 46 undergraduates (Study 1) gathered over one semester through unrestricted naturalistic use of GPT for general exam preparation, and 1,140 messages from a 16-student subsample providing learning outcome information (Study 2). In Study 1 an LLM-based coding approach was used to classify messages into question type and Bloom’s taxonomy level. Procedural requests were the most frequent (23 %), whereas higher-order “Analyse” queries dominated the taxonomy distribution (27 %), suggesting that students routinely outsource complex thinking. In Study 2 conversations were manually coded for degree of cognitive offloading (none, light, heavy), task and for Bloom's level. Results showed that “Heavy offloading” clustered in “Create” dialogues (e.g., drafting arguments or code) and appeared more often among students who receive high grades; lower-tier students favored light or no offloading. Because Study 2 is small and single-site, findings are descriptive and not causal; we do not assess learning gains or integrity, but gain valuable insights into the nature of cognitive offloading. Contributions include: (i) an operational, reproducible rubric for offloading that decouples it from Bloom levels, (ii) the joint distribution of Bloom × offloading in authentic student–AI interactions, and (iii) prospective research for confirmatory studies.
Bayesian Adaptations of Four Popular Audit Sampling Estimators
Koen Derks; jacques de swart
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Testing a financial population for material misstatement is a standard audit activity. However, this can be challenging when the population contains many errors or when both over- and understatements occur. In such situations, auditors typically rely on four popular frequentist methods: the direct, difference, ratio, and regression estimators. Although widely applied, these methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: they cannot provide direct evidential support for the auditor’s conclusion about the population misstatement. Bayesian approaches can provide this evidential support, but corresponding adaptations of these estimators are largely absent in the literature. This article addresses that gap in three ways. First, it develops a unified Bayesian posterior predictive framework for all four estimators that enables both estimation and hypothesis testing. Second, it proposes a default prior for computing Bayes factors that is suitable for routine audit applications. Third, it provides an open-source software implementation to facilitate practical adoption of these methods.
The experience of cognitive conflict is intrinsically rewarding
Marta La Pietra; Marc-Lluís Vives; Nicola Molinaro; Manuela Ruzzoli
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The co-activation of two incompatible responses leads to the experience of cognitive conflict, which is thought to be aversive and hence, generally avoided. Consequently, previous research has often rewarded participants monetarily for engaging in cognitive conflict. In contrast, here, across two experiments (N = 100 each), participants freely chose the level of cognitive conflict they wanted to engage in the Simon (experiment 1) and Stroop tasks (experiment 2) with no external reward. In both experiments, we found that participants chose to freely engage with cognitive conflict, evaluated it as effortful yet enjoyable, and reported feeling surprised and enthusiastic after experiencing high cognitive conflict. Overall, these findings suggest that cognitive conflict is valued and can function as an intrinsic reward, despite the effort associated with it. These results broaden the neuroeconomic approach to cognitive control theories by integrating a hedonic perspective on the subjective experience of cognitive conflict.
Idiographic Patient Reported Outcome Measures (I-PROMs): A Narrative Systematic Review on Patient-Centred Measurement in Psychotherapy
Jessica Fritz; Eva-Maria Krüger; Alexander Z. Dayani; Louisa Venhoff; Esther Frey; Flavio Iovoli; Stefan Salzmann; Marilyn Piccirillo; Julian Rubel
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Objectives: In psychotherapy, self-report measures with standardized item-sets are widely used to evaluate therapy progress and outcome. However, relying solely on standardized (nomothetic) measures may overlook person-specific (idiographic) problems. Idiographic patient-reported outcome measures (I-PROMs) allow patients to formulate their items, capturing therapy-relevant aspects that standardized measures might miss. To provide guidance on implementing I-PROMs and improving item quality, we conducted a pre-registered narrative systematic review (PROSPERO:CRD42022361535). Methods: We searched "Web of Science," "PsycINFO," "PubMed," and "EMBASE," along with reference screenings, to identify studies using I-PROMs in therapy settings, including a psychometric evaluation, published before March 18th 2025. Results: Our search yielded 32 empirical articles (51 studies) examining 13 I-PROMs and 6,706 participants. Four I-PROMs assessed therapy-relevant aims (three assessed goals, measuring goal-attainment; one assessed values, measuring value-directed behaviour), four problems (measuring problem-duration, -severity or -change), three both goals and problems (measuring motivational variables), and two assessed helpful aspects of therapy (measuring helpfulness/hindrance). Items were generated via self-administration (four I-PROMs), interviews (six I-PROMs), or both (three I-PROMs). We identified two strategies to enhance item quality: improving item-wording (e.g., instructions, examples, (re)formulation guidelines) and ensuring relevance to therapy (e.g., predefined focus-areas, prioritization-procedures). I-PROMs were applied across therapy settings, talking-therapy schools, nationalities, genders, and disorders, but differences in applicability across these remained unclear. Discussion: Our synthesis helps therapists and researchers evaluate I-PROMs' strengths and limitations, enabling informed choices for selection and implementation, and offers guidance to improve item quality – thereby, facilitating comprehensive measurement and promoting a broader adoption of I-PROMs moving forward.
Pertsch: A Corpus of Persian and German Based on Different Speech Elicitation Tasks
Neda Mousavi
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This paper introduces the Pertsch Corpus, a speech corpus designed to capture variations in speech production across a range of speech elicitation tasks in Persian and German. The corpus consists of recordings of sixty speakers who completed a fixed sequence of seven speech tasks, ranging from controlled reading tasks to more open-ended communicative situations. All recordings were collected under standardized laboratory conditions and are accompanied by orthographic transcriptions, phonetic segmentation, and annotations on verbal and nonverbal elements. The multi-task design within a single speaker allows for a systematic comparison of speech across communicative contexts, while the parallel structure across languages supports cross-linguistic analysis. Descriptive statistics provide an overview of the temporal and structural properties of the dataset and illustrate how speech organization varies depending on the task and speaker. Meanwhile, the corpus offers a flexible resource for more detailed analyses at various levels, including phonetic, prosodic, and temporal dimensions.
“No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming”: Zendle et al. (2023) cannot support its claims due to a flawed design
Veli-Matti Karhulahti; Nick Huntington-Klein; Nick Ballou; Ivan Ropovik
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Accepted for publication in Collabra: Psychology. Zendle et al. (2023) is a study of the impact of a Chinese policy restricting heavy videogame play among minors, finding that the policy had no effect. We show that, due to flaws in design, the study could not—even in principle—causally identify the minors-targeted policy effect, which it claims to have measured: the data lacked age information, thus rendering the study incapable of answering its own research question. This warrants a formal Expression of Concern under the COPE guidelines. The concerns were originally shared with the authors of the target study (Zendle et al. 2023) after the study’s publication. Because the authors dismissed these issues as inconsequential, we submitted them as a Matters Arising commentary to Nature Human Behaviour, which had published the study. However, the journal too failed to admit the seriousness of the flaws and rejected the commentary, for which we submitted this work to the present journal for independent evaluation.
A grounded theory exploration of the key role of self-kindness in how young people practice mental health self-care in everyday life
Alex Truscott; Daniel Hayes; Janet Allison; Sandra Jacek; Maddi Crease; Julian Edbrooke-Childs
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Objectives: Mental health self-care often includes resources and activities which are easily accessible and have the potential to benefit mental health and wellbeing. This study aimed to explore how young people with experience of mental health difficulties put mental health self-care into practice in their everyday lives. Methods: A constructivist grounded theory was developed from interviews conducted with fourteen young people aged 16-25 years with experience of mental health difficulties. Participatory research methods involved young people in the design of the study and data analysis. Results: The theory demonstrates a central role of self-kindness in three key processes: Creating space for self-care; Knowing when and how to self-care and Enabling daily life and wellbeing. Each of these processes supported each other, with self-care involving continuous learning about how to care for mental health in a way that finds a balance between challenging themselves and respecting their limits. Conclusions: This study extends current theory and research by focusing on young people’s perspectives of how they practice mental health self-care and the impacts on their wellbeing and daily lives. The theory provides a practical foundation to support young people to use resources in their everyday lives to care for their mental health.
Can intolerance of uncertainty & anxiety impact the lives we lead? Understanding lived experiences of people with chronic physical health and pain conditions
Dalainey H. Drakes; Emmanuelle Rochon; Allison Ouimet
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Purpose: Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is associated with poorer emotional wellbeing and worse prognosis of chronic physical health and pain conditions (CHPCs). Our current understanding of IU in CHPCs is siloed within the literatures on specific CHPCs. However, IU is consistently identified as a risk factor for anxiety and depressive disorders. In this exploratory study, we used a mixed methods design to better understand the role of IU and anxiety in people’s (n = 139) lived experiences of their CHPCs and how they respond to uncertainty across health and everyday contexts. Primary Results: Higher acceptance of illness and perceived social support were related to lower IU and anxiety among people with CHPCs. Higher IU and anxiety were also related to lower scores on many domains of quality of life. Our reflexive thematic analysis resulted in four primary themes: 1) distressing ambiguous contexts are not limited to health scenarios and require management in diverse ways; 2) interference of CHPCs affects multiple domains of life beyond physical health; 3) navigating uncertainty for a chronic period changes coping abilities and identity development; and 4) responsivity to uncertainty is a multifaceted cognitive-behavioural and emotional physiological response that hinders or promotes coping. Conclusions: IU significantly impacts the lives of those with CHPCs and holds potential as a transdiagnostic target for early prevention and intervention. By tailoring therapeutic approaches to acknowledge the importance of health-related cues while increasing tolerance of uncertainty, people with CHPCs will likely experience improved prognosis, wellbeing, and fulfillment. Keywords: intolerance of uncertainty, anxiety, chronic health, chronic pain, transdiagnostic, context, mixed-methods
Nature immersion in virtual reality does not reduce naturally occurring muscle pain or improve motor outputs during prescribed or self-regulated tasks
Callum O'Malley; David Harris; Sam William Hughes; Jack Cottrell; Dan Lloyd; Samuel James Vine; Tom Arthur
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Virtual reality (VR) can reduce experimental and clinical pain, yet it remains unclear whether these effects translate to naturally occurring muscle pain (NOMP) experienced during physical tasks. This study examined whether nature immersion presented through immersive VR attenuates NOMP and enhances motor performance during prescribed and self-regulated exercise. Two within-participant crossover studies were conducted. In Study 1, twelve healthy participants completed a stepped incremental cycling task to exhaustion under three conditions: immersive VR (nature scene), a two-dimensional sham display, and a no-intervention control. Pain onset, NOMP intensity, perceived effort, and time to exhaustion were measured. In Study 2, twenty-four participants performed intermittent isometric handgrip contractions at fixed light (13/100) or strong (50/100) perceived effort under the same conditions, with self-regulated force output and NOMP intensity measured. Immersive VR did not significantly delay pain onset, prolong time to exhaustion, reduce NOMP intensity, or lower perceived effort compared with sham or control conditions. A small reduction in NOMP intensity occurred early in the cycling task, but effects were trivial and not sustained. In Study 2, NOMP intensity, force production, and fatigue-related declines were similar across conditions. Exploratory analyses showed no moderating effects of sex, environmental presence, or fatigue. Overall, these findings demonstrate that nature-based VR immersion has limited effects on NOMP or motor performance. This likely reflects a mismatch between central mechanisms targeted by VR and strong peripheral drivers of NOMP. Consequently, VR hypoalgesia appears pain-type dependent and potentially pain-intensity dependent, with effects limited to lower pain intensities.
When AI is (not) in your camp: The role of ideological fit for trust in AI chatbots
Tobias Wingen; Marlene Sophie Altenmüller; Sophie Möller; Angela Rachael Dorrough
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As AI chatbots increasingly serve as central information sources, understanding what drives user trust is critical. In light of the growing politicization of these bots, we investigate how their perceived political ideology shapes trust. We hypothesized that user trust is driven by the ideological fit between a user's own political leanings and the chatbot's perceived ideology. Across five preregistered studies (total N = 3,293) utilizing correlational and experimental designs in U.S. and German samples, we tested this "ideological fit effect." We found robust evidence that political conservatives trust conservative AI chatbots more, while liberals trust liberal AI chatbots more (Studies 1, 2, and 4). Mediation analyses suggest that this effect is driven by perceived ideological similarity. Furthermore, directly manipulating this similarity likewise increased trust and intentions to use an AI chatbot (Studies 3a and 3b). Finally, exploratory analyses suggest that among participants unfamiliar with a specific charity, the bot's recommendations influenced real prosocial decision-making in a behavioral donation task (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that trust in AI chatbots is strongly impacted by perceived ideological fit. A deliberate or accidental politicization of AI chatbots thus risks dividing the AI landscape into ideological echo chambers, carrying profound implications for AI ethics, politics, and society.
The Road to Liberation is Paved with Threats: A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Minoritized Individuals’ Responses to Hierarchy-Disruptive Social Change
Marty Colombo; Daan Scheepers; Félice van Nunspeet
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When social equates to social mobility, it elicits adaptive (“challenge”) stress responses among low-status individuals. Instead, hierarchy-disruptive social change may impose under-theorized demands on minoritized individuals, eliciting maladaptive (‘threat’) stress. Thus, LGBTQ+ (n = 57) and cisgender-heterosexual (n = 57) participants expressed their opinion about the status quo and the social change (introducing a non-binary constitution) while cardiovascular challenge-threat was measured. As hypothesized, LGBTQ+ participants exhibited threat when discussing change, compared to the status quo; unexpectedly, cisgender-heterosexual participants exhibited challenge. Among LGBTQ+ participants, higher personal, but not ingroup, demands paired with lower personal resources predicted higher threat. Verbal opinions, coded into five clusters of demands and resources mapped onto challenge-threat, endorsement of change, and protest intentions (but not donations). Notably, one cluster combining failure and retaliation demands with moral hope and collective resources revealed that minoritized individuals persist in social change despite threat, potentially at the cost of their well-being.
Genetic Exploration of Depression Onset in Females from Menarche to Menopause
Hannah Oppenheimer; Maria Viejo-Romero; Louise Schindler; Arielle Crestol; Dennis van der Meer; Christopher Rayner; Jared Gichohi Maina; Lars T. Westlye; Ann-Marie G de Lange; David M Howard
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Depression risk in females is markedly elevated during hormonal transitions such as menarche, the perinatal period, and menopause; yet the genetic basis of depression onset during these windows remains uncharacterized. We conducted GWAS meta-analyses (including the X chromosome) in females from Generation Scotland and UK Biobank, running the first GWAS of depression onset around menarche (ncases = 3,089; ncontrols = 25,558) and around natural menopause (ncases = 3,754; ncontrols = 14,079), and the largest female-specific GWAS of continuous age at onset of depression (N = 29,735). We identified one locus for depression onset around menarche and two for depression onset around menopause, including one mapping onto CDKAL1, a gene implicated in metabolic disorders, and no genome-wide significant findings for continuous age at onset. Genetic correlation analyses revealed moderate to strong positive correlations among depression onset around menarche, around menopause, and postpartum depression (rg = 0.47-0.95), suggesting possible shared genetic pathways of reproductive-related depressions. Mendelian randomization demonstrated a causal effect of earlier menarche on depression onset around menarche; by contrast, age at menopause did not causally influence depression onset around menopause. Together, these findings establish a partly shared and partly distinct genetic architecture across reproductive-related depression subtypes, implicate possible metabolic pathways in depression onset around menopause, and provide a genetic framework for understanding why hormonal transitions confer differential depression risk across the female lifespan. By shifting focus from lifetime risk to hormonally defined onset windows, this study advances a timing informed genetic framework for understanding sex differences in depression.
Hate Speech versus Free Speech: How Online Hate Speech Exposure Shapes Perceptions and Regulatory Preferences about Freedom of Expression
Cornelia Sindermann; Eva-Maria Trüdinger
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While social media platforms have expanded avenues for social and political engagement and self-expression, they are also spheres for harmful and uncivil online speech. This contrast has intensified debates about how to reconcile the protection of free speech with efforts to regulate hate speech. Yet, causal evidence on how exposure to hate speech influences citizens’ perceptions of freedom of expression and regulatory preferences in view of this dilemma remains scarce. To address this gap, we conducted a preregistered online experiment with two independent samples from the German population (total N = 1,045). Participants were randomly assigned to view and rate hate speech targeting different political groups across two issue domains (climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights), factual information on the respective issue, or no stimulus. Then, they provided information on their attitudes toward freedom of expression. We show that mere exposure to hate speech does not significantly affect the perceived state of freedom of expression or regulatory preferences. However, individuals who perceive hate speech as more uncivil are more likely to favor combating hate speech over protecting freedom of expression. This finding points to the importance of individual perceptions of harmful content when assessing its social and political consequences.
Emotion Regulation in Functional Neurological Disorder: A Multimethod Comparison of Intra- and Interpersonal Strategies
Inga Niedtfeld; Johanna Hepp; Sabine Schellhaas; Astrid Steffen-Klatt; Dominik Klaasen van Husen; Valentin Held
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Objective: Emotion regulation (ER) difficulties are frequently reported in individuals with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), yet most evidence derives from self-report data, and little is known about intra- and interpersonal ER preference and success under controlled conditions. Methods: In a multimethod design, Study 1 assessed habitual ER difficulties and interpersonal ER using validated questionnaires in 109 individuals with FND and 88 healthy controls (HC). Study 2 employed two laboratory paradigms in 33 individuals with FND and 33 HC, examining ER choice and ER success during intrapersonal (reappraisal vs. distraction) and interpersonal regulation (self- vs. other-guided reappraisal). ER success was indexed by subjective arousal ratings and startle reflex magnitude. Results: In Study 1, individuals with FND reported greater ER difficulties, higher alexithymia, more childhood trauma, and reduced use of interpersonal ER compared to HC. In Study 2A, stimulus intensity predicted ER choice, with a shift toward distraction at higher intensities; groups did not differ in intrapersonal ER choice or success. In Study 2B, individuals with FND showed a non-significant trend toward reduced preference for interpersonal regulation. Interpersonal reappraisal was associated with lower startle amplitudes than intrapersonal reappraisal, indicating stronger physiological downregulation. Across paradigms, ER success did not significantly differ between groups. Conclusions: FND is characterized by pronounced self-reported intra- and interpersonal ER difficulties, whereas laboratory findings suggest preserved momentary ER implementation. Interpersonal ER may represent a clinically relevant domain in FND, warranting replication in adequately powered samples. Registration: Preregistered at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/hxfje).
Short-form video consumption in primary school children: Associations with cognitive control, ADHD symptoms, and academic achievement
Ebru Ger
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Short-form videos (SFVs) on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts are increasingly common in children’s daily media routines, but their impact on cognitive and academic outcomes remains unclear. This study examined associations between SFV use, cognitive control, ADHD symptoms, and academic performance in 376 primary school children from Bern, Switzerland. Children completed tasks assessing cognitive control, reading, and math, while parents reported on children’s SFV use, ADHD behaviors, and sociodemographic variables. According to parent reports, children watched SFVs on average eight minutes per day. SFV consumption was associated with lower reading performance and higher inattentive behaviors and learning problems, but not with cognitive control, math performance, or hyperactivity-impulsivity. Lower parental education predicted higher SFV use. These findings suggest that even modest SFV exposure may relate to attentional difficulties and reading challenges, highlighting the importance of balanced media routines for children’s development.
AI-based Scoring of Memory Search Processes in a Creative Thinking Task
Simone A Luchini; Lucie Vigreux; Marcela Ovando-Tellez; Roger Beaty; Emmanuelle Volle
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Creative thinking has been linked to how people search their semantic memory. Past research highlighted two modes of memory search—clustering (staying within a semantic category) and switching (jumping to a new one)—which are particularly relevant for creativity. Yet, little work has investigated semantic memory search during a divergent thinking task, partly due to difficulties in scoring clustering and switching. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise for automatically scoring the product of creative thinking, such as the originality of ideas, yet no work to date has tested LLMs for scoring the process of creative thinking. Here, we conduct an extensive investigation into the automated scoring of clustering and switching in multilingual responses to the Alternate Uses Task (AUT; N = 5,992), a common creativity task in which people generate new uses for objects. We prompted two LLMs, GPT-4o and GPT-5, to classify AUT ideas as clustering or switching. We also trained several machine learning models on unsupervised metrics spanning text embeddings and attention weights extracted from an open-source multilingual LLM, XLM-RoBERTa. Across all our automated scoring approaches, GPT-5 “zero-shot” prompting, without any examples, achieved the highest accuracy by correctly classifying 80% of clustering and 76% of switching responses. Compared to human inter-rater agreement, GPT-5 matched 93% of the accuracy achieved by human classifications. Our findings reveal how automated scoring of memory search processes relevant for creativity can be successfully conducted across multiple languages using LLMs. Open access is provided to our machine learning models, code and dataset.
The Sense of Reality in Consciousness Science
Nicola De Pisapia
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Consciousness science has made substantial progress in studying how perceptual contents become conscious, yet it has paid comparatively little attention to a broader question: what makes an experiential world feel real? This article treats the sense of reality as a distinct explanandum, understood as the pre-reflective way in which a current world is experienced as present, coherent, inhabitable, and resistant to doubt. I propose that this phenomenon is best understood as multidimensional, comprising felt presence, ontological weight, perceptual coherence, bodily situatedness, action-guidance, and public validity. On this view, ordinary waking reality reflects the coordinated stabilization of these dimensions, whereas altered states including lucid dreaming, derealization, hypnosis, psychedelic states, meditation, and immersive virtual reality reveal different configurations of experiential worldhood. Building on predictive processing and active inference, I introduce a computational framework in which the sense of reality is formalized as a higher-order reality-model that evaluates the standing of the currently active world-model. This framework distinguishes self-model, world-model, and reality-model processes, and suggests that reality endorsement depends not only on sensory, interoceptive, and sensorimotor evidence, but also on social and symbolic constraints such as shared attention, reciprocal prediction, communicative alignment, and institutional framing. The article concludes by outlining an empirically tractable research program and arguing that consciousness science should explain not only how contents and states are generated, but how worlds are experienced as real.
How can we achieve a good measurement of attentional control?
Alodie Rey-Mermet; Julia M. Haaf; Michelle C. Donzallaz; Gidon T. Frischkorn; Craig Hedge; Niels Oliver Kempkens; Klaus Oberauer; Anna-Lena Schubert
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Attentional control refers to the basic ability necessary to maintain a goal and goal-relevant features in the face of distraction. Many researchers conceptualize attentional control as a psychometric construct that can explain individual differences across experimental tasks and situations. However, recent research has challenged this idea by observing difficulties with establishing reliable and valid measures of attentional control. The goal of the present theoretical review is threefold: (1) to review and discuss the current methodological challenges that contribute to these difficulties, (2) to move beyond these methodological challenges to highlight theoretical challenges, and (3) to propose an approach combining formal modeling with experimental and correlational methods to address these methodological and theoretical challenges.
The effect of photo-taking on memory: naturalistic conditions challenge the impairment effect
Sahar Ali; Ali Mair
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A photo-taking impairment effect, wherein photographing objects leads to poorer subsequent memory for those objects than simply observing them, has been well-documented in previous research. However, previous studies have typically provided poor analogues of everyday photo-taking behaviour. The current study investigated the effect of photo-taking on memory in a naturalistic procedure. Participants took a self-guided tour of an art gallery, during which they photographed some exhibits, and observed others without photographing them. We simultaneously manipulated the degree of choice over what to capture by comparing one condition in which participants were required to photograph certain items to another in which only the required number of photographs was specified. Memory was measured after a 48-hour delay, using a multiple choice test probing specific visual details of each exhibit. Results showed that memory was better for items that were photographed compared with those that were only observed. The improvement in memory was driven by volitional photo capture, whereas there was no evidence for an effect of photo taking on memory in the forced capture condition. These results are inconsistent with previous research demonstrating a photo-taking impairment effect, indicating that under naturalistic conditions photo-taking does not hinder, and may even benefit, subsequent memory.
Selfing without a self: The missing dimension of identification in computational accounts of selfhood
Shawn Prest; Aviva Berkovich-Ohana; ‪Yair Dor-Ziderman‬‏; Ruben Eero Laukkonen; Matthew Sacchet; Kevin Berryman
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This paper explores the conceptualisation of “self” from the perspective of the active inference framework (AIF), advanced meditation and Buddhist literature. We argue that AIF accounts generally emphasise the organismic self—inference supporting agentic adaptive control—while overlooking a distinct aspect: the identified-with self—unperceived subject-creating elements of experience. On the AIF received view of the self, the persistent absence of a self entails dysfunction, in contrast with insight practices, in the context of the meditative endpoint in Buddhism called awakening or nibbana, which seek the permanent elimination of identification while leaving functional agency intact. We propose a two-dimensional articulation of the self that distinguishes between the organismic and identified-with self, and differentiates between reported temporary and persistent trait-like alterations. We examine how meditative deconstruction can temporarily attenuate hierarchically deep inference, disrupting organismic selfing, while long-term meditative development may persistently reduce or even eliminate the identified-with self, yielding a specific kind of selfless experience during ordinary perception, action and cognition–without functional disadvantage. We then take initial steps toward a synthesised AIF account of selfing, proposing that reductions in identified-with selfing unmask lower-level percepts, shorten engagement in higher-level inference, and establish upper limits on the certainty of beliefs.
Gendergerecht oder Gendergaga? Eine Metaanalyse über den Einfluss von geschlechtergerechten Formulierungen auf das Lesen
Katharina Marie Bach; Amadeus J. Pickal; Veronika Wachholz; Constanze Richters; Julia Murböck; Laura Brandl; Matthias Stadler; Michael Sailer
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Geschlechtergerechte Sprache wird medial, politisch und gesellschaftlich kontrovers diskutiert. Befürworterinnen und Befürworter möchten alle Geschlechter sprachlich repräsentieren und dem male bias durch das generische Maskulinum entgegenwirken. Im Gegensatz dazu befürchten Kritikerinnen und Kritiker negative Auswirkungen auf das Lesen. Bisher fehlen eindeutige Forschungsergebnisse zum Einfluss von geschlechtergerechter Sprache auf subjektive Textwahrnehmung und objektives Textverständnis. Daher aggregiert die vorliegende Metaanalyse Daten von 24 bisher unpublizierten Primärstudien mit insgesamt 922 Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern, welche den Einfluss verschiedener geschlechtergerechter Formulierungen im Vergleich zum generischen Maskulinum auf die subjektive Textwahrnehmung (Güte der Formulierungen, Lesbarkeit, Verständlichkeit, kognitive Belastung) sowie das objektive Textverständnis (Erinnerungsleistung und Lesedauer) untersuchten. Zusätzlich untersuchte die Metaanalyse, ob die Art der geschlechtergerechten Formulierung (Gendersternchen, Binnen-I, Doppelpunkt, Beidnennung) die Effekte moderiert. Die Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer der einzelnen Online-Studien wurden dafür randomisiert auf die verschiedenen Bedingungen aufgeteilt und mussten einen Text über die Schulschließungen während der Pandemie lesen und im Anschluss Fragebögen sowie einen auf den Text bezogenen Wissenstest ausfüllen. Lediglich bei der wahrgenommenen Verständlichkeit zeigte sich in den Random Effects Modellen ein kleiner negativer Effekt der geschlechtergerechten Varianten gegenüber dem generischen Maskulinum. Bei allen anderen Variablen waren die Effekte nicht signifikant. Die Art der geschlechtergerechten Formulierung hatte für keine der abhängigen Variablen einen signifikant moderierenden Einfluss. Die vorliegende Metaanalyse zeigt somit, dass das objektive Textverständnis nicht durch geschlechtergerechte Formulierungen eingeschränkt wird, auch wenn die subjektiv wahrgenommene Verständlichkeit etwas schlechter bewertet wird. Diese schlechtere Bewertung der Verständlichkeit drückt möglicherweise die Skepsis gegenüber geschlechtergerechten Formulierungen aus. Menschen gewöhnen sich allerdings schnell an sprachliche Änderungen; eine regelmäßige Konfrontation kann im Sinne des Effekts der Darbietungshäufigkeit den Gewöhnungsprozess positiv beeinflussen.
Description and effectiveness of environmental approaches to cognitive rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury: a systematic review of randomised controlled trials
Ella Waldman; Jennie Ponsford; Michal Boneh; Jessica Trevena-Peters
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Interventions addressing cognitive impairments after traumatic brain injury (TBI) often rely on survivors’ relatively preserved capacity to learn, initiate, and consistently use rehabilitation strategies, along with the ability to apply strategies in various contexts. The cognitive functions required for such active engagement in rehabilitation are commonly impaired after TBI, consequently limiting the benefits of many existing cognitive rehabilitation approaches. Environmental approaches, which involve manipulating the environment to support cognition and function, may benefit TBI survivors, as they do not require active involvement of the user to initiate and maintain their use. Although these approaches are recommended by experts and frequently used, their effectiveness and components are largely unknown. We conducted a systematic review, searching for randomised controlled trials of adults with TBI who received environmental interventions for cognitive or related functional outcomes, compared to any control. Two reviewers independently undertook screening and data extraction following a standardised protocol. Risk of bias was assessed using Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Instruments. Five studies were included in the review. Environmental intervention approaches included prompting (three studies) and trained communication partners (two studies), both of which demonstrated relatively strong evidence for their effectiveness. Key methodological limitations included insufficient blinding to group allocation, randomisation concealment, reliability of outcome measurement, and lack of baseline similarity between groups. Whilst environmental approaches involving prompting and trained communication partners demonstrate potential for improving the daily functioning of individuals with TBI, further research is needed.
Active vision is linked to category selectivity in the individual brain
Diana Kollenda; Elaheh Akbarifathkouhi; Maximilian Davide Broda; Benjamin de Haas
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Individuals reliably differ in how they look at complex visual scenes, with the most prominent variation in their propensity to fixate faces and text. In 61 adults, we tested the hypothesis that these differences in gaze are linked to representational properties of the individual visual system. Eye-tracking captured each observer’s characteristic gaze tendencies during naturalistic scene viewing, and independent functional magnetic resonance imaging recorded category-selective responses to faces, words, and other stimuli when participants were instructed to fixate centrally. We find that the propensity to fixate faces or text goes along with enhanced distinctiveness and enlarged functional regions of corresponding categorical representations in the ventral stream. These in turn predicted performance on reading and face recognition tasks. Thus, active vision appears linked to the precision of category-selective encoding and corresponding neural resources in the individual brain.
Unveiling the Psychological Dimensions of Child Labor: Understanding the Impacts and Building Solutions
Élison Silva Santos; Ana Luiza Raggio Colagrossi
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This chapter delves into the global issue of child labor, transcending geographical boundaries and highlighting the diverse origins of the children. It emphasizes the shared humanity we all possess. The chapter addresses two vital challenges: offering a psychological perspective on child labor from a global standpoint, drawing from scientific research, respected sources, and relevant data, while steadfastly valuing the intrinsic worth of each individual. It acknowledges the limitations of relying solely on numbers in psychology, emphasizing the importance of understanding the unique narratives behind the statistics. Responsibility plays a significant role in the child labor context, with over 160 million children engaged in such labor globally, prompting crucial questions about accountability. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the child labor scenario, featuring local realities and successful interventions, inviting reflection on the psychological aspects of child and adolescent development. Lastly, it explores the potential contributions of psychology and behavioral sciences to the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Gender in Latin America and the Caribbean
Élison Silva Santos; Edivani Reghin Santos
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This chapter examines the complex history and evolving dynamics of gender roles in Latin America. By tracing the region's history from pre-colonial civilizations to contemporary times, it explores how indigenous beliefs, colonial influences, and evolving economic structures have shaped and reshaped gender norms. The introduction of Christianity by European colonizers significantly impacted these societies, embedding patriarchal values that persist in various forms today. While traditional gender roles, such as "machismo" and "marianismo," continue to influence behavior, the diverse ethnic and cultural landscape of Latin America means these roles vary widely across different communities, with some Indigenous and Afro-descendant societies demonstrating more egalitarian practices. The chapter further delves into the implications of these historical legacies on contemporary gender issues, including labor participation, domestic roles, and the legal and societal challenges that affect gender equality. It highlights ongoing efforts to redefine these roles, spurred by feminist movements and increased recognition of LGBTQ+ rights.
Collaboration, Creation, & Imagination: Exploring the Effects of Co-Imagination on Divergent Thinking
Zoe Fowler; Clin KY Lai; Roger Beaty; Brendan Bo O'Connor
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Creativity is an essential cognitive tool in adaptively navigating the challenges of the future. While research on creativity has revealed the complex ways in which the social context—and particularly interpersonal collaboration—can influence creative outcomes, research on how we imagine the future has only just begun to explore imagination as a collaborative process (i.e., collaborative imagination, or co-imagination). How does collaborative imagination influence creative cognition? Across two studies (N = 164), we assess how imagining the future collaboratively rather than individually influences engagement in divergent thinking during the imagine task. This work adapted a recently developed natural language processing tool to quantify divergent thinking by measuring the semantic distance between all words spoken by a given participant in the narrative (i.e., Divergent Semantic Integration, or DSI). Study 1, run with university students in the lab, included pre-registered analyses testing the effect of condition (i.e., collaborative imagine vs. individual imagine) and found no significant effects on DSI scores. Exploratory analyses including social connection as a predictor found that participants in the co-imagine condition had significantly higher DSI scores, though this effect was counteracted by a negative effect of social connection on DSI scores. Study 2, run over video call with Prolific participants, did not replicate these exploratory findings. Taken together, these studies consider underexplored questions at the intersection of collaboration, imagination, and creativity, and provide both methodological and analytical tools for future research to further investigate creative cognition in co-imagination.
Implementing Mixed Integer Programming for Forced-Choice Questionnaire Assembly: An R-Based Tutorial with ROI
Kyosuke Bunji; Kensuke Okada
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Forced-choice questionnaires (FCQs) mitigate social desirability bias in personnel selection, yet their optimal assembly—equating item desirability within blocks while satisfying scale-level constraints—remains computationally challenging. This paper presents a mixed integer programming (MIP) framework that identifies globally optimal FCQ assemblies under structural constraints including factor balance, factor-pair representation, and mixed-keyed block proportions. Unlike heuristic approaches such as simulated annealing or genetic algorithms, the proposed MIP formulation guarantees optimality when both objective functions and constraints admit linear representations. We detail a two-stage procedure: (1) generation of a restricted candidate block pool via top-N selection to mitigate combinatorial explosion, and (2) set-partitioning optimization using the ROI R package with commercial or open-source solvers. Simulation studies show that MIP consistently identified the best solutions observed in our comparisons within practical timeframes, whereas the heuristic methods did not match those solutions within 600 seconds. The tutorial provides complete R implementations, enabling researchers to construct psychometrically optimized FCQs for high-stakes assessment contexts.
Listeners store category identity and uncertainty in memory during spoken word recognition, but not acoustic detail
Wednesday Bushong
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During spoken language processing, listeners maintain gradient information about past speech input in memory, but it is unclear how detailed these representations are. We test this question in an experiment using the speech discrimination paradigm. We focus on two perceptual decision-making effects: (1) more distant stimuli are more accurately discriminated; and (2) people are more confident about accurate choices, and this relationship is stronger as stimulus distance increases. We consider three types of stimulus ‘distance’ as a proxy for level of representational detail: (a) distance in acoustic cue space; (b) distance in category certainty space; and (c) difference in category identity. We assess which of these levels drive decision-making effects, finding that only category identity and category certainty are significant; difference in acoustic space was not a driver of perceptual decisions. This suggests that during real-time processing, listeners can maintain uncertainty about past speech, but cannot access its acoustic details.
We don’t know how social media bans will affect youth but we’re doing it anyway!
Monika Neff Lind; Stephen M. Schueller; Candice Odgers
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Around the world, governments are banning youth from social media. Proponents of bans claim that banning or restricting social media access is necessary to curb the youth mental health crisis and support youth well-being. Our review of experimental evidence from social media restriction studies shows that, to date, youth participants who would be subject to these bans have been excluded from research. We argue that bans are unlikely to eliminate or change social media use among youth in positive ways and caution against the unintended consequences of these policies. Finally, we provide recommendations for how to evaluate whether these bans achieve their stated aims of improving youth outcomes. Youth social media bans may represent an opportunity for scientific advancement and positive impact. However, rigorous evaluation efforts will be needed to guide evidence-based policymaking and understand the impacts, if any, of social media bans on youth.
Structure Guides Function: How Brains Do More Than Computation
Alexander Maier
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A central theme in Jon Kaas’ research, celebrated in this issue, is the relationship between brain structure and function. As a tribute, we examine how certain neuroanatomical structures enable functions that go beyond classical computations instantiated on conventional computers. Specifically, we argue that biological neurons exploit coincident input detection to realize more-than-pairwise, higher-order operations that cannot be reduced to pairwise interactions. Such processes can be simulated on conventional computers, but cannot be physically instantiated in their hardware. Pairwise statistics systematically miss these effects. To formally capture and analyze these higher-order neural interactions, we advocate for an extension of graph-based models of neuronal connectivity to hypergraphs. We conclude that, while brain function is sometimes likened to that of a conventional computer, brains can instantiate information processing beyond the limits of classical computation. In this sense, brains do not just “compute more”; brains do more than just compute.
Perceiving Uncertainty: how visual encoding, socially mediated doubt, and task complexity influence human decision-making
John R. Taylor; Stafford van Putten; Christopher J. Stanton
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Human decision-making during autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) operations is fundamentally influenced by uncertainty in environmental information. This exploratory pilot study investigates how during path planning, task dynamics can influence operator performance and risk tolerance, relative to a 2D visualisation of bathymetric data uncertainty. Using bathymetric data obtained from field trials of prototype AUVs, we visualise uncertainty in these data using Gaussian Processes (GP), manipulating the hyperparameters. Participants (n=18) completed 108 free-form path planning trials, overlayed on a 2D contour map of bathymetric uncertainty, while avoiding marine dangers. Additional uncertainty was introduced via an AI agent with one of three face realism conditions, designed to sow doubt in the participants perceived task performance. Bayesian modelling suggests Contour lowered redraw rates, with a modest U-curve relationship. Variance followed an inverted U-curve effect on redraw rates, with moderate values reducing ambiguity and improving performance. AI agent appearance shaped trust behaviour, while environmental complexity reduced risk tolerance. Results of our experimental pilot study show that visual uncertainty, social agent appearance, and task complexity systematically shape human trust, risk tolerance, and decision-making behaviour during path planning.
Integrating the Model of Excellencism and Perfectionism with the Big Three Model of Perfectionism: A Cumulative Risk Approach
Patrick Gaudreau; Antoine Benoît
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The Model of Excellencism and Perfectionism (MEP) makes two novel distinctions. First, it differentiates the pursuit of excellence from perfectionistic standards. Second, it repositions perfectionistic standards as the core definitional feature of perfectionism while positioning perfectionistic concerns as signature expressions. Two principles from the MEP were tested across two studies, looking at fear of failure (Study 1, N = 169) and psychological distress (Study 2, N = 278). Results of multivariate multiple regression supported the differentiation principle with perfectionistic standards (but not excellencism) positively and significantly associated with eight signature expressions of perfectionism. Results of path analyses supported the distal-to-proximal principle. Perfectionistic standards was positively associated with a cumulative risk factor that characterized the number of signature expressions of perfectionism espoused by a person. In turn, having more signature expressions was positively associated with fear of failure and psychological distress. The indirect effect of perfectionistic standards supported the distal-to-proximal principle. Perfectionistic standards and concerns play distinct roles and are therefore equally important. Overall, the MEP offers a way forward to understand multidimensional perfectionism as a unitary framework in which standards and concerns – once separated from excellencism – contribute to a better understanding of psychological adjustment.
The Role of Neural Oscillations in Incidental Learning
Kianoosh hosseini; Aaron Mattfeld; George Arthur Buzzell
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This paper reviews and synthesizes studies investigating the role of neural oscillations in incidental learning—the spontaneous acquisition of knowledge during everyday activities without conscious effort to memorize. We interpret findings through the lens of working memory (WM), given that information represented and maintained in WM is more likely to be offloaded into long-term memory (LTM), ultimately giving rise to incidental learning. Accordingly, we suggest that theta oscillations serve as an organizing rhythm that establishes discrete temporal windows within which information can be encoded into and maintained within WM via nested gamma oscillations. Alpha oscillations act as an attentional filter, influencing what information is more likely to be processed and encoded into WM, while beta clears prior WM contents. By influencing what information is prioritized, encoded into, and maintained within WM, these coordinated oscillatory dynamics determine the likelihood of information being offloaded into LTM, ultimately manifesting as incidental learning. This review offers an integrative framework for understanding how neural oscillations support incidental learning and highlights critical directions for future research, including the need for causal methods to directly establish the mechanistic role of these rhythms in LTM formation.
On-off synecdoche: a just good enough model of subjective experience
Mario Martinez-Saito
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We provide an account of the apparent intermittency of subjective experiences, between conscious and unconscious phases, grounded on three parsimonious notions: (1) the brain is an inference engine and stochastic simulator endowed with a good enough generative model of the world inherited via evolution and forged by experience, (2) the brain’s internal model of the self (itself, its body and actions) is an intermittent and simplified representation invoked only when needed to expedite inference, which specifies and enables first-person subjective experiences through the identification of a model of the self (d-self or synecdoche for the p-self) with the physical self (p-self), and (3) realistic monism as a merger of physicalism and panpsychism. This scheme shifts the focus from problematic standalone subjective experiences to the identification of subjective experiences with the system’s model of itself and its contingent attributes, is consistent with the empirical and phenomenological evidence and provides testable predictions: (1) only macroscopic scale information that is expedient for survival (d-self shell) can become subjective experience, and (2) the hub of subjective experience is mostly distributed along the posterior medial cortex.
Bringing Youth Preventative Mental Health Technologies to Rural Communities: A Mixed-Methods Pilot
Mallory Dobias; Erica Szkody; Steph Peters; Jessica I. Lake; Jessica L. Schleider
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Rural areas in the U.S. face continued inequities in infrastructure and investment, despite housing approximately 20% of the country’s population. Sourcewell, a service cooperative created by Minnesota as a local unit of government, developed the AscendRural program to de-risk technology adoption to improve rural well-being and health by sourcing and piloting innovative technologies alongside rural communities. In this mixed-methods evaluation, AscendRural partnered with Northwestern University researchers to evaluate (1): facilitators and barriers to the implementation of two technology solutions across five rural contexts, and (2) AscendRural’s impact as a facilitator of the pilot implementation. Survey data from technology companies and rural community partners before, during, and after the pilot period indicate high acceptability of AscendRural and their pilot model; however, aggregated trends in technology usage data suggest low uptake of technology solutions. Rapid qualitative analysis of de-identified interview transcripts identified key facilitators and barriers to implementation for technology and community stakeholders—as informed by the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation–Behavior Model (COM-B) and the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). We discuss theory-informed recommendations for future implementation efforts based on the ERIC taxonomy, to better serve rural communities within and beyond AscendRural.
Understanding the evolution of individual response process: An exploratory approach
Ruiting Shen; Klint Kanopka
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The massive use of computer-adaptive testing has contributed to revolutionizing psychometric analysis in terms of both data collection and analysis methodologies. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is one of the most well-known assessments that collect respondents' process data, which has been extensively analyzed (Bosch, 2021; Levin, 2021; Patel et al., 2021; Zehner et al., 2020). Much of this work has primarily focused on efficiency estimation, due to the 2019 NAEP Educational Data Mining Competition. Prediction models were trained mainly using item-level feature engineering and person-level grouping. Some work focusing on exploring the data itself rather than training models has also focused on grouping respondents' behavior patterns on subsets of items (Wei et al., 2024) through the use of clustering and relating these patterns to demographics and respondent ability. With a similar goal, we expand on this approach by firstly developing item level behavior profiles using clustering-based methods (i.e., latent class analysis) for all items. Using these profiles, we explore individual trajectories from profile to profile over the course of the test. Combining these trajectories with latent abilities and speed estimated from item responses and demographic information, we characterize the respondents who comprise the individual trajectories. Preliminary results find item-to-item variation in the structure and interpretation of the behavior profiles, but also distinct profiles within each item that represent differences in the underlying IRT-derived latent ability distributions. Understanding usage patterns for respondents of various ability levels, demographic backgrounds, and disability statuses may inform future item development, assistive tool design, and user interface for computerized assessments.
Representation of the prediction of silence at sensory and higher cognitive levels of cortical processing
Valeria Baragona; Erich Schröger; Andreas Widmann
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The unpredicted omission of expected sound, that is “silence”, elicits omission N1, N2 and P3 (early and late oN1, oN2, oP3) event-related potential (ERP) and pupil dilation responses (PDR), which are interpreted as prediction error signals located along different processing levels. This study aims to investigate whether these responses to unpredicted silence can also be elicited by the unpredicted continuation of sound, that is, the “absence” of expected silence. A prediction error response to the absence of silence would indicate that silence was predicted including the levels of processing on which a prediction of silence was established. Participants (27 women, 10 men) pressed a button every 1-2s while exposed to continuous Brownian noise. Button presses predictably (88% of trials), randomly (50% of trials) or never (0% of trials; motor-control) interrupted the noise. EEG and pupil diameter data were recorded. We found that the unpredicted absence of a silent interval in the noise elicited late oN1 (~150ms) and oN2, oP3 and PDR omission prediction error responses. However, we did not find an early oN1 (~100ms). Predictive representations of silence can be established at the level of categorical sensory processing (late oN1) and at the levels of later, higher cognitive processing and attention (oN2, oP3, and PDR), but not at the level of feature-based, early cortical sensory processing (early oN1), possibly because the absence of features cannot easily be encoded. These results suggest that silence is represented not only as the absence of sound but also as a predictable event in itself.
White-Knuckled Prosociality: Loneliness increases willingness to exert effort to benefit others
Anita Restrepo; Karen E Smith; Sabina Raja; Cynthia Gaspard; Elizabeth Mickiewicz; Gabe Minchev; John Veillette; Gregory Norman
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Loneliness, or perceived social isolation, motivates individuals to foster their relationships while remaining vigilant to potential social threats. Lonely individuals must interpret the social cues they receive from others and respond accordingly by engaging in affiliative behaviors while also identifying and managing threats. Prosocial acts – or voluntary actions meant to benefit others – are one type of behavior that can help lonely individuals reaffiliate. Loneliness has been linked to differences in prosocial behaviors. However, this relationship has mainly been investigated using self-report measures that ask respondents to imagine their own behavior in hypothetical scenarios. Here, we utilized a physical effort prosocial decision-making experimental task to investigate whether loneliness influences willingness to exert physical effort to benefit others. We also explore whether this relationship differs in contexts of potential gain compared to potential loss and is moderated by participants’ resting parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity as a physiological marker of variability in individuals’ ability to regulate competing social motivations. In a sample of 80 U.S. undergraduate students, we find lonelier individuals are more likely to choose to exert effort to benefit someone else both to earn rewards and to avoid punishments. Resting cardiac PNS activity did not moderate the association between loneliness and prosocial behavior. These findings indicate loneliness increases effortful prosocial behavior, which is in line with theoretical frameworks positing prosocial actions as a tool for lonely individuals to foster connection and reaffiliation with others. Implications for our understanding of loneliness as a driver of social behavior are discussed.
Residential environment and behavioral factors as underexplored determinants of cognitive reserve and cognitive functioning in older adults: A structural equation modeling approach
Blanca Cativiela Campos; Patricia Sancho; Diego Ruiz-Sobremazas; Angel Barrasa; Fernando Sánchez-Santed; Teresa Colomina; Caridad López-Granero
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Aging is associated with progressive cognitive changes, although substantial interindividual variability exists in the trajectory and severity of cognitive decline. Cognitive reserve has been proposed as a key mechanism explaining why some individuals maintain relatively preserved cognitive functioning despite age-related or pathological brain alterations. While traditional determinants such as education, occupation, and lifestyle have been widely studied, the contribution of behavioral traits and environmental context, particularly residential environment, remains insufficiently understood. The present study investigated the relationships between cognitive reserve, cognitive functioning, and a range of sociodemographic, psychological, and environmental factors in 75 older adults from rural and urban areas of Aragón, Spain (mean age = 74.03 years). Participants completed assessments of global cognitive functioning (MMSE), cognitive reserve, impulsivity, mental health symptoms, loneliness, and engagement in sociocultural, physical, instrumental, and intellectual activities. Structural Equation Modeling was applied to explore the complex interrelationships among these variables. Results indicated that younger age, female sex, lower impulsivity, and rural residence were associated with higher cognitive reserve, whereas older age and greater impulsivity were linked to poorer cognitive functioning. Associations between lifestyle activities and cognitive reserve were attenuated after accounting for other predictors. Overall, these findings support a more integrative perspective on cognitive aging, highlighting the relevance of modifiable behavioral and environmental determinants and suggesting that factors such as impulsivity and environmental context may promote cognitive resilience.
“Blind in the Mind”: An IPA Study of Self-Stigma Related to Living with a Dissociative Disorder
Jeremy Cooper
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Self-stigma has been shown to produce a treatment barrier while dissociation has been shown to produce a secondary treatment barrier. In individuals that suffer from dissociative disorders, self-stigma can lead to worsening symptoms and increase distress around feeling misunderstood. This qualitative study asked ten participants living with a dissociative disorder to describe what their experience was like. Themes have pointed to the ways explicit judgment and implicit perception carry equal weight and can lead to isolation to the degree that, because of the shame experienced, individuals feel helpless to improve relationships or even associate with peers. The hope of this study is to shed light on a unique condition that has crucial implications for compassionate and successful treatment.
Representing object state change during sentence comprehension: Boundary conditions and language-specific constraints
Channing Everidge Hambric; Jon Sides; Kevin James Holmes; Abhilasha Ashok Kumar
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Language comprehension entails forming contextually appropriate representations of described entities and events. Previous work suggests that non-visual object properties like weight are automatically integrated into event models during comprehension. Horchak and Garrido (2021) found that Portuguese speakers’ response times were faster when the state of a presented object (e.g., a smashed tomato) matched the event implied by the preceding sentence (e.g., You drop a bowling ball on a tomato). In an exact pre-registered replication in English (Experiment 1), we failed to replicate this sentence-picture match effect. To explore the reasons for this nonreplication, we designed three pre-registered extensions to examine the effects of another type of state change (slicing, Experiment 2), the role of implicit target object properties (squashability, Experiment 3), and the role of syntactic structure (sentence focus, Experiment 4). Contrary to previous work, we observed a match effect on both accuracy and response times in Experiment 4, but the effect on response times was only present when the target object was the focus (i.e., subject) of the sentence. A follow-up survey comparing readers’ interpretation of the original Portuguese stimuli and their English translations indicated that the syntactic structure of Portuguese amplified the relative salience of the objects described in the state change event. Overall, these findings suggest that the representation of object state changes during language comprehension depends on the interaction of object properties and language-specific syntactic constraints.
"Desistance": A multi-method review of the literature on gender identity variability in transgender and gender diverse youth
MaRSS Lab; Catherine Wall; Quinnehtukqut McLamore; John Kitchener Sakaluk
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The rates of persistence and desistance in transgender identities (broadly defined) are among the most common rhetorical points in legal and ethical debates over transgender health. Originally popularized by a researcher’s blogpost, political and legal action restricting gender-affirming care (GAC) claim that 60-90% of youth presenting for care “desist” from a transgender identity on the basis of informally 11 reviewed datasets. Our multi-method synthesis of this literature, in contrast, uses and finds: (1) a series of meta-analytic estimates suggesting very heterogeneous and fickle estimates of desistance from both these studies alone, and when supplemented by more recent samples, (2) simulations suggesting that volunteer bias compromises how informative these estimates can be, and (3) a qualitative review revealing serious conceptual problems, outdated assumptions, and substantial methodological limitations. These analyses undermine the popularized “60-90%” desistance estimate that commonly underlies policy efforts intended to restrict access to gender affirming care for transgender youth. Attempts to justify such legislative and healthcare policy initiatives with this ostensible desistance rate reflect, at best, a misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific literature and, at worst, a motivated reading of the scientific literature.
What happens when you cocktail your guests? On the processing and acceptability of innovative denominal verbs
Margreet Vogelzang; Robyn Carston; Ianthi Tsimpli
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Polysemy is a phenomenon in which a single word form has multiple related senses. It can be cross-categorial, that is, the related senses can occur across word categories, such as noun, verb and/or adjective with the same root (e.g. ‘stone’). One source of cross-categorial polysemy is speakers’ innovative use of nouns as verbs (e.g. ‘porch the newspaper’). The meanings of such innovative or unconventional uses have been argued to be pragmatically inferred in context. Taking an experimental approach, we explored whether grasping the meaning of such lexical innovations is typically effort-demanding and whether this process is influenced by cognitive or linguistic individual differences. The results showed that processing innovative denominal verbs is indeed effortful. In addition, people who are more sensitive to or aware of linguistic variation seem to have less difficulty processing innovative verbal uses of nouns, but individual differences in cognitive flexibility did not influence this process. These results provide evidence for an individual differences-based approach to language processing and show that experiential factors, rather than different degrees of cognitive flexibility, can explain differences in pragmatic inferencing required for processing non-conventional polysemy.
The Human Oversight Fallacy–and What We Can Do About It
Angelica Lermann Henestrosa; Alexei Grinbaum; Ivan P. Yamshchikov
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Human oversight, as one of several ethical principles required for the safe use of AI systems, plays a prominent role in the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). This position paper argues that, while human oversight remains a necessary safeguard to mitigate the risks posed by AI systems aimed at directly interacting with humans across diverse domains, its current conceptualization rests on problematic assumptions about human judgment, epistemic access, and institutional responsibilities. Drawing on empirical findings from psychology and human–AI interaction research, we show that human oversight, as presently envisaged, runs risk to remaining an illusion of control if the conditions for meaningful oversight are not made explicit. To address these limitations, we propose a conceptual reorientation of human oversight away from reactive approval and toward structurally embedded control, by suggesting incentive-based ethical stress testing, the establishment of normative clarity, and the systematic accounting for the limits of human oversight. We conclude that only by grounding oversight in realistic assumptions about human cognition and institutional incentives can it fulfill its intended role in ensuring trustworthy AI.
Social and cognitive activities for dementia risk reduction: A qualitative exploration of perspectives of citizens with diverse backgrounds
Giselle Geertruide Antonia Menting; Jeroen Bruinsma; Rik Crutzen
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Background: Engagement in social and cognitive activities can reduce dementia risk, but currently, concepts are loosely defined, leading to enormous heterogeneity in available measurements. Moreover, interventions often focus on brain-training and contact between participants instead of engagement in everyday activities that seem protective. Objective: This qualitative study explores how citizens with diverse backgrounds conceptualize engagement in social and cognitive activities and identifies factors influencing engagement. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 citizens of diverse backgrounds living in the Netherlands. Specific emphasis was devoted to recruiting participants with a low socioeconomic position and migration background, as they have a higher dementia risk. Two researchers independently conducted an inductive-deductive content analysis. Results: Participants conceptualized social activities as interactions with others, extending earlier definitions to also include non-human interactions (e.g., God or pets) and prioritized interaction quality (e.g., reciprocity, autonomy, and value). Participants conceptualized cognitive activities as challenging and requiring information processing, such as concentration and focus. Novelty and personal control contributed to the perceived challenge. Engagement in both activities was influenced by perceived purpose (e.g., enjoyment, fulfilment), individual disposition (e.g., mental and physical health), and contextual barriers (e.g., financial scarcity, cultural norms). Conclusions: Measurements and interventions should operationalize attributes that make certain activities socially or cognitively stimulating. Instead of relying on frequency or duration, activity measurements would benefit from assessing subjective attributes like reciprocity, autonomy, value, challenge, and novelty. Interventions would benefit from promoting engagement in purposeful activities and support in overcoming individual and contextual barriers.
The neurobiology of adolescent decision-making and implications for health policy
Dori Grijseels
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Neurobiological evidence is given increased weight in discussions surrounding health policy. Findings about adolescent brains have led to questioning their decision-making capabilities in various settings. However, inferences from laboratory studies often do not apply directly to real-world cases, leading to misconceptions about adolescent decision-making and risk-taking. Using the context of trans adolescent healthcare, this article reviews current knowledge on adolescent decision-making and discusses applications and limitations of these findings to healthcare policy.
Cross-Cultural Validation and Ideological Fairness of a Historical Perspective Taking Instrument: Evidence from Czech Secondary Students
Juda Kaleta
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This study reports the first Czech adaptation of the Hartmann and Hasselhorn Historical Perspective Taking (HPT) instrument and examines whether its politically charged scenario introduces construct-irrelevant variance (CIV) related to students' ideological attitudes. Among 293 Czech secondary students, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the three-factor structure. Item Response Theory (IRT)-based differential item functioning (DIF) analysis detected no biased items across ideology groups. Multi-group CFA demonstrated full scalar measurement invariance. Historical knowledge predicted HPT scores; ideology was unrelated. These findings support a transferable protocol for evaluating measurement fairness when assessment content carries attitudinal valence.
Sound and meaning: On the duration of Japanese homophones
Motoki Saito; Ruben van de Vijver
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Different words can have the same sounds and yet different meanings. They are called homophones. In this paper, we investigate whether the meaning of homophones affects their duration, and how this effect is distributed over the sounds of the word, based on Japanese. Japanese is of particular interest because of its phonemic length contrasts, which could constrain subphonemic durational differences. Using the Discriminative Lexicon Model, we mapped the meanings (from fastText) onto word forms and derived two measures: unconditional semantic support, which represents how well the meaning of a word predicts its sounds as a whole, and conditional semantic support, which represents how this association between word meaning and form unfolds from the beginning to the end of the word. We found that, at the word level, stronger semantic support is associated with longer word duration. At the sound level, in contrast, semantic support is interacted with position in the word. Sounds earlier in the word receive more support and are realized with longer duration, while this effect diminishes and potentially even reverses for sounds later in the word. We discuss our findings in the light of morphological studies, information-theoretic approaches, and alternative theories of the mental lexicon.
Social affective forecasting and the default mode network in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: A daily diary and fMRI study
Bridget Shovestul; Abhishek Saxena; Xiaoyu Dong; Stephanie Reda; Emily Dudek; Chenwei Wu; Lisa Lin; J. Steven Lamberti; David Dodell-Feder
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Social anhedonia (SA) is a well-established symptom of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSDs), but its etiology remains unknown. Research suggests that the ability to accurately predict future emotions in real-world social contexts—i.e., social affective forecasting (SAF) accuracy—is impaired in SSDs, particularly for anticipated negative emotions, and is associated with SA. However, little is understood about the neural basis of this phenomenon. Alterations in the default mode network (DMN)—a network of brain regions recruited during stimulus-independent, future oriented thinking—has been observed in SSDs. Thus, altered DMN connectivity may be contributing to reduced SAF accuracy and SA. In a sample of individuals with and without SSDs, we tested associations between SAF, SA, and functional connectivity within the DMN. Participants completed a daily diary assessing anticipatory and consummatory emotions associated with their social interactions to derive indices of SAF accuracy, and underwent resting-state fMRI to assess functional connectivity within three subsystems of the DMN. We find that the SSD group demonstrated hypoconnectivity within the midline core, but this was not associated with SAF accuracy of negative or positive emotions. Exploratory analyses indicated that social pleasure moderated the association between core connectivity and SAF accuracy for positive emotions, such that this positive association was observed only among individuals with low levels of social pleasure. Taken together, these findings suggest that although aberrations in DMN connectivity may characterize SSDs, its relevance to SAF may depend on individual differences in SA and social pleasure, underscoring the need to clarify how these constructs shape prospection.
Participatory Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Introspective Predictive Processing Inventory (IPPI): A Self-Report Measure for Autistic and Non-autistic Adults
Marik Roos; Hannah Storm; Lucie Zimmer; Tobias Schuwerk
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Traditional self-report autism measures are often constructed from an "outside view" by non-autistic researchers rather than reflecting authentic autistic experiences. Predictive processing theory offers a promising framework for understanding autism through internal cognitive processes, but comprehensive tools assessing these characteristics and their associated daily challenges have been lacking. This study aimed to develop and validate the Introspective Predictive Processing Inventory (IPPI), a self-report measure assessing predictive processing characteristics and their subjective consequences in everyday life. Through community-led, participatory research, we developed a 65-item pilot version and employed a five-stage validation approach across three samples (N = 790). We used network-based item optimization, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, measurement invariance testing, and convergent validity assessment. Network optimization reduced the scale to 18 items while maintaining excellent reliability and improved discriminative power. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a stable two-factor structure: "Prediction Integration and Interpretation" and "Prediction Error Sensitivity and Stability Needs". The IPPI demonstrated exceptional discriminative validity (AUC > 0.97), strong convergent validity with established measures, measurement invariance across groups, and independence from general cognitive abilities. The IPPI provides a validated tool for assessing internal predictive processing experiences and their daily consequences, advancing autism research that bridges predictive processing theory with lived experiences.
Beyond awareness: mental health promotion requires epistemic diversity, not pathologization
Vojtech Pisl; Vladan Starčević; Jiří Horáček; Jan Vevera; Timo Beeker
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Public mental health has become an increasing concern over recent decades, accompanied by a rapid expansion of public awareness campaigns aimed at improving population mental well-being. We argue that while psychiatric interpretations of distress promoted by these campaigns may be beneficial for individuals with clinically significant mental disorders, emerging evidence suggests that the same interpretations may have unintended adverse effects among psychologically healthy individuals. We argue that empirical support for the effectiveness of universal mental health awareness campaigns remains limited and that their benefits are frequently overstated due to selective or overly generalized interpretations of existing studies. We propose that effective mental health promotion should move beyond uniform messaging toward individualized approaches that foster flexibility in how distress is understood and managed. Finally, we suggest that mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence offer promising technical tools for designing such adaptive, individualized mental health promotion strategies, and provide an example of the latter.
The complex science of tailoring loneliness interventions
Laura Coll-Planas; Samia C. Akhter-Khan; Giuliana Longworth; Prakhar Srivastava; Sharanya Mosalakanti; Miguel Alejandro A. Silan; Hans IJzerman; Joanna McHugh Power
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Loneliness requires urgent action, both as public health and as social justice issue. However, existing loneliness interventions have shown limited effectiveness, likely due, in part, to the assumption that ‘one-size-fits-all' approaches guide intervention attempts. Drawing on methodologically and disciplinarily pluralistic principles, we propose new directions for designing, implementing, and evaluating tailored interventions. These new directions are necessary to prevent or reduce loneliness considering its complexity. We first problematise state of the art loneliness interventions, focusing on issues of definition, one-size-fits-all approaches, theoretical frameworks, and evaluation, and framing these as challenges for the field. We then introduce four ‘complexity dimensions’ of loneliness, i.e., transdisciplinarity, multilevel aetiology, conceptual diversity, and temporal dynamics, which can help us to understand the how, whom, what, and when of effective interventions. Further, we present a diverse set of methods related to participatory research, precision health and complex systems illustrated with case studies that can be used to address the complexity dimensions of loneliness within interventions. This perspective has implications for designing and evaluating future loneliness interventions, including the need to consider the multilevel interventional context, to frame loneliness interventions within theoretical frameworks, and to explore how this approach may be applied to issues beyond loneliness.
Negativity Bias in Person Perception: Exploring the Reverse Side of the 'What is Beautiful is Good' Stereotype in Women
Tobias L. Kordsmeyer; Natalie Fichte; Sabine Ostermann; Julia Stern; Marco Antonio Correa Varella; Jaroslava Varella Valentova; Lars Penke
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According to the attractiveness halo effect, global person perceptions are biased by physical attractiveness. Few studies have shown similar influences by unattractiveness, with unattractive people being ascribed negative attributes. This preregistered study compared the strength of (positive) attractiveness halo effects with negative halo effects employing target samples from two phenotypically distinct populations. Facial photos of 154 German and 149 Brazilian women were judged separately for their attractiveness, social (in-)competence, intellectual (in )competence, and emotional (in-)stability by 168 female German raters. Results showed moderate-to-strong positive associations of perceived attractiveness with all three positively framed attributes, and moderate-to-strong negative correlations with all three negatively framed attributes, which did not differ considerably in magnitude, nor between German and Brazilian targets (one exception for intellectual incompetence). In exploratory analyses, judgements of social competence, intellectual competence, and emotional stability were in most cases significantly more negative for low- than for medium-attractiveness targets, than they were positive for high- than for medium-attractiveness targets. These findings provide a systematic comparison of positive and negative halo effects, revealing that negative biases for unattractive individuals can be at least as pronounced as positive biases for attractive individuals. These effects also mostly generalize across German and Brazilian faces, extending evidence on halo effects beyond single‑population samples.
Processes and Contents: An Intensive Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Approach for Capturing Everyday Identity Formation
Anna-Maria Mayer; Katharina Eckstein; Elise Grunwald; Peter Noack; Julia Dietrich
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Understanding identity requires capturing not only how strongly individuals endorse aspects of their identity but also what those mean and how they are expressed in everyday contexts. To address this methodological challenge, we introduce an intensive longitudinal mixed-methods design integrating daily quantitative with qualitative identity elements. We illustrate the design within research on civic identity. German adolescents and young adults (N = 135; Mage = 21.23 years) completed an online baseline survey and 14 days of daily assessments. Daily surveys included an open-ended narrative prompt for assessing qualitative elements (e.g., behaviors) and closed items on identity processes to assess quantitative elements (i.e., commitment, exploration, reconsideration). Open-ended daily narratives were deductive–inductively content coded. Bayesian multilevel models examined within- and between-person associations between daily quantitative and qualitative elements. Participants’ civic-identity content was heterogeneous and often centered on discussions or conversations and apolitical behavior. On days with higher commitment or exploration, participants more likely reported identity-relevant experiences as well as more diverse behaviors; reconsideration was unrelated. While the design can be used to examine which contents and behaviors instantiate identity processes in everyday life, it also provides a starting point for redefining domain-specific daily measures by combining qualitative and quantitative assessment.
When Collaboration Beats Ability: Mixed-Ability Teams Can Outperform High-Ability Teams Under Coordination Demands
Younes Strittmatter; Rachael Skye; Samuel Lozano Iglesias; Samuel Liebana; Andrew Saxe; Miguel Ruiz-Garcia; Erin Teich; Markus Spitzer
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Collective intelligence describes the capacity of groups to achieve levels of performance that cannot be explained by the abilities of their individuals. The existence of collective intelligence implies that groups composed of mixed-ability members may outperform groups of high ability. Here, we examine when such benefits emerge in humans and whether it is driven by collaboration. We designed a collaborative multiplayer online game and manipulated team composition (mixed-ability vs. high-ability) and coordination demands by exposing teams to two different task environments that varied in how much they encouraged collaboration. We collected data from 280 teams of two human players (70 per condition), totaling 560 participants. We found that mixed-ability teams outperformed high-ability teams in environments designed to encourage collaboration. This performance advantage was due to more collaborative actions and more frequent division of labor. These results show that collaboration emerges selectively as a function of group composition and coordination demands.
Individual Differences in the Effects of Response Time-Adaptive Multiplication Practice: A Classroom Study on Experience and Effectiveness
Maarten van der Velde; Jane de Boer; Burcu Arslan; Thomas Wilschut; Myrthe Braam; Hedderik van Rijn
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Background. Multiplication is a key skill in primary education, but traditional teaching methods vary in effectiveness and may not suit individual needs. Adaptive learning systems personalise practice and promote the use of effective study strategies, with algorithms that adapt based on accuracy (accuracy-adaptive), or accuracy and speed (RT-adaptive). Incorporating response times should enable more precise adaptivity, leading to better learning. A prior study (n = 540) with both kinds of algorithm showed promising results, but did not compare them directly. Emphasising speed may also affect learners differently, especially those with attentional difficulties. Aims. This study evaluates whether practice with an RT-adaptive spaced repetition algorithm improves multiplication fluency, compared to a simpler accuracy-adaptive algorithm. Sample. Participants were 44 Dutch primary school pupils (grade 4; US grade 2; aged 7–8). The sample included participants with average and raised levels of hyperactivity/inattention. Methods. A within-subject experiment compared practice with accuracy- and RT-adaptive algorithms. We tested multiplication fluency before and after practice (immediately after and after a 1-week delay) and recorded participants’ subjective experiences. Results. Performance was better during RT-adaptive practice, but this difference did not translate to better immediate or delayed post-test outcomes.Hyperactivity/inattention levels did not affect performance but did influence experience: participants with raised levels reported more difficulty concentrating in the RT-adaptive condition. Conclusions. We found limited added value of RT-adaptive practice, but saw that individual differences influenced experiences of AI-supported learning. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of an effective application of AI in primary education that meets the needs of neurodiverse learners.
Is the “theory-theory” of understanding a mistake? An interactive perspective on knowledge and explanation
Simon Myers; Nick Chater
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Shiffrin, Stigler, and Keil worry that science frequently falls victim to an illusion of understanding. We take their argument a step further, arguing that psychological scientists often fundamentally mischaracterize human understanding as rooted in internally represented theories of any kind. We propose an alternative, interactive notion of understanding.
Does the ‘maturity principle’ hold for social, emotional, and behavioral skills? A study on age differences from 18 to 65
Maria Jalynskij; Franz-Josef Neyer; Clemens M. Lechner
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The maturity principle posits that socially desirable personality traits, such as agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability tend to increase across adulthood. This study examined whether this principle extends to social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills by investigating age differences in a representative sample of N = 940 German adults (age range: 18-65, mean age = 43, SD = 14, 50 % female) using moderated non-linear factor analysis models and comparing them to age differences in Big Five traits in a demographically comparable sample. Additionally, we explored age-specific associations between SEB skills and life quality, measured by life satisfaction and self-rated health. Contrary to the widely accepted maturity principle, we found few corresponding age differences in SEB skills, whereas the expected age-related patterns were evident in Big Five traits. These results remained consistent regardless of the level of measurement invariance. Some skills showed lower mean levels in older adults, and skill variances differed with age. In conclusion, these findings suggest that the maturity principle known from the Big Five literature does not fully generalize to SEB skills. This cross-sectional study lays the groundwork for future longitudinal research on SEB skills and highlights the importance of considering individuals within context. Keywords: age differences, life satisfaction, maturity principle, SEB skills, self-rated health
The geography of the shooter bias: Regional context is linked to racialized threat perception
Marleen Stelter; Iniobong Essien; Oliver Christ; Jimmy Calanchini
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The first-person shooter task is widely used for studying discrimination, grounded in theories linking shooter bias to threat-related stereotypes. Yet, evidence for these links remains weak. Using a large sample (N = 2,043) and a multilevel framework, we examined how individual and regional stereotypes and prejudice relate to shooter bias. Reaction time effects replicated robust shooter bias, but the unreliability of shooter bias measures limited individual-difference analyses. Correlations between individual stereotypes and prejudice with response bias for Black targets were small (|rs| = .05-.10), yet detectable given high statistical power. Correlations with regional bias measures were stronger (|rs| = .22-.34), magnifying effects through aggregation. Multilevel analyses revealed that regional bias predicted shooter bias beyond individual biases (contextual effects), and individual-level associations were amplified in high-bias regions (cross-level interactions). These findings underscore the value of regional approaches in revealing subtle psychological patterns and the influence of social context on discriminatory behavior.
Bilingual language control during sentence vs. single word production – A Registered Report
Anna Dalakoura; Neil William Kirk; Mathieu Declerck
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Whenever bilinguals produce language, both languages are activated and compete to some degree. Language control is the process used to minimize this cross-language interference and facilitate the selection of words in the appropriate language. While ample research has investigated language control, the overwhelming majority of studies focus on single word production with little attention to language control during sentence production. The distinction between single word and sentence production is an important one, as the few studies that compared these two conditions have observed language control differences. With this study, we investigated this issue by relying on an index of language control that has not been used to investigate differences/similarities in language control during single word and sentence production, namely the blocked language order effect. The results revealed a robust blocked language order effect reflecting sustained language control following second language use. Importantly, the effect did not differ as a function of the linguistic content of second language use (i.e., single word vs sentence production), suggesting mainly similarities in proactive language control processes across levels of linguistic complexity.
When Regulation Is No Longer Self-Regulation: Interoceptive Authority, Interpretive Displacement, and the Structural Conditions of Affective Dependence
Ryan SangBaek Kim
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Predictive processing accounts of interoception hold that emotion regulation depends on the brain’s capacity to model, interpret, and update internal bodily signals. These frameworks assume that the locus of interpretation remains with the subject. This paper identifies a structural condition under which that assumption fails: interpretive displacement—the progressive reconfiguration of inter- nal arbitration such that externally generated interpretations, including those produced by wearable devices, algorithmic mood trackers, and digital health platforms, acquire privileged precision and become the default resolution rule within the subject’s own inferential system. Under interpretive displacement, bodily signals continue to be registered, yet the internal arbitration system stabilises on a configuration in which externally sourced interpretations determine affective meaning. Under the conditions specified in this framework, emotion regulation may persist behaviorally while no longer constituting self-regulation in a strict sense; it becomes a form of interpretive dependence. The paper develops a conceptual framework distinguishing three configurations: intact interoceptive self-regulation, partial delegation, and structural dependence. It specifies the conditions under which each configuration emerges and the point at which regulation transitions from agency to reliance. This reframing has direct implications for interoception research and for the design of interoception- based interventions, which currently presuppose an intact interpretive subject. The framework also clarifies conditions under which external interpretive supports remain assistive rather than displac- ing, an issue with direct relevance to educational, allied health, and neurodevelopmental contexts. By clarifying what must hold for self-regulation to remain self-regulation, the framework identifies a prior condition that intervention models have yet to address.
Eat your vegetables: Exploring food learning cues in 12-month-old infants
Camille Rioux; Karola Schlegelmilch; Annie E. Wertz
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Food learning in early life largely relies on social learning. Previous research has shown that infants learn something is edible when they directly observe someone else eating it. However, the role of other forms of food-related social information remains largely unknown. Food processing actions (e.g., chopping, mashing) are essential components of human food behaviors and a ubiquitous part of infants’ everyday lives. Here we examined whether infants (i) differentially attend to eating and food processing actions compared to control actions and (ii) learn that novel foods are edible after observing eating and food processing actions performed with them. To do this, we tested 12-month-olds’ responses to three different actions: eating, food processing, and a food-irrelevant control. First, we showed infants side-by-side videos of an adult performing two different actions with novel foods across three between-subjects conditions and measured their gaze and pupil dilation with an eye-tracker. Then, we offered infants the novel foods shown in the videos and measured their choices and eating behaviors. Our eye-tracking results indicate that infants differentially attend to eating and food processing actions relative to the control action, and show increased pupil dilation for the control action relative to the two food-relevant actions. When asked to choose which novel food they could eat, infants chose the novel food they saw an actor eat, but only when that eating action was paired with the control action. These findings help identify important mechanisms that increase acceptance of healthy foods early in life.
Spatial-positional association of response codes is modulated by the number of items in working memory
Maëliss Vivion; Alessandro Guida; Stephen Ramanoel; Fabien Mathy
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The SPoARC (spatial-positional association of response codes) effect refers to a mental spatialization of ordinal information in working memory. In the present study, we investigated how spatialization can be modulated by the number of items to be maintained in working memory. In Experiment 1, 139 participants performed a spatialization task with sequences of either two, three, four, or five items using a between-subject design. The results showed a significant spatialization effect for all sequence lengths except for sequences of 5 items. In Experiment 2, 96 participants performed the same spatialization task for sequences of three, four, and five items but using a within-subject design. The results confirmed the absence of a SPoARC effect for sequences of five items, and showed a greater effect for sequences of four items. In addition, we found that participants with lower spans spatialized more sequences of four items. This indicates that the effect is linked to participants' span. Overall, our findings suggest that working memory load is a moderator of the spatialization effect.
Beyond Average Effects: Youth Mental Health Profiles Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic
Lianne P. de Vries; Elske Marra; Imme Rahmon; Tinca JC Polderman; Meike Bartels
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The COVID-19 pandemic was a major stressor that disrupted the daily lives and mental health of youth. Using large population-based samples from the Netherlands in youth aged 12–25 years, we examined variation in youth mental health problems and wellbeing before (N = 14,146, 58% female), during (N = 14,308, 55% female), and after the pandemic (N = 37,797, 62% female), in a cross-sectional design. On average, wellbeing decreased and depressive symptoms increased from before to during the pandemic, with limited recovery afterwards (p < .001). Latent profile analyses identified two mental health profiles before the pandemic, three during the pandemic, and three after the pandemic. Across all periods, most youth showed good mental health (51-86%) and a smaller group poor mental health (8-14%), whereas during and after the pandemic an additional group emerged with moderate wellbeing and depressive symptoms (38-40%). Demographic factors (sex and age) and psychosocial factors (loneliness, self-perceived health, optimism, and stress exposure) differed between profiles in similar and expected ways across periods. In contrast, associations with educational level differed across periods: whereas lower educational level was associated with poorer mental health before the pandemic, this pattern disappeared during the pandemic. Although mean levels of wellbeing and depressive symptoms indicated an overall decline in youth mental health, the profile analyses showed heterogeneity. The largely consistent pattern of risk and resilience factors across periods suggests that well-known correlates of youth mental health remained relevant despite changing circumstances.
Affective Reactivity to Social Media Use and Upward Social Comparisons in the Development of Young Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms
Andrea Irmer (geb. Schmidt); Florian Schmiedek
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Youths differ substantially in how they emotionally respond to daily experiences. Repeated episodes of heightened negative affect in daily life may accumulate over time and increase vulnerability for developing depressive disorders. This study examined whether individual differences in negative affective reactivity to daily experiences (i.e., social media use and upward social comparisons) predict changes in depressive symptoms over time. Using a 14-day diary design with 200 young adolescents (103 female; ages 10–14), we assessed daily social media use, daily upward social comparisons, daily negative affect, and depressive symptoms at pre- and posttest. We employed multilevel structural equation modeling, estimating the within-person coupling between daily social media use (Model 1) or daily upward social comparisons (Model 2) and negative affect and tested whether between-person differences in the strength of this coupling predicted average negative affect and depressive symptom change. Findings revealed that a stronger within-person coupling between upward social comparisons and negative affect, but not between social media use and negative affect, was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms via elevated negative affect across the study. These results highlight the importance of capturing dynamic affective responses to daily comparison experiences when assessing psychological risk in early adolescence.
Can Large Language Models Emulate Human Performance on Educational Assessments?
Xiuxiu Tang; Yikai Lu; John T. Behrens; Ying Cheng
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate synthetic data for research and evaluation, including simulating student responses to educational assessments. However, their validity for emulating authentic human performance remains unclear. This study evaluates whether LLMs can-generate assessment data that preserve the score distribution, subgroup relationships, item functioning, latent-variable model properties, and overall distributional similarity required for valid measurement. Using fourth-grade mathematics data from TIMSS 2011, we compare synthetic responses generated by GPT-4o and GPT-5 under multiple prompting conditions against empirical student responses and theory-driven simulated data from a cognitive diagnostic model (CDM). Across both LLM architectures, LLM-generated data exhibit systematic score inflation and variance compression, with distortions more pronounced for GPT-5. Item easiness is overestimated, item discriminations are attenuated, and alignment with empirical item properties is weak. Adding information on cognitive mastery profiles and personal background modestly increases variability but does not recover human-like psychometric structure. Although the CDM shows adequate fit to some LLM-generated datasets, item parameter recovery remains poor. In contrast, CDM-based simulations closely reproduce human score distributions, item properties, and latent structure. These results suggest that LLM-generated synthetic assessment data deviate systematically from human data, which limits their usefulness for inferences requiring structural fidelity. Caution is therefore warranted when using LLM-generated synthetic data in measurement contexts where variance, item functioning, and latent structure are central.
Within-Individual and Across-Individual Variation in a Large Corpus of Conflict Tasks
Shanglin Yang; Jeffrey N. Rouder
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Are patterns of within-individual variation the same as across-individual variation in cognitive control conflict tasks? We study whether the effect of conflict is additive or multiplicative on response-time distributions both within and across individuals in a large-scale meta-analytic corpus of 64 conflict tasks that spans over 10 million observations. To understand additive and multiplicative effects, we develop a hierarchical statistical model and use quantile regression to robustly estimate parameters. We show that for Stroop effects, the primary source of both within-individual and across-individual variation is parameters that reflect the scale of the distribution indicating a multiplicative locus. The situation is more nuansced for flanker and Simon effects as there are also additive components to the effect within individuals. Even so, the additive component is fairly constant and the main source of across-individual variation in the effect is in scale parameters. These findings highlight two key points: 1. Conflict tasks are not interchangeable and exhibit qualitatively different patterns; 2. The distributional locus of across-individual variation is largely on multiplicative parameters even when within-individual variation has a substantial additive basis.
Social relevance reshapes memory encoding and promotes false memories across sensory modalities
Huan Zhang; Xiquan Qin; Hejun Liu; Ullrich Wagner; Chunming Lu; Gerald Echterhoff
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Memory is shaped not only by the information itself but also by its social relevance. The present study investigated whether, in the absence of misleading information, social relevance can increase false memory by altering encoding processes, and whether this effect depends on sensory modality. Using a social DRM paradigm combined with fNIRS, we manipulated item relevance (self-relevant, partner-relevant, irrelevant) and encoding modality (visual, auditory). Behavioral results showed that partner-relevant items elicited more false memories than irrelevant items, indicating that social relevance alone is sufficient to enhance false memory; moreover, this effect was stronger under auditory than visual encoding. Neural findings revealed that socially relevant items recruited the frontal, temporal, and temporoparietal regions during encoding, suggesting that social relevance may trigger a spontaneous monitoring process. Further analyses indicated that frontal and temporal activity predicted subsequent false memory, whereas temporoparietal activity reflected social orienting rather than directly predicting memory distortion. These results suggest that false memory may arise not only from external misinformation but also from encoding biases triggered by social cues. Overall, this study provides new evidence for understanding how social contexts influence false memory and suggests that social relevance may shape subsequent memory performance by modulating attentional allocation and encoding processes.
From quality of life measurement to dialogical practice: Reframing quality of life assessment in patients with muscular dystrophy
Haruo Fujino
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Assessing quality of life (QoL) is essential in patients with muscular dystrophy where functional improvement is limited. Generic health-related QoL instruments may underestimate patients' well-being by focusing on functional decline, raising questions about how QoL should be understood in those people. The Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual Quality of Life (SEIQoL) offers an individualized approach in which patients identify the life domains that matter most to them and rate their current levels and relative importance in their situations. Changes in domains and weights over time, understood through the concept of response shift, reflect patients' ongoing adaptation rather than mere measurement instability. This paper argues that the clinical value of QoL assessment extends beyond quantification to a dialogical process through which patients and clinicians interpret results together, share values, and shape goals of care.
Practice Effects Confound the Emotion–Performance Link in Self-Regulated Learning: A Reanalysis of Lin et al. (2026)
Chi Zhang
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Lin et al. (*Journal of Educational Psychology*, 2026) proposed a computational model of the dynamic interplay between goal setting, performance, and emotions in self-regulated learning. In a repetitive math task (Study 1), they reported that positive emotions predicted lower subsequent performance, interpreting this via the coasting hypothesis. We argue that this finding may instead reflect a temporal confound: in a repetitive task, performance improves due to practice while emotional engagement declines, producing a spurious negative association when time trends are unmodeled. We reanalyze the Study 1 data by introducing a log(trial) learning curve into the best-fitting model. The negative emotion-to-performance effect is no longer credible in this extended model; instead, a strong practice effect emerges. This confound-based interpretation also parsimoniously accounts for why the emotion-to-performance pathway reversed direction in the original Study 2, where task variety and high stakes attenuate practice-driven time trends. Methodologically, we show that the WAIC criterion used in the original study exhibits poor diagnostic reliability and is theoretically biased for autoregressive panel models. We implement exact leave-future-out cross-validation as an unbiased alternative, under which the original model selection conclusions are no longer supported.
Exploring variation in infants’ preference for infant-directed speech: Evidence from a multi-site study in Africa
Angeline Tsui; Alexandra Carstensen; George Kachergis; Anjie Cao; Amina Abubakar; Mulat Asnake Goshu; Barry Oumar; Dana Basnight-Brown; Dangkat Bentu; Christina Bergmann
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This preference has been linked to infants’ language processing and word learning in experimental settings, and also correlates with later language outcomes. Recently, the cross-cultural consistency of infants’ IDS preference has been confirmed by large-scale, multisite replication studies, but conclusions from these studies were primarily based on participants from North America and Europe. The current study addressed this sampling bias via a large-scale, multisite study of infants (3-15 months) across communities in Africa. We investigated whether participants showed a preference for IDS over ADS, and if so, whether the magnitude of their preference differs from effects documented in other populations of infants. Across six sites (total N = 200), we observed a preference for IDS βIDS vs. ADS = 0.06), suggesting that infants look on average 6% longer on the IDS trials than the ADS trials. There was no significant difference between African infants in this study and a method-matched subsample of infants from prior studies of IDS preference. This study provides new evidence on the generalizability of IDS preference and looking-time methods more broadly, while also highlighting some of the challenges of global big team science.
Creative Engagement as Calibrative Regulation: The 7 Muses and Adaptive Functioning in an Uncertain World
Kyung Hee Kim
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This chapter presents creative engagement as a form of calibrative regulation through which individuals maintain adaptive functioning under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than treating creativity as a specialized ability or a domain-specific outcome, the chapter argues that creative engagement operates as a regulatory system that coordinates top-down and bottom-up processes across cognitive, emotional, social, and physiological domains. Drawing on Wallas (1926), Preparation, Imagination, and Verification are reinterpreted as a dynamic regulatory cycle through which schemas are stabilized, loosened, and reintegrated in response to changing conditions. Within this framework, the 7 Muses—Independence, Curiosity, Playfulness, Confidence, Openness, Interdependence, and Passion—are conceptualized as regulatory processes that shape whether this cycle supports coherence, flexibility, and reorganization or collapses into rigidity or instability. Integrating research across creativity, neuroscience, psychology, and health, the chapter argues that these regulatory processes are implemented through neural rhythms, neuromodulatory systems, and neurochemical mechanisms, helping explain the relationship between creativity, mental health, physical health, and broader well-being. From this perspective, the benefits associated with creative engagement are understood not as isolated effects of activity alone, but as downstream expressions of more fundamental processes of calibrative regulation. In an uncertain and rapidly changing world, creative engagement is therefore framed as a foundational mode of adaptive regulation through which individuals sustain functioning, health, and meaningful participation over time.
Existential Parallelism and Suicidal Desire: A Clinical Framework for Meaning-Based Assessment and Intervention
Élison Silva Santos
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Objective: This paper introduces a socio-existential framework for understanding suicidal desire by integrating Existential Parallelism (EP) (Silva Santos, 2025) with the Five-Step Meaning-Centred (M-5) clinical model (Silva Santos & Antúnez, 2025). Whereas theories such as the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS) emphasize proximal psychological states, this integration proposes a pre-IPTS layer that explains how late-modern social conditions create antecedent vulnerabilities that can precipitate acute suicidal crises. Method: Through conceptual synthesis, this paper integrates classical and contemporary social theory, existential psychology, and clinical suicidology. The EP–M5 model is grounded in empirical findings on meaninglessness, the influence of digital environments on belongingness, experiential avoidance, perfectionism, and the psychological effects of economic and social precarity. Results: EP identifies a distinct mechanism: a societally induced existential vacuum that leads individuals to rely on inauthentic “parallel paths,” such as performative selfhood, ideological rigidity, consumerism, or achievement-based identities. The collapse of these substitute attachments, such as the implosion of a digital persona or failure of a productivity-based self, functions as an event-based catalyst for suicidal desire. These collapse events rapidly intensify thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and psychache, aligning with ideation-to-action frameworks and contemporary clinical observations. Conclusion: The EP–M5 integrated model contributes a clinically actionable perspective by situating suicidal desire within a broader crisis of meaning. It supports a meaning-centered, process-based approach to assessment and intervention, guiding clinicians to identify collapsed life projects, fragile identity structures, and existential disruptions that may underlie acute suicidal crises. This framework offers new targets for clinical treatment, empirical evaluation, and prevention.
From Masculine Norm Strain to Generative Masculinity: A Motivational Model of Identity Stability in Boys and Men
Élison Silva Santos
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Research in the psychology of men and masculinities consistently links conformity to restrictive masculine norms with emotional suppression, loneliness, reduced help-seeking, and relational aggression. Masculinity threat and discrepancy stress models further suggest that when men perceive a gap between internalized gender norms and lived experience, identity threat may activate compensatory responses aimed at restoring masculine status. Digital environments may intensify these processes by amplifying performance-based comparison, particularly around muscularity, dominance, and visibility. Integrating scholarship on masculine norm conformity, gender role strain, discrepancy stress, minority stress, body image, and relational power, this conceptual paper proposes that many contemporary expressions of masculine distress may reflect forms of fragile identity architecture, masculine identities organized primarily around external validation and comparative status. In response, we introduce the construct of generative masculinity: an identity configuration grounded in responsibility, contribution, and relational stewardship rather than dominance or self-expansion. Anchored in developmental and existential perspectives while situated within masculinity research, generative masculinity is proposed as a stabilizing orientation that preserves agency while reducing threat sensitivity and discrepancy-based reactivity. Implications are discussed for advancing theory, intersectional research, and clinical practice aimed at promoting psychological resilience and relational integration among boys and men.
Artificial Intelligence as a Psychotherapeutic Tool: Competency Delegation, Ethical Boundaries, and the Irreducible Human Element
Élison Silva Santos
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The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into psychological practice has introduced new opportunities for assessment, intervention, and decision support, while simultaneously raising critical ethical and professional concerns. This paper examines the role of AI as a psychotherapeutic tool through the lens of competency delegation, arguing that the responsible integration of AI in psychotherapy depends on clearly delineating which psychological functions can be ethically automated and which remain irreducibly human. Drawing on contemporary research in AI-assisted mental health interventions, clinical decision-support systems, and psychological assessment, the paper identifies domains in which AI can enhance efficiency, scalability, and personalization, such as data-driven assessment, psychoeducation, and structured interventions. At the same time, it critically analyzes the limits of AI in psychotherapy, emphasizing the centrality of the therapeutic alliance, embodied empathy, and relational dynamics as core elements that cannot be replicated by non-conscious systems. The paper argues that while AI may simulate aspects of interpersonal interaction, it lacks the capacity for genuine emotional presence, co-regulation, and intersubjective engagement. These limitations establish clear ethical boundaries for the delegation of psychological competencies. Building on this analysis, the study proposes a framework for ethical integration grounded in principles of human oversight, transparency, fairness, and alignment with human values. It highlights the role of professional organizations in establishing guidelines for competency delegation, certification of AI tools, and the promotion of digital literacy among psychologists. Ultimately, the paper advances a model of human–AI collaboration in psychotherapy that preserves the irreducible human elements of care while leveraging technological innovation to expand access and enhance clinical practice.
Cognitive and Existential Dimensions of Suicidal Ideation: A Rorschach and Logotherapy Assessment
Élison Silva Santos; Andrés Eduardo Aguirre Antúnez; Thaís Cristina Marques-Reis; Alfredo Mendes Chaves
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This study explores the intersection between cognitive disorganization, existential despair, and suicidal ideation through the application of the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R-PAS) and the principles of Logotherapy. By analyzing 16 Rorschach protocols from university students, the research identifies heightened cognitive disorganization (e.g., WSumCog, Ell-3) and existential despair (e.g., SC-Comp) among participants with suicidal ideation. These findings underscore the need for targeted interventions that address both cognitive and existential dimensions of mental health. The analysis highlights five clinical steps for suicide prevention: Differentiated Reception, Listening to the Voice of Conscience, Expanding Worldview, Calibrating Tension, and Reclaiming Direction. For instance, a Group 2 participant diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder exhibited high cognitive disorganization (WSumCog = 12.5) and elevated MOR responses, reflecting profound existential despair. In contrast, a Group 1 participant displayed cognitive flexibility (CT = 5) and existential clarity, which facilitated alternative solutions to their challenges. Integrating R-PAS findings with Logotherapy principles provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and intervening in suicidal ideation.
Moralization by Analogy: A Novel Perspective on Moral Change
Julie Maria Ejby Pedersen; Matti Wilks; Leonidas A. A. Doumas; Adam Moore
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Moral feelings and beliefs are powerful drivers of behavior. While analogies are commonly invoked to induce moral sentiment, analogical reasoning has not been empirically tested as a mechanism for moralization. Across two studies (N=292, N=234), we investigated whether analogical reasoning facilitated moralization of neutral target actions by transferring moral significance from moralized source actions. Participants judged neutral target actions paired with either analogous immoral source actions or unrelated immoral actions (control). Target actions were judged as more immoral in the analogy condition compared to the control, but only when the source and target were considered comparable (i.e., mappable relations), and the source was judged as highly immoral. These factors interacted synergistically, consistent with analogical transfer: moral significance transferred to targets when relational mappings supported the inference. However, poorly-perceived analogies backfired, producing less moralization than controls. These findings provide novel evidence for analogical reasoning as a mechanism for moralization.
A Novel Five-Step Clinical Framework for Suicide Prevention
Élison Silva Santos; Andrés Eduardo Aguirre Antúnez
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This paper introduces a novel, five-step clinical framework for suicide prevention that integrates meaning-centered principles with contemporary evidence-based strategies. Drawing from existential psychotherapy and recent empirical research, the framework emphasizes authentic therapeutic relationships, identification of core values and personal responsibilities, expansion of perspectives, management of existential tension, and the rediscovery of purpose and agency. Each step is designed to guide clinicians through a compassionate, structured, and empirically supported process that supports patients in rediscovering their sense of meaning and purpose, thereby fostering a renewed will to live. The proposed framework aligns with contemporary models such as the Integrated Motivational-Volitional Model and the Three-Step Theory, which highlight factors like entrapment, hopelessness, and disconnection as key drivers of suicidal ideation. By combining theoretical insights with practical tools, this framework offers clinicians a flexible and comprehensive approach that can complement existing suicide prevention models. The integration of existential concerns with evidence-based strategies holds promise for a more holistic and sustainable approach to suicide prevention. Further empirical validation through randomized controlled trials is recommended to assess its efficacy across diverse populations.
Existential Parallelism: A Theoretical Integration for Understanding a Modern Crisis of Meaning
Élison Silva Santos
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This paper introduces Existential Parallelism, a work of theoretical integration designed to provide a new synthesis for understanding the proliferation of inauthentic living in late modernity. We argue that contemporary structural conditions, characterized by neoliberal rationality and the cultural burden of perpetual self-construction, foster a widespread "existential vacuum." Theorized as a systemic societal condition, this vacuum channels individuals toward "substitute attachments”, market-driven replacements for authentic sources of meaning, such as genuine community and value-based action. These substitutes (e.g., consumerism, ideological rigidity) simulate purpose while deepening alienation. We posit that cognitive biases function as crucial stabilizing mechanisms, sustaining the parallel life paths that mimic authenticity but ultimately diverge from it. By integrating knowledge from classical social theory (including the Frankfurt School), existential philosophy, and cognitive science, this framework reinterprets crises like political polarization and burnout as predictable outcomes of a social order that commodifies meaning. This paper contributes to a more universal social science not only by offering a synthesized model for critique but also by outlining potential pathways toward authenticity, thus addressing both the diagnosis of and potential remedies for this contemporary crisis of meaning.
Continuous developmental changes in word recognition support language learning across early childhood
Michael C. Frank; Virginia A. Marchman; Claire Augusta Bergey; Veronica Boyce; Mika Braginsky; George Kachergis; Jess Mankewitz; Stephan Meylan; Ben Prystawski; Nilam Ram
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Being a fluent language user involves recognizing words as they unfold in time. How does this skill develop over the course of early childhood? And how does facility in word recognition relate to the growth of vocabulary knowledge? We address these questions using data from Peekbank, an open database of experiments measuring children's eye movements during early word recognition. In an observational study of 26 datasets from over 2,500 children ages 6 months -- 6 years, we show that word recognition becomes faster, more accurate, and less variable across development, consistent with a process of skill learning. Factor analysis reveals covariation of word recognition speed and accuracy with children's vocabulary size in cross-sectional analysis. Further, across a range of longitudinal models, speed, accuracy, and vocabulary were coupled. Children with overall faster word recognition tended to show faster vocabulary growth, though developmental growth in word recognition skill was not specifically associated with growth in vocabulary. Together, these findings support the view that word recognition is a skill that develops gradually across early childhood and that this skill is deeply intertwined with early language learning.
The relationship between cognitive abilities and depression in the context of old age: Testing for measurement invariance using local structural equation modeling
Stanisław Konrad Czerwiński; Paweł Andrzej Atroszko; Roman Konarski
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Recent work revealed that measures of mental health might lack measurement invariance across the levels of cognitive abilities. This finding raises concerns for studies on both cognition and mental health, as measurement invariance is a fundamental requirement for meaningful comparisons of variables across a given characteristic. The aim of this study was to test the measurement invariance of the Center for Epidemiological Studies – Depression (CES-D) scale across four cognitive abilities: crystallized knowledge, quantitative reasoning, verbal fluency, and episodic memory. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) were used. The sample analyzed consisted of 19,475 participants aged 50 years or older. The results showed that CES-D lacked measurement invariance across all four cognitive abilities measured. A prominent pattern emerged, with unstandardized item thresholds increasing as cognitive abilities increased. The CES-D scores of individuals at different levels of cognitive abilities are not comparable, which may lead not only to incorrect inferences about the relationship between cognitive abilities and CES-D scores but also affects any other research using CES-D where the impact of cognitive abilities on the scales' observed scores is uncontrolled for. The increase in thresholds might suggest that individuals with higher cognitive abilities are more likely to mask their symptoms.
Police use of force promotes protester violence: the mediating role of social identity and perceived procedural injustice in the context of police-protester relationships
Monica M Gerber; Joaquín Bahamondes; Danny Osborne
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In recent decades, the world has witnessed numerous violent demonstrations in which some protesters use violence to achieve their goals, and some police officers use violence to silence protesters. Drawing on the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) and procedural justice theory, we argue that police use of force increases activists’ identification with radical protesters and perceptions of procedural injustice. In turn, identification with radical protesters and procedural injustice should foster support for protester violence. We tested these hypotheses using three waves of longitudinal panel data (n = 1,514) from Chile collected after the 2019 Social Outbreak, which saw violence from both protesters and police. In our data, 404 protesters in wave 1 (31.69% of protesters) reported experiencing police repression, which allows us to examine its effect on identification with radical protesters, perceived procedural injustice, and the justification of violent collective action. Consistent with the ESIM, results reveal a significant positive correlation between experiencing police violence and identification with radical protesters across waves. In turn, identification with radical protesters correlated positively with the justification of protester violence. The effect of police violence on procedural injustice was, however, less clear. Although experiencing police repression did not directly impact perceptions of procedural injustice, it did so indirectly via identification with violent protesters. Procedural injustice also had a positive effect on the justification of protester violence. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results on the role of police in the escalation of violence and for promoting peaceful methods of protest.
FERRAMENTAS EDUCATIVAS PARA O ACOMPANHAMENTO DO NEURODESENVOLVIMENTO INFANTIL: UM RELATO DE EXPERIÊNCIA
Cassiele Santos de Oliveira; Giovanna Cardoso Lobo; Luana Eduarda Neves de Andrade
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Child development is a dynamic and multifactorial process influenced by biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors, requiring articulated action between family, school, and health services. In this context, educational resources emerge as relevant strategies to support developmental monitoring while avoiding both neglect and premature pathologization. Objective: To report the academic experience of developing an educational booklet aimed at supporting child development monitoring and the responsible identification of warning signs related to possible developmental delays. Method: This is a qualitative experience report developed by undergraduate Psychology students within the course Psychopathological Processes. The booklet was produced through a theoretical review of scientific literature and official public policy documents, followed by the didactic adaptation of technical concepts into accessible language for parents and educators. Results: The material was organized by age groups and included developmental milestones, warning signs, and practical guidance, functioning as an educational technology that mediates communication between families, schools, and health services. Conclusion: The experience demonstrated that the development of educational tools contributes to the promotion of child development, strengthens inclusive educational practices, and supports an ethical, contextualized, and preventive approach to developmental monitoring.
Identity Collapse as a Catalyst of Acute Suicidal Desire: An Existential Parallelism Framework for Clinical Assessment
Élison Silva Santos
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This Practice and Policy Insight proposes a clinically usable framework for understanding acute suicidal desire as a crisis of identity coherence and meaning. Building on Existential Parallelism and meaning-centered clinical work, the model highlights how patients may rely on fragile “parallel paths” of selfhood, such as performative digital identity, ideological certainty, consumerist striving, or achievement-based worth, to stabilize underlying emptiness, disconnection, or purposelessness. When a central identity investment collapses through loss, humiliation, disillusionment, or failure, the resulting rupture can rapidly intensify psychache and amplify key proximal states in suicidology, including thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness. Rather than replacing established theories, the framework reframes these proximal states within a process of identity destabilization and existential disruption that may help clinicians identify “collapse events,” map vulnerable life projects, and target meaning reconstruction. Practical implications include assessment attention to contingent self-worth structures, signals of narrowing future orientation after rupture, and interventions that restore agency by re-anchoring commitments in durable values and relational connection.
Facilitating Collective Flow in Team Sports: An Evidence-Informed Five-Step Framework
Élison Silva Santos
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Flow is a psychological state characterized by deep task absorption, efficient attention, and coordinated action during performance. Although extensively studied at the individual level, practitioners often lack clear guidance on how to facilitate flow within interdependent team environments. This paper presents an evidence-informed, applied five-step framework for structuring conditions associated with collective flow in sport. The framework, Balance (challenge–skill calibration), Clarity (shared task representation), Feedback (perception–action coupling), Connection (relational synchrony), and Continuity (attentional and emotional regulation), integrates established principles from flow theory, team cognition, and sport psychology into a coherent model for practice. Drawing on existing empirical and theoretical literature, the paper clarifies how these components function at both individual and team levels to support coordinated, real-time engagement. Practical examples from team sport contexts illustrate how the framework can be implemented through training design, communication strategies, and competition routines. Rather than proposing a new intervention, the framework organizes well-supported mechanisms into a structured approach aimed at increasing the likelihood of collective flow. Implications for practitioners and directions for future research are discussed.
Motivational content features improve tailoring of anti-smoking advertisements
Avenel Justine; Elsa Bidant; Anne Pasquereau; Romain Guignard; Viêt Naguyen-Thanh; Coralie Chevallier; Daniel Nettle; Edgar Dubourg
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Mass communication campaigns are among the most effective population-level tobacco control policies, yet their impact varies widely across individuals, suggesting substantial scope for optimization. Message tailoring is known to increase persuasion, but a central question remains unresolved: which recipient characteristics should be used for tailoring, which message features matter most, and how should they be matched? In a large pre-registered study, 2,622 daily smokers in France viewed three anti-smoking video advertisements randomly drawn from a library of 38 advertisements (N = 7,866 ad evaluations). Advertisements were independently coded for two complementary dimensions of content: (i) 19 arguments commonly used in tobacco prevention and (ii) 17 motivational content features defined as cues that activate motivational systems (e.g., disgust or parental care). We examined which arguments and content features most effectively increased intention to quit smoking and whether these effects differed depending on individuals’ personality traits or perceived financial situation. Analyses relied on repeated cross-validated LASSO with stability selection and post-LASSO mixed-effects estimation. The results are consistent with individual-level heterogeneity, with multiple content features and arguments showing interactions with personality traits and perceived financial situation. Model comparison further indicated that tailoring motivational content features to both personality and perceived financial situation provided the best predictive account of intention change. These findings suggest that persuasive impact in tobacco prevention depends substantially on person-specific alignment between motivational cues and recipient profiles, offering a framework for more precise and scalable campaign design.
Falling in Love with AI? The Formation, Development, and Impacts of Human-AI Romantic Relationships among Young Adult Women
Fangfang Tian; Huiguang Ren; Fanlong Wang; Xiaoran Sun; Yunqi Wang; Chuqi Chen; Junsheng Liu; Biao Sang
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Human-AI romantic relationships are becoming increasingly common. However, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding about how these relationships initiate and evolve. Therefore, this study combines semi-structured interviews with a community-based participatory approach to examine the motivations, developmental stages, real-life impacts, and distinctive perspectives in young adult women’s romantic relationships with AI (e.g., ChatGPT). Twenty-five women (Mage = 22.92, SD = 2.96) participated in semi-structured interviews and later provided feedback on preliminary analyses. Results revealed that relationship formation arises from the intersection of users’ needs and AI’s affordances, mainly progressing through four stages: exploration, cultivation, affirmation, and potential crisis. Each stage involves dynamics distinct from human-human romance, such as unique motivational patterns, power asymmetries, and deliberate efforts to “train” the AI partner. Overall, participants felt the benefits of romantic relationships with AI outweighed the drawbacks. Community feedback highlighted two under-recognized themes: the appeal of AI’s non-gendered nature, which offers women alternatives to traditional gender dynamics and low-risk sexual identity exploration; and the notion of “true AI lovers,” who view AI’s essence as a genuine romantic partner. This study provides nuanced insights into young adult women’s romantic experiences with AI, with participant feedback enriching understanding of this emerging phenomenon.
Resolving the Attentional Bottleneck: Cross-Modal Representational Alignment Reveals Late-Stage Working Memory Consolidation
Zilin Li; Tianle Jiang; Weiwei Xu; Xuanqi Zhao
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The attentional blink reveals the severe capacity limits of conscious human processing, yet whether this bottleneck arises from early perceptual decay or late-stage consolidation failure remains highly debated. To disentangle these psychological stages, the present study employed causally silenced cross-modal representational similarity analysis (EEG-fMRI RSA) to trace the fine-grained spatiotemporal information flow of target processing. Our results revealed a striking spatiotemporal double dissociation: although the early primary visual cortex successfully extracted the physical features of the targets, a stable cross-modal psychological representation did not emerge until 414 ms post-stimulus, an effect entirely dominated by the right parieto-frontal network. This finding provides decisive spatiotemporal evidence that the attentional bottleneck stems not from a failure of perceptual extraction, but from restricted late-stage working memory consolidation. By pinpointing the critical temporal threshold and the gating network for conscious access, this study offers robust cross-modal support for the Global Workspace Theory.
Expressivity Is Not Learnability in Constrained Cognitive Systems
Ian S. Howard
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Cognitive systems are often evaluated in terms of representational or expressive capacity, yet robust learning depends on whether transformations can be identified, stabilized, and reused under delay, noise, and partial observability. Information theory characterizes what can be represented or transmitted, but not what can be stably transformed under physical constraints. We argue that standard assumptions about learnability become problematic once delay, noise, and partial observability are treated as structural constraints rather than nuisances. We develop a unified framework in which learnability depends not only on representational structure but also on structural conditions for observability and identifiability, with stability treated as a distinct closed-loop constraint. This framework is directly relevant to psychological theories of motor learning, perception, and cognitive control, in which successful behavior depends on learning transformations that remain inferable and stable under real-world conditions. We further argue that some highly expressive transformation classes can be structurally under-constrained, making task-relevant structure difficult to infer and increasing the risk of brittle solutions. Some representations may therefore be not merely difficult to learn, but effectively unlearnable from the signals available under delay, noise, partial observability, and hidden-variable coupling. These limits do not arise solely from failures of optimization, but from feasibility constraints on inference in closed-loop systems. Viewing learned transformations as constrained functional constructs helps clarify poor generalization, instability, and context specificity in motor and cognitive learning, and provides principled guidance for interpreting behavioral and computational results.
S-JAFFE = JAFFE: A Note on Dataset Rebranding and Misattribution
Michael J Lyons
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This note clarifies that the entity referred to in parts of the label-distribution-learning (LDL) literature as S-JAFFE is not distinct from JAFFE, the Japanese Female Facial Expression dataset. It does not introduce substantively new images or new primary annotations beyond those already contained in the original JAFFE resource; rather, it is a task-specific reformulation of JAFFE based on information already present in the original dataset (Geng, 2016; Lyons et al., 1998). We argue that use of the label S-JAFFE has contributed to citation drift and scholarly misattribution by encouraging later authors to treat a derived representation as a distinct dataset (for example, Xu et al., 2019). To reduce further credit displacement, future work should discontinue the label S-JAFFE, refer instead to JAFFE, and cite the original JAFFE dataset according to the dataset terms of use.
Working memory control and creative cognition: the mediating role of associative memory retrieval.
James Lloyd-Cox; Alan Pickering; Joydeep Bhattacharya
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Creative cognition depends on the ability to regulate and manipulate information in working memory (WM). Yet, empirical findings on the relationship between WM control and creative cognition are inconsistent. In this exploratory study (N = 200), we examined how distinct facets of WM control – inhibition, updating, shifting and WM capacity – relate to creative and associative cognition, including divergent and convergent thinking, verbal fluency, and creative achievement. Automated measures of semantic distance were applied to quantify creative quality, flexibility, and the breadth of retrieval processes in creative and associative tasks. WM updating and capacity were positively correlated and both predicted convergent thinking and verbal fluency, but not divergent thinking. Moreover, the relationship between convergent thinking and WM updating/capacity was fully mediated by verbal fluency, and not moderated by trait openness. Self-report measures of WM control explained variance in convergent thinking beyond lab-based measures. No other significant relationships were found between WM control and creative or associative measures. Findings suggest that specific components of WM control support creative cognition via associative retrieval processes, while broader claims about the role of WM control in creative cognition require caution. The study emphasizes the importance of adopting multi-method approaches when investigating creative cognition.
Ethics in Church-Based Research
David Robert Dunaetz
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Both biblical principles and the standards used in the social sciences help researchers understand how to ensure their research is ethical and how to avoid the temptations associated with conducting research. Using a framework derived from Ephesians 4:25-28, these principles include truthfulness, avoidance of harm, and integrity through hard work. Ethical violations include data fabrication and falsification, questionable research practices, inaccurate references, duplicate publication, coercion of participants, and plagiarism. Special care must be taken to prevent harm to participants, either directly or indirectly. Researchers studying church-based phenomena also need to be aware of the heuristics and biases that can weaken the quality of their research.
Parallel Worlds of Recognition: Identity, Attention Economies, and Affective Polarization in Digital Communication
Élison Silva Santos
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The expansion of digitally mediated communication has transformed how individuals construct identity, negotiate recognition, and interpret social reality. Social media platforms are frequently associated with anxiety, polarization, misinformation, and the fragmentation of public discourse, yet existing explanations often emphasize either technological design features or individual psychological vulnerabilities in isolation. This article offers a cultural–theoretical framework for understanding these developments by examining how platform-based communication environments reshape the conditions of meaning-making and social recognition. Drawing on the concept of Existential Parallelism (EP), the analysis argues that digitally mediated communication intensifies structural dynamics characteristic of late modernity, including the weakening of shared interpretive frameworks and increased pressures of identity construction. Within attention-driven platform economies, emotionally activating content and performative identity signaling are systematically amplified, shaping patterns of visibility, recognition, and belonging. These dynamics contribute to the emergence of curated interpretive micro-worlds in which individuals stabilize identity through selective informational environments while broader symbolic coordination becomes more fragile. By integrating research on attention economies, social comparison, and affective polarization, the article situates digital communication within wider processes of symbolic competition and commodification. It proposes that contemporary communication infrastructures do not simply produce fragmentation but amplify existing tensions between recognition, belonging, and identity formation in digitally networked societies.
Generative Democracy: Civic Friendship and the Relational Foundations of Democratic Resilience
Élison Silva Santos
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Contemporary democracies are increasingly characterized by affective polarization, declining civic trust, and the fragmentation of shared political reality. While many explanations focus on institutional failures, media environments, or ideological disagreement, this article argues that democratic instability also reflects deeper psychological and relational dynamics shaping how citizens interpret political life and relate to one another. Drawing on political psychology, democratic theory, cooperation research, and existential psychology, the article introduces the concept of existential parallelism to describe how identity-driven meaning-making processes can fragment shared interpretive frameworks in polarized societies. Building on this analysis, the article develops the framework of generative democracy, which conceptualizes democratic participation not primarily as competition for political power but as civic engagement oriented toward sustaining the cooperative foundations of political community. Integrating insights from cooperation science and moral psychology, the analysis emphasizes the role of shared narratives, reciprocal norms, and relational trust in maintaining democratic stability. The concept of philocracy, derived from the classical idea of civic friendship (philia), is proposed as the relational infrastructure that enables democratic societies to sustain cooperation across disagreement. By situating these ideas within contemporary research on political identity, polarization, and democratic resilience, the article advances a relational and psychological perspective on democratic life and outlines new directions for research on the social and psychological foundations of democratic coexistence.
Growing Apart: Scalp Hair, Stigma, and the Cultural Default Signaling Hypothesis in Recruitment Settings
Tosen Nwadei; Arielle N. Lewis; Eden King
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We examine how Black and non-Black women in recruitment settings may show diverging responses to organizational signals for members to assimilate via their choice of hairstyles. Consistent with theories of identity threat, we expect Black women to show lower organizational attractiveness amidst such signals due to stigmatization. For non-Black women, in contrast to research suggesting they should be deterred by norms that signal identity threat for Black women, we propose the cultural default signaling hypothesis and argue that some forms of stigmatization at work may be accepted by members of majoritized groups. Thus, non-Black women may be undeterred by prospective employers with appearance norms relating to hairstyles, despite the possible stigmatization they anticipate because of these expectations. We test these competing predictions in our investigation (N = 4,534) and find considerable support for the cultural default signaling hypothesis. Our research contributes to work on identity threat and organizational attraction by demonstrating how majority groups can treat some signals of stigmatization during recruitment as inconsequential concerning the appeal of prospective employers.
Post-resettlement context matters: a qualitative study of refugee parents’ responses to child trauma in low-resource settings
Mohsen Rajabi; Rachel Calam; Fatemeh Bagherifard; Victoria Williamson; Fatemeh Ashrafi; Anke Karl; Sarah Halligan
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Background: Despite evidence that post-resettlement socio-environmental factors affect parenting, refugee parents’ experiences of meeting children’s posttrauma needs in resource-poor settings remain severely underexplored. Objective: This study aimed to explore parental understanding of child distress, caregiving responses, and support seeking in the context of displacement and resource limitations in Iran, one of the world’s largest refugee-hosting countries. Methods: Thirty refugee parents were recruited from deprived communities in Iran. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Parents were mainly from Afghanistan, most were illiterate, and all reported at least moderate PTSD symptoms. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Findings showed that parents lacked a basic understanding of the emotional consequences of trauma and associated psychological difficulties. Parents described extreme uncertainty about how to respond to their child’s needs after arrival, as well as limited insight into those needs, coupled with a severely limited capacity to support their children and lack of access to wider resources. Post-resettlement stressors appeared to trigger harsher, reactive parenting in the post-migration context relative to pre-migration parenting. Material deprivation also shaped parent–child interactions: many children withheld trauma-related mental or physical consequences to avoid healthcare costs, and some adopted parenting-like roles to support their caregivers. Finally, parents’ priorities were wholly focused on material needs essential for their children’s basic survival, rather than psychosocial support. Conclusion: Our findings provide novel insight into the profound influence that markedly low-mental health literacy, material deprivation, and limited internal and external resources have on how parents understand and respond to their child’s post-trauma needs in low-resource post-resettlement settings. Interventions that support parents to build mental health literacy and resources to respond to their child’s needs are indicated.
Testing Behavior Dynamic Models to Predict Choice in a Non-Stationary Two-Choice Foraging Environment
David J. Cox
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Between the 1970s-1990s, researchers proposed several dynamic models of choice to explain how organisms adjust responding under changing contingencies (e.g., melioration, kinetic model, behavioral momentum, hill-climbing). Although widely debated, these models were rarely tested against one another on the same dataset, and alternative models from related sciences similarly predict individual choice based on contact with reinforcement. The present study revisits this literature by fitting 22 models to trial-level choice data from 60 humans completing a four-phase, non-stationary, two-option foraging task with regime shifts, contingency reversals, and perturbation probes. Models included three baseline heuristics, six historical models, three reinforcement-learning (RL) models, three hidden Markov models (HMMs), three foraging models, and four empirical dynamical models (EDM). Using AIC, HMMs with 3-4 latent states performed best (mean AIC = −2,010 to −4,183) followed by RL (≈ 1,040), historical models (≈ 1,052), then foraging models (≈1,216). Next-response predictive accuracy showed a similar pattern: HMMs performed best (≈ .88), followed by EDM (.74), RL (.69), historical (.66), foraging (.66) and baseline models (.53). Overall, state-switching architectures may better describe and predict choice in dynamic contexts where steady-state behavior is unlikely to emerge. Regardless, much work remains to predict response-by-response behavior dynamics across varying environmental contexts.
Beaten by Chimpanzees or by the Task? Rethinking Visuospatial Memory Comparisons
Nadine Charanek; Olessia Jouravlev
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Humans often perform worse than chimpanzees in rapid visuospatial memory tasks, which has been interpreted as evidence for lower human working memory (WM) capacity. However, these tasks also impose strong time pressure and require remembering both locations and order, which may make them especially difficult for humans. We tested how presentation mode (sequential vs. simultaneous), encoding time, and memory load affect performance in a visuospatial WM task previously tested with chimpanzees. Two hundred ninety participants completed adaptive tasks in which digits were presented either one at a time with increasing load or all at once with decreasing display duration. Using beta-binomial mixed-effects models and survival analysis, we found that longer encoding time improved accuracy, but this benefit depended on presentation mode. Sequential presentation supported performance across increasing difficulty, whereas simultaneous presentation led to rapid task failure. Performance declined sharply beyond about five to six items. These results suggest that poorer human performance in these tasks reflects task structure and time pressure rather than fundamentally lower visuospatial WM capacity.
A Systematic Review of Nudging in the Mental Health Contexts - Progress, Findings, and Ways Forward
Siu Kit Yeung; Winnie W. S. Mak; Gabriel M.H. Cheung; Ching Wan Li; Hoi Ching Yu; Yuxuan Zheng
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Nudges, defined as decisional context designs such as information presentation and structure (Münscher et al., 2016), are increasingly utilized to encourage mental health behaviors. We conducted a preregistered (OSF preregistration) systematic review, including 25 studies predominantly employing between-subject framing experiments, involving mainly adult participants from Western regions, and mostly on help-seeking and self-care. Findings on norm nudging and framing (self-other and positive-negative) have been mixed with evidence of positive-framing advantage in encouraging help-seeking (5 studies: g = 0.17, p < .001). Limited studies on default nudge (1 study), decoy nudge (3 studies), and reminder nudge (2 studies) found mostly beneficial effects. We provided suggestions and concrete recommendations to advance mental health nudging research, including a call for more theory-driven research with potential mediating and moderating measures, sampling of diverse populations in mental health conditions, age, cultural backgrounds. More research on tailored nudges and comparison between different nudges are also encouraged. Finally, studies with more consequential outcome variables (e.g. mental health, longer term behaviors), and monitoring and addressing risks of adverse effects, will be worthwhile. Keywords: Nudges, Decision-Making, Mental Health, Self-care, Help-seeking, Systematic Review
Validity is a Theoretical Problem: A Computational Psychometrics Perspective on How to Measure Cognition
Gidon T. Frischkorn; Ricardo Rebmann; Klaus Oberauer
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Psychometric methods alone cannot determine what cognitive tasks measure. We argue that validity – whether behavioral indicators reflect the cognitive processes they are intended to measure – is fundamentally a theoretical problem. Traditional validation through convergent and discriminant correlations is circular when constructs are defined through the same correlational patterns used to validate them. Computational cognitive models can break this circularity by specifying how cognitive processes generate behavior, allowing validity to be assessed independently for each indicator through simulation. We demonstrate this framework using two models of conflict processing – the Diffusion Model for Conflict (DMC) and the Shrinking Spotlight model (SSP) – applied to tasks commonly used to measure attention control. Simulations reveal four measurement phenomena invisible to correlational validation: (1) process impurity, where many behavioral indicators conflate multiple cognitive processes; (2) differential validity, where RT difference scores uniquely reflect attention-control parameters under both models; (3) reliability-validity dissociations, where highly reliable mean scores show weaker validity for attention control than less reliable difference scores; and (4) correlation transfer failure, where process-level correlations across tasks transfer to indicator-level correlations only to the extent that indicators validly reflect the correlated parameters. These phenomena emerge consistently from both models despite different processing assumptions. Our work shows that advancing validity requires explicit theories of how cognition generates behavior, not more sophisticated psychometric methods or models.
Existential Positive Psychology as an integrative evidence-based paradigm: Theory, advances, and future directions
David F. Carreno; Richard Cowden; Lilian C. J. Wong; Miguel Romero-Farina; Timothy T. F. Yu; Nikolett Eisenbeck
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In memory of the recent passing of Prof. Paul T. P. Wong, this article synthesizes the current state of existential positive psychology as part of his profound legacy in the field of psychology. The primary aim is to present existential positive psychology as a unique evidence-based paradigm of vital relevance to today’s global challenges. To this end, the paper reconceptualizes the entire paradigm and its six foundational pillars, while reviewing the existing body of research supporting their significance for well-being. These pillars are: 1) life is viewed through a realistic existential lens that integrates both life’s bright and dark aspects; 2) personal suffering is approached with a positive mindset that accepts and makes meaning of vulnerability; 3) dialectical coping is crucial for resilience and flourishing; 4) meaning in life is central to well-being amid adversity; 5) meaning in life is inherently relational and grounded in self-transcendence; and 6) existential well-being takes the form of mature happiness and culminates in authentic flourishing and fructification (a novel construct proposed in this paper). These pillars capture the fundamental assumptions that underpin an existential positive psychology approach to human nature, theory, principles, models, and methodology. The article further proposes an integrative process model and outlines promising future directions for this emerging psychological paradigm. With its integrative and cross-cultural foundation, existential positive psychology provides a unifying framework for guiding scientific inquiry across psychology and the broader field of human flourishing.
Metabolic Constraints and the Limits of Cognitive Modularity
David Moreau; Kristina Wiebels
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Building on Haueis and Colaço, we argue that metabolic considerations should also constrain cognitive architecture. Globally shared and dynamic resources make strong modularity difficult to justify. Rather than fixed features, modules may reflect local optima within a metabolically constrained landscape—stable under typical conditions but liable to break down under perturbation. Metabolic perturbations thus provide diagnostic tools for architectural assumptions.
Relational Well-Being Predicts Positive First Impressions More Strongly Than Affective Well-Being
Firdaus Moner; Louis Tay; Daniel DongWon Oh
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Does happiness make us see others more positively? Although classical research suggests yes, recent high-powered studies indicate otherwise. We propose that these inconsistencies may stem from conflating different dimensions of well-being. In two studies with American samples (Study 1: n = 196; Study 2: n = 250, preregistered), participants rated faces on multiple traits and completed comprehensive well-being assessments. Principal component analysis revealed two factors: Affective Well-Being (AWB; emotions, vitality, arousal) and Relational Well-Being (RWB; community, self-worth, belonging). Across analytical approaches, RWB consistently predicted more positive impressions of others with superior predictive power, whereas AWB showed weak to null effects. The pattern of results replicated using validated affective versus relational subscales from the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving. Despite the correlational design, our consistent findings highlight RWB as a key predictor of person perception, suggesting the classic “feel good, judge favourably” effect may reflect stable relational schemas shaping perceptions of others.
Reassessing Project 100,000: Context and Lessons – A Research Note
Russell T. Warne
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Between October 1, 1966, and December 31, 1971, a total of 341,127 men joined the military under lowered physical (9%) or mental test standards (91%). Called Project 100,000, this initiative was controversial from its first announcement and has been the subject of commentary for over 50 years. In various discussions, Project 100,000 has been portrayed as a cynical method of meeting military needs without drafting middle-class youth, a dangerous experiment that harmed vulnerable people, and a successful employment program. This literature review explores the context and empirical research on Project 100,000. The conclusion is that Project 100,000 met some of its creators’ goals and fell short of others. Though it ended over half a century ago, Project 100,000 still provides valuable historical, theoretical, scientific, and societal lessons for both civilian and military leaders.
Cognitive and Affective Predictors of Sharing Intentions on Social Media: The Role of Anxiety, Social Benefits, and Risks
Isabelle Freiling; Anja Stevic
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Sharing information and participating in discussions on social media involves social risks and benefits. It is unclear whether those risk and benefit perceptions predict sharing intentions. Previous research on sharing news has shown emotions like anxiety to predict sharing intentions, but it remains unclear whether this also applies beyond sharing news. This study builds on the Appraisal Tendency Framework and the social calculus perspective. Using an online experiment (N = 523), with a 2 (emotional state: anxiety vs. relaxation) by 3 (consequences: social benefits vs. social risks vs. none) design, this study examines cognitive (risks, benefits) and affective (anxiety) predictors of sharing intentions on gun laws. Results show that benefit perceptions and anxiety positively predicted sharing intentions, while risk perceptions and interactions with cognitive and affective factors did not. Taken together, the results suggest that reducing anxiety cues and making social rewards more salient may fuel political discourse on social media.
Using Ultra Abridged Individual Difference Scales for Personalization in Digital Mental Health to Improve Uptake, Engagement, and Experiences: A Three-Tiered Decision Framework for Scale Shortening
Siu Kit Yeung; Alan C. Y. Tong; Han Zhao; Winnie W. S. Mak
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Given the diversity of human characteristics and experiences, personalization in nudges, messages, choice presentations, interventions, and overall product design has been increasingly adopted in digital health to promote engagements. Past studies on moderators and personalization in digital health and mental health services generally focused on demographic and symptom variables, with generally inconsistent findings or null findings [10]. Cognitive, motivational, and decisional psychological attributes are largely overlooked. Psychology often uses long self-report scales to measure various psychological attributes. Although they are useful in tapping into individuals’ psychological profiles, when applied in real-life, everyday settings to assess individual differences, people are most likely unwilling to complete them. With the pressing need to personalize digital health platforms to enhance uptake, retention and engagement, ultra short versions of these psychological scales may be considered to allow assessment of multiple attributes at the same time. Scale shortening can be achieved through regression analyses of each item, factor analyses, item response theory, ant colony optimization, and machine learning methods, with each method having advantages, disadvantages and conditions required to make it suitable. To illustrate, we provided examples of regression analyses of each item and factor analyses, with potential implications for personalizing narrative versus research-based messages in digital mental health contexts. We present a three-tiered decision framework for scale shortening method selection depending on goals and possible constraints, with guidelines on validation methods for ultra short scales. Moving forward, more validation studies and field studies in digital health platforms are needed to evaluate ecological validity, reliability, and generalizability of these methods, bearing in mind the limitations and conditions where such shortening methods may not work well. Researchers may compare effectiveness and limitations of personalization using ultra short scales with other commonly adopted personalization methods (for example, based on longer scales, behavioral data, and LLMs). Ethical concerns need to be considered and mitigated carefully, respecting diverse preferences, informed choices, and privacy of service users. Our perspective piece is primarily intended for digital mental health researchers and practitioners, but may also be informative for the fields of digital health and medicine as well as personalization (e.g., personalized healthcare, personalized nudging, message matching) more broadly, given the common goal of boosting uptake and engagements as well as improving service users’ experiences. Keywords: Personalization, Scale Shortening, Digital Mental Health, Individual Differences, Uptake, Engagement
The roots of rationality
Rahul Bhui; Kevin Matthew Dorst; Oriel FeldmanHall; Stephen M Fleming; Jacqueline Gottlieb; Catherine A. Hartley; Tomas Lejarraga; Johannes Müller-Trede; Angela Radulescu; Alexandra G. Rosati
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Functional accounts of mind, brain, and behavior have profoundly shaped thinking across many disciplines. Despite this common lens, the processes driving adaptive outcomes are often studied in isolation, leading to narrow and localized explanations. This paper brings together perspectives across fields by identifying six dynamics that enable agents to behave adaptively. These dynamics span multiple timescales and systems, including individual-level processes—thinking, learning, and development—and population-level processes—market selection, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution. We examine the reasons behind functional explanations of cognition and behavior, the conditions that foster rationality, and the interactions between adaptive processes. Our goal is to bring the cognitive, social, biological, and computer sciences into closer conversation by exposing researchers to a wide range of perspectives on adaptive decision-making.
Exploring Narcissistic Personality Disorder Among Higher Education Students in West Bengal: A Cross-Sectional Study Using a Culturally Adapted NPI-40
Nivedita Saha; Dipty Subba
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Abstract Introduction: Though there are growing indications that NPD-related tendencies are becoming increasingly prevalent among young adults in India, relevant research remain scarce. This study aimed at exploring how subclinical narcissism manifests across different dimensions and severity levels among higher education students in West Bengal; focusing particularly on how gender, academic qualification, and institutional locality shape that experience. Methods: A total of 348 participants were purposively selected as sample from various rural and urban universities in West Bengal for this cross-sectional quantitative study. Data were collected in 2021 via an online Google Form using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-40). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation was applied to derive a culturally adapted NPI structure. Independent samples t-tests examined demographic differences. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 28.0. Results: 45.70% of the total 348 participants scored at a high NPD level (above 20), while 42.80% fell within the borderline range (16–20), and just 11.50% scored in the normal level (10–15). PCA revealed six culturally meaningful components: Egomaniacal, Self-absorption, Self-assertion, Self-supremacism, Self-eroticism & Autocracy, and Self-centred Manoeuvre. Significant differences were observed in terms of gender; males scoring meaningfully higher on overall NPD (t = 2.551, p = .011). While there was significant differences in terms of Educational qualification (t = 2.106, p = .036), it was not the case with Locality of Institutions. Similarly, while Self-assertion indicated significant dimensional variation by only gender, Self-absorption differed by gender and educational qualification. Conclusions: A notable share of higher education students in West Bengal show signs of subclinical NPD, and both gender and educational qualification appear to play a meaningful role in shaping that variation. The six-component structure emerging from PCA goes beyond a simple statistical outcome; it offers a contextually tuned way of understanding narcissistic traits within the Indian higher education context, one that carries real implications for how educators and institutions might respond.
The Power of Social Media Bios: How Common Profile Content Unintentionally Signals Political Ideology and Shapes Prejudice
Jackson Trager; Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi; Suhaib Abdurahman; Yalda Daryani; Morteza Dehghani
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Social media bios are ubiquitous yet understudied identity signals, persistently visible to diverse audiences. Despite often non-political intent, such cues may be politicized in perception, with consequences for intergroup bias. Across four studies (N = 2,084), we test how commonplace bio content—occupations, hobbies, family roles, religious affiliations, pronouns—can unintentionally signal political ideology and shape prejudice. In Study 1, partisan-leaning bios were perceived as politically motivated, especially by outgroup members, who attributed greater political intent than signalers intended. Social media users whose bios contained outgroup signals were seen as less warm, competent, and trustworthy, and more threatening, toxic, and misinformed. Studies 2–4 extended the influence of bio content on behavioral contexts: influencing the perceived toxicity and valence of user comments (Study 2), discrimination in online marketplace interactions (Study 3), and simulated hiring scenarios (Study 4), each revealing discrimination toward users with outgroup-congruent bios. Findings show how subtle online self-presentations can be politicized, fueling prejudice and discrimination, with implications for signaling theory, meta-perception, and interventions to reduce polarization.

SocArxiv

Spirit-Masters, Supernatural Punishment, and Religious Cooperation Among the Altai Uriankhai of Mongolia
Daniel Major-Smith; Benjamin Grant Purzycki; Attila Mateffy
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Whether supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation has been studied extensively, yet much remains to be understood. For instance, most previous work has focused on “moralistic” religious traditions (e.g., Christianity, Hinduism), and how this may facilitate cooperation with distant co-religionists. Here, we use data from the Altai Uriankhai of Western Mongolia to examine whether punishment and omniscience beliefs regarding local deities (here, spirit-masters) promotes cooperation among distant co-religionists of this spirit-master tradition. Cooperation with distant co-religionists was assessed using two experimental games, the Random Allocation Game and Dictator Game. A formal causal inference approach was employed to specify our estimand of interest – i.e., the joint causal effect of punishment and omniscience beliefs on cooperation with distant co-religionists – and the assumptions required for a causal interpretation. Across most models a negative relationship between spirit-master beliefs and cooperation with distant co-religionists was observed, although many were also consistent with a null relationship. To the extent these results can be given a causal interpretation, they suggest that supernatural beliefs regarding local deities do not promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries in this population, although whether the relationship is negative or null is equivocal.
Integrating social life cycle analysis (SLCA) into safe and sustainable by design (SSbD): a systematic review of data, indicators, and approaches
Riccardo Boero; Olga Lysenko; Ana Virgolino
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Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is increasingly discussed as a socio-economic evidence stream for Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), but its practical suitability for design-stage decision-making remains unclear. We conducted a protocol-registered systematic review (OSF: 10.17605/OSF.IO/YEFP5) following PRISMA 2020 to assess methods, data, indicators, tools, and SSbD fit/gaps in SLCA practice. Searches covering 2000--2024 (conducted July 16-17, 2025) were run in OpenAIRE, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Dimensions, yielding 7,296 records. After two screening rounds, 368 records were included. Extraction was performed in five independent variable groups using a human-in-the-loop workflow designed to adhere to open-science principles of transparency, inspectability, and reproducibility. Results show a field anchored in UNEP-SETAC guidance (71.2%), but with substantial reporting gaps (27.7% without explicit definitional basis; 60.9% without system-boundary specification). Data inputs were dominated by labor statistics (96.2%) and social hotspot data (92.7%), with strong country-level granularity (90.2%). Indicator practice concentrated on risk- and impact-based approaches. Although tools were frequently documented, key metadata (licensing, maturity, integration details) were often incomplete. Explicit SSbD framing was rare (0.3%); most records were classified as unclear (62.8%) or partially applicable (37.0%) for SSbD. Current SLCA practice appears useful for broad screening but structurally misaligned with SSbD design-stage needs, especially for prospective, micro-scale decision contexts. Priority developments include prospective micro-scale SLCA, standardized SSbD socio-economic impact reporting, and explicit SLCA integration protocols within SSbD governance steps.
Multimodal Misinformation: How Climate Obstruction Is Constructed on TikTok
Victoria Vallström
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This article examines how conspiratorial climate claims are multimodally constructed and emotionally mobilized on TikTok, advancing understanding of multimodal climate misinformation in short-form audiovisual content. Despite the growing prominence of audiovisual and conspiratorial climate misinformation, research has largely focused on text- based analyses and mainstream platforms, overlooking how meaning, affect, and attention are organized through multimodal communication on visual-first, sound-on platforms. Addressing this gap, the study asks: What thematic patterns emerge from a large corpus of TikTok videos on climate and weather modification? How are conspiratorial climate narratives constructed through the integration of visual, sonic, and textual cues, and how do these narratives mobilize emotional engagement? Methodologically, the study employs a mixed-methods design that combines computational multimodal topic modeling of 7,658 TikTok videos with theory-informed qualitative multimodal framing analysis of 27 topics (1,220 posts). Drawing on framing theory, social semiotics, and the sociology of emotions, the analysis shows how conspiratorial meaning is assembled distributively across posts and modes. Findings identify a distinct variant of climate conspiracy that affirms climate change as real, human-caused, and urgent, while reframing its cause as covert technological intervention by powerful actors. These narratives fall outside established climate misinformation typologies, often reliant on isolated, text-based signals. Conspiratorial framing mobilizes an oscillation between fear and epistemic emotions such as curiosity, redirecting attention from the climate crisis toward sustained conspiratorial investigation. The study further demonstrates how multimodal misinformation on TikTok can function as a form of climate obstruction by reshaping emotional orientation and diverting engagement away from climate action.
Assessing Party Success Following Conflict Onset: An Alternative to Leadership Tenure in regard to the United States
James Wright
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The oft-used leadership tenure measure in international relations is ill-suited to the United States and other democracies where the Head of State has term limits. I propose a new measure of analyzing the impact of and decision to engage in conflict by a head of state in such a polity: presidential party success. This new measure allows for the analysis of all elections that a leader may face during their tenure and, with respect to the United States, yields interesting results for the effect conflict onset has on a president’s party’s seat share in Congress.
The Scientific Case Against Parental Alienation: A Critical Review
Keith Robert Head
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Parental alienation syndrome (PAS) and its reformulation as parental alienation (PA) have gained traction in family courts despite persistent scientific controversy. This review synthesizes peer-reviewedresearch across psychology, law, and family studies from 1985 to 2025 to examine the empirical foundations and professional acceptance of PA/PAS. The analysis suggests that Gardner's original formulation and subsequent iterations fail to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs and are unsupported by research. Major medical, psychiatric, and psychological professional organizationshaverejected PA/PAS as a legitimate concept. Empirical data shows a troubling correlation between PA allegations and documented domestic violence, with such claims frequently functioning as litigation strategies that redirect attention from abuse allegations.When courts credit PA claims, children face measurable harms including placement with abusive parents and subjection to unvalidated reunification interventions. These findings suggest that PA allegations often represent a form of post-separation coercive control and call for heightened judicial skepticism when such claims arise alongside safety concerns. Note: This article was removed from the journal website following pressure from parental alienation proponents. It remains available here under its original CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Early AI Adoption and Firm Productivity Growth in a Middle-Income Economy: Evidence from Colombia
Juan Duran-Vanegas
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This paper examines the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and firm-level productivity growth in a middle-income economy. Combining data on AI use from the 2019 Colombian Enterprise ICT Survey with longitudinal manufacturing data, I estimate productivity growth differentials between adopters and non-adopters while accounting for pre-adoption characteristics and productivity trajectories using entropy balancing. AI adoption is associated with a 16 percent cumulative increase in labor productivity over 2016–2019, equivalent to roughly 5 percent annualized growth. These differentials appear to be driven by higher sales and value added rather than reductions in costs or employment, are similar among in-house and outsourced AI developments, and increase for firms with higher pre-existing technical capabilities. Finally, the analysis points to changes in organizational structure as a potential adjustment margin. AI adoption is associated with a small but significant decline in the share of administrative workers, suggesting a reallocation of tasks away from administrative functions.
Estimation bornée du nombre d’adhérents d’un parti politique : le cas de La France Humaniste
Andreas Mulard
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La mesure du nombre d’adhérents des partis politiques repose souvent sur des données déclaratives, difficiles à vérifier et rarement homogènes. Cet article propose une méthode simple de bornage fondée sur des contraintes organisationnelles publiques. Nous l’appliquons au cas de La France Humaniste, dont l’organisation en cercles locaux présente deux propriétés exploitables : le nombre de cercles est public et chaque cercle possède une capacité maximale de 20 membres. En combinant ces informations avec une observation automatisée des cercles indiqués comme complets, nous obtenons un encadrement du nombre d’adhérents visibles. Cette approche ne fournit pas une mesure exacte des effectifs totaux, mais une estimation bornée du nombre d’adhérents observables dans la structure étudiée.
Methods for analyzing transferability of health interventions
Tamara Schloemer
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Evidence-based public health and healthcare require incorporating evidence of the effectiveness of interventions into real-world settings. To address a health problem or a need, decision-makers must analyze transferability of a health intervention to their specific target context. The Population-Intervention-Environment-Transfer Models of Transferability (PIET-T models) explain the underlying mechanism of the concept of transferability and a process for evaluating transferability of health interventions. In this article, I elaborate on methods for transferability analyses and provide materials accompanying the PIET-T process model. Participatory approaches are particularly relevant to better utilize evidence of interventions for sustainable improvement of health services.
When Students Use AI: Toward Validity-Centered Assessment Design
Joshua Weidlich
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The rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has intensified debates about cheating and academic integrity. Yet a growing body of assessment scholarship argues that the more fundamental issue is validity: whether assessment scores continue to support the interpretations and decisions that assessors and institutions want to make in contexts where students can legitimately or illegitimately rely on powerful GenAI tools. Drawing on argument-based validity theory, this paper re-articulates the interpretive argument for AI-inclusive assessments by distinguishing ten validity threats along an inference chain (domain, scoring, generalization, explanation, extrapolation, utilization). A main contribution of this paper is a Validity-Centered Assessment Design (V-CAD) checklist, an inference-by-inference diagnostic and evidence scaffold to help educators and assessment designers identify which inference is under threat, which mechanisms make it salient under AI inclusion, which design implication may follow, and which locally collectable evidence could strengthen or weaken the corresponding validity claim.
Rethinking Educational Development in the Postdigital Medical University
Henrika Florén; Maria Watter; Anna-Klara Rundlöf
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This commentary invites a critical reconsideration of educational development in the contemporary landscape of medical and higher education. It brings a novel perspective on educational development in response to rapid technology developments. We argue that our understanding of educational development needs to be reconsidered as the landscape of higher education is undergoing significant shifts driven by rapid developments in digital technology which reshape both the university as an institution and the practices of those within it. This commentary contributes to understanding shifts in the context of educational development in the postdigital university, specifically initiatives and activities concerned with improving and transforming educational practices where the analogue and digital meet and are increasingly intertwined.
A Behavioral Instrument for Measuring Political Overconfidence: Implications for Understanding Affective Polarization in the United States
Mickael Temporão; Laurence-Olivier M. Foisy; Jeremy Drouin; Hubert Cadieux; Yannick Dufresne
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Traditional measures of political knowledge have proven insufficient for understanding contemporary political attitudes and behaviors, particularly the rise of affective polarization. While existing research has explored the interplay between political knowledge and affective polarization, this study introduces a novel theoretical distinction between political knowledge and political overconfidence. Using American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 2020 and 2024 (N = 6851 and N = 4792), we develop a scale to measure political overconfidence and explore its relationship with affective polarization. Our findings reveal a consistent correlation between political overconfidence and heightened levels of affective polarization (β = 17.0–38.5, p < 0.01), whereas political knowledge exhibits smaller, less robust associations (β = 3.4–9.8). This pattern holds across partisan groups, revealing remarkable structural stability between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles once covariates are accounted for. These results highlight the importance of political overconfidence in understanding affective polarization in an era of information abundance and suggest the need for further exploration into whether political overconfidence mediates, moderates, or covaries with other drivers of partisan animosity.
Identity-Driven Sustainable Consumption: How Conspicuous Consumption Motives Mediate Moral Identity and Green Purchase Intentions
Senyo Obed Amponsah
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This study examines how moral identity shapes green purchase intentions among young consumers in an emerging market context, and why identity-driven morality often requires expressive pathways to become behaviorally effective. Drawing on Identity-Based Motivation Theory, the study distinguishes between moral identity internalization and symbolization and propose that their effects on green purchase intentions operate through Green Conspicuous Consumption Motives (GCCM). Survey data from 206 students and young professionals in Ghana were analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling. The findings reveal that neither dimension of moral identity directly predicts green purchase intentions. Instead, moral identity internalization significantly predicts self-oriented GCCM, while moral identity symbolization predicts other-oriented GCCM. Both forms of GCCM, in turn, positively influence green purchase intentions. These results indicate that moral identity motivates green consumption primarily when it can be affirmed or communicated through visible, identity-expressive behaviour. This study makes three key contributions. First, it clarifies mixed findings in prior research by showing that moral identity influences green consumption indirectly rather than directly. Second, it extends Identity-Based Motivation Theory by identifying conspicuous consumption motives as a critical mechanism linking identity to sustainable behaviour. Third, by focusing on Ghana, it broadens the geographic scope of green consumption research and highlights the growing role of digital self-presentation in shaping ethical consumption among youth in emerging markets.
From Digital Twins to Adaptive Metaverse Infrastructures: A Distributed Systems Framework for Smart Buildings and Factories
Angelo Leogrande; Nicola Magaletti; Ettore Zini; Mauro di Molfetta; Maria Giovanna Trotta; Valeria Notarnicola
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The article introduces the concept of Smart Infrastructure Metaverse (SIM) and considers it from the perspective of Distributed Adaptive Systems (DAS). The approach combines technologies such as IoT, Digital Twins, AI, and XR to form an infrastructure intended to provide continuous real-time monitoring of objects, along with their prediction. The key idea behind SIM is that the infrastructure is viewed as an entity that changes continuously through data synchronization. The REMM (Real Estate Metaverse Manager) tool is provided as one way to apply the principle of distributed intelligence alongside edge and cloud computing to manage infrastructure. The experimental results demonstrate improvements in energy optimization, predictive maintenance, and situational awareness.
Parties as Superordinate Categories and Their Functions in Sociopsychological Adaptation to Political Conflict
Max Magana
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In two-party systems, each of the two dominant parties emerges as a broad, cross-cutting umbrella pressured to differentiate itself and align and coordinate heterogenous social groups to be politically viable. I argue parties solve these problems by converging on narratives that reflect subgroup hierarchy orientation and portray subgroups as victims of discrimination and their opponents as culprits. The narratives generate priors through societal beliefs that structure individual perception, yielding stable coalitions and contributing to polarization. Moreover, I argue, hierarchy orientation also shapes the psychological structure of partisan identification. Partisanship is a superordinate social identity whose structure varies according to party organizational culture. The Democratic Party, which views itself as a vehicle for inclusion and has a decentralized power structure, allows for dual recategorization and permits identifiers to retain subgroup identities under the more inclusive partisan identity. In contrast, the Republican Party, which is more socially homogenous, discourages individuality, and promotes deference to authority, emphasizes single recategorization–uniting subgroups by emphasizing partisanship exclusively.
Adapting for Solitude: Stress-Coping, Substitution Behaviors, and Intentions to Return in Wilderness Recreation
Michael Ferguson
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Increasing visitation to Wilderness Areas is intensifying pressure on ecological conditions and visitor experience quality, highlighting gaps in current monitoring systems that rely heavily on biophysical indicators while overlooking visitor-based psychological and experiential dimensions. This mixed-methods study addresses these gaps by operationalizing Wilderness Character Qualities as measurable visitor motivations and examining how these motivations relate to substitution-based coping behaviors and intentions to return across the six Wilderness Areas of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, USA. Guided by stress-coping theory, the research assessed how the perceived importance of core wilderness motivations (e.g., solitude, pristineness, unconfined recreation) shaped behavioral adaptation and long-term visitor loyalty. On-site intercept surveys (n=1,086) provided quantitative and qualitative data analyzed using descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling, and thematic coding. Findings extend stress-coping theory by demonstrating that coping functions as an adaptive, experience-maintaining process rather than solely a reaction to participation impacts. Visitors who placed high importance on solitude and pristineness were more likely to adjust timing or location through temporal and resource substitutions to maintain desired conditions. These adaptive behaviors, in turn, positively influenced return intentions, highlighting substitution as a key mediating process linking motivations to loyalty. Results provide a validated approach for assessing wilderness character from the visitor perspective and a theory-driven framework for integrating motivations, coping, and loyalty into wilderness management. Strategies that promote voluntary temporal or spatial dispersion, improve infrastructure, and offer targeted educational messaging can help sustain core wilderness character quality while supporting long-term visitor retention.
Beyond Sustainable Development: A Critique and the Framework of Civilizational Justice
Hamdy Ahmed Hassan Elhawary
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For decades, the world has pledged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet emissions keep rising, temperatures break records every year, and inequality deepens. This is not a failure of implementation – it is a failure of the model itself. This first part of a two‑part study introduces the concept of Civilizational Justice as a radical alternative. Drawing on critical literature and real‑world cases, I show that sustainable development rests on three fatal paradoxes: green growth, carbon markets, and displacement by well‑meant sustainability projects. These are not glitches but systemic features of a growth‑driven system. I then build an alternative framework on four pillars – post‑growth economics, rights of nature, participatory democracy, and a culture of sufficiency and solidarity – and outline its philosophical roots, core elements, and dual strategy of disruption and prefiguration. The second part applies this framework to education, civil society, and the Arab world.
Engaged Yet Exhausted: Work Engagement and Burnout of Librarians Post-COVID
Justin Fuhr
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Work engagement and burnout have detrimental effects on the wellbeing of librarians and can be one indicator of how well a library functions. This study uses the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) to measure work engagement and burnout of librarians. With 786 responses, this study finds librarians have high burnout and average work engagement. Older librarians have higher levels of work engagement and lower levels of burnout compared to their younger colleagues, confirming previous research, while diverse genders have lower work engagement and higher burnout compared to men and women. Additionally, library administrators have higher work engagement and lower burnout than department heads and librarians. Contrary to previous research, librarians with children or elderly dependents have similar levels of work engagement and burnout compared to librarians without dependents. With this study’s results, it is incumbent upon library leadership and management to implement strategies to increase work engagement and decrease burnout.
Thirty-five years of accelerating heat stress in Kenya: subnational patterns of hazard, exposure burden, and vulnerability in priority populations
Felix Oluoch; Fredrick Gudda; Prissy Makena; Anthony Ngugi; Jai K Das; Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta
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Background: Extreme heat is an increasing public health threat in sub-Saharan Africa, yet evidence on subnational disparities and group-specific vulnerability remains limited. We characterized heat hazard, exposure, and vulnerability across all 290 Kenyan subcounties, focusing on pregnant women, children under five years, and adults aged 60 years and older. Methods: We conducted a nationwide ecological panel study using annual subcounty observations from 2015 to 2025, with extended climatological context from 1991 to 2025. Heat hazard was defined using Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI)-derived metrics from the Copernicus ERA5 HEAT product, including annual counts of days with UTCI > 38°C (H38) and UTCI > 46°C (H46). Group-specific population denominators were derived from WorldPop, and socioeconomic vulnerability was represented using the Relative Wealth Index. We quantified long-term trends, anomalies relative to the 1991 to 2020 baseline, hotspot persistence, person-day exposure burden, and a composite Heat Vulnerability Index for each population group. Results: National area-averaged mean annual H38, defined as days per year with UTCI > 38°C, increased significantly over 1991 to 2025 (Sen slope 0.97 days per year; p < 0.001), reaching record levels in 2024 and 2025. In 2025, 136 subcounties recorded zero H38 exposure, whereas 61 experienced sustained heat, defined as H38 ≥ 30 days per year. These 61 sustained-heat subcounties accounted for 96.2% of annual person-day heat burden for pregnant women, 96.8% for children under five, and 95.0% for older adults. Heat exposure was inversely associated with subcountylevel relative wealth (Spearman rho = -0.561; p < 0.001). In a separate hotspot-stability analysis, 62 subcounties entered the annual top-quintile H38 tier at least once during 2015 to 2025, and 50 of these remained in that tier in all 11 years. Heat Vulnerability Index rankings were highly concordant between pregnant women and children under five (Spearman rho = 0.977), but less so for older adults, whose priority geography extended further into coastal transitional subcounties. Rankings based on 2025 conditions were highly consistent with rankings based on mean conditions over 2015 to 2025. Conclusions: Heat stress in Kenya has increased markedly over the past 35 years and is concentrated in a structurally stable set of socioeconomically disadvantaged subcounties. These findings support tiered, geographically targeted heat-healthplanning, with shared priority areas for maternal and child health and additional agespecific targeting for older adults.
The False Polarization of Heroes: How Social Sorting Affects Collective Memory
Clayton Childress; Craig Rawlings; Neda Maghbouleh
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Iconic historical figures are meant to represent a society’s most enduring and universal values. And yet, across partisan and sociodemographic groups Americans believe their most important values are widely contested rather than shared. Whether these perceived divisions extend to sentiments for objects of collective memory meant to represent shared values remains unknown. Relying on a dataset measuring public sentiments toward the 15 most institutionally consecrated iconic historical figures, we examine both polarization and false polarization, defined as the misperception that political opponents hold polarized views of these figures. We find little evidence of true polarization in sentiments toward iconic historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. In contrast, we find that false polarization is widespread, patterned, and asymmetric. Ultimately, we find that the false polarization of collective memory is rooted in partisan animus and social sorting into mental camps, both of which are amplified by homogeneous social networks and attenuated by crosscutting ties.
Climate Change Coverage in The Guardian, 2010–2025
Fabian Dablander; Simon Wimmer; Jonas M B Haslbeck
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Leading news outlets play a central role in shaping how political leaders and the public understand the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change. Here, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of how The Guardian, a globally influential newspaper widely recognized for high-quality climate journalism, has reported on climate change between 2010 and 2025. We applied a validated methodology based on large language models to analyze N = 18,785 articles and evaluate to what extent reporting covers scientifically grounded causes, impacts, mitigation strategies, and adaptation measures. We find that climate coverage increased markedly after 2018 and has remained structurally elevated relative to the preceding decade. Coverage of causes and mitigation is dominated by fossil fuels and renewable energy, whereas agriculture, overconsumption, carbon inequality, and economic growth are mentioned far less frequently. Aspects related to adaptation receive considerably less attention than aspects related to causes, impacts, and mitigation. Our findings highlight opportunities for more comprehensive coverage that better reflects full range of societal transformations needed to address climate change.
The Long Arm of Childhood Cultural Capital: Pathways to Health in Later Life
Aitor Garcia Aguirre
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This paper examines whether childhood cultural capital leaves a lasting imprint on health in later life and identifies the pathways through which that influence operates. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and life-course research on health inequality, the study argues that early cultural resources shape later-life health not only through socioeconomic attainment, but also through the formation of health-related dispositions and continued cultural engagement. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the Life History Mail Survey (LHMS), and the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS), the analysis follows a nationally representative sample of roughly 14,900 older adults in the United States. Childhood cultural capital is measured through the number of books in the household at age 10, and its association with later-life health is estimated through a life-course structural equation model incorporating childhood conditions, education, adult socioeconomic attainment, health behaviors, cultural participation, and adult health history. The results show that childhood cultural capital is positively associated with later-life health both directly and indirectly. Approximately 65% of its total association operates through mediating pathways, with the strongest indirect effects running through educational and occupational attainment and through healthier behavioral profiles in adulthood; cultural participation also contributes, though more modestly. Gender differences are limited and largely concentrated in the behavioral pathway. Overall, the findings suggest that childhood cultural capital is an important and distinct determinant of later-life health, helping to reproduce health inequalities across the life course through multiple, interrelated mechanisms.
Marrying In vs. Marrying Out: Comparing Trajectories of Functional Health of Exogamous and Endogamous Immigrant Unions in the U.S.
Aitor Garcia Aguirre; Lucia Fernandez-Melero; Silvia Loi
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While the Healthy Immigrant Paradox documents an initial health advantage among the foreign-born, ample evidence shows that they present an accelerated decline in comparison to the native-born. However, heterogeneities in these patterns of aging by different migrant groups remain largely understudied. This study addresses this gap by examining how marital assimilation stratifies functional health trajectories among U.S. immigrants. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and growth curve models, we compare the accumulation of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) limitations between immigrants in intramarried (same-origin) and intermarried (native-partner) unions. Our results reveal distinct stratification by union type. We find that intermarried immigrants present "premium," allowing immigrants to maintain health trajectories indistinguishable from the native-born population. In contrast, intramarried married immigrants experience accelerated functional decline, a disadvantage that is particularly pronounced among women. Furthermore, we find support for a "Substitution Hypothesis," where marriage to a native-born partner effectively substitutes for the integration benefits typically accrued through duration of residence. These findings showcase that the "immigrant health advantage" and its ensuing erosion is not uniform but is conditional on the type of union, duration of residence and gender.
Russia’s low-level agents: Characteristics, roles, and organisational structure of covert operatives in Europe, 2022-2025
Bart Schuurman
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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has increasingly supported its battlefield operations with covert actions against Kyiv’s European supporters. Executing many such actions are cheap and plentiful low-level agents who provide Russia with considerable geographic reach and plausible deniability. Using a new dataset of 145 low-level agents, this study combines descriptive and inferential statistics with social network analysis to explore their demographics, roles, deployment patterns, and organisational structure. Findings indicate that low-level agents are predominantly male, in their mid-thirties, drawn disproportionately from Ukrainian, Russian, Moldovan, and Bulgarian populations, and quite frequently re-used. Networks appear structurally hierarchical and compartmentalised, and seem designed with plausible deniability in mind. However, inconsistent operational security by Russian intelligence officers limits Moscow’s ability to claim ignorance. The findings provide empirical insights into an ongoing European security threat, informing policy responses and further scholarship.
Parenting Leave Policies and Social Inequalities in Europe: Evidence, Blind Spots and Policy Direction
Alzbeta Bartova; Thordis Reimer; Johanna Lammi-Taskula
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Reducing inequalities is a core objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and a longstanding commitment of European welfare states. Parenting leave policies constitute a central policy instrument for addressing inequalities in gender relations, labour market participation, income security and family formation. However, their effectiveness depends not only on formal entitlements but on access, affordability and actual use across different social groups. This Policy Brief draws on the CA21150 Working Group 4 report Mapping the Unknown, whose primary objective was to identify research and data gaps in the European evidence base on parenting leave and social inequalities. Lammi-Taskula, J. and Reimer, T. (eds) (2026), Mapping the Unknown: Research Gaps in Parenting Leave Inequality Research in Europe, COST Action Parental Leave Policies and Social Sustainability (Sustainability@Leave), DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8kbsz_v1, available at: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8kbsz_v1
Toward a Structured Approach to Analytic Autoethnography: Integrating Experience Sampling and Text Mining
Hideki Muramatsu
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The author introduces a new approach called modified-analytic autoethnography (M-AA), which integrates the elements of analytical ethnography. M-AA comprises three main components: 1) self-disclosure as a researcher subject, which includes complete member researcher and analytic reflexivity; 2) reflexivity experience sampling method, incorporating experience sampling method, and diary method; and 3) narrative visibility of the researcher’s self through text mining. This study is original in that it reconstructs analytic autoethnography as a framework to simplify and ensure methodological transparency. For papers employing analytical autoethnography, this study proposes a framework that integrates statistical methods, including quantitative text analysis, thereby contributing a new method to the flexible methodology of autoethnography and providing new insights for researchers.
A Behavioral Instrument for Measuring Political Overconfidence: Implications for Understanding Affective Polarization in the United States
Mickael Temporão; Laurence-Olivier M. Foisy; Jeremy Drouin; Hubert Cadieux; Yannick Dufresne
Full text
Traditional measures of political knowledge have proven insufficient for understanding contemporary political attitudes and behaviors, particularly the rise of affective polarization. While existing research has explored the interplay between political knowledge and affective polarization, this study introduces a novel theoretical distinction between political knowledge and political overconfidence. Using American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 2020 and 2024 (N = 6851 and N = 4792), we develop a scale to measure political overconfidence and explore its relationship with affective polarization. Our findings reveal a consistent correlation between political overconfidence and heightened levels of affective polarization (β = 17.0–38.5, p < 0.01), whereas political knowledge exhibits smaller, less robust associations (β = 3.4–9.8). This pattern holds across partisan groups, revealing remarkable structural stability between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles once covariates are accounted for. These results highlight the importance of political overconfidence in understanding affective polarization in an era of information abundance and suggest the need for further exploration into whether political overconfidence mediates, moderates, or covaries with other drivers of partisan animosity.
Instruments for Measuring Knowledge, Attitudes, and Skills in Preventing Sexual Violence against Children: Scoping Review
Yogi Hasna Meisyarah; Rindani Claurita Toban; Destria Fithrotul Aziizah; Sri Hartini; Fitri Haryanti
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ABSTRACT Millions of girls and boys in the world experience abuse and exploitation every year. The UNICEF data reported that between 2005 and 2022 at least 16,000 children experienced violence related to rape, forced marriage, sexual exploitation, and other forms of violence. Sexual violence against children can have long-term adverse effects on the physical health, social life, and psychological well-being of the victims. One of the efforts that can be made to protect children from the effects of sexual violence is to increase knowledge about the concepts and skills in preventing sexual abuse. This article aims to identify instruments to measure knowledge, attitudes, and skills regarding the prevention of sexual violence against children found in various literatures. A scoping review was conducted to synthesize this research. The CKAQ has been the most frequently used instrument in the prevention of sexual violence against children and has been translated into various languages to measure knowledge of prevention of sexual violence against children. An Illustrated Scale Measuring the Sexual-Violence Prevention Knowledge and PSQ are instruments that can be used to measure knowledge of the prevention of sexual violence against children with intellectual disabilities. This research has found that the SAQ has been the most frequently used instrument to measure attitudes on the prevention of sexual violence, while the WIST has been the most frequently used instrument to measure skills in preventing sexual violence against children. Keywords: instruments, knowledge, attitudes, skills, the prevention of sexual violence
Development of a scale to measure self-advocacy skills among female university students
Hideki Muramatsu
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Objective: This study aimed to develop a Female University Student Self-Advocacy Skills Scale (FUS-SSS) and test its reliability and factor model fit. This study also assessed factors associated with maladaptation to university life among female university students (FUS). Methods: Two self-advocacy skills (SAS) scales were consulted when creating the preliminary FUS-SSS items to ensure construct validity. A focus group interview was held with FUS (N = 15), and qualitative data were used to ensure content validity. A questionnaire survey was administered to FUS (N = 362). A factor analysis was performed to test the reliability and factor model fit of the FUS-SSS. Results: The factor analysis yielded one factor and eight items. The Cronbach’s alpha was .77. The factor analysis produced a comparative fit index of .90, a goodness of fit index of .97, an adjusted goodness of fit index of .94, a root mean square error of approximation of .09, and a standardized root mean square residual of .54, thus confirming that the reliability and factor model fit of the FUS-SSS met the desired statistical criteria. Question items characteristic of the low-scoring group from the total scores for SAS were identified. Conclusion: In creating the FUS-SSS, questionnaire items were used to identify factors such as maladaptive behaviors, thereby highlighting the importance of SAS education in the lives of FUS.
Theory-Based Instruments to Measure Caring Behavior among Nurses and Healthcare Professionals: A Scoping Review
Petrus Paris Rumsori; Rindani Claurita Toban
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ABSTRACT Aim To systematically map theory-based instruments used to measure caring behavior and to critically evaluate their theoretical foundations, psychometric properties, and applicability across healthcare contexts. Design Scoping review. Methods A scoping review was conducted following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. A comprehensive search was performed across Scopus, ScienceDirect, PubMed, and ProQuest for studies published between 2020 and 2025. Eligible studies were screened and analyzed to identify instruments grounded in nursing theories and to examine their validity, reliability, and contextual use. Methodological quality was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). Data Sources Scopus, ScienceDirect, PubMed, and ProQuest (2020–2025). Results Eight instruments were identified, predominantly derived from Jean Watson’s Theory of Human Caring (n = 6) and Kristen Swanson’s Theory of Caring (n = 2). All instruments demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties, particularly in terms of internal consistency and construct validity. Three key themes emerged: (1) integration of theoretical frameworks in instrument development, (2) variability in psychometric evaluation practices, and (3) cross-context applicability across nurses, students, and midwives. Despite overall reliability, inconsistencies in validation approaches and limited cross-cultural testing were identified. Conclusion Theory-based instruments provide a structured and conceptually grounded approach to measuring caring behavior. However, the dominance of specific theoretical frameworks and variability in psychometric evaluation highlight the need for more standardized and globally adaptable measurement models. Implications for the profession and/or patient care Strengthening methodological rigor and expanding cross-context validation are essential to advance the science of caring measurement in healthcare research. Impact Measuring caring behavior remains a methodological challenge due to its abstract and multidimensional nature. This review identifies theory-based instruments and evaluates their psychometric properties. The findings support improved measurement approaches applicable across healthcare contexts.
Use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education in Guatemala: Student Perspectives and Ethical–Pedagogical Implications
Joseph Alexander Freire
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The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into Latin American higher education is advancing at a pace that outstrips institutional response capacity. Guatemala is neither an exception nor an ordinary case: its university system combines a public institution of national scope with private universities of very different profiles, which allows examination of whether AI adoption reproduces or modifies the sector's structural inequalities. This article presents the results of a cross-sectional survey administered to 190 students from Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM, n = 108) and Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC, n = 82), aimed at describing patterns of use, perceptions of academic impact, and ethical-pedagogical concerns. Some 92.1% of participants report some use of AI, and 94.2% perceive improvements in academic performance, with relevant inter-institutional differences: regular use at UFM reaches 74.1% versus 43.9% at USAC, and comparative valuation of AI courses is consistently higher at the former institution (mean = 8.97 vs. 7.54 out of 10). Ethical concerns—collected through a multiple-selection item—show that technological dependency (57.9%) and plagiarism (52.1%) are the most prevalent. The data suggest that AI has already become part of everyday academic practice before institutions have articulated pedagogical or normative frameworks for its governance.
Diskriminierung von Konsument:innen in Deutschland. Vignetten zur Verbraucher:innenarbeiten
Matthias Schneider; Friederike Rosenbaum
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Dieses Working Paper präsentiert fünf Vignetten zu Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag in Deutschland. Die Vignetten basieren auf 30 Interviews mit Verbraucher:innen, die im Rahmen des Projekts DEVGAV geführt wurden, und wurden aus dem Interviewmaterial verdichtet, anonymisiert und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit aufbereitet. Ziel ist es, typische Konstellationen von Diskriminierung in unterschiedlichen Konsumbereichen sichtbar zu machen, darunter Dienstleistungen, Mobilität, Einzelhandel, Kulturangebote und digitale Buchungssysteme. Die Vignetten zeigen, dass Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag häufig nicht als offene Zurückweisung auftritt, sondern in Routinen, institutionellen Regeln, technischen Vorgaben und fehlenden Zugängen wirksam wird. Zugleich machen sie deutlich, dass solche Erfahrungen mit Emotionen wie Unsicherheit, Scham, Unbehagen oder Verunsicherung verbunden sind und das zukünftige Verhalten von Verbraucher:innen prägen. Das Working Paper versteht Vignetten damit nicht nur als Darstellungsform, sondern als analytisches und praxisbezogenes Instrument, um Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag zu erfassen, zu diskutieren und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit nutzbar zu machen. Ergänzend werden Leitfragen vorgestellt, die eine reflexive Auseinandersetzung in Beratung, Workshops und Bildungsformaten unterstützen.
Apple versus Orange: Exaggerated Multiple Religious Belief in East Asia
Ruiqian Li
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Recent scholarship proposes that East Asians commonly hold multiple religious beliefs simultaneously, even when they report a single religious identity or none at all. This note argues that this claim is substantially exaggerated due to a measurement mismatch: what GES-based studies operationalize as religious belief is better understood as ambient cultural familiarity. Using probability sample data from the 2023 Pew Research Center Survey of Religion and Spirituality in East Asian Societies across Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, I test whether the multiple religious belief pattern holds under more precise operationalization. When replicating the GES approach using cultural attachment items, the familiar pattern reproduces. When instead examining active devotion to specific deities, prevalence drops substantially, most sharply among Christians and religious nones, though the extent varies across societies. Comparing cultural attachment to religious belief is comparing apples to oranges.
Empirical Challenges in the Capability Approach: Measuring Capability Sets and Unfreedom through Counterfactual Comparisons
Reiko Gotoh; Ryo Kambayashi
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This study addresses a fundamental challenge in the empirical application of the Capability Approach: the measurement of the “capability set” as an opportunity set. Unlike standard utility-based measures that focus solely on achieved outcomes, measuring capability requires assessing the welfare of potential activities—including those not chosen (counterfactuals). We propose a novel methodology that bridges normative social choice theory and econometric causal inference. Specifically, we interpret the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) derived from panel data fixed-effects models as capturing marginal counterfactual welfare differences between alternative actions, rather than level comparisons of chieved outcomes. Using a unique panel dataset of elderly individuals in Japan, focusing on “going-out” versus “staying-home” behavior, we evaluate the size of capability sets and the degree of “unfreedom” (the welfare gap between options). Furthermore, we propose and apply several aggregation rules—ranging from Utilitarian to Rawlsian—to construct group-level capability measures. Our empirical results demonstrate that the ranking of social groups varies significantly depending on the normative aggregation rule employed, highlighting the importance of explicitly defining the informational basis of social evaluation.
Intelligence artificielle générative et élections municipales 2026 : Entre innovations communicationnelles et risques démocratiques
Antoine Marie
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Les élections municipales des 15 et 22 mars 2026 constituent le premier scrutin local français où l'intelligence artificielle générative s'invite massivement dans les pratiques de campagne. Cette note de recherche propose une analyse équilibrée des usages documentés, distinguant les applications légitimes (génération d'affiches, chatbots programmatiques, synthèse de contenu) des dérives avérées (deepfakes diffamatoires, images trompeuses, astroturfing). Si ces nouvelles capacités technologiques soulèvent des préoccupations légitimes pour l'intégrité du débat démocratique, nous argumentons que leur impact doit être mis en perspective au regard de la littérature sur les effets limités de la communication politique de masse et sur les déterminants réels de la consommation de désinformation. Plutôt qu'un catastrophisme qui risquerait d'alimenter la défiance généralisée, nous plaidons pour une approche fondée sur l'éducation aux médias, la transparence algorithmique et le renforcement du journalisme professionnel.
How Does Socioeconomic Status Affect Health? The Sequential Mediation of Social Capital and Health Lifestyles
Meng-Hsien Lin
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The positive gradient between socioeconomic status (SES) and health is well established, yet the mechanisms through which SES translates into health advantages remain underexplored in the Taiwanese context. Drawing on Fundamental Cause Theory (FCT), Health Lifestyle Theory (HLT), and Social Capital Theory, this study proposes and tests a serial mediation model in which SES promotes social participation, which in turn shapes regular exercise behavior, ultimately affecting physical and mental health. Using data from the 2021 Taiwan Social Change Survey Health Module (N = 1,465), we employ path analysis with bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrapping (3,000 resamples) to estimate serial indirect effects, and multigroup path analysis to examine gender moderation. Results show that: (1) SES exerts significant positive indirect effects on both physical health (PCS) and mental health (MCS) through the sequential pathway of social participation to regular exercise (BCa 95% CIs exclude zero); (2) social participation's direct effect on health is nonsignificant, functioning primarily as an upstream enabler of health behavior rather than an independent protective factor; and (3) the direct effect of SES on exercise differs significantly by gender—significant among men but nonsignificant among women, suggesting gender-differentiated pathways through which SES translates into health behavior. This study provides the first SEM-based test of the sequential mediation mechanism linking social capital and health lifestyles in a nationally representative Taiwanese adult sample, with implications for health promotion policies that prioritize building social participation environments over individual behavior change alone.
Immigration as a Perpetually Divisive Issue: How Moral Boundaries Keep Political Conflict Alive in Social Life
Kristina Bakkær Simonsen; Anna van Vree
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Some political issues drive citizens apart even long after their political salience has waned. As a lingering force in society, these issues have demonstrably disruptive consequences, shaping group animosity and intolerance far beyond the political sphere. Yet, the social processes that sustain such division once elite politicization subsides remain poorly understood. Extending work on issue-based affective polarization, we develop a theory of moral boundary-drawing as a central mechanism perpetuating political conflict in social life. We use the depoliticized topic of immigration in Denmark as our theory-informing case and analyze 27 focus group discussions to uncover the social dynamics of moral boundary-drawing in-action. Our analysis demonstrates how moral boundaries make division sticky, solidified, and potent, with implications for understanding the transformation of political conflict into deep social divides—ready to be reactivated and mobilized for political purposes.
Drought displaces agricultural labor: Evidence from 450,000 Indian villages
Robbin Jan van Duijne; Fabien Cottier; Tanuj Pareek; Fabian Dablander
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Drought threatens the agricultural livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Nowhere is this risk larger than in India, where agriculture still employs 275 million people, by far the world’s biggest farming workforce. Here we present results from a new village-level panel that links agricultural employment data for 450,000 villages to 0.05° daily climate grids, enabling us to track each village’s drought exposure month by month. Every single month of drought during the June–October growing season reduced the share of people working in agriculture the following year by 1.2 percentage points. Nationally, this translates to ~3.3 million fewer people working in farming for each extra month of drought (95 % CI: 2.1– 4.5 million). Because rural India offers few alternative jobs, such losses are likely to trigger surges of circular labor migration to towns and cities. Using CMIP6 mid-century projections, we estimate that by 2050 the average village will experience 1.5–2.0 more drought months each year. In the absence of adaptation, this would imply ~5.1–6.5 million fewer people working in agriculture in an average year, potentially amplifying rural-to-urban migration flows and increasing pressure on urban systems already struggling to provide jobs, housing, and basic services.
The Visibility of Women and Ethnic Minorities in Claims-Making about Immigration
Maarja Vollmer; Leila Hadj-Abdou; Didier Ruedin
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Migrants and increasingly migrant women have become subject to a highly politicized public debate on migration. However, we know little about the role they play in this politicization. To address this gap, this article examines to which extent women and members of ethnic minorities have a voice and appear as claims-makers on immigration and integration. Newspapers in 10 Western European countries (1990-2018) were systematically coded to identify public claims on these issues, together with coding of first names of claims-makers to identify gender and ethnic membership (N=11,164 claims). Results show that women appear less often as claims-makers than men, with even lower visibility among ethnic minority women. Hierarchical regression analyses reveal systematic differences in framing, tone, topic, and the addressees of the claims. This indicates that the voices of women and ethnic minorities are not visible, and these debates would be different if women and minorities had an equitable voice.
Parenting Leave Policies and Social Inequalities in Europe: Evidence, Blind Spots and Policy Direction
Alzbeta Bartova; Thordis Reimer; Johanna Lammi-Taskula
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Reducing inequalities is a core objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and a longstanding commitment of European welfare states. Parenting leave policies constitute a central policy instrument for addressing inequalities in gender relations, labour market participation, income security and family formation. However, their effectiveness depends not only on formal entitlements but on access, affordability and actual use across different social groups. This Policy Brief draws on the CA21150 Working Group 4 report Mapping the Unknown, whose primary objective was to identify research and data gaps in the European evidence base on parenting leave and social inequalities. Lammi-Taskula, J. and Reimer, T. (eds) (2026), Mapping the Unknown: Research Gaps in Parenting Leave Inequality Research in Europe, COST Action Parental Leave Policies and Social Sustainability (Sustainability@Leave), DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8kbsz_v1, available at: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8kbsz_v1
Revisiting Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education: The Case of Uruguay’s University of the Republic (Preprint)
Maria Victoria Mujica
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The COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions worldwide to rapidly transition to emergency remote teaching, exposing both structural vulnerabilities and institutional capacities for adaptation. This study examines the case of Uruguay’s University of the Republic, the country’s largest public and open-access university, through a document-based case study approach. Drawing on institutional reports, survey data, and secondary literature, the analysis explores how educational continuity was maintained during the initial phase of the pandemic and how pre-existing conditions shaped the university’s response. The findings show that Udelar’s democratic governance structure, extensive digital infrastructure, and prior experience with virtual learning environments enabled a rapid and large-scale transition to remote teaching. At the same time, the study identifies significant limitations in the pedagogical use of digital technologies, highlighting a gap between technological capacity and instructional transformation. Faculty members faced increased workloads and limited training opportunities, while students experienced challenges related to engagement, interaction, and well-being, particularly among vulnerable groups. By situating these developments within the broader context of Latin American higher education, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions on the tension between structural conditions and pedagogical transformation.
Policy matters: Developments in the language acquisition of Syrian refugees in the Netherlands and the impact of reception and civic integration policies
Wybren Nooitgedagt; Jaco Dagevos
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During their first years in the Netherlands, asylum seekers and permit holders are confronted with the reception and civic integration policies. Past research suggests these policies may have an impact on second language acquisition. Using three waves of longitudinal data collected among Syrian refugees in the Netherlands, we investigated whether any (dis)advantages in language skills accrued during the reception period are mitigated or exacerbated by the civic integration process. Our findings show that civic integration plays a key role in Dutch language acquisition, with language skills improving significantly before completion and stabilizing afterward. This is likely due to the end of mandatory classes and reduced access to further instruction. While this stabilization may reflect fossilization, it could also represent a temporary plateau, as past research suggests. Furthermore, more highly educated people improved their language skills more rapidly during civic integration, suggesting they are better able to make use of language classes. Finally, frequent relocations between asylum seeker centers initially hindered language skills but this disadvantage disappeared during civic integration, suggesting that civic integration can at least partially offset early setbacks.
The Social Psychology of Peer Downfall: A Systematic Review of Schadenfreude, Moral Disengagement, and Hostile Responses in Close Systems
Niha Salman
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Social systems, ranging from workplaces to digital platforms, are structured by implicit hierarchies in which individual performance is continuously evaluated through upward social comparison. This review examines the psychological mechanisms underlying hostile responses to peer downfall within such close systems. By synthesizing research from social, organizational, and experimental psychology (1954–2025), the paper analyzes how schadenfreude emerges in contexts of self-evaluation threat, perceived deservedness, and status-based comparison. It further examines how moral disengagement processes may facilitate the cognitive justification of emotionally rewarding but socially harmful responses. The review proposes an integrative model in which emotional reactions, cognitive justification, and structural conditions interact to determine whether peer misfortune remains an internal emotional response or develops into overt hostility. It emphasizes that evaluative pressure, competitive norms, and digital visibility can strengthen these processes across different contexts. Finally, the paper discusses implications for designing social, organizational, and digital systems that reduce comparison-driven hostility and promote more ethically regulated interaction in high-evaluation environments.
Imagining tomorrow's cities: Representations of urban futures in Google Images and visual generative AI
Cornelia Brantner; Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat; Joanne Kuai
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This study investigates how urban futures are represented on Google Images and by visual generative AI, such as DALL-E, focusing on the prioritized sociotechnical imaginaries. Anchored in concepts on imagined spaces, socio-technical imaginaries, and from critical future(s) studies, as well as a conceptualization of algorithms and AI as biasing technologies, this research employs an image-type analysis combined with an interpretive iconographic-iconological framework to examine images ranked or generated by these tools. Preliminary findings reveal dominant tropes of urban eco-technical sustainability and technological solutionism, with a limited representation of human-centered or participatory design elements and, thus, of alternative futures. Results suggest that the algorithmic hierarchy of Google Images and AI tools promotes a narrow vision of urban futures, often favoring commercial and techno-centric ideals over nuanced social, political, and ecological considerations. This research critically assesses the implications of these algorithmically mediated urban imaginaries, raising questions about representation, inclusivity, and the democratization of urban planning. The project contributes to discussions on the power of digital tools in shaping public perceptions of urban futures, proposing a need for more inclusive and diversified sociotechnical imaginaries that better reflect varied urban realities and aspirations.
Semantic Schema and Group Differences in Everyday Conceptions of Happiness and Unhappiness: An Investigation with a Word-association Network
LYU ZEYU; Zhemeng xie; Sachiko Yasuda; Aguru Ishibashi; Takaharu Saito; Hiroki Takikawa
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To understand how ordinary people conceptualize happiness—that is, the everyday conception of happiness—it is necessary to examine not only its constituent components, but also how these components are interconnected and organized into a semantic schema. Furthermore, a comprehensive understanding also requires investigation into the semantic schema of unhappiness as its conceptual counterpart, as well as variations in these schemas across demographic groups. To achieve this aim, this study employs a word-association network approach to investigate the semantic schemas and group differences in people's perceptions of happiness and unhappiness. Specifically, we create semantic representations of happiness and unhappiness using a word-association task in which participants freely listed words they associate with happiness and unhappiness, and then listed further words associated with each response; these word pairs are used to construct association networks from which underlying schemas are identified and demographic differences examined. Based on a survey conducted in Japan, our findings suggest that the proposed method not only captures major components, such as “Wealth” and “Relationships,” that have been widely identified in existing theories, but also reveals underrepresented components, such as “Food.” Moreover, our analysis provides insights into the structural relationships among these components, allowing us to understand how different components are connected to one another and what roles they play within the schema. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed method provides a useful framework for investigating how everyday conceptions of happiness and unhappiness differ across demographic groups by suggesting variation across groups in both the schema structure and its specific semantic features. Overall, this study demonstrates the value of word-association networks for capturing everyday conceptions of happiness and unhappiness, offering both theoretical insights and practical implications for developing more accurate and culturally grounded measures.
Satellite Sociology: Interpreting Spatial Traces of Human Activity from Earth Observation Data
Yuichiro Otani
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We introduce Satellite Sociology, a framework for observing and interpreting social processes using Earth observation data. The framework treats artificial satellites as devices that capture the material traces through which human activity becomes expressed in space. These traces are not limited to urban environments but include any spatial configurations shaped by human behavior, institutions, and economic processes. A central feature of Satellite Sociology lies in the definition of the unit of analysis. Spatial units—such as buildings, grids, or administrative regions—are not treated as neutral technical choices, but as explicit constructions of the social system under investigation. Different unit definitions yield different representations of social structure, enabling multiple interpretations of the same spatial domain. The framework interprets spatial patterns as observable traces from which underlying behavior can be inferred, and emphasizes the feedback relationship between activity and its spatial manifestations. Spatial configurations both reflect accumulated decisions and influence subsequent behavior, linking observation with process. To illustrate one application, we analyze urban space as an accumulated outcome of social decisions and examine its structural persistence. Using Shinagawa Ward (Tokyo) and Christchurch (New Zealand), we construct two building-level indicators: the Building-Level Vegetation Exposure Index (BVEI) and the Built--Vegetation Imbalance Index (BVII). The results reveal distinct allocation regimes and identify spatial configurations consistent with structural constraints on environmental redistribution. These findings demonstrate how satellite-derived spatial patterns can support inference about the processes that generate and stabilize spatial structure. Satellite Sociology provides a general framework for interpreting spatial data as traces of human activity and for linking Earth observation with sociological analysis.
Η Ισορροπία Nash ως Αναλυτικό Εργαλείο στη Δημόσια Διοίκηση Διάγνωση Παθογενειών και Στρατηγικές Παρέμβασης στο Ελληνικό Πλαίσιο
Konstantinos Grigoriadis
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Το παρόν άρθρο αξιοποιεί τη Θεωρία Παιγνίων για να διαγνώσει επίμονες παθογένειες της δημόσιας διοίκησης, όπως η γραφειοκρατική αδράνεια, αντιμετωπίζοντάς τις όχι ως τυχαίες αστοχίες αλλά ως σταθερές, αν και μη βέλτιστες, Ισορροπίες Nash. Μέσα από μια συστηματική βιβλιογραφική ανασκόπηση εστιασμένη στην ελληνική πραγματικότητα, προτείνεται μια θεμελιώδης εννοιολογική μετατόπιση: η δημόσια διοίκηση οφείλει να μεταβεί από τον ρόλο του παθητικού «παίκτη» σε αυτόν του προορατικού «σχεδιαστή του παιγνίου» (game designer). Ο σχεδιαστής αυτός τροποποιεί στρατηγικά τα κίνητρα, τους κανόνες και τη διαθέσιμη πληροφόρηση. Η ανάλυση καταδεικνύει ότι το συγκεκριμένο πλαίσιο προσφέρει έναν πρακτικό οδικό χάρτη για την αντιμετώπιση βαθιά ριζωμένων προβλημάτων, όπως η φοροδιαφυγή και οι συγκρούσεις αρμοδιοτήτων, μετασχηματίζοντας τις δυσλειτουργικές ισορροπίες. Τελικά, προσφέρεται ένα εφαρμόσιμο μοντέλο για τον σχεδιασμό αποτελεσματικών μεταρρυθμίσεων που μπορούν να μετακινήσουν πολύπλοκα διοικητικά συστήματα από το αδιέξοδο προς τη βιώσιμη συνεργασία.
The Queen Bee Mother: A Developmental and Contextual Framework for Evolved Female Intra-Group Power Dynamics in Aotearoa New Zealand Workplaces
Tasha Paladin
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The Queen Bee syndrome is well established in organisational scholarship as a pattern in which senior women distance themselves from female peers in male-dominated environments. However, the existing literature treats this behaviour as a relatively fixed response to identity threat, attending insufficiently to its developmental trajectory and the evolved forms of power it may produce. This concept paper introduces the Queen Bee Mother as a distinct and previously unnamed archetype: a senior woman who has moved beyond competitive self-group distancing and now exercises informal organisational power through selective inclusion, network cultivation, and the strategic grooming of loyal successors. The warmth and apparent mentorship that characterise Queen Bee Mother behaviour render it structurally invisible and considerably more damaging to organisational culture than the visible dominance dynamics that have historically received greater research attention. Drawing on social identity theory, maternal gatekeeping, benevolent sexism theory, and informal organisational network research, this paper develops a two-archetype typology comprising the Legacy Queen Bee Mother and the Late-Entrant Queen Bee Mother. The paper situates both archetypes within the specific cultural ecology of Aotearoa New Zealand, where enforced egalitarianism, tall poppy norms, small population dynamics, and tightly bounded professional networks create conditions of unusual potency for these dynamics. A research agenda is proposed to invite empirical engagement from scholars in organisational behaviour, gender studies, and New Zealand workplace discourse.
Systematic, quality appraisal of household recycling influences research finds evidence is mostly insufficient
Jennifer Macklin; Liam David Graham Smith; James Curtis
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Research on recycling behaviour and its influences can play a key role in supporting public policy efforts to mitigate the negative effects of waste generation and landfilling. However, recent reviews have raised concerns about the quality of research on recycling behaviour. Despite this, no previous reviews have conducted quality appraisals to judge the extent and impact of quality issues. This is partly due to the difficulty of applying validated quality appraisal tools developed for intervention reviews in the health and medicine fields to behaviour influence reviews in environment and sustainability fields. This update of a previous systematic review aims to fill this gap by developing and piloting a novel quality appraisal framework, specifically tailored to the needs of interdisciplinary reviews of the influences on recycling and other pre-environmental behaviours. Application of the novel framework to a set of 118 recycling papers highlighted a substantial lack of causal evidence and weak construct validity of measured ‘behaviour’. These quality issues undermine the ability of individual studies and the body of literature as a whole to firstly, draw strong conclusions about what factors have causal influence on real-world recycling behaviour in broad populations of interest, and secondly, therefore, to guide interventions to improve recycling outcomes. To improve future research, this review identifies instances of better practice to increase the quality of evidence and the field’s confidence in what influences household recycling, and potentially, other pro-environmental behaviour.
Climate Barriers to Democratic Participation
Vítor Calafate; Francisco J M Costa; João Paulo Pessoa
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Extreme weather events can undermine political representation by preventing vulnerable populations from voting. Using georeferenced polling-station records from eight Brazilian elections (2010–2024) matched to daily river discharge, we exploit within-polling-station variation to show that historically low river discharge on election day increases voter abstention in communities dependent on river transportation. The effects are larger in polling sections with higher illiteracy rates and married voters. These shocks also shift electoral outcomes by reducing the vote share of parties whose bases overlap with affected populations. Our findings show that climate change can systematically weaken the political voice of the populations most exposed to climate damages.
Does Race have Confounders?
Travis Loux; Ethan Wankum
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Studying of the effect of racial differences on health outcomes is a difficult task for reasons including varying definitions of race - many of which may not adhere to current best practices - its philosophical acceptance as a well-defined exposure, and appropriate utilization of factors with important roles in the relationship between race and outcome. Inattentive approaches to any of these issues can lead to biased, irrelevant, or unreplicable study findings. We highlight these concerns paying special focus to the issue of covariates in analyses of racial causal effects. We show that mis-identifying many common covariates as confounding variables can bias estimates of racial causal effects. Rather than defaulting to using covariates as confounding variables, researchers should carefully consider the role each variable plays in the relationship between race and outcome and how accounting for each will affect effect estimates and their interpretability.
Estimating Alleged Sick Leave Misuse Accounting for Social Desirability Afflicted Responding
Raenhha Dhami; Stephanie Zintel; Marike Andreas; Hannah Heennig; Vera Araujo Soares; Falko Sniehotta
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Sickness absence has become a focal issue in labour market debate across high income economies- Specifically, accessible telemedical sick leave procedure is politically cited as a driver of opportunistic absenteeism. However, empirical evidence on the prevalence of such behaviours and their underlying mechanisms remains limited as traditional questionnaires on sensitive behaviours are prone to social desirability bias (SDB). We estimate the prevalence and predictors of voluntary absenteeism in this large, population-based pre-registered study (N = 1964) with an indirect questioning technique designed to circumvent SDB responding. We find that self-reported voluntary absenteeism doubles when measured indirectly (34.6%) compared to directly (18.6%). Psychosocial workplace factors - burnout, role conflict, and low work engagement - emerge as consistent predictors along with injunctive social norms (p’s < 0.05). Uncertainty about telemedical access was associated with reduced odds of voluntary absenteeism compared to having access (OR = 0.58, p = .003), while no effect was found for no access. Findings challenge dominant narratives attributing telemedical-sick leave to opportunistic misuse. Rather voluntary absenteeism is better understood as a function of workplace conditions and employee well-being rather than procedural access to certification. Policy efforts should focus on improving workplace conditions over simplistic reforms of sick leave certification procedures.
Beyond the Core: Diffuse Anti-Gender and Perceived Male Reverse Discrimination Beliefs in Italy
Nicola Righetti
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Manifestations of gender backlash such as anti-genderism and the manosphere’s anti-feminism have been extensively studied, yet there is little data on their prevalence in the general population. This study examines the prevalence of anti-gender beliefs and perceived male reverse discrimination beliefs using data from a survey conducted in Italy in December 2024 and assesses whether these two expressions of gender backlash are correlated. The findings show an ideologically committed core of individuals surrounded by a larger share of others whose adherence to such views ranges from moderate to low, approaching complete rejection. Subgroup analyses further indicate that variation by gender and age is uneven, with some of the highest levels observed among younger and middle-aged men, and factor-analytic results indicate that perceived male reverse discrimination is closely connected to anti-gender beliefs. This suggests a diffuse, albeit moderate, belief landscape that could, under specific social conditions, such as biographical events of early and middle adulthood, lead individuals from the low-intensity belief margins toward the radicalized center.
Misperceived Social Norms and Political Accountability: Evidence and Theory
Shuhei Kitamura; Ryo Takahashi; Katsunori Yamada
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Elections can deter corruption only if voters punish tainted incumbents. We study whether punishment depends on second-order beliefs---beliefs about how other voters will react. Before Japan’s October 2024 general election amid a funding scandal, we ran a pre-registered online survey experiment. To study this channel, we provided no new factual information about the scandal itself and instead reported a baseline statistic about perceived public intolerance of the underlying corruption: treated respondents learned that, in our baseline survey, the average respondent estimated that 67% of other respondents viewed the conduct as unacceptable. The message increased turnout by 6 percentage points and support for opposition challengers by 7 percentage points. Effects were sharply heterogeneous. Swing voters, especially those who initially overestimated how widely others would punish, became more likely to vote and back challengers. By contrast, ruling-party supporters, especially those who initially underestimated how widely others would punish, shifted toward the incumbent when they learned that intolerance of the corruption was higher than expected. More broadly, anti-corruption messages may affect voting not only by changing beliefs about wrongdoing, but also by changing beliefs about others’ reactions, helping explain why such campaigns often have mixed effects.
Restrictive Immigration: The Reduction of Support Provisions for Vulnerable Asylum Seekers
MOBILE - Center of Excellence for Global Mobility Law; Kamille Munch Andreasen
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This paper, which extends from a student master’s project, seeks to understand the impact of Danish immigration policy on vulnerable asylum seekers. It departs from the closing of Centre Jelling to investigate the consequences of reducing costs by closing accommodation with specialised inclusivity provisions for queer asylum seekers. Therefore, I examine the Danish hardline approach to immigration and asylum to understand the conditions created for asylum seekers. The paper builds on contemporary literature of queer migration and Nordic asylum models, with a particular focus on Denmark. From a poststructuralist perspective, I apply concepts of biopower and structural violence to understand the positioning of queer asylum seekers in an increasingly restrictive framework. The paper is supplemented with three expert interviews with persons working in asylum in Denmark. The paper finds that the Danish state is continuing its turn towards deterrence and restriction in asylum and immigration policy. This is demonstrated by the recent decision to close Centre Jelling, an asylum centre with special provisions for vulnerable groups. Queer asylum seekers are known to be more vulnerable, as acknowledged by the Ministry of Immigration and various civil society actors. Yet through continued cuts to the Danish asylum system, they are put in increasingly precarious positions. This paper finds that worry for the lives of queer asylum seekers was a major theme within civil society. The paper argues that the Danish model’s emphasis on restriction creates deliberately intolerable conditions for asylum seekers, which can potentially systemise harm at a structural level.
Synergies and Gaps in Support for Technical Career Development in UK Higher Education and Research: A Semi-Quantitative Analysis of ‘Technician Commitment’ Action Plans and Progress Reports using Natural Language Processing
Samuel Jackson
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This study analyses Technician Commitment action plans from UK higher education institutions to address persistent technical talent demand in research. Using natural language processing with Google Gemini, 3558 action items from 104 plans were categorised into 26 key themes. The most common focus areas were "Ongoing Visibility and Communication", "Networking and Presenting" and "Career Pathways and Progression", whilst "Wellbeing and Mental Health", "Environmental Sustainability" and "Equipment Sharing" received minimal attention. Comparison with the TALENT Policy Commission's recommendations revealed strong alignment on improving visibility and diversifying entry routes, but significant gaps in technical staff's policy involvement and strategic workforce planning. Notably, institutions rarely cited external resources from professional bodies, suggesting underutilisation of available support. The study proposes developing a 'Skills Portfolio' methodology with a standardised 'living skills ontology' to provide verifiable mechanisms for demonstrating technical expertise. These findings highlight the need for more prescriptive national guidance and targeted outreach to foster comprehensive technical workforce development.
The state as a vehicle for, or alleviator of, cultural reproduction? An example comparing state funded Schools of Music and Performing Arts in Norway with ideal organizations for cultural training.
Andreas Roaldsnes
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Unequal access to cultural goods remains a social problem that public policy tries to mitigate. But is the state efficient in heightening cultural equality compared to what non-governmental organizations are doing? This study compares the importance of social and cultural preconditions for receiving cultural training for children in Norway and investigates the propensity to participate in Kulturskole (The Norwegian publicly funded School of Music and Performing Arts) or in third sector cultural organizations using survey data of 15 182 children aged 6-15 years old. The findings display a paradoxical situation, where a state cultural policy program is warped to benefit the highly educated and culturally privileged, whereas cultural training in organizations that are not subject to public policy and not directly funded is less characterized by social and cultural inequalities. This paradox is heightened by the fact that the large-scale program (Kulturskole) is in no small part justified because it is “for all”, with a stated aim to contribute to democratization of cultural goods. The result is a cultural policy program that serves as a vehicle for cultural reproduction, rather than a mitigator of this problem, despite being devised and funded in an egalitarian-oriented cultural welfare state.
Preventing Corruption: Ups and Downs of India’s Employment Guarantee
Jean Drèze; Anmol Somanchi
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This paper reexamines evidence of corruption in India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the largest public-works programme in the world. We estimate “validation ratios”, defined as the proportion of MGNREGA person-days that are reflected in independent surveys such as the National Sample Surveys and the India Human Development Survey. In the initial years of the programme, estimated validation ratios were as low as 50% or so, but they rose steadily, and by 2011-12, the bulk of MGNREGA employment was validated by two independent national surveys. The more recent Periodic Labour Force Surveys, however, suggest that validation ratios fell again after that, and may be as low as 40% or so today. In other words, MGNREGA seems to be back to square one as far as corruption is concerned. We note that PLFS data on MGNREGA may not be entirely reliable, yet the evidence of resurgent corruption is hard to dismiss. We discuss possible reasons for this setback. Briefly, MGNREGA seems to be trapped in a vicious circle of underfunding, erratic wage payments, worker discouragement and high leakages.
Revisiting Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education: The Case of Uruguay’s University of the Republic (Preprint)
Maria Victoria Mujica
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The COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions worldwide to rapidly transition to emergency remote teaching, exposing both structural vulnerabilities and institutional capacities for adaptation. This study examines the case of Uruguay’s University of the Republic, the country’s largest public and open-access university, through a document-based case study approach. Drawing on institutional reports, survey data, and secondary literature, the analysis explores how educational continuity was maintained during the initial phase of the pandemic and how pre-existing conditions shaped the university’s response. The findings show that Udelar’s democratic governance structure, extensive digital infrastructure, and prior experience with virtual learning environments enabled a rapid and large-scale transition to remote teaching. At the same time, the study identifies significant limitations in the pedagogical use of digital technologies, highlighting a gap between technological capacity and instructional transformation. Faculty members faced increased workloads and limited training opportunities, while students experienced challenges related to engagement, interaction, and well-being, particularly among vulnerable groups. By situating these developments within the broader context of Latin American higher education, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions on the tension between structural conditions and pedagogical transformation.
New Class, New Me? Class Mobility and Political Attitudes in Britain and Switzerland
Guillaume Bornet
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The literature on occupational classes' political attitudes largely assumes socialisation effects. While self-selection into occupations and general tendencies towards attitudinal stability challenge this view, an emerging literature using panel data still finds small, but existent effects of class mobility. However, we argue that their framework does not correspond fully to socialisation. We propose a more appropriate one and study whether occupational socialisation affects socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes through a two-way fixed-effects model with dummy impact functions. We use Swiss (SHP) and British (BHPS) panels, covering the periods 1999-2023 and 1991-2008 respectively, to unpack the evolution of these attitudes after vertical or horizontal mobility. We find that, despite clear between-class differences in socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes, neither vertical nor horizontal class mobility is consistently associated with immediate or late-onset attitudinal changes. The lack of evidence for socialisation shows that this implicit assumption present in most research on classes' political attitudes should be reconsidered. Our results also show why using models that are well suited to socialisation is crucial.
Understanding Human-Technology Interaction: Models, Ethics, and the Future of Control
Kristina Sabrina Weißmüller; Pascal König
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Drawing on the latest interdisciplinary insights on human-technology interaction, this chapter explains key perspectives and frameworks of how people adopt, interact with, and experience technology. After introducing core ethical aspects of technology, the chapter takes a critical stance on the promises and pitfalls of disruptive technological advancement—including but not limited to AI. Combining organizational, socio-psychological, and ethical perspectives on human-technology interaction, fundamental challenges of human control over digital technologies—which are not only tools but also agents and infrastructures—are explained. The chapter explains important blind spots within the most commonly used models of human-technology interaction and discusses unresolved issues of user-technology value alignment, accountability, and control.
Parallel Ageing: The Synchronised Postponement of Fertility and Mortality
Serena Vigezzi; Annette Baudisch
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As births and deaths occur at progressively older ages, further delays must increasingly encounter resistance from existing physiological constraints. For female fertility, these constraints ultimately manifest as menopause. Whether an analogous limit exists for survival, however, remains debated. Evidence indicates that reproductive and actuarial ageing share underlying physiological constraints. We hypothesize that these common constraints limit fertility and mortality postponement in similar ways, becoming particularly apparent as ages at childbearing and death shift upwards and physiological factors gain in importance. Consequently, we propose leveraging the known limit to female fertility to shed light on the unknown limit to survival. Utilizing percentile-based aggregate measures of mortality and fertility schedules to compare their trends since the 1940s in various low-mortality and low-fertility female populations, we show that for the last 35 years, the pace of mortality and fertility postponement has been surprisingly consistent, forming two parallel lines. This pace persists throughout almost the entire period of fertility postponement and therefore appears independent of the proximity to an upper age-limit. These results support the hypothesis of common constraints governing fertility and mortality delay, offering deep implications for the nature of human ageing. Moreover, we highlight shortcomings in previous approaches to locate a limit to human lifespan using aggregate measures, thereby refining future research on the subject.
Audit Intensity and Defensive Decision Architectures: A Fear-Based Mechanism in High-Scrutiny Organizations
RALPH RENDELL TOLEDO
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Public administration systems have intensified accountability and oversight to address corruption, inefficiency, and misuse of public resources. These developments have reinforced an audit society in which verification and performance control increasingly shape everyday administrative routines. Although scholarship widely documents proceduralism, risk aversion, and compliance-oriented behavior under audit-intensive regimes, it has paid limited attention to the behavioral mechanism through which these outcomes are systematically produced. This paper develops the Fear-Based Decision-Making Framework, positioning fear as an institutionalized mechanism linking audit culture and asymmetric accountability to conservative administrative behavior. Using theory-driven conceptual synthesis across Audit Culture Theory, Risk Aversion Theory, and Behavioral Public Administration, the analysis integrates evidence from peer-reviewed literature and institutional reports, with comparative attention to Western and ASEAN governance contexts. The synthesis shows that expanding audit regimes tend to redefine accountability around documentation and procedural defensibility, encouraging anticipatory compliance and narrowing discretionary space. Conservative administrative behavior commonly manifests as rigid rule adherence, documentation inflation, defensive standardization, and discretion avoidance, reflecting loss-avoidance incentives under conditions of retrospective scrutiny. The framework specifies five-part typology of fear: anticipatory, sanction, reputational, interpretive, and institutionalized, and explains how ASEAN scholarship often masks fear-driven behavior through proxy framings such as capacity and compliance narratives. By making fear analytically explicit, the paper reframes conservative administration as an accountability design problem and provides a basis for developing testable propositions and governance reforms that protect integrity without systematically constraining discretion and judgment.
The Spiritual Mindset : An Integrative Theoretical Framework for Meaning-Making and Motivational Orientation
Mitchell Sanders
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This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding spirituality as a psychological orientation embedded in social and cultural systems of meaning. Psychology has long struggled to define and operationalize spirituality in a manner that preserves conceptual clarity while accommodating its experiential and motivational diversity. Existing approaches often fragment spirituality across trait-based measures, coping frameworks, or institutional religious constructs, limiting integration across clinical, cognitive, and personality research. This article presents an integrative theoretical framework for the spiritual mindset, conceptualized as a dynamic psychological orientation characterized by meaning-making, self–transcendence, epistemic openness, and significance regulation. Drawing on research from psychology of religion and spirituality, motivational psychology, cognitive science, and clinical theory, the framework synthesizes prior findings into a coherent model that accounts for both adaptive and maladaptive expressions of spirituality. The model clarifies boundary conditions between spirituality and religiosity, delineates mechanisms through which spiritual orientations influence cognition and behavior, and identifies pathways through which spiritual meaning-making may contribute to psychological growth or vulnerability. The framework is intended as a standalone theoretical contribution that consolidates existing literatures while offering testable claims to guide future empirical research.
Remote Work Across Spaces: A Narrative Review of Boundary Management at Home and Third Places
Matthew J. Xerri; Xi Wen Chan; Philip Hider; Simon Wakeling
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Remote work has expanded rapidly, with most research focusing on work from home and offering limited insight into how alternative work environments shape work–life boundary management. This narrative review synthesises research on remote work and boundary management to examine how different work settings influence employee experiences and outcomes. The review identifies five key themes: (1) the role of spatial and temporal flexibility in shaping boundary control; (2) the influence of environmental and social cues on boundary enactment; (3) the potential of alternative remote workplaces outside the home (or ‘third places’) to support boundary management; (4) the behavioural strategies individuals use to manage boundaries across contexts; and (5) the implications of boundary management for wellbeing and work-related outcomes. While existing research highlights the importance of the work environment in shaping boundary dynamics, evidence remains heavily skewed towards home-based work, with limited empirical attention to third places as distinct boundary-supporting environments. As such, the role of these spaces in enabling or constraining boundary management remains underdeveloped and warrants further investigation. By integrating insights across fragmented literatures, this review advances a more contextually grounded understanding of boundary management in remote work and identifies key directions for future research.
Create the Code You Want to See
Diego Romero Brandt
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As climate change accelerates and becomes a more significant existential threat, the tech sector’s carbon footprint keep increasing and they are difficult to quantify. The tech sector also continues to produce harmful technologies and engage in harmful practices, ranging from work surveillance to AI children’s toys. This essay argues that climate change and these unjust practices are entangled and cannot be individually solved in silos, as they are symptoms of a centralized system driven by competition and artificial scarcity. The essay critiques the tech sector’s reliance on top-down central planning by utilizing frameworks of Elizabeth Sawin’s multisolving, Donella Meadows leverage points, and Elizabeth Ostrom’s work that empirically proves the viability of polycentric governance. It proposes prefiguration as the necessary strategy for STEM workers to enact deep systemic change that works towards polycentricity. Concrete, actionable prefigurative practices already occurring within STEM are surveyed, including open source hardware, mesh networks, and repair cafes. While these prefigurative acts exist in the micro-scale, they are necessary practices for the adoption of circular economies, renewables, and worker-owned cooperatives. This paper reframes technical labour as a political act and provides a strategic blueprint for STEM workers to mitigate immediate environmental and social harm while constructing the democratic and decentralized infrastructure required for a just climate transition.
LLM Tool: A Hybrid Pipeline for Automated High-Throughput Text Annotation Using Local Language Models and BERT Classifiers
Antoine Claude Lemor; Shannon Dinan; Jeremy Gilbert
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Large language models now routinely annotate text in computational social science, but they do not hold up at corpus sizes of several million sentences. Proprietary LLMs are financially prohibitive, local open-weight LLMs take days or weeks of computation, and both remain opaque and hard to reproduce. Using LLMs to train dedicated classifiers solves these problems, yet the approach itself remains sparsely tested in the social sciences and largely inaccessible to researchers without engineering support. We present LLMTool, an open-source Python package that runs the full hybrid workflow from a command line. On a bilingual corpus of 38,451 Canadian parliamentary debates and news media texts coded across four dimensions, classifiers trained on the best LLM labels reach amean Micro F1 of 68.9%. Open-weight models such as GPT-OSS match one of the best proprietary models available, GPT-5, and deliver a 109–395× inference speedup over directLLM annotation on standard workstations
The Relationship between China's One-Child Policy and Female Empowerment
Wendi Wang; Qing Guan; Natalie Nitsche
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Vanessa Fong (2002) theorised that China's One-Child Policy (OCP; 1979–2016) enhanced female empowerment by removing competition from sons and allowing daughters to obtain resources traditionally reserved for sons. However, no systematic review has comprehensively assessed the available evidence on this issue. Drawing on Fong’s framework, we examined the relationship between the OCP and female empowerment across seven subfields: family investment and parental support, education, employment and career development, gender attitudes and norms, intergenerational relationships, reproductive rights and autonomy, and other social dynamics. We searched six scientific databases, yielding 1265 sources and, after applying exclusion criteria, analyzed 32 studies published between 2002 and 2024. The majority (21 of 32) report a positive relationship between the OCP and female empowerment. Resource concentration driven by reduced sibling size emerges as a central mechanism, benefiting only-daughters in family investment, education, and career development. In contrast, impacts on mothers are more mixed; while the OCP reduced childbirth burdens and enhanced life autonomy, it also violated reproductive rights and imposed disproportionate contraceptive burdens on women. Moreover, it emerges the OCP's empowering effects were contingent on external conditions, such as local educational and economic resources or place of residence. We point out various research gaps in the existing literature, amongst other the consistent failure to distinguish the OCP’s effects from concurrent socio-economic transformations. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the OCP, together with broader social changes, has shaped women's lives and promoted female empowerment, although its impacts were neither uniform nor inherent, but rather shaped by contextual factors.
Caring for the Whole Woman: A Case for a Comprehensive Postpartum Assessment Index
Julia Romano
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The six-week postpartum visit remains the primary — and often only — formal clinical encounter a woman receives following childbirth in the United States. Despite recommendations by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) that this visit be broadened into a comprehensive postpartum care model, most providers continue to rely on a narrow set of single-domain screening tools that collectively fail to capture the full scope of postpartum experience. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), the most widely administered postpartum instrument, screens for depression alone. Other validated tools address anxiety, PTSD, bipolar spectrum disorder, or pelvic floor dysfunction in isolation. No existing instrument integrates physical recovery, psycho-emotional wellbeing, birth trauma, relational identity, energetic depletion, and the capacity for meaning-making and awe into a single, clinically usable framework. This paper introduces the Comprehensive Postpartum Assessment Index (CPAI), a novel multi-domain screening instrument grounded in the panchamayakosha model from the yoga therapy tradition — a five-layered framework that understands the human being as physical body, breath and energetic body, psycho-emotional realm, discernment body, and capacity for awe. The CPAI draws on validated, open-source items from existing instruments where applicable and introduces original items in domains that are currently unaddressed in clinical practice. It is designed to be administered by obstetricians, midwives, or other postpartum providers as a starting point for whole-person assessment and targeted referral. This paper reviews the current landscape of postpartum screening tools, articulates the clinical and humanistic gaps they leave unaddressed, introduces the theoretical framework underlying the CPAI, and presents the instrument itself. While formal psychometric validation studies are beyond the scope of this initial work, the CPAI is offered as a rigorously grounded foundation for future research, clinical pilot testing, and iterative refinement. Keywords: postpartum care, postpartum depression, comprehensive screening, panchamayakosha, yoga therapy, birth trauma, matrescence, pelvic floor, postpartum PTSD, body awareness, bodily dissociation, whole-person assessment
Hierarchies of Political Fear: Democratic Legitimacy under Chronic Insecurity - Evidence from Burkina Faso
Souleymane Yameogo
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Why does democracy lose credibility under chronic insecurity? Existing accounts of democratic backsliding emphasise authoritarian attitudes, institutional weakness, or elite manipulation. This article advances the Hierarchical Fear Theory (HFT), arguing that democratic legitimacy depends on the ordering of competing political fears. Political fear is conceptualised not as an irrational emotion but as a structured anticipation of harm that becomes hierarchically ranked in specific contexts. When insecurity intensifies, fears of physical survival, state collapse, and symbolic disappearance can displace fear of arbitrariness—the liberal concern with unchecked power. Using Burkina Faso as a critical case and drawing on theory-driven analysis and Afrobarometer trends, the article shows how chronic violence reordered the hierarchy of fears, shifting legitimacy from procedural constraint to protective effectiveness. Democratic institutions are consequently evaluated instrumentally rather than intrinsically, generating conditional support for concentrated authority. The findings offer a non-moralising, context-sensitive explanation of democratic erosion with implications for other conflict-affected and fragile democracies.
Revolutionary State-Building and the Politics of Conflict: Antagonism, Contestation, and the Collapse of Sankara’s Burkina Faso (1983-1987)
Souleymane Yameogo
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Why do revolutionary projects with strong popular legitimacy so often fail to institutionalise their gains? Drawing on the Schmittian–Mouffean debate on political conflict, this article theorises revolutions as state-building experiments whose durability depends on how post-rupture conflict is organised: through antagonistic closure (friend–enemy politics) or through agonistic contestation (legitimised disagreement). Using qualitative process tracing of speeches, policy documents, and secondary sources, the article analyses Thomas Sankara’s revolution in Burkina Faso (1983–1987) as a diagnostic case of postcolonial revolutionary governance. It shows how ideological ambiguity and confrontational state-building initially enabled mobilisation but subsequently narrowed coalitions, eroded institutions, and generated political and strategic isolation, culminating in regime collapse. A structured comparison with Ghana under Jerry Rawlings illustrates an alternative trajectory in which revolutionary legitimacy was stabilised through hybrid institutions that channelled conflict rather than suppressing it. The article contributes to comparative debates on revolution, state formation, and postcolonial governance by specifying a mechanism linking conflict management, legitimacy, and regime durability across the Global South.
Strengthening Women-Led Businesses During COVID-19: The Role of Estate Management, Social Capital, and Community Leadership in Residential Estates in Lagos, Nigeria
Zainab Adewunmi Aderinwale; Ajibade Ojo Majeed; Chukwuma Nwude; Chinwe Ann Iloabanafo
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The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a massive shock to global economic activity, and micro and small enterprises (MSEs) were among the most impacted. Women-led enterprises in residential estates in Lagos, Nigeria, were particularly vulnerable as Lagos is a highly densely populated urban center that is characterized by very high dependence on informal enterprise. Most of these enterprises, however, showed resilience by basing their operations on hyperlocal means like estate management, social networks, and community leadership, despite the limited mobility and affected consumer behavior. Many of these businesses found strength in hyperlocal structures, such as estate management, social networks, and community leadership, despite shifting consumer behaviors and limited mobility. This article examines how these community-based systems helped the survival and even expansion of women-led businesses throughout the pandemic. The study highlights the value of grassroots systems in protecting women entrepreneurs against macro-level disruptions by synthesizing theoretical perspectives on social capital and local governance. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, Women-led business, Estate management, Social capital, Community leadership, Lagos.
Structural Pathways to Equity: How Estate Management, Education & Leadership, and Economic Systems Shape Financial Access and Resilience Among Minority Women Entrepreneurs in the United States
Zainab Adewunmi Aderinwale; Ajibade Ojo Majeed; Chukwuma Nwude
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In accessing financial capital and sustaining their businesses, minority women entrepreneurs in the United States confront structural barriers. These barriers are influenced by interconnected structural factors, such as systems of residential estate management, opportunities for educational and leadership, and broader economic frameworks. This research explores how these structural areas enable or impede financial access and entrepreneurial resilience. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, empirical data from U.S. entrepreneurial studies, and a framework for economic justice, the article investigates (1) how estate and housing policies influence access to networks and resources; (2) the role of education and leadership pathways in equipping minority women for competitive business environments; and (3) how economic systems perpetuate or dismantle barriers to capital. The paper contends that addressing financial exclusion necessitates an integrated strategy that takes into account the spatial, educational, and economic determinants of entrepreneurship. Keywords: minority women, entrepreneurs, Estate Management, Education, Leadership, Financial access, Economic system.
Diskriminierung von Konsument:innen in Deutschland. Vignetten zur Verbraucher:innenarbeiten
Matthias Schneider; Friederike Rosenbaum
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Dieses Working Paper präsentiert fünf Vignetten zu Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag in Deutschland. Die Vignetten basieren auf 30 Interviews mit Verbraucher:innen, die im Rahmen des Projekts DEVGAV geführt wurden, und wurden aus dem Interviewmaterial verdichtet, anonymisiert und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit aufbereitet. Ziel ist es, typische Konstellationen von Diskriminierung in unterschiedlichen Konsumbereichen sichtbar zu machen, darunter Dienstleistungen, Mobilität, Einzelhandel, Kulturangebote und digitale Buchungssysteme. Die Vignetten zeigen, dass Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag häufig nicht als offene Zurückweisung auftritt, sondern in Routinen, institutionellen Regeln, technischen Vorgaben und fehlenden Zugängen wirksam wird. Zugleich machen sie deutlich, dass solche Erfahrungen mit Emotionen wie Unsicherheit, Scham, Unbehagen oder Verunsicherung verbunden sind und das zukünftige Verhalten von Verbraucher:innen prägen. Das Working Paper versteht Vignetten damit nicht nur als Darstellungsform, sondern als analytisches und praxisbezogenes Instrument, um Diskriminierung im Konsumalltag zu erfassen, zu diskutieren und für die Verbraucher:innenarbeit nutzbar zu machen. Ergänzend werden Leitfragen vorgestellt, die eine reflexive Auseinandersetzung in Beratung, Workshops und Bildungsformaten unterstützen.
Exigência de Inglês “para Inglês ver”: Exclusão Antecipatória e Estratificação Racializada na Transição para o Mercado de Trabalho entre Graduados Cotistas
Omar Koshin; Andre Vieira
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Este artigo examina o papel do requisito de fluência em inglês nos processos de contratação de graduados como um mecanismo de estratificação racializada no mercado de trabalho brasileiro. Os dados provêm de 19 entrevistas semiestruturadas com graduados beneficiários da política de cotas e profissionais de recursos humanos realizadas no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo entre julho de 2025 e janeiro de 2026. O argumento central é que a exigência de fluência em inglês opera como um mecanismo de fechamento social na transição para o emprego. Esse mecanismo não se baseia na função produtiva da habilidade, mas em três processos inter-relacionados: (i) seleção por um recurso cultural cuja distribuição é fortemente estratificada por classe e raça; (ii) legitimação institucional do requisito como marcador de profissionalismo, associada a modelos organizacionais internacionalizados; e (iii) exclusão antecipatória de candidatos que, ao confrontar o requisito, deixam de se candidatar às vagas. Abstract: This article examines the role of English proficiency requirements in graduate hiring as a mechanism of racialized stratification in the Brazilian labour market. Data come from 19 semi-structured interviews with quota-policy beneficiary graduates and human resources professionals conducted in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo between July 2025 and January 2026. The central argument is that English proficiency requirements operate as a social closure mechanism in the school-to-work transition. This mechanism does not rest on the direct productive function of the skill, but on three interrelated processes: (i) selection by a cultural resource whose distribution is strongly stratified by class and race; (ii) institutional legitimation of the requirement as a marker of professionalism, associated with internationalised organisational models; and (iii) anticipatory exclusion of candidates who, upon encountering the requirement, choose not to apply.
Assessing Funders’ Databases Against Bibliographic Sources: A Study of Interoperability, Metadata Quality, and Coverage Using South Korea’s National R&D Database
Soohong Eum
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Comprehensive and reliable funding information is essential for evaluating public research investment, yet funding metadata remain fragmented across heterogeneous data sources maintained by funders and bibliographic platforms. This study examines the interoperability between a national funder database, the National Science and Technology Information Service (NTIS) of South Korea, and two bibliographic sources, Web of Science (WoS) and OpenAlex, in order to assess the quality and coverage of funded publication data. Using a multi-step metadata matching procedure, more than 99% of NTIS records were successfully linked to corresponding documents in WoS and OpenAlex, demonstrating that bibliographic metadata in NTIS records are generally complete and accurate despite incomplete coverage of persistent identifiers such as DOIs. However, limitations are identified in funding-specific metadata, particularly in the centrally assigned contribution rate, which does not account for non-Korean or non-governmental funding and may bias national statistics. Comparison across data sources reveals substantial overlap but also notable differences in coverage and granularity. These differences reflect the distinct collection mechanisms of funders’ databases and bibliographic sources and give rise to complementarities that can be exploited to obtain a more comprehensive picture of funded research outputs and their associated funding sources. The findings carry broader implications for funding agencies seeking to improve interoperability, metadata standardisation, and the analytical utility of research information systems.
UNHREP Policy Paper: CLIMATE JUSTICE AS A HUMAN RIGHTS-BASED FRAMEWORK
Benedicta Neysa Nathania Vieira de Mello; Sergio Alfredo Jose Vieira de Mello
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Climate justice has emerged as one of the most critical ethical, legal, and political frameworks in global climate governance. It is no longer sufficient to treat climate change as a purely scientific or environmental matter, as the crisis increasingly reveals structural inequalities, historical injustice, and uneven global vulnerability. Climate change affects communities differently based on wealth, geographic exposure, political representation, and access to adaptation resources. These unequal impacts reinforce existing social injustices and deepen poverty, displacement, health insecurity, and conflict. This paper, developed by the United Nations Human Rights Educational Project (UNHREP), examines climate justice as a human rights-based framework that connects environmental protection with global equity and sustainable peace. It argues that climate policy must not only aim for emission reduction and technological transition, but also uphold human dignity through accountability mechanisms, inclusive decision-making, and fair distribution of resources. Using a qualitative policy-based approach, this paper integrates human rights principles with climate governance instruments, including the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and evolving norms recognizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The paper highlights that the climate crisis is fundamentally linked to rights such as the right to life, health, food, water, housing, and cultural identity. It also addresses the importance of intergenerational justice and the ethical responsibilities of high-emission states and corporate actors. The paper concludes with the position that climate justice must be operationalized through transparent financing, legally binding accountability, protection of Indigenous and marginalized communities, and climate education that empowers global citizenship. UNHREP recommends stronger mechanisms for loss and damage support, inclusive adaptation governance, and global partnerships rooted in human rights obligations.
Political Denial-of-Service Attacks Database (PDOSD)
Philipp Lutscher
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This short report introduces the Political Denial-of-Service Attacks Database (PDOSD), a media-based dataset on politically motivated DoS attacks using English-language newspaper articles retrieved from LexisNexis, manually coded by two human coders for the period 2008--2016. This period covers a historically important era of hacktivist and state-sponsored DDoS attacks, including the Arab Spring, the rise of Anonymous, and early Russian cyber operations. The database records news reports on politically motivated DoS attacks and can be downloaded at both the news article and aggregated event level.
LLM Tool: A Hybrid Pipeline for Automated High-Throughput Text Annotation Using Local Language Models and BERT Classifiers
Antoine Claude Lemor; Shannon Dinan; Jeremy Gilbert
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Large language models now routinely annotate text in computational social science, but they do not hold up at corpus sizes of several million sentences. Proprietary LLMs are financially prohibitive, local open-weight LLMs take days or weeks of computation, and both remain opaque and hard to reproduce. Using LLMs to train dedicated classifiers solves these problems, yet the approach itself remains sparsely tested in the social sciences and largely inaccessible to researchers without engineering support. We present LLMTool, an open-source Python package that runs the full hybrid workflow from a command line. On a bilingual corpus of 38,451 Canadian parliamentary debates and news media texts coded across four dimensions, classifiers trained on the best LLM labels reach amean Micro F1 of 68.9%. Open-weight models such as GPT-OSS match one of the best proprietary models available, GPT-5, and deliver a 109–395× inference speedup over directLLM annotation on standard workstations
The Spiritual Mindset : An Integrative Theoretical Framework for Meaning-Making and Motivational Orientation
Mitchell Sanders
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This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding spirituality as a psychological orientation embedded in social and cultural systems of meaning. Psychology has long struggled to define and operationalize spirituality in a manner that preserves conceptual clarity while accommodating its experiential and motivational diversity. Existing approaches often fragment spirituality across trait-based measures, coping frameworks, or institutional religious constructs, limiting integration across clinical, cognitive, and personality research. This article presents an integrative theoretical framework for the spiritual mindset, conceptualized as a dynamic psychological orientation characterized by meaning-making, self–transcendence, epistemic openness, and significance regulation. Drawing on research from psychology of religion and spirituality, motivational psychology, cognitive science, and clinical theory, the framework synthesizes prior findings into a coherent model that accounts for both adaptive and maladaptive expressions of spirituality. The model clarifies boundary conditions between spirituality and religiosity, delineates mechanisms through which spiritual orientations influence cognition and behavior, and identifies pathways through which spiritual meaning-making may contribute to psychological growth or vulnerability. The framework is intended as a standalone theoretical contribution that consolidates existing literatures while offering testable claims to guide future empirical research.
Children of War and Prejudice: Security as Pacification South of the Arctic
Armando Garcia
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This article argues that Iceland's wartime 'Situation' (Ástandið), the expansive moral and administrative apparatus erected to govern relationships between Icelandic women and Allied soldiers during and after the Second World War, was a foundational project of pacification through which Iceland consolidated itself as a white security state. Approaching security as social war (Neocleous, 2025) alongside Veblen's analysis of pecuniary culture and trained incapacity (Veblen, 2008), the article demonstrates how eugenic anxieties about a fragile Icelandic 'racial stock' (kynstofn) underpinned gendered surveillance, emergency legislation, forced medical examination, and carceral confinement targeting working-class young women. A state-negotiated colour bar, rooted in Prime Minister Jónasson's 1941 demand for 'white troops only' and institutionalised in secret provisions of the 1951 US–Iceland Defence Agreement, inserted Iceland into a militarised global apartheid (Besteman, 2019; 2020). Children born of these relationships, ástandsbörn, were marked as racially liminal through naming practices and community ostracism, extending pacification across generations as a form of necropolitical governance over kinship and futurity (Mbembe, 2003). Connecting these histories to contemporary moral panics over 'migrant predators', DNA collection proposals targeting non-EEA residents, and violent protest policing, the article argues that governing rationalities forged during Ástandið persist in a spectral pacification of racialised migrants and dissenting citizens. Mobilising critical conversations on culture, security, and white supremacy, the article positions Iceland as a formative site for critical race inquiry.
La atención sanitaria de la población racializada: de lo estructural a lo interpersonal
Yolanda González-Rábago; María Kamila Góngora Manrique
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El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo analizar los factores estructurales, organizacionales e interpersonales que condicionan la atención a la población racializada en España. Para ello, se desarrolló una investigación cualitativa con diseño descriptivo basada en entrevistas en profundidad realizadas entre mayo y julio de 2025 en distintas ciudades del País Vasco y Cataluña. En el estudio participaron profesionales expertas en la atención sanitaria de población racializada, incluyendo personal sanitario, representantes de organizaciones del tercer sector, profesionales del ámbito institucional e investigadoras. La selección de participantes se llevó a cabo mediante un muestreo intencional a partir de perfiles previamente identificados, ampliado posteriormente con la técnica de bola de nieve hasta alcanzar la saturación del discurso. Los datos obtenidos fueron analizados mediante un análisis de contenido temático. Los resultados muestran que diversos factores estructurales e interpersonales condicionan la calidad de la atención sanitaria ofrecida a las personas racializadas. Entre ellos destacan la falta de información clara y accesible sobre el sistema sanitario, la limitada adaptación de este a la diversidad sociocultural de la población, la insuficiente formación del personal sanitario en competencias interculturales y la presencia de prácticas de estereotipación racial y cultural. Estas dinámicas tienen repercusiones tanto en el ámbito clínico como en otros aspectos de la atención, afectando de manera significativa la experiencia asistencial de esta población. En conclusión, el estudio señala que la mejora de la atención sanitaria a las personas racializadas requiere intervenciones orientadas tanto a la organización de los servicios sanitarios como a la formación del personal profesional. En particular, resulta necesario promover una atención más competente desde el punto de vista sociocultural e incorporar de forma transversal un enfoque de equidad en salud que permita responder adecuadamente a la diversidad de necesidades de la población.
SynPop-DE: Synthetic population of 40 million German households using generative neural networks
Jakob Napiontek; Peter-Paul Pichler
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Household microdata combining socio-demographic, housing, income and expenditure attributes are a core resource for many studies in quantitative social science, such as modelling the household-level impacts of the energy transition. Yet no such data are openly available for Germany's full population. SynPop-DE provides a synthetic population of 40,235,916 households and their 82,039,613 members in all 400 German districts, calibrated to the 2022 census, with 34 attributes per household. Synthetic households are generated by estimating the joint attribute distribution of the German Household Budget Survey through a two-stage machine learning architecture. While an autoencoder first compresses high-dimensional categorical data into a continuous latent space, a generative adversarial network subsequently learns to sample new records from this representation. These records are then aligned with census marginals for all German districts using iterative proportional updating to ensure spatial representativeness. Validation along three dimensions confirms that the model learns attribute relationships and generates synthetic households that reproduce the statistical properties of the survey data (fidelity), supports downstream analyses with accuracy comparable to the original survey (utility), and prevents disclosure of individual respondents (privacy). The dataset is openly available at https://synpop.de.
Political Denial-of-Service Attacks Database (PDOSD)
Philipp Lutscher
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This short report introduces the Political Denial-of-Service Attacks Database (PDOSD), a media-based dataset on politically motivated DoS attacks using English-language newspaper articles retrieved from LexisNexis, manually coded by two human coders for the period 2008--2016. This period covers a historically important era of hacktivist and state-sponsored DDoS attacks, including the Arab Spring, the rise of Anonymous, and early Russian cyber operations. The database records news reports on politically motivated DoS attacks and can be downloaded at both the news article and aggregated event level.
Theory building review Η ανατομία της συλλογικής ανευθυνότητας στη δημόσια διοίκηση και το μοντέλο του προοπτικού σχεδιασμού της ευθύνης
Konstantinos Grigoriadis
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Η παρούσα μελέτη ανατέμνει το αποκαλούμενο «πρόβλημα των πολλών χεριών» (problem of many hands) στη σύγχρονη δημόσια διοίκηση μέσα από μια θεωρητική ανασκόπηση. Το θεμελιώδες πλαίσιο του προβλήματος εδράζεται στην εντεινόμενη σύγκρουση μεταξύ της δημοκρατικής απαίτησης για σαφή απόδοση ευθυνών και της αυξανόμενης δομικής πολυπλοκότητας της διακυβέρνησης. Η πολυπλοκότητα αυτή χαρακτηρίζεται από δικτυακές δομές, ιδιωτικοποιήσεις και αλγοριθμική λήψη αποφάσεων που καθιστούν τον εντοπισμό ενός υπεύθυνου δράστη σχεδόν αδύνατο. Σκοπός της εργασίας είναι να συνθέσει την κατακερματισμένη και διεπιστημονική βιβλιογραφία προκειμένου να αμφισβητήσει την παραδοσιακή προσέγγιση της απόδοσης ευθύνης η οποία εστιάζει στον εντοπισμό του υπαίτιου αποκλειστικά μετά από μια αποτυχία. Υιοθετώντας μια εννοιολογική μετατόπιση ως θεωρητικό φακό, η μελέτη αντιμετωπίζει την ευθύνη όχι ως μια ατομική ιδιότητα που ανακαλύπτεται εκ των υστέρων αλλά ως μια συστημική ικανότητα που σχεδιάζεται εξ αρχής. Τα κύρια ευρήματα, τα οποία προκύπτουν από τη συστηματική ανάλυση 98 μελετών οργανωμένων μέσω του πλαισίου εντοπισμού προηγούμενων αιτιών, αποφάσεων και αποτελεσμάτων (ADO), αποκαλύπτουν ότι η δομική και τεχνολογική πολυπλοκότητα δημιουργεί γνωστικά και ηθικά κενά. Αυτά τα κενά τα εκμεταλλεύονται στρατηγικά οι πολιτικοί και διοικητικοί δρώντες μέσω «παιχνιδιών επίρριψης ευθυνών» οδηγώντας σε διάχυση της ευθύνης, υποβάθμιση της δημοκρατικής λογοδοσίας και αδυναμία συστημικής μάθησης. Ως θεωρητική συμβολή το άρθρο προτείνει ένα νέο εννοιολογικό μοντέλο γνωστό ως «Προοπτικό Σχεδιασμό της Ευθύνης» (Prospective Design Responsibility). Το μοντέλο αυτό μετατοπίζει το επίκεντρο από την αναζήτηση υπαιτίων στην προληπτική θεσμική αρχιτεκτονική πλουραλιστικών δικτύων λογοδοσίας όπου η συλλογική ευθύνη καθίσταται αναπόδραστη μέσω του σχεδιασμού σαφών ρόλων, μηχανισμών συντονισμού και κοινών πληροφοριακών υποδομών.
COORDINATION AND GROWTH IN TOURISM: When self-interest does not suffice
Moisés Navarro-Sánchez; Federico Inchausti Sintes
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Private goods and common goods coexist in tourism. However, the nature of the latter means that self-interest alone cannot guarantee their optimal provision. Hence, coordination emerges as a necessary strategy to reconcile both. The analysis shows that, with coordination, a virtuous circle emerges between common goods (public incentive) and tourism (private incentive), becoming more intense and important with tourism-driven economic development. Coordination also allows a transition toward high-quality tourism (crowding out low-quality tourism), which is necessary to compensate for the lack of productivity in this sector. Without coordination, there is room for a tourism development trap or economic growth reversal. Finally, we identify a “Quality Paradox”: quality improvements might jeopardize economic growth by triggering a price hike, reducing overall competitiveness.
Analysing International Diplomacy and Maritime Trade Network in The Late Bronze Age
Aryan Banerjee
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The Late Bronze Age (1500-1200BCE) saw an unprecedented expansion of Sea-borne Commerce. A Maritime Trade Network developed which interconnected every kingdom of Ancient Near East and Aegeans(Mycenaeans, Minoans) to Ancient Egypt. Subordinates of Great Kings engaging in International Diplomacy to maintain and establish World Peace. This paper analyzes the extent to which Maritime trading flourished, and the first ever attempt of humans to maintain and establish International peace. Drawing on the Amarna Letters, the Ugaritic royal archives, the remarkable cargo of the Uluburun shipwreck, Linear B palatial records, and a wealth of archaeological evidence from shipwrecks, frescoes, and cosmopolitan port sites, this paper reconstructs the structure of Late Bronze Age maritime networks, the diplomatic protocols that governed them, and the catastrophic systemic collapse that dissolved them around 1200 BCE. It argues that maritime connectivity was not merely an economic phenomenon but the constitutive infrastructure of Bronze Age international relations — the medium through which political "brotherhood," strategic resources, and cultural koiné were simultaneously maintained.
The portrayal of libraries as remote workplaces in the general media: A qualitative content analysis
Philip Hider; Lulu Yee; Simon Wakeling; Xi Wen Chan; Matthew J. Xerri
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A sample of 52 sources were analyzed to investigate how libraries are portrayed in the general media as spaces for remote workers. Features highlighted as advantageous included meeting rooms, booths, quiet zones, and on-site cafes; Wi-Fi, computers, reprographic services, and suitable desks; the quiet, yet social, comfortable, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment; and libraries’ free access and convenient locations. Disadvantages included crowding and noise levels, insecure belongings, inadequate resources, and limited opening hours. The wide range of positive features suggests that remote workers’ needs are varied and complex, as are the ways in which libraries can meet these needs.
Children of War and Prejudice: Security as Pacification South of the Arctic
Armando Garcia
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This article argues that Iceland's wartime 'Situation' (Ástandið), the expansive moral and administrative apparatus erected to govern relationships between Icelandic women and Allied soldiers during and after the Second World War, was a foundational project of pacification through which Iceland consolidated itself as a white security state. Approaching security as social war (Neocleous, 2025) alongside Veblen's analysis of pecuniary culture and trained incapacity (Veblen, 2008), the article demonstrates how eugenic anxieties about a fragile Icelandic 'racial stock' (kynstofn) underpinned gendered surveillance, emergency legislation, forced medical examination, and carceral confinement targeting working-class young women. A state-negotiated colour bar, rooted in Prime Minister Jónasson's 1941 demand for 'white troops only' and institutionalised in secret provisions of the 1951 US–Iceland Defence Agreement, inserted Iceland into a militarised global apartheid (Besteman, 2019; 2020). Children born of these relationships, ástandsbörn, were marked as racially liminal through naming practices and community ostracism, extending pacification across generations as a form of necropolitical governance over kinship and futurity (Mbembe, 2003). Connecting these histories to contemporary moral panics over 'migrant predators', DNA collection proposals targeting non-EEA residents, and violent protest policing, the article argues that governing rationalities forged during Ástandið persist in a spectral pacification of racialised migrants and dissenting citizens. Mobilising critical conversations on culture, security, and white supremacy, the article positions Iceland as a formative site for critical race inquiry.