Happiness is a complex concept that has been intensively researched from many perspectives, but the linguistic aspects of this phenomenon are still under-researched. Using corpus-based analysis of semantically similar words (word embedding), the author studies lexical units denoting happiness and joy in three West Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and compares them with the corresponding lexical units in English. The results show that despite the mutual linguistic and non-linguistic ties, the Polish, Czech and Slovak understanding of happiness exhibits not only similarities (e.g. the relationship between happiness and joy and the outward orientation of joy) but also significant differences (e.g. the different value of the component ‘luck’ in happiness, a different relationship between joy, sadness and fear, and cross-cultural differences related to religion). The results also highlight similarities and differences between West Slavic languages and English. In addition to this, the study tests the advantages and limitations of the word-embedding analysis for the analysis of concepts and their culturally specific features. The author believes that the method is useful because it offers new insights into the analysed data, but it also requires human oversight and careful interpretation.

People with stronger conspiracy beliefs tend to trust others less, show more antisocial tendencies, and behave more self-centeredly. We investigated whether they are also less likely to act generously. In Study 1 (N = 850; UK), conspiracy beliefs were negatively correlated with charitable donations, though effect sizes were small. In Study 2 (N = 323; US), conspiracy beliefs did not predict sharing in a Dictator Game. In Study 3 (N = 830; US), higher conspiracy beliefs were related to more generosity, but only when donations went directly to the recipient without intermediaries. Overall, people with higher conspiracy beliefs are not less generous per se, but their generosity may be constrained by distrust in institutions or intermediaries.

Collective crises – such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and pandemics – profoundly disrupt the symbolic and social frameworks that normally sustain everyday life. Sociological research has long shown that such crises often trigger waves of solidarity, communication, and collective mobilization. However, the psychological forces driving these social dynamics remain insufficiently understood. This article addresses this gap by proposing that anxiety and the social sharing of emotion constitute central psychosocial mechanisms underlying collective responses to crisis. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the social sharing of emotion and integrating empirical findings from studies conducted in interpersonal contexts, public gatherings, and digital communication environments, we examine how emotional responses shape the cognitive and social processes that unfold after disruptive events. We argue that the diffuse anxiety generated by collective crises stimulates rumination, information seeking, and extensive interpersonal communication. Through repeated social sharing, emotions propagate across social networks, synchronizing emotional experience and fostering social cohesion. Evidence from laboratory studies, field research, and large-scale analyses of digital communication demonstrates that these processes can reinforce collective beliefs, support social solidarity, and contribute to the reconstruction of meaning after disruption. In this perspective, emotional turbulence following collective crises, far from reflecting social disorganization, represents a fundamental mechanism through which societies transform emotional reactions into shared knowledge, collective memory, and renewed social cohesion.

This study tests the relative amount of cognitive effort required for Spanish language processing by L1-dominant speakers (Spanish-raised bilinguals, SRBs), heritage speakers (HSs) and late second-language learners (English-raised bilinguals, ERBs). In a dual-task study, three groups of bilingual Spanish speakers were presented concurrently with a linguistic and non-linguistic task, each at three levels of difficulty. When responding to the non-linguistic task, which required concurrently processing and encoding in memory a Spanish-language phrase, SRBs were, on average, most accurate and ERBs least accurate. This suggests a three-way difference between SRBs, HSs and ERBs in the amount of cognitive resources required for language processing in the target language, highlighting HSs’ unique developmental trajectory. Results further suggest that accuracy on the non-linguistic task was reduced for all groups when the concurrent linguistic stimulus was of higher syntactic complexity, suggesting that more complex linguistic structures require more cognitive resources regardless of language background.

This study evaluated whether young adult romantic relationship quality is an intergenerational mechanism linking Generation 1–2 (G1–G2) family climate and G2 social problem-solving skills during adolescence to G2–G3 parenting and family level-functioning and ultimately G3 child maladjustment and social–emotional competence. Our sample included 396 families with a parent (Mage = 28.29; 94% White) from a longitudinal study starting when they were in 6th grade. Participants completed annual assessments through high school, three assessments in young adulthood, and surveys after becoming parents. Two intergenerational pathways emerged: Positive G1–G2 family climates in adolescence predicted less young adult relationship violence; in turn, violence was associated with lower G2–G3 harsh discipline, abusive parenting, and family conflict. Of these, harsh discipline and abusive parenting were associated with G3 children’s adjustment. In addition, G2 social problem-solving skills in adolescence were associated with stronger couple problem-solving skills in young adulthood and with better G2–G3 family routines; in turn, G2–G3 family routines were associated with G3 child social–emotional competence. Finally, moderation effects were observed in which youth who received the PROSPER interventions exhibited associations between adolescent social problem-solving skills and young adult couple problem-solving and G2–G3 parental warmth and (lower) lax discipline.

Research on how non-natives process and learn binomials (black and white) is limited. The present study addresses this gap using online (eye-tracking) and offline (familiarity rating) tasks. Sixty non-native speakers of English (L1 = Arabic) read six stories seeded with 21 novel binomials in three conditions: one exposure, six exposures, and no exposure (i.e., only in post-test) in a counter-balanced design. Each item was also presented in the reversed order (white and black). The non-natives read the stories as their eye movements were monitored and answered comprehension questions. In addition to the novel binomials, 12 existing binomials (congruent with Arabic) were included in the passages as a baseline for comparison. After completing the reading task, the participants completed an offline rating task as a measure of declarative knowledge of the binomial configuration (i.e., word order). All items were rated twice, once in the forward direction and once in the reversed direction. Online results showed that non-natives were not sensitive to the configuration of existing binomials, and there was limited evidence of any sensitivity to novel binomials. Offline, non-natives showed sensitivity to the configuration restrictions of existing binomials but not novel ones.

To contribute to the ongoing discussion on the role of pitch processing in grammar learning, this study examines the extent to which pitch statistical learning (pitch statistical learning (SL); the ability to detect and internalize pitch patterns in auditory input) affects second language (L2) morphosyntax learning outcomes. In the context of 93 Japanese learners of English, piece-wise regression analyses were conducted to compare the roles of their pitch SL abilities and pitch acuity in L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. The results revealed a weak but significant positive correlation between pitch SL and morphosyntactic knowledge, whereas pitch acuity showed no significant association. Further analysis identified a threshold effect: pitch SL has a strong association with morphosyntactic knowledge for learners with lower pitch SL abilities, but not for those with higher pitch SL abilities. These findings suggest that the lack of pitch SL ability could substantially slow down L2 morphosyntactic learning.

This meta-analysis synthesized 88 studies to investigate the processing advantages of emotion words over neutral words. Additionally, we explored the moderating effects of emotional properties (valence, arousal, emotion word type), linguistic factors (concreteness, frequency, length, neighborhood size), and task type in L1, advanced L2, and intermediate L2 speakers. We found a significant valence effect, with positive words showing a greater processing advantage than negative words only in L1 speakers. For arousal, the interaction analysis revealed that high arousal reduced the processing advantage of emotion words to a greater extent in intermediate L2 speakers than in L1 speakers. Furthermore, only advanced L2 speakers showed a significant processing advantage for emotion-label words compared to emotion-laden words. Regarding linguistic factors, longer word length was associated with greater processing advantages compared to shorter word length, but only in advanced L2 speakers. The greater processing advantage for concrete over abstract emotion words was observed only in intermediate L2 speakers, indicating that this group was the most sensitive to concreteness among all language speaker groups. Finally, task type significantly influenced emotion word processing in interaction with language proficiency. Overall, our findings support theoretical frameworks in both L1 and L2 processing and cognition.

Evidence that certain semantic and pragmatic skills follow a similar developmental trajectory cross-linguistically suggests an important role for semantic-pragmatic tasks in the assessment of bilingual children. This study investigates whether quantifiers constitute a language-neutral linguistic category in this context. Forty-three Polish–English bilingual children aged 4–7 years completed the Quantifier Comprehension Task (QCT) and the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), a standardized morphosyntactic assessment, in both languages. The results indicated that children’s performance on QCT is strongly correlated between their two languages. This correlation was significantly stronger than that observed for the TROG-2, indicating that quantifier comprehension may be less language dependent than general grammar comprehension measures. These findings highlight the diagnostic value of semantic-pragmatic tasks, particularly quantifier interpretation, in evaluating bilingual language development. While the children in this study are all typically developing bilinguals, our goal is to explore whether quantifier comprehension tasks can support the development of language-neutral tools for assessing bilingual language skills.

This study examined fingerspelling accuracy and error patterns in deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers and written spelling in hearing English speakers to investigate how orthographic representations are shaped by phonological, visual, and motor encoding strategies. Deaf participants (n = 39) completed a fingerspelling repetition task, while hearing participants (n = 35) completed a written dictation task using the same word and pseudoword stimuli. While overall accuracy did not differ significantly between groups, deaf participants exhibited qualitatively distinct error patterns, including higher rates of deletions and transpositions, compared to hearing participants who made more substitution errors. Deaf participants also produced more pronunciation-violating errors. Notably, they showed greater accuracy in preserving geminate (double letter) segments, highlighting enhanced sensitivity to letter identity and quantity, likely supported by the explicit visual-motor representation of geminates in fingerspelling. Additionally, deaf participants showed no difference in accuracy between real words and pseudowords, indicating that fingerspelling strategies generalized beyond stored lexical forms. We interpret these findings in light of graphemic buffer constraints, motoric fluency pressures, and the structural affordances of the fingerspelling system. Visually based encoding strategies can support robust orthographic representations for those who rely less on speech-based phonological coding.

The present study examined how task demands modulate neural activations during the processing of emotion-label words (words describing emotional states) and emotion-laden words (words triggering emotions through connotations) in a second language (L2). To this end, we directly compared behavioral and electrophysiological responses in late Chinese-English bilinguals when the words’ affective information was task-relevant (emotional categorization task, ECT) versus task-irrelevant (emotional Stroop task, EST). Our results revealed the modulation of emotion word type and valence on L2 emotion word processing. Specifically, negative emotion-laden words exhibited slower response times, and positive emotion-label words elicited larger Late Positive Complex amplitudes. Notably, these effects were observed exclusively within the task where the emotional dimension of the stimuli was task-relevant, that is, when participants explicitly determined the word valence. Taken together, our study highlights the potential task-dependent nature of the effects of emotion word type and valence in late bilinguals’ L2, suggesting that assumptions about the universality of such effects should be evaluated in light of task demands and language context.

Low insurance uptake in developing countries poses a strong obstacle to financial resilience and poverty reduction. Although behavioural biases, such as ambiguity aversion, myopia and distrust, are acknowledged as key barriers, their combined effects are not directly observed. Therefore, this study relies on regulatory and administrative proxies linked to these biases. This study goes beyond analysing these proxies separately to explore how they co-occur in shaping insurance outcomes. Using a novel crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) on a sample of 40 developing countries across Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and the Americas, we identify multiple, equifinal configurations of regulatory and institutional conditions associated with higher insurance uptake. Our necessity analysis reveals that transparent pricing is central to regulatory environments associated with insurance uptake. In addition, product suitability and design standards, as well as deposit insurance coverage, are sufficient regulatory requirements when combined. The csQCA results show that no condition works in isolation; outcomes are associated with specific combinations of regulatory and institutional conditions. The findings indicate that interventions should be interpreted as configurational regulatory packages.

Maternal internalizing (anxiety and depressive) symptoms are a robust risk factor for the development of internalizing symptoms in offspring, yet the neurobiological mechanisms that influence this association remain relatively unexplored. The aperiodic “slope” of the EEG power spectrum (i.e., aperiodic exponent) is hypothesized to index the cortical excitatory-inhibitory balance and may serve as an early neurophysiological marker of mental health risk. In a prospective longitudinal cohort (N = 323 mother–child dyads), we examined associations among maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms in infancy and at age 5 years, child EEG aperiodic slope at age 3 years, and child internalizing symptoms at age 5 years. We investigated whether the aperiodic slope at 3 years (a) mediated associations between maternal internalizing symptoms in infancy and child internalizing symptoms at age 5 years and/or (b) moderated associations between maternal internalizing symptoms and child internalizing symptoms at age 5 years. There were no significant mediation effects. The aperiodic slope moderated the association between maternal anxiety symptoms and child internalizing symptoms: A steeper slope was associated with a stronger association between maternal and child symptoms. Findings suggest that the EEG aperiodic slope may represent a moderator of intergenerational risk for internalizing symptoms in early childhood.