Implementation arrangements are increasingly recognized as a decisive factor in the success of contemporary welfare policies, particularly those that combine income support with activation requirements. This paper examines the Italian case of minimum income schemes - the Reddito di Inclusione and the Reddito di Cittadinanza - to explore how local implementation arrangements shape one of their core objectives: reintegrating beneficiaries into the labour market. Drawing on an original dataset that integrates administrative data with a unique INAPP survey of local institutions, we operationalize “implementation arrangements” along three dimensions: institutional capacity, alignment between organizational missions and policy goals, and the quality of institutional cooperation within a multilevel governance framework. Using regression models at the municipal level, we find that implementation strength matters, but horizontal cooperation and effective communication between Public Employment Services (PES) and Local Social Planning Institutions (LSPIs) emerge as the strongest predictors of successful outcomes. While PES performance is central due to their policy mandate, LSPIs’ ability to foster integrated networks also contributes positively when well-coordinated. These findings highlight that policy success depends less on formal design than on the quality of local governance and institutional complementarities. The results provide new evidence for the literature on implementation, underscoring the importance of horizontal multilevel governance in active social policies.

The quality of research across psychology needs improvement. Ample evidence has indicated that publication bias, specifically making publication decisions based on a study’s results, has led to a distorted literature (e.g., high rates of false positives). Registered Reports, which can now be submitted to Development and Psychopathology, are a recent publication format designed to combat publication bias and problematic research practices. The format represents a shift from a system in which publication decisions are based on the nature of the findings, to one that is based on the quality of the study conceptualization and design. In this invited Views article, we introduce the Registered Reports format to Development and Psychopathology by arguing that they can and should be used in developmental psychopathology research. We first describe what Registered Reports are and why they are useful. We then review 10 commonly expressed concerns about publishing Registered Reports – including that they are not appropriate for studies using preexisting data, that they do not allow for exploratory analyses, and that they take too long to publish – explaining why these concerns are unwarranted. We hope that this article will allay concerns about publishing Registered Reports, and that readers will submit them to Development and Psychopathology.

We derive large- and moderate-deviation results in random networks given as planar directed navigations on homogeneous Poisson point processes. In this non-Markovian routing scheme, starting from the origin, at each consecutive step a Poisson point is joined by an edge to its nearest Poisson point to the right within a cone. We establish precise exponential rates of decay for the probability that the vertical displacement of the random path is unexpectedly large. The proofs rest on controlling the dependencies of the individual steps and the randomness in the horizontal displacement as well as renewal-process arguments.

Adelges tsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), an invasive pest of eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis (Linnaeus) Carrière (Pinaceae), has been causing widespread tree decline and mortality across southwestern Nova Scotia, Canada, since its detection there in 2017. To gain basic knowledge of its biology in this novel part of its invaded range in eastern North America, we investigated the effect of predation on A. tsugae densities and conducted repeated surveys of the resident complex of natural enemies. We found only minimal and incidental predation by generalist arthropod predators, confirming the lack of population regulation by resident natural enemies, including predators of other adelgids. Our results suggest the role of escape from natural enemies in the pest’s rapid spread and impact in eastern Canada. In parallel, we tracked the timing of development through the complex life cycle of A. tsugae to compare its phenology to that in other invaded regions and to that of the closely related strain native to western North America. We discuss the implications of the local phenology of A. tsugae in the context of adopting a classical biological control programme, such as has been implemented in the United States of America, through the redistribution of native specialist predators of A. tsugae from British Columbia, Canada.

Risks and disputes are prevalent in the illegal online erotic fiction market due to the absence of state protection and enforcement, the lack of accepted criteria for evaluating product quality, the customisation of services, and widespread plagiarism. Drawing on insights from the sociological literature on signalling theory and Varese’s production–trade–governance framework, this article empirically investigates the strategies developed by author-sellers in this market to signal their trustworthiness to customers and resolve disputes. Agents and author-sellers send multiple signals to persuade potential buyers of their trustworthiness and ability, including by sharing writing samples created for previous clients, sharing their collective writing projects, disclosing past transaction records, and being selective about which orders to accept. Agents and author-sellers also offer multiple options for dispute resolution during the sales process, leverage information asymmetry to resolve disputes caused by delivery delays, and utilise neutralisation techniques to address disputes stemming from plagiarism. This research expands the literature on signalling theory, and its findings will hopefully inspire future studies of other illegal online markets.

Public opinion increasingly associates nuclear energy with negative environmental outcomes, but can this perception influence how people judge food? This study examines whether the perceived naturalness of energy sources used to manufacture kitchen appliances affects the perceived healthiness of foods prepared with those appliances. Food prepared with appliances manufactured using nuclear energy was consistently perceived as less healthy than food prepared with appliances manufactured without any specified energy source (Studies 1–3; $N_{\text {total}}$ = 1,939), with this negative nuclear effect also emerging when compared against a wind energy condition in the most well-powered, preregistered experiment (Study 3). Further, the effect of nuclear energy on healthiness perceptions was indirect through perceived risk (Study 3), implying that nuclear energy evoked greater perceived risk, which ultimately reduced perceived healthiness. This work extends contagion theory by showing that perceptions of unnaturalness can spread through abstract and distant links—such as energy sources used in manufacturing—to shape judgments in unrelated domains. The persistence of negative contagion effects associated with nuclear energy, but the more modest positive effects from wind energy, aligns with the principle of negativity dominance in contagion research. These results suggest that consumer resistance to nuclear energy may stem, in part, from naturalness perceptions.

In 1937 the philosopher Robin Collingwood excavated a henge monument in Cumbria and identified the postholes of a series of timber buildings, which he compared with those at other sites. These structures at Eamont Bridge were replaced by a stone circle. He planned to continue the work for a second season, but was prevented by illness. His project was completed by the famous German scholar Gerhard Bersu, who concluded that many of the features identified two years earlier were of geological origin; others were rootholes and animal burrows. Their projects have played a part in the history of fieldwork, but in recent years influential researchers have tried to rehabilitate Collingwood’s reputation as an excavator. Their views were encouraged by his pivotal role in studies of the northern frontier of Roman Britain. In 2023 parts of the monument at King Arthur’s Round Table were re-excavated with the aim of settling the dispute. The new work supported Bersu’s interpretation, but recognised that Collingwood’s approach was not as misguided as his critics had supposed – it was directly based on his agenda for historical research. The real problem is that he had been working without sufficient experience on a difficult subsoil. This article considers the methods used by both researchers at King Arthur’s Round Table and compares their distinctive approaches to field archaeology.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a wug production task. Performance was not significantly poorer for DHH children, though some morphophonological contexts proved challenging for both groups. Performance was correlated with vocabulary size. This suggests that, if DHH children have sufficient vocabulary, they may perform like primary school NH peers in plural comprehension and production.

Eric Mandelbaum has reported some troubles with Bayesianism in cognitive science. He has brought some behavioral data to show that belief updating in humans is fundamentally Bayesian perverse. I argue that the behaviors that he seeks to explain do not undermine Bayesian accounts of belief updating and can instead be explained as idiosyncratic consequences of an appropriately bounded implementation of a Bayesian-normative belief-updating system.

We determine the locally flat cobordism distance between torus knots with small and large braid index, up to high precision. Here small means 2, 3, 4, or 6. As an application, we derive a surprising fact about torus knots that appear as cross-sections of almost minimal cobordisms between two-stranded torus knots and the trivial knot.

As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.

Audiences for science in the media live and operate, as agents who endow science with social and cultural meanings, in an intermedial world. Following cultural tracers through time and across media, and attending to a key actors’ category, intermediality, historians of the public culture of science can access the social dimension of the mediation of science. Adopting an intermedial approach allows us to attune the historiography of the public culture of science to the evolution of science communication scholarship over the past three decades, and understand the role of audiences in the production of cultural meanings about science.