Treatment response in pediatric social anxiety disorder (SAD) is highly variable, and symptoms may be maintained by maladaptive attention. A previous study found that youth with SAD scan a more restricted area of faces than healthy controls during emotion recognition, potentially limiting interpretation of social cues. The current study followed up on these results by examining whether restricted face scanning 1) predicts response to psychological treatment, and 2) changes with successful treatment. Youth with SAD (n = 59) were assessed prior to treatment with internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) or supportive therapy (ISUPPORT) and then again three months after treatment. Restricted scanning of faces predicted a smaller symptom reduction, independent of treatment arm. Scanpath distribution was moderately stable from T1 to T2 and did not change with treatment. Restricted scanning of faces may be a risk factor for sustained SAD symptoms after therapy. As the visual scanpath is a key aspect of human visual processing, inflexible scanning could potentially interfere with information processing. Implications for theories of attention in pediatric SAD are discussed.

Previous research reports that offspring of parents with histories of childhood maltreatment are at increased risk for mental health problems, yet the mechanisms remain unclear. This study examines the extent to which parent psychopathology mediates the relationship between parent maltreatment history and offspring psychopathology. Using a prospective cohort design, individuals with documented histories of childhood maltreatment (ages 0 – 11 years) during 1967 – 1971 and demographically matched controls were followed into adulthood and first interviewed in 1989-1995 (N = 1,196). Offspring (N = 697, Mage = 22.8 years) were assessed in 2009 – 2010. A general p-factor structure and a model with specific latent constructs were tested. Structural equation modeling was used for mediation. The results indicated that only minor offspring of maltreated parents exhibited more symptoms of depression than offspring of controls. Parent psychopathology predicted offspring psychopathology. Parent depression and dysthymia predicted greater offspring depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol use, drug use, and marijuana use. Parent anxiety and alcohol and drug symptoms also predicted offspring alcohol symptoms. There was no evidence that parent psychopathology explained the relationship between a parent’s history of maltreatment and their offspring’s psychopathology. These new results suggest that reconsideration of some assumptions about the intergeneration impacts of maltreatment may be warranted.

In behavioural economics, sludge is a novel umbrella term (introduced by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler) referring to the subjectively experienced excessive frictions in decision-making. Sludge researchers propose incorporating insights from institutional economics by linking sludge to subjective transaction costs that align with the subjectivist tradition in transaction cost theory. However, sludge research relies entirely on the i-frame: an individualistic and internalist (inside-the-brain) notion of decision-making. Although popular, the i-frame results in critical shortcomings and contradictions in sludge analysis. In contrast, I propose a systemic (s-frame) perspective for studying sludge. Along with a subjectivist view, sludge should be understood as an outcome of complex and evolving rule systems. Instead of focusing solely on the cost side of sludge, sludge analysis should be developed to include not only transaction costs but also transaction benefits that are unevenly distributed among heterogeneous actors. Furthermore, decision-making and sludge perception are not purely internal processes but socially extended cognitive processes governed by cognitive institutions and embedded in dynamic social interactions. Shifting the focus of sludge research toward the s-frame will allow us to understand sludge in all its institutional and socio-cognitive complexities.

Reverberation mapping (RM) is a technique in which the mass of a Seyfert I galaxy’s central supermassive black hole is estimated, along with the system’s physical scale, from the timescale at which variations in brightness propagate through the galactic nucleus. This mapping allows for a long baseline of time measurements to extract spatial information beyond the angular resolution of our telescopes, and is the main means of constraining supermassive black hole masses at high redshift. The most recent generation of multi-year RM campaigns for large numbers of active galactic nuclei (AGN) (e.g. OzDES) have had to deal with persistent complications of identifying false positives, such as those arising from aliasing due to seasonal gaps in time-series data. We introduce LITMUS (Lag Inference Through the Mixed Use of Samplers), a modern lag recovery tool built on the ‘damped random walk’ model of quasar variability, built in the automatic differentiation framework jax. LITMUS is purpose-built to handle the multimodal aliasing of seasonal observation windows and provides Bayesian evidence integrals for model comparison and null hypothesis testing, a more quantified alternative to existing post-fit selection methods. LITMUS also offers a flexible and modular framework for using more expressive high-dimensional models for the AGN variability and includes jax-enabled implementations of other popular lag recovery methods like nested sampling and the interpolated cross-correlation function. We test LITMUS on a number of mock light curves modelled after the OzDES sample and find that it recovers their lags with high precision and successfully identifies spurious lag recoveries, reducing its false positive rate to drastically outperform the state-of-the art program JAVELIN. LITMUS’s high performance is accomplished by an algorithm for mapping the Bayesian posterior density which both constrains the lag and provides Bayesian evidences for model comparison and null hypothesis testing while outperforming nested sampling in computational cost by an order of magnitude.

In the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, places now categorized by some as archaeological ruins have retained power and meaning through time. Ruins often retain vibrancy and are (and were) typically treated respectfully and carefully. Although many of the sites may no longer be occupied by humans, these ruined or palimpsest places should not be considered entirely abandoned or uninhabited. Some sites in Nejapa, such as Los Picachos and Cerro del Convento, were charged with spiritual valency that inspired people to leave offerings at the sites. Other long unoccupied archaeological sites, such as the ruins of La Baeza, Casa Vieja, and the Pueblo Viejo, were viewed in multiple ways: sometimes approached with trepidation or purposely avoided, and at other times viewed with nostalgia and reverence. Part of what makes ruins powerful and layered with meanings is their association with ancestors and their common connections to memorable, and often difficult, historical events. Thus, ruins play active roles and can at times inspire social actions and at other times entail intentional avoidance.

In contemporary politics, the rise of a leadership style centered on “gaslighting”—persuasion through systematic besmirching, belittling, and the inversion of shared norms—poses profound challenges to democracy. This essay traces the conceptual roots of gaslighting and its uptake as a style of leadership, explores its distinguishing features compared to other manipulative political tactics, and uses the current American situation (that is, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and JD Vance) alongside international examples to illustrate its consequences. Against this backdrop, “adaptive leadership” is advanced as a normative counterweight—one that invites honest engagement with adaptive challenges and bolsters civic trust. The contrast illuminates the stakes for democratic culture as gaslighting erodes the very fabric of orientation, accountability, and mutual respect. It is no exaggeration here to speak of a battle for the soul of democracy.

Cultural heritage occupies a paradoxical position in law: It is protected as property but experienced as a repository of identity, memory, and dignity. This article examines whether cultural heritage could, in principle, be recognized as a subject of law, drawing on emerging developments in environmental and nonhuman personhood. After tracing the historical and conceptual evolution of legal personhood—from human and corporate subjects to nature and ecosystems—it explores the moral, relational, and symbolic dimensions that might justify extending personhood to heritage. The analysis highlights both the potential benefits of such recognition, including stronger ethical and representational protections, and the associated risks, such as legal inflation, state appropriation, and conflicts with ownership and restitution law. Ultimately, it argues that rethinking heritage through the lens of relational personhood reveals the need for a more pluralistic and ethically responsive legal imagination.

Is an autocracy’s official rhetoric a reliable proxy for forecasting military escalation? While the conventional hands-tying mechanism argues that official rhetoric binds leaders to stated positions and limits their ability to back down, recent scholarship on bluster suggests that autocracies may employ hawkish rhetoric to justify de-escalation ex-post. This study evaluates these competing perspectives by analyzing China’s official rhetoric and military behavior in the Taiwan Strait from 2016 to 2022. Employing a word-embedding approach, I construct an original Chinese-language lexicon capturing implicit threats from over two million state-media articles. I show that increases in China’s implicit threats toward Taiwan are associated with a higher likelihood of military escalation, implying that official rhetoric conveys predictive information rather than mere cheap talk.

Resonance lines encode rich information about astrophysical sources and their environments, yet fully analytic treatments of multi-line radiative transfer remain almost entirely unexplored. We present exact, closed-form solutions for steady-state resonant-line radiativeP transfer in “V-shaped” atomic networks, where a single ground state couples to multiple transitions. Starting from the full angle-dependent transfer equation, we generalise absorption and emission coefficients to an arbitrary number of lines, derive a modified Fokker–Planck expansion of the frequency-redistribution integral, and use a judicious change of variables to reduce the problem to a Helmholtz equation with point-like sources in frequency space. This transformation admits analytic solutions for arbitrary sets of lines with fixed frequency offsets and strengths in both slab and spherical geometries. We implement V-shaped line networks in the colt Monte Carlo radiative transfer code and find excellent agreement with the analytic predictions across a wide range of line separations, optical depths, and damping parameters, establishing our solutions as stringent validation benchmarks. For concrete applications related to the Lyman-alpha (Ly$\alpha$) transition of neutral hydrogen, we examine how fine-structure splitting and deuterium injection modify the emergent spectra, internal radiation field, and radiative force multiplier. We show that these effects leave previous conclusions about Ly$\alpha$ feedback in the early universe essentially unchanged. Even when direct observational diagnostics are subtle, our framework provides novel analytic and numerical insights into coupled resonance-line transport and facilitates progress in general modelling of multi-line radiative transfer in diverse astrophysical settings.

This article examines the collecting that occurred after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the collections database as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. The Eighth Amendment prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances by equating the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child; its repeal was a result of four decades of grassroots, feminist campaigning. The collections now being preserved depict this activism, and are made up of campaign documents, photographs, and first-person stories archived from Facebook. Through a close analysis of the database of the Digital Repository of Ireland, where most of these materials are held, this article argues for an interpretation of the database as a political infrastructure, which refracts existing tensions surrounding the future of Irish feminisms and the activist archive. It also examines the database’s politics of visibility in relation to the shame and silence that defined women’s position in Ireland prior to the referendum and advances a theorisation of the archival database as a historiographical technology, which plays an active role in the production of Irish identity in the wake of the Eighth.