Recent changes to US research funding are having far-reaching consequences that imperil the integrity of science and the provision of care to vulnerable populations. Resisting these changes, the BJPsych Portfolio reaffirms its commitment to publishing mental science and advancing psychiatric knowledge that improves the mental health of one and all.

Globally, considerable attention is being given to the multifaceted challenges that policing faces as part of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) refers to promoting peace, security, human rights, stability and effective governance based on the rule of law. However, policing Nigeria to meet this goal has been fraught with several challenges, which range from erosion of public trust to growing crime rate, police brutality and other misconduct. This article reviewed empirical studies on how legitimacy issues impacted police enforcement of COVID-19 protocols and lockdown rules in Nigeria. Leaning on legitimacy and procedural justice theories, a systematic and iterative approach was adopted to identify and synthesize relevant literature on pandemic policing in Nigeria. We searched 12 databases (Scopus, PsycINFO, AJOL, Sage Journals Online, Web of Science, Academic Search Ultimate, PAIS Index, ProQuest Sociology, HeinOnline, Criminal Justice Abstracts, JSTOR, Sociological Abstracts) for empirical studies on pandemic policing in Nigeria published between 2020 and 2024. A total of 11 studies were included in the review. Four main themes were identified: the Nigerian police pre-COVID legitimacy issues; police enforcement of lockdown rules; key challenges; and lessons for post-pandemic policing. The review highlights the pre-COVID legitimacy issues of the Nigerian police that made an impact on public trust and cooperation during the lockdown period and recommends strategies to assist the Nigerian police in building momentum for a systemic and stylistic change of policing from force-based to consent-based.

Contemporary racial theorization about American society assumes the universality of White dominance as its point of departure. We argue here that Hawai‘i is an exception, where White supremacy has given way to a multiracial mainstream, shared by the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites. This was a surprising development in a state founded in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which was moreover a racially hierarchical plantation society until the middle of the twentieth century. The pivot, in Hawai‘i as on the mainland, occurred during the post-World War II period, when the economy underwent a transformation requiring a more educated workforce. On the mainland, this socioeconomic shift opened up the mainstream to the so-called White ethnics. But these were few in number in Hawai‘i, and so the Chinese and Japanese ascended socioeconomically and socially instead. The ethnoracial hierarchy created in this period is still in evidence, as shown by pronounced inequalities among Hawaiian groups. However, the end of White supremacy has been associated with very widespread ethnoracial mixing in families. We discuss some ways in which Hawai‘i may offer a preview of twenty-first-century changes in the U.S. as a whole.

Aerosol-cloud interactions contribute significant uncertainty to modern climate model predictions. Analysis of complex observed aerosol-cloud parameter relationships is a crucial piece of reducing this uncertainty. Here, we apply two machine learning methods to explore variability in in-situ observations from the NASA ACTIVATE mission. These observations consist of flights over the Western North Atlantic Ocean, providing a large repository of data including aerosol, meteorological, and microphysical conditions in and out of clouds. We investigate this dataset using principal component analysis (PCA), a linear dimensionality reduction technique, and an autoencoder, a deep learning non-linear dimensionality reduction technique. We find that we can reduce the dimensionality of the parameter space by more than a factor of 2 and verify that the deep learning method outperforms a PCA baseline by two orders of magnitude. Analysis in the low dimensional space of both these techniques reveals two consistent physically interpretable regimes—a low pollution regime and an in-cloud regime. Through this work, we show that unsupervised machine learning techniques can learn useful information from in-situ atmospheric observations and provide interpretable results of low-dimensional variability.

Though formal life sentences have been abolished in Norway, forvaring (post-conviction indefinite preventive detention) – a type of informal life sentence – can be imposed on individuals convicted of certain offenses who are considered to be at high risk of future offending. While great attention has been paid to Norway as an “exceptional” penal outlier globally, there is a notable lack of comprehensive knowledge about its indefinite penal sanction. Drawing on extensive historical research and legal and policy documentary analysis as well as leveraging a unique national dataset on the total forvaring population, this article provides the first international in-depth assessment of the evolution and implementation of Norway’s ultimate penalty. In so doing, it highlights significant disparities between policy ambitions and current practice and questions the extent to which the sanction of forvaring can be considered an “exceptional” approach to life imprisonment. It is argued that the development and growth of this type of informal life sentence can be seen as the epicenter of the impact of a more punitive ideology in Norway, emphasizing the need to move away from the concept of penal exceptionalism to better understand the full spectrum and practice of Norwegian and Nordic penality.

Changing sea-ice conditions have significant societal impacts and implications across Alaska and the Arctic. This research examined the relationship between sea ice and extreme weather events with socio-economic impacts in Nome, Alaska (1990–2020), a community that has experienced notable changes in sea ice and impacts from extreme weather events. The research is based on the analysis of sea-ice concentrations from passive microwave data, socio-economic impacts of extreme weather events from an archival analysis of newspaper coverage, and an examination of the relationship between sea-ice concentrations and impacts. We found that sea-ice concentrations at the time of the reported socio-economic impacts were all characterised by ice-free conditions. Additionally, extreme events linked to socio-economic impacts occurred when sea-ice concentrations were at or below their historical (1979–2000) median for the day. Key implications for the observed increased probability of ice-free conditions in the autumn include a greater likelihood that a given coastal storm from November to mid-December may contribute to socio-economic impacts, which may have been mitigated by sea ice in the past, as well as an increased potential for impacts to occur when they have previously not been experienced.

Maladaptive daydreaming is a distinct syndrome in which the main symptom is excessive vivid fantasising that causes clinically significant distress and functional impairment in academic, vocational and social domains. Unlike normal daydreaming, maladaptive daydreaming is persistent, compulsive and detrimental to one’s life. It involves detachment from reality in favour of intense emotional engagement with alternative realities and often includes specific features such as psychomotor stereotypies (e.g. pacing in circles, jumping or shaking one’s hands), mouthing dialogues, facial gestures or enacting fantasy events. Comorbidity is common, but existing disorders do not account for the phenomenology of the symptoms. Whereas non-specific therapy is ineffective, targeted treatment seems promising. Thus, we propose that maladaptive daydreaming be considered a formal syndrome in psychiatric taxonomies, positioned within the dissociative disorders category. Maladaptive daydreaming satisfactorily meets criteria for conceptualisation as a psychiatric syndrome, including reliable discrimination from other disorders and solid interrater agreement. It involves significant dissociative aspects, such as disconnection from perception, behaviour and sense of self, and has some commonalities with but is not subsumed under existing dissociative disorders. Formal recognition of maladaptive daydreaming as a dissociative disorder will encourage awareness of a growing problem and spur theoretical, research and clinical developments.

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor market to replicate three classic experiments. The first finds quantitative agreement between levels of cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma played online and in the physical laboratory. The second shows— consistent with behavior in the traditional laboratory—that online subjects respond to priming by altering their choices. The third demonstrates that when an identical decision is framed differently, individuals reverse their choice, thus replicating a famed Tversky-Kahneman result. Then we conduct a field experiment showing that workers have upward-sloping labor supply curves. Finally, we analyze the challenges to online experiments, proposing methods to cope with the unique threats to validity in an online setting, and examining the conceptual issues surrounding the external validity of online results. We conclude by presenting our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices.

We conducted the first randomized controlled field experiment of an Internet reputation mechanism. A high-reputation, established eBay dealer sold matched pairs of lots— batches of vintage postcards—under his regular identity and under new seller identities (also operated by him). As predicted, the established identity fared better. The difference in buyers’ willingness-to-pay was 8.1% of the selling price. A subsidiary experiment followed the same format, but compared sales by relatively new sellers with and without negative feedback. Surprisingly, one or two negative feedbacks for our new sellers did not affect buyers’ willingness-to-pay.

We apply moral foundations theory (MFT) to explore how the public conceptualizes the first eight months of the conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (Russia). Our analysis includes over 1.1 million English tweets related to the conflict over the first 36 weeks. We used linguistic inquiry word count (LIWC) and a moral foundations dictionary to identify tweets’ moral components (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) from the United States, pre- and post-Cold War NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia. Following an initial spike at the beginning of the conflict, tweet volume declined and stabilized by week 10. The level of moral content varied significantly across the five regions and the five moral components. Tweets from the different regions included significantly different moral foundations to conceptualize the conflict. Across all regions, tweets were dominated by loyalty content, while fairness content was infrequent. Moral content over time was relatively stable, and variations were linked to reported conflict events.

Monumental roads were constructed during the ninth to thirteenth centuries by the regional society centred on Chaco Canyon in the US Southwest. Here, the authors present new lidar and field documentation of parallel roads at the Gasco Site, which sits within a ritual landscape south of Chaco Canyon. Their findings reveal that the Gasco Road is substantially longer than previously believed and forms alignments between natural springs and towards the winter solstice sunrise over Mount Taylor, a mountain sacred among contemporary Indigenous peoples. These findings highlight the agency of landscapes and skyscapes in structuring ritual practices in ancient societies worldwide.

Obruchevodid petalodonts are rare small chondrichthyans known from nearly complete to partial skeletons from the Upper Mississippian (Serpukhovian) Bear Gulch Limestone of central Montana and isolated teeth from the Upper Mississippian Bangor Limestone of northern Alabama. New records of obruchevodid petalodonts are presented here from the Middle Mississippian (Viséan) Joppa Member of the Ste. Genevieve Formation at Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Obruchevodids are here represented by multiple teeth of a new taxon, Clavusodens mcginnisi n. gen. n. sp., and a single tooth referred to ?Netsepoye sp. Clavusodens mcginnisi n. gen. n. sp. is characterized by teeth with pointed mesiodistal and lingual margins and more robust chisel-like cusps on the anterolateral and distolateral teeth. The suggestion that obruchevodid petalodonts evolved to inhabit complex reef-like environments and other nearshore habitats with a feeding ecology analogous to extant triggerfish is explored and discussed.

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Observation of thin sections of the WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) Divide ice core in cross-polarized light reveals a wealth of microstructures and textural characteristics indicative of strain and recovery in an anisotropic crystalline substance undergoing high-temperature plastic deformation. The appearance of abundant subgrain domains—relatively strain-free regions inside crystals (grains) surrounded by walls of dislocations across which small structural orientation changes occur—is particularly noticeable in the depth range associated with the brittle ice (∼650–1300 m). Here we describe a subgrain texture, not previously reported in ice, that resembles chessboard-pattern subgrains in β-quartz. This chessboard texture at WAIS Divide is strongly associated with the presence of bubbles. We hypothesize that chessboard-subgrain development may affect grain-size evolution, the fracture of ice cores recovered from the brittle ice zone and perhaps grain-boundary sliding as well.