In this article, I argue that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that misogynistic cruelty often stems from the sense that certain women are wrongdoers; it often stems from the sense that certain, privileged men are entitled to violate women; and it often stems from the sense that, at least when they threaten such men, women simply do not matter. Misogynistic cruelty is thus more a product of moral vilification, entitlement, and devaluation than dehumanization proper. I explore the implications for the need to posit dehumanization as a mechanism to explain cruelty elsewhere.

Does L2 production involve adaptive control? Previous research drawing on a parallel between Stroop effects in L1 and cognate effects in L2 produced no support for this idea when inducing adaptive control implicitly (i.e., involuntarily). Reasoning that adaptive control might be hard to implement implicitly in L2 production, here, we induced adaptive control explicitly by presenting informative cues revealing whether the upcoming stimulus would be congruent/incongruent (in L1 Stroop) or cognate/noncognate (in L2 picture naming). Adaptive control was successfully induced in L1 Stroop, with informative cues, relative to uninformative ones, having a facilitatory effect. Such was not the case for L2 picture naming, in which informative cues had an inhibitory effect. While there might be several reasons for this reverse cueing effect, this finding represents another dissociation between L2 production and conflict tasks, which likely has implications for theories assuming a close connection between domain-general and bilingualism-specific control.

The generation and propagation of acoustic-gravity–Scholte wave fields produced by different types of nonlinear interactions between ocean surface waves and shallow, non-uniform depth contours of an elastic seafloor are investigated. Specifically, nonlinear interactions between surface waves and the seafloor, surfacewaves themselves and the seafloor, and acoustic-gravity-waves and the seafloor are shown to produce resonantly strong bottom pressures. Whereas the interaction between shoreward-propagating surface waves and seafloor depth contours (and the resulting seafloor waves and microseisms) has been discussed in the literature, not much is known about the compression wave–seafloor wave groups forming an important component of the overall energy transfer process in shallow water. Forcing due to the different wave interactions involving the seafloor depth contours and the dispersion relations for the coupled ocean–seafloor system are derived, providing estimates of the energy transfer that results at resonance when the interaction produces a wavenumber–frequency combination that lies on one of the dispersion surfaces for the two-media system. Wavenumber spectra and their temporal evolution are found analytically for stationary random surface-wave fields, and the acoustic-gravity wave potentials, seafloor pressure amplitudes, seafloor power densities and Scholte wave amplitudes are computed, and their sensitivity to critical parameters is estimated. The nonlinear interactions derived here may account for some of the 200 % increase of low-frequency ($0.01\leqslant f\leqslant 0.03$ Hz) spectral densities of bottom pressure observed between 25 and 8 m water depths in the Atlantic Ocean at a site off Duck, NC. Further, subject to experimental validation, the power densities estimated here could contribute energy for sensing operations.

In thise survey, we present in a unified way the categorical and syntactical settings of coherent differentiation introduced recently, which shows that the basic ideas of differential linear logic and of the differential lambda-calculus are compatible with determinism. Indeed, due to the Leibniz rule of the differential calculus, differential linear logic and the differential lambda-calculus feature an operation of addition of proofs or terms operationally interpreted as a strong form of nondeterminism. The main idea of coherent differentiation is that the summations required by differentiation can be controlled and kept deterministic, in the denotational models, as well as in the syntax and operational semantics themselves. In sharp contrast with the differential lambda-calculus, coherent differentiation indeed allows one to design differential extensions of Turing complete functional programming languages, such as PCF, endowed with a deterministic evaluation mechanism, typically implemented in a Krivine abstract machine.

Legal jurisprudence is widely debated but rarely measured. We present the first comprehensive measure of jurisprudence in U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1870 to 2024. Building on qualitative studies of legal reasoning, we classify court opinions into two contrasting types: “formal” reasoning and anti-formal or “grand” reasoning. The foundation of this measurement dataset is a smaller, hand-annotated dataset created by a team of domain experts. Using this annotated dataset, we fine-tune and evaluate a foundational large language model, which is then employed to predict legal reasoning across all opinions in the full dataset. We demonstrate the potential of this new measure for applications in empirical research, enabling analyses of shifts in jurisprudence over time, the reasoning styles of individual justices, and the relationship between legal reasoning and other judicial features, such as ideology. To support further research, we release the annotated dataset, the fine-tuned model, and the final measures, offering a resource for both studying legal reasoning and judicial behavior and evaluating language models in the legal domain.

With alcohol use disorder rising in England, evaluating the impact of interventions used in services is important. This evaluation was conducted in a third sector drug and alcohol service within South England. It aimed to explore the association of a structured cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) group and engagement for service users in early recovery from alcohol use disorder, comparing outcomes with a previously unstructured psychosocial group. A mixed-methods approach compared the groups. Both groups lasted 12 sessions. Self-reported alcohol consumption, psychological health, physical health, and quality of life were measured using the Treatment Outcomes Profile (TOPs; Marsden et al., 2008). Quantitative data were analysed from 47 service users in the unstructured group and 43 in the structured CBT group. Qualitative analysis explored four service users’ feedback from the structured CBT group through interviews, using thematic analysis. Significantly more participants completed the structured CBT group (93.02% vs 74.47%). Structured group participants, on average, attended 50.97% of sessions, compared with 25.53% in the unstructured group. Mixed-model ANOVAs (repeated measures and between subjects) showed an improvement in psychological health, quality of life, and physical health regardless of the intervention type. Both groups also reduced alcohol consumption. Qualitative analysis identified two emerging themes, accessibility and a sense of belonging, alongside several subthemes. While both groups improved treatment outcomes, findings suggest a structured CBT group may be associated with more engagement and facilitate greater retention in treatment.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To understand how engagement and treatment outcomes differ between a structured CBT group and an unstructured psychosocial group in the treatment of alcohol use disorder.

2. (2) To identify potential mechanisms in a structured group which may influence engagement and treatment outcomes in the treatment of alcohol use disorder.

3. (3) To reflect on differing ways to measure effectiveness of a group in community drug and alcohol services.