While emotions are pivotal in intergroup conflicts, individuals are less motivated to feel peace-promoting emotions in extreme conflicts. In the current research, we investigated whether virtual reality (VR) can be harnessed to overcome this limitation by utilizing two of its features: (a) the ability to simulate reality in an immersive way, and (b) to allow people to experience a situation from different perspectives immersively. Two studies done outside the lab (N = 346) on Jewish-Israelis showed that watching conflict-related scenes using VR increased empathy and other peace-promoting emotions and attitudes. Additionally, the results showed that VR could be used to assist emotion-regulation interventions, namely, cognitive reappraisal (CR) and perspective-taking (PT), by allowing participants to immersively experience a scene from the desired perspective (a “bystander,” detached perspective for CR and an outgroup perspective for PT). Both features were found to have a distinct contribution in affecting participants’ emotions. However, most effects were found only among rightists, suggesting VR is beneficial when motivation to feel peace-promoting emotions is low. Our findings suggest that interventions should be carefully tailored to the audience, the context, and the desired effect.

This study investigated the impact of war on personal religiosity and spirituality (R/S). From a Terror Management Theory perspective, mortality awareness might lead individuals to seek existential security not only by endorsing R/S, but also by adhering to cultural norms. Therefore, we expected that war would drive widespread R/S change, but the extent to which individuals increase or decrease R/S would depend on the culturally normative nature of R/S. We relied on data from 1,278 Jewish-Israeli students collected during the ongoing 2023–2025 Israel-Gaza war. Approximately half of the sample reported some change, with increases in R/S being more prevalent than decreases. However, this pattern varied by religious group affiliation and was especially true in contexts where R/S is more normative. Considering the culturally normative nature of R/S and both increases and decreases in R/S is important to contributing a fuller account of R/S change in the face of protracted stress.

Purpose Set for variability (SfV; the ability to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of a word and its correct pronunciation) has been shown to predict regular and irregular word reading in children across both transparent and opaque orthographies. It has been theorized that SfV is a crucial part of the decoding process associated with orthographic learning. Consistent with this hypothesis, SfV may be more important when partial decoding occurs such as in irregular words or when children lack the decoding skills to fully decode a word. This study’s purpose was to investigate whether SfV skill’s influence on the prediction of word reading is impacted by a word’s regularity and a child’s decoding skill. Methods The present study used a cross-classified random effects model of 160 words and 491 children (mean age = 9.16, 51.5% female, 40.3% White, 40.7% African American, 1.4% Asian, 2.0% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 0.4% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 2.0% Multiracial, and 17.2% Hispanic) to determine whether the SfV-word reading relation is moderated by a word’s spelling-to-pronunciation transparency rating and a child’s decoding skill. Results SfV was more important under conditions that may lead to partial decoding, such as when decoding skill is low or word transparency is low, and was most important when both decoding skill and word transparency are low. Conclusions Results suggest that when children with poor decoding skills read irregular words whose pronunciation is not readily available from its spelling, SfV is a large contributor to whether that word will be read correctly.

Background: Cognitive biases in information processing, particularly attentional and memory biases, play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). These biases lead individuals with MDD to preferentially attend to and remember negative information, thereby maintaining a depressed mood. A recently proposed attentional resources model suggests that exposure to negative stimuli leads to deeper cognitive processing of subsequent information, regardless of its content. Based on this model, the current study investigated a novel paradigm that manipulated exposure to negative emotional stimuli and examined its effect on information processing and mood improvement. Method: Thirty-eight unmedicated participants with MDD and no comorbid disorders, and 37 healthy controls, completed three blocks of an emotional recall task, which involved watching a short emotional video followed by a recall task of neutral or positive valence stories. Mood changes were assessed throughout the task. Results: Results revealed that both the MDD and HC groups reported improved mood after exposure to a negative emotional video followed by a positive story. Conclusions: These results have important clinical implications. The paradigm may be applied in a broader sense as an active tool that may help to improve mood in depression treatment.

A popular intervention for increasing support for peace in violent intergroup conflicts is to describe the peaceful resolution of other conflicts. In four experiments, we tested the effectiveness of this approach in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by exposing Jewish-Israelis to information about the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, or about tourism in Northern Ireland as a control. We found that learning about the historical peace process generally led participants to view conflicts as more malleable, their own conflict as less unique, and led to unfreezing of conflict-related beliefs. However, it neither increased hope nor consistently boosted support for conciliatory policies. We explored boundary conditions and found effects were often stronger among leftist and centrist compared with rightists. Moreover, explicitly drawing analogies between conflicts at the outset proved ineffective, whereas exposing participants to the historical conflict and peace process without mentioning the proximal conflict was more successful.

We test the theory that personality incoherence may instigate personality change in the context of personal values. Values’ near-universal organization makes value incoherence assessment straightforward. The study included 13 longitudinal samples from seven cultures (Australia, Israel Palestinian citizens, Israel Jewish majority, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Switzerland), total N = 7,126, and T1 M_age ranging between 6 and 18. Each participant reported values between two- and six-times. Using unfolding analysis, we calculated the fit of the internal value structure of each participant at the first time point to the value structure in their sample (normative structure) and to the theoretical structure of values. We estimated value change using Growth Curve Modeling (when at least three measurement times were available) and the difference between T1 and T2 in each sample. We correlated value incoherence with value change and estimated the effect across samples using a meta-analysis. Incoherence with the structure of values predicted greater value change. The associations were stronger when participant’s value structures were compared to the normative value structure at T1 than when they were compared to the theoretical structure. A meta-regression analysis indicated that effects were not moderated by age. We discuss possible underlying processes and implications for personality development.

Speech processing involves a subjective sense of engagement with content. This experience occurs alongside continuous prediction of upcoming contents, raising questions regarding the potential relationship between these phenomena. Is the activation of predictive mechanisms sufficient for subjective experience, or can it proceed when the mind wanders away? Participants (N = 25) listened to audiobook content (>12,000 words) while providing self-reports of mind-wandering. Such reports were associated with spectral changes in the EEG signal and decreased early response to word onset, in line with current accounts of mind-wandering. In contrast, markers of word-level contextual surprise (indexed by the contextual surprise of Language Models) remained intact during mind-wandering, alongside significant encoding of semantic contents. Last, we measured the neural encoding of predictive context, measured by the correlation between EEG and the vectorial embeddings that Language Models use to predict each word given prior context. This encoding also remained strong during mind-wandering, albeit weaker compared to attentive periods. Our findings show that the brain predicts and monitors relevant inputs even when we disengage from the external environment. It suggests that the shared computational mechanisms between humans and Language Models are insufficient for experiencing the meaning of speech contents, with implications for theoretical accounts of mind-wandering and predictive processing accounts of consciousness.

Objective This study utilized a single-session, randomized controlled analog design to investigate the mechanisms underlying cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic therapy in treating anxiety sensitivity (AS). We hypothesized that changes in catastrophic interpretations of bodily sensations would predict reductions in AS in CBT, whereas improvements in panic-specific reflective functioning (pRF) would predict changes in the psychodynamic intervention (PDTp). Methods Participants with elevated AS (N = 110; Mage = 43, 91 women) were randomized to CBT, PDTp, or a control group. Pre-to-post changes in mechanisms were examined as predictors of changes in AS at post-treatment and one-month follow-up. Results Results partially supported the hypotheses. Catastrophic interpretations changed significantly in the CBT condition. However, pRF did not change in any group. The relationship between changes in mechanisms and AS was more complex than predicted. In CBT, reductions in AS were closely tied to changes in interpretations. Within-session, distress declined in CBT but did not consistently predict AS change. pRF change was related to AS reductions only in CBT. Conclusion These findings highlight the clinical relevance of targeting catastrophic thinking in brief CBT for AS, and suggest that pRF may play a secondary role. Future work should test these mechanisms in clinical settings and longer treatments.

Abstract. Exposure to trauma has been theorized to contribute to the onset and exacerbation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), yet direct empirical evidence remains limited. This study examined whether individuals directly affected by the trauma of October 7th, 2023, in Israel exhibited higher rates of new-onset or worsening OCD symptoms compared to controls who were not directly affected. A total of 132 adults participated, including 66 survivors from the Gaza envelope who experienced direct exposure to the attacks and 66 matched controls from other areas of Israel who were not directly affected. Data on OCD and PTSD symptoms were collected approximately 4–6 months after the events. Results revealed significantly higher OCD symptoms in the directly affected group and PTSD symptom severity partially mediated the relationship between trauma exposure and increased OCD symptoms. Notably, 39% of individuals in the directly affected group met a priori criteria for probable OCD, 24% reported new-onset symptoms after October 7th, and most others reported worsening of existing symptoms. These findings provide the first direct evidence that acute trauma can trigger new-onset and worsening OCD symptoms. Consistent with the diathesis-stress model, the results underscore the role of environmental stressors in OCD etiology and highlight the need for screening for OCD in trauma-exposed populations.

Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of human speech [W. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (1994); N. P. Himmelmann et al., Phonology 35, 207–245 (2018)). Linguistic research suggests they are found across languages and that they fulfill important communicative functions such as the pacing of ideas in discourse and swift turn-taking. We study the rate of IUs in 48 languages from every continent and from 27 distinct language families. Using an analytic method to annotate natural speech recordings, we identify a low-frequency rate of IUs across the sample, with a peak at 0.6 Hz, and little variation between sexes or across the life span. We find that IU rate is only weakly related to speech rate quantified at the syllable level, and crucially, that cross-linguistic variation in IU rate does not stem from cross-linguistic variation in syllable rate.