This study explores the concept of spiritual intelligence from an evolutionary perspective, providing a comprehensive and updated definition. A concept analysis was conducted following Rodgers' Evolutionary Method, supported by a scoping review in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Studies explicitly addressing spiritual intelligence, regardless of population, setting, or discipline, were included across quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, and review designs. Four databases-PsycINFO, PubMed Central, Scopus, and Web of Science-were searched for publications up to 15 December 2025, using the term "spiritual intelligence." One-hundred-twelve articles met inclusion criteria and were analyzed through narrative synthesis and inductive analytical processing. Spiritual intelligence emerged as a construct encompassing adaptive cognition, higher consciousness, problem management, and personal growth, often referred to as Spiritual Quotient or Existential Intelligence. Antecedents included self and transcendental awareness, existential questioning, and search for meaning and purpose, while consequents comprised enhanced health, performance, self-awareness, and humanitarian orientation. Defining attributes were equanimity, life-wisdom, transcendental awareness, spiritual consciousness, meaning and purpose creation, and existential questioning. This evolutionary analysis traced the concept from theory to application, revealing its positive influence in daily life. Equanimity and life-wisdom were identified as core attributes, highlighting implications for training and integration of spiritual care in professional practice.

The ATHENA (Advanced Tool for Holistic Evaluation and Nurturing of Abilities) competency framework proposes a multidimensional approach to human performance structured around five interdependent dimensions (cognition, conation, knowledge, emotion, and sensori-motion), operationalized through 60 fine-grained facets. Although ATHENA is grounded in contemporary psychological theory and supported conceptually by multivariate research in intelligence, creativity, and skill acquisition, empirical evidence regarding the clarity and practical comprehensibility of its facets remains limited. This study investigates the extent to which instructional designers and human resource development (HRD) professionals-two groups who routinely operationalize competencies for learning, assessment, and workforce development-understand and evaluate the semantic clarity and usability of the 60 facets. Seventy-five practitioners completed a structured evaluation of the ATHENA framework facets, which are designed to be used in a hybrid intelligence system for competency management. This article presents the theoretical background, methodological design, and results concerning users' comprehension of the framework's components. The findings support, in general, the compatibility of ATHENA's facets and practitioners' conceptions.

Working memory capacity (WMC) has long served as a central indicator of individual differences in complex cognition. However, growing evidence suggests that a substantial portion of its predictive power may reflect attention control (AC)-including goal maintenance, interference management, and inhibition-rather than storage capacity alone. This review synthesizes findings across six domains: (1) perception and sensory discrimination, (2) learning and problem solving, (3) cognitive control and decision making, (4) retrieval and memory performance, (5) multitasking and real-world performance, and (6) clinical applications. Across these areas, WMC-related effects frequently align with demands on AC, though the strength and nature of this alignment vary by domain. We highlight the importance of incorporating reliable AC measures and recommend latent-variable approaches to more clearly separate storage, control, and representational processes underlying complex performance.

This article introduces a theoretical framework centered on enhancing creativity through gaming, termed the Game-based Creativity Enhancement Framework (G-CEF). Rooted in experiential learning and game-based learning theories, the framework adopts an input-process-output paradigm: two inputs (personal attributes and game attributes), one process stage (learning situation), and outputs (learning improvements and acquisitions). Personal attributes take the form of conative dispositions and variables common to both creativity and games, which help explain why gaming habits and creativity are linked, particularly outside the laboratory. Six variables are identified and presented: playfulness, imagination, mind-wandering, mindfulness, psychological capital and motives. The second input corresponds to game attributes, which help explain why and how games can help improve creativity. Two forms of game attributes are presented: affordances and game mechanics. Eight types of affordances were identified: degree of flexibility, narrative, tools, environment, content creation, avatar, progression and replayability. Five types of game mechanics were also identified: originality, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, mental flexibility and creative dispositions. The learning situation within games represents a four-step cyclical experiential learning process: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Lastly, the framework details enhancements in creativity due to gaming, supported by a literature review examining the impact of different game types on creativity.

Internationally, there are several studies that examined the relationship between core executive functions (working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility) and mind wandering. These studies focused mostly on adult samples and there are fewer studies that examined this relationship with children and adolescent samples. Therefore, the current systematic review aims to identify and critically examine the existing peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between the core executive functions and mind wandering. Journal articles reporting quantitative results were identified through keyword searches in PsycINFO, Scopus, and PubMed. In total, 750 references were identified using the specified keywords. Among those, only ten studies were deemed to fit the inclusion criteria. The majority of the studies employed behavioural measures. The evidence on the relationship between the core executive functions and mind wandering was rather scarce and mixed. Most of the studies suggest that working memory capacity is critical for reduced mind wandering. The evidence regarding inhibitory control is rather mixed. Cognitive flexibility may underpin adaptive reallocation of attention between internal and external states, producing performance declines. The directional nature of the relationship between the three core executive functions and mind wandering is largely an unresolved matter, which requires further research.

The prevalent method for measuring emotional experiences is self-report scales. However, this method is prone to bias, affected by retrospective errors, and limited in studying individual differences due to variability in how individuals interpret scale values. In the present study, we tested the convergent validity of an alternative approach, which infers emotional components from computational modeling as applied to binary pleasant/unpleasant reports about affective images. Reaction times and choices were modeled to estimate the drift rate (efficiency of emotional evidence accumulation) and the boundary (decision caution). Participants (N = 191) also completed five self-report questionnaires assessing affect, anhedonia, depressive symptoms, and pleasure. Only one correlation reached evidence level (Bayes Factor > 10): Higher consummatory pleasure was negatively associated with drift rate for unpleasant emotions (r(178) = -0.258). This suggests that individuals who typically experience greater in-the-moment pleasure accumulate evidence less efficiently toward unpleasant judgments. Other correlations were absent or inconclusive, potentially reflecting differences in temporal focus and in the specific facets of emotion for each measure. Overall, these results provide some initial support for the convergent and discriminant validity of the drift rate as an indirect measure of online emotional experience.

This study explored how mathematics teachers in Chinese special schools provide instructional support to primary-aged students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The types, characteristics, and classroom implementation processes of such support were identified to address a gap in the literature regarding subject-specific instructional practices in special education settings. A qualitative research design using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was employed. Five mathematics teachers from special schools in Shanghai participated in the study. Data were collected through 15 video-recorded classroom observations and five semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify key patterns of instructional support. The analysis revealed five core domains of instructional support for students with IDD: (1) comprehension facilitation through simplified explanations, real-life connections, and visual scaffolding; (2) responding to tasks involving prompts, modeling, and hand-over-hand support; (3) maintaining attention using individual and collective cues; (4) sustaining motivation through praise, encouragement, and second-chance opportunities; and (5) regulating behavior such as verbal restraint, physical proximity, and attention redirection. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of effective instructional support tailored to students with IDD.

This study aims to develop effective screening tools for cognitive impairment by integrating optimised speech classification features with various machine learning models. A total of 65 patients diagnosed with early-stage Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and 55 healthy controls (HCs) were included. Audio data were collected through a picture description task and processed using the Python-based Librosa library for speech feature extraction. Three machine learning models were constructed: the Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models utilised speech classification features optimised via the Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) algorithm, while the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model was trained on preprocessed speech data. After parameter tuning, the Librosa library successfully extracted 41 speech classification features from all participants. The application of the SFS optimisation strategy and the use of preprocessed data significantly improved identification accuracy. The SVM model achieved an accuracy of 0.825 (AUC: 0.91), the RF model reached 0.88 (AUC: 0.86), and the XGBoost model attained 0.92 (AUC: 0.91). These results suggest that speech-based machine learning models markedly improve the accuracy of distinguishing MCI patients from healthy older adults, providing reliable support for early cognitive deficit identification.

The use of open educational resources (OERs) is on the rise in higher education. Open pedagogy, as a learner-centered approach, provides students with opportunities to create, design, or adapt openly licensed materials or resources. With the potential of open pedagogy to enhance student learning, this study investigated the effect of an open pedagogy project on minority students' motivation and perceived learning in the computer game programming course. An experimental design was implemented to compare minority students' learning in programming through the open pedagogy approach versus the traditional approach. Participants were fifty-eight minority students enrolled in game courses from an institution in the southeastern United States. Thirty students received the instruction with open pedagogy, while twenty-eight students were in the traditional instruction. Quantitative approaches were performed to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that minority students in the open pedagogy group perceived significantly higher levels of motivation on the aspect of pressure/tension than those receiving the traditional approach. Minority students participating in the open pedagogy project had significantly higher levels of computational thinking and perceived learning performance in computer programming, compared to the students with the traditional instruction. Major findings and limitations of this study (i.e., short intervention period, small sample size, etc.) were reported and discussed.

This study leverages longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS, 2012–2020) to examine the association between teacher support and cognitive ability among children aged 10–16 living in economically disadvantaged rural areas of China. Employing a difference-in-differences (DID) framework, we found that exposure to the Rural Teacher Support Program (RTSP) is associated with an improvement of about 0.19 standard deviations in students’ cognitive abilities after accounting for individual-, family-, and county-level characteristics. Two key mechanisms appear to underlie this association, reflected in increased teacher quantity and enhanced student satisfaction with teachers. Heterogeneity analyses further show that these benefits are more pronounced among female students and those from low-income households, suggesting that teacher-centered institutional improvements may help mitigate developmental disparities. Overall, the longitudinal results indicate that better teacher-related environments are likely to support children’s cognitive development, which in turn may help reduce educational inequality in under-resourced areas.