Articles In Issue Research Articles

The articles in this special issue are a good representation of the current state of passive sensing research, illustrating both its potential and significant challenges. These articles span multiple areas of sensing, including behaviors in the real world (e.g., global positioning system [GPS], actigraphy, and spoken language), online behaviors (e.g., app use and texting), behaviors that straddle the real world and online (e.g., phone use, text messages, and keystrokes), and psychophysiological states. As noted in the editors' introduction, the consistency of findings in both Filip's metaanalysis (Filip et al., 2025) and other systematic analyses (De Angel et al., 2022) indicates something is "there." But effect sizes remain stubbornly in the small to at best medium range. Small effect sizes are perhaps unsurprising. Passive sensing provides objective behavioral and physiological data, while clinical targets typically rely on subjective symptom ratings. Objective and subject measurements of the "same" constructs use inherently different vantage points and tend to show only modest correlations (e.g., the modest correlations between objective neuropsychological tests and self-reported cognitive symptoms). In this commentary, the author discusses a few reasons for these limited effect sizes and potential uses for passive sensing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

It has been a pleasure to review the 14 articles in this special issue, along with the editors' introduction and the other commentary. It is impressive to see the progress in the field and the number of research groups now engaged in pursuing overlapping or related questions. At the same time, many of us are grappling with common challenges. I approached these articles primarily from a statistical perspective and will highlight some common themes and offer potential ways to address challenges moving forward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Counterprotests have become commonplace around the world today in various issue areas, ranging from abortion, migration, and LGBTQ+ rights to disarmament, labor, and climate change. And yet, our knowledge about the relationship between protests and counterprotests remains limited—especially with respect to concrete interactions between them in situ . This introduction outlines how the articles in the special issue contribute to a better understanding of when and why counterprotests are likely to emerge, how they are affected by—and, in turn, alter—the protests they target, and what the outcomes of their interaction might be.

Artisans and their labour have shaped the trajectories of South Asian social, economic and political history. In this introduction to a special section titled ‘Making Artisans: Artisanal Lives and Production in South Asia History’, we position the articles that follow within ongoing reconsiderations of South Asian artisanship, emphasising especially the reinvigoration of studies of artisanship within contemporary practices of labour history. This introduction to the special section considers key themes that connect the subsequent articles. These include the importance of trade-specific practices of artisan work; the occasionally divergent regional experiences of South Asian artisanal communities; and the cultures and relationships of production that shaped how artisans lived and worked. Ultimately, we argue that by disaggregating ‘artisanship’ as a category, the articles in this special issue contribute to new efforts to understand artisans as labouring actors within the history of South Asia’s political economy.

The Introduction to the Special Issue on Contributions of Biometrics to Advertising Research outlines the guest editors’ vision for the Special Issue. We sought and received papers that: (1) reflect on the history of biometrics in advertising research to provide insight into future directions for researchers; (2) present empirical research aimed at elucidating implicit psychological processes while leveraging the dynamic capabilities of biometric tools; and (3) challenge the field and interrogate standard practices in biometrics research to encourage continued intellectual growth and ethical scholarship. In this introduction, we position articles in the special issue within a history of biometrics tools in advertising starting more than a century ago; we synthesize the contributions of the included empirical research under a larger theoretical understanding of dynamics of implicit processes; and we further reflect on ethical issues present in biometrics advertising research and advocate for further development of ethical standards and best practices.

ABSTRACT This introduction provides an outline of what a study on banditry beyond the common notion of social banditry/common banditry, or armed robbery/criminal violence divide might look like. The first section is a short description of the focus of the special issue. The second briefly reviews the literature for the different conceptualizations and explanatory models to banditry that have developed over the years. The third section takes a step back from the literature review to provide what might be considered a proper definition/conceptualisation of banditry within the context of the Nigerian experience of the phenomenon. Building on this, the section gives the sense in which banditry is used in this special issue. To conclude, the fourth section highlights the contributions that the articles of this special issue bring to the analysis of banditry in Nigeria.

Abstract This article reviews the evolution of law and economics as applied to the study of labour law and labour market issues, as an introduction to the articles included in this special issue. This evolution can be divided into three main stages. Initially, the focus was on the negative effects of labour law on efficiency. This was followed by a stage devoted to examining the role of labour law in addressing market failures. The third stage is marked by the expansion of empirical analysis, driven by the development of causal inference techniques. Throughout this evolution, labour economics has been a key partner in this subfield, with a fruitful exchange of concepts. The result of this interaction between disciplines is a kind of comprehensive research agenda, where law and economics related to the labour market retain the typical characteristics of detailed and nuanced analyses of institutions, legal practice, and the enforcement of legal regulations. The articles in this special issue illustrate this comprehensive perspective. They cover labour tribunals, severance pay, and worker representation at the firm level.

This essay introduces a special issue exploring the topics of variation, indigeneity, and heritage in historical English language studies. It highlights several key insights from research on diachronic changes in English from studies of historical sociolinguistics, indigenous languages, and heritage languages, acknowledging the roles of indigenous, immigrant, and multilingual speakers in charting the history of the English language. It provides brief summaries of the three research articles in the special issue, as well as an afterword connecting glocal methodologies to the themes of variation, indigeneity, and heritage.

Understanding how policy decisions are made is a vital skill for students and practitioners in public administration. Yet policymaking remains a complex, dynamic, and often opaque process—where ideas compete, interests clash, and change is hard-won. This special issue examines how digital serious games can teach policymaking in a manner that is both theoretically grounded and experientially rich. This introductory article addresses the unique challenges of teaching policymaking—a subject that lies at the intersection of the technical and procedural aspects of public administration and the conceptual focus of policy process theories. Teaching policymaking carries both practical and democratic value. It helps students develop strategic agency by learning how actors frame problems, build coalitions, overcome opposition, and design pathways to policy reform. At the same time, it fosters democratic competence by encouraging students to recognise the pluralistic nature of public decisions, understand power asymmetries, and resist simplistic or populist narratives. The article also argues that addressing complex policy problems requires not only sound evidence but also knowledge of policymaking, i.e. a deep understanding of how evidence is framed, contested, and mobilised within the policy process. The introductory article discusses how serious games can effectively integrate these dimensions into the classroom. By simulating real-world dynamics, games allow students to experience policymaking first-hand. This experiential approach fosters critical thinking, soft skills, and a realistic understanding of the complexity of policy decisions. The articles in this special issue expand on these themes, presenting insights from the use of the P-CUBE digital game across diverse policy fields, including social inclusion, scientific decision-making, and urban policy, and offering practical guidance on game design, classroom strategies, and learning outcomes.

Following the racial reckoning of summer 2020, the American Psychological Association charged all psychologists to actively engage in antiracist efforts and promote racial justice through research. It is a call for change and an unlearning of discriminatory and marginalizing research practices, and instead, engage in work that humanizes. This charge also aligns with the growing interest and motivation among educational psychologists to engage in race-focused research. However, to conduct race-focused research well necessitates a rethinking of research intentions and processes such that they elevate the foci beyond the mere absence of explicit adverse outcomes, and adopt a humanizing approach to research. In the introduction, we describe our conceptualization of humanizing research, making clear the need for prerequisite work, including reflection and reflexivity about inquiry worldviews, advancing knowledge about the racist roots of methods central to educational psychology, and the development of critical consciousness. To ground these ideas in educational psychology, we describe situated expectancy value theory (SEVT) as one prominent motivation theory well-poised to promote humanizing principles; yet, although the model explicitly includes cultural and social influences on individuals’ motivational choices, these factors remain under-theorized. The conclusion provides summaries of the articles in the special issue, highlighting how the content provides explicit ways to reframe constructs, research design, and methods to honor and respect the humanity of People of Color.

The questions of how life forms, whether life is an inevitable outcome and how diverse its presentation could be remain some of the most profound in science. Investigations into the origin of life confront key issues such as uncovering key constraints and universal features of life, the plausibility of alternative biochemistries and the transition from purely chemical systems to information-bearing, evolvable entities. Many of these issues can be associated with early cell formation and evolution. Thus, protocellular systems have emerged as a key focus of study. Here, the community can ask questions about physical constraints and the co-evolution of energy, matter and information. The pursuit of these answers spans a wide range of disciplines, including geochemistry, statistical physics, systems and evolutionary biology, artificial life, synthetic biology and information theory, and reflects the inherently interdisciplinary nature of origin-of-life research. This article surveys key theoretical frameworks and experimental approaches that have shaped our current understanding, while outlining the major unresolved challenges that continue to drive the field forward. It also summarizes and contextualizes the articles in this special issue that address these questions.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Origins of life: the possible and the actual’.

SYNOPSIS This Special Issue Introduction presents the rationale and underpinnings for this Special Issue devoted to contemporary perspectives on fathering and father–child relationships. We argue for a move away from traditional models of father involvement that focus on the quantity of time fathers spend in predominantly feminine caregiving activities to a more nuanced perspective focused on the parenting behaviors fathers engage in with their children. Each article in this Special Issue contributes to understanding fathering through this contemporary lens by highlighting a family systems perspective for the design of both research and interventions, by focusing in on theoretically meaningful, but often overlooked, fathering constructs, by showcasing fathers in families often underrepresented in the literature (e.g., military fathers, primary caregiving fathers), by presenting practices for recruiting fathers in longitudinal research, and how best to analyze father data. The articles also reflect fathers from different parts of the world, from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and rearing children of different ages. This Special Issue provides exemplars of methods, analyses, and findings that set the stage for the next generation of research on fathering and father–child relationships so that we no longer need to ask if fathers are or are not involved with their children, but what fathers specifically do when they are involved with their children.

Discussion of the articles in the special issue ‘Resilience in learning: In search of protective factors and compensatory mechanisms’

ABSTRACTIncreasing political polarization poses a significant threat to democratic functioning, hindering constructive dialogue and collaborative problem‐solving. This paper explores the potential of information science, specifically through the application of sensemaking tools employing Artificial Intelligence (AI), to address this challenge. Drawing on theories of sensemaking and framing, we examine how technology can support structured dialogue initiatives by using sensemaking tools to support the political depolarization work of the non‐profit organization Braver Angels. We introduce two specific sensemaking tools – Issue Sensemaking and Article Sensemaking – designed to help individuals explore complex political issues from multiple perspectives, analyze information sources critically, and identify areas of common ground and disagreement. By facilitating deeper understanding and more structured engagement with diverse viewpoints and information artifacts, these tools offer a promising avenue for improving the quality of civic discourse and potentially reducing affective polarization. This work aligns with the need for information science to contribute responsible, human‐centered solutions in turbulent socio‐political contexts.

Cognitive behavioral therapies are the first-line psychotherapeutics for fear-based conditions, including anxiety, obsessive-compulsive (OCD), and trauma-related disorders. Despite documented efficaciousness and effectiveness, various factors limit the availability of these evidence-based treatments. Technologies may be used to circumvent treatment barriers, improving access to care and optimizing treatments to address symptoms among those with fear-based conditions. Original research articles in this Special Issue include a study on provider use of digital mental health and extended reality technologies for the treatment of OCD; a stepped-care treatment study on trichotillomania, a condition highly comorbid with fear-based conditions; and a qualitative needs assessment for the development of a digital, trauma-informed, single-session intervention for foster caregivers. The Special Issue also includes two review pieces: one presenting treatment recommendations on generative artificial intelligence for exposure therapies and the second on treatment considerations for telehealth-delivered treatment for OCD.

ABSTRACT Following the third wave of democratization, democracy and its proponents have recently experienced a shift towards autocratization. To date, however, little is known about the impact of this trend on democracy promotion. This article introduces a special issue that examines the complex relationship between autocratization and external democracy promotion. It provides a conceptual framework for understanding how the global trend of autocratization affects democracy promotion efforts. We identify two ways in which this is the case: first, autocratization requires democracy promoters to adapt to increasingly resistant environments in target countries where they seek to promote democracy or prevent autocratization; second, autocratization reduces the global leverage of democracy promoters due to the rise of autocratic competitors. We highlight the evolving strategies and responses of democracy promoters in the face of rising autocratic influence. We then provide an overview of the articles in this special issue, which examine the motives and strategies of traditional democracy promoters and their autocratic competitors and analyse how democracy promoters navigate the challenges of autocratization in target countries of democracy promotion and the strategic competition with autocratic regimes, using case studies from Southeastern Europe, the post-Soviet space, Africa and Latin America.

The interesting intersection of Sport, business and society was underexplored. This special issue addresses important aspects such as political interference in sports, challenges related to hosting prestigious games, societal and cultural issues faced by athletes and organizers to mention a few. Studies in this special issue are based on evidence from different geographies and have implications for stakeholders at both national and international levels. IMPACT STATEMENT This is an editorial for the special issue on Sport, Business and Society. The articles in this special issue focus upon key topics of leveraging sport celebrities, sports-washing, strategic communication, ethics in sports and CSR. Practitioner Relevance Statement The articles in this special issue are more significant for the audience following world sports or maybe involved in organizing these games. The implications of these studies are also highly relevant to the governments, national and international sporting bodies and athletes.

The contribution of health and health systems to other sustainable development goals. An overview of the evidence on co-benefits.

Boosting student motivation is an important goal, as it fuels effective learning and collaboration in school. Motivation develops through both personal beliefs and environmental influences. While peers make up much of students' social world, they have received less attention than teachers. Articles in this special issue explore the complex and dynamic ways peer relationships are intertwined with student motivation. This commentary synthesizes key findings from the special issue around two themes: (1) how peer relationships and motivation influence each other, and (2) how multiple aspects of the peer context jointly shape students' motivational development. We focus on 8 articles in the special issue that were diverse in age (from primary to university) and regions of the world (e.g., China, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, United States, and Turkey). Several studies used social network approaches, while others used longitudinal, qualitative, or mixed methods designs. Findings highlight the reciprocal and contextual dynamics connecting peer relationships and motivation. Yet, there was greater agreement affirming the positive and negative influences of peers on motivation. Whereas inconsistent findings regarding how aspects of academic motivation drive the formation of peer groups warrant future investigation. By centring on motivation, this special issue extends research on peer relationships in school. Broadly, there is a continued need to match distinct definitions and measures of peer relationships to specific aspects of motivation, while considering the potential for bidirectional and joint influences.

ABSTRACT In the 1990s when environmental security first gained mainstream prominence, environmentally-minded academics viewed the involvement of the military in this agenda negatively. Nowadays, academics seem more willing to accept a role for the provision of climate security. Drawing on lived experience, observation, and readings of the literature, this article advances a series of propositions that together aim to examine whether there really is a change in perception of the military among environmental security scholars, and, if so, why it occurred. The propositions’ relative explanatory value is established via a literature review and cross-referenced with informal interviews with scholars in the field. The article ends by warning that these developments ought not breed complacency on the role of the military in this space. It is suggested that many of the articles in this special issue demonstrate how being critical is reconcilable with a more positive view of the military.