The gut microbiome hosts diverse bacterial communities that significantly influence individual spatial behaviour in animal societies. However, this relationship remains understudied in marine fish due to the challenges associated with measuring behavioural traits in free-living fish and simultaneously obtaining gut microbiome composition data. In this study, we conducted a field experiment to explore the relationship between space and habitat use, social organization, and gut microbiome composition in marine fish. We used a novel high-resolution acoustic telemetry system to collect 7930 one-day-long movement trajectories from 232 individuals of Xyrichtys novacula of the same population (153 females, 79 males) near the coastline of Mallorca, Spain. A subset of these individuals was recaptured to analyse the diversity of core and non-core gut microbiome, quantified using operational phylogenetic units (OPUs) based on 16S rRNA gene amplicons through Illumina sequencing. Individuals closer to Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadow had higher non-core microbiome diversity, especially larger individuals. Multivariate analysis showed no significant differences in microbiome composition across the tested variables (i.e. body size, territory size, degree, strength, distance to the seagrass meadow, and sex), but males showed a visually greater, but non-significant, variability in core microbiome composition. Core microbiome composition was weakly associated with social harem structure. These findings indicate that gut microbiome composition is primarily shaped by local habitat conditions, while social organization may contribute weakly and indirectly, pending further experimental validation.

Teleonomical intelligence across scales: A categorical and partial differential equation framework for biology and artificial systems.

Person-centered care planning (PCCP) involves active collaboration between people seeking care, clinical teams, and others to co-create longitudinal treatment plans. It is a crucial part of care for people with multiple chronic conditions (MCCs) and other complex needs. Despite the widespread acceptance of the concept, the use of PCCP in the US is variable. Many effective models of PCCP exist but uptake has been limited. We sought to identify and assess current models and approaches for PCCP by performing a multi-component environmental scan. We conducted targeted literature reviews based on streamlined systematic review methods and qualitative interviews with key informants, identified for their relevant expertise and frontline knowledge of PCCP models. In all, 966 abstracts and 187 full articles met review criteria. We identified 40 models with elements fitting into 7 categories of how they differed from usual care (adding People/Roles, innovative Payment/Incentives, novel Technology, decision support Tools, Services, Functions, and Changing Focus). Most were multi-component models with evidence of effectiveness in outcomes that address the quintuple aim. Barriers to adoption and integration across sectors were primarily lack of time and appropriate payment mechanisms. A small set of measures for PCCP was identified that focused primarily on patient experience and goal setting. Similarly, a small number of PCCP models connected with social services organizations to address health-related social needs and highlighted challenges with data sharing and payment as well as growing collaborations in community care hubs to address social needs. KI interviews echoed and deepened our understanding of these findings by contextualizing experiences with barriers and factors facilitating the delivery of PCCP. PCCP is a key aspect of high-quality care for people with MCCs; uptake is limited with barriers related to time and resources. Facilitators include alignment with healthcare system objectives and practices, and ready-to-deploy resources that enable coordinated PCCP care across providers. To promote greater adoption of PCCP concerted efforts are needed to share implementation details, success stories, and build the case for PCCP with patients, their families, and healthcare system leaders.

Comparing Patient-Centered Approaches to Social Care in the Emergency Department: A Mixed-Method Randomized Controlled Trial.

Diabetes and its risk factors are embedded in a complex multilevel ecology. Upstream factors (i.e., 'forcing factors' that refer to fundamental population-based social, economic, and political structures shaping health outcomes long before disease develops) and downstream risk factors (i.e., the individual-level characteristics and outcomes that result from upstream forcing factors) are to be considered when predicting diabetes. This study aims to predict diabetes prevalence at the United States' (US) county level using analytical methods that account for the contextual complexity of diabetes. US county-level datasets incorporating 27 predictor variables were analysed cross-sectionally. A Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) model was trained to predict county-level diabetes prevalence, after which model performance and feature importance were evaluated. The final model retained 17 features and explained 95% (R2=0.952) of the variance in county-level diabetes prevalence. Physical inactivity, racial and ethnic minority status, frequent physical distress, and obesity showed the highest Shapley (SHAP) importance values, which exceeded all remaining SHAP values. This study delineates the most important predictors of diabetes prevalence based on a complex multilevel ecology. Efforts to reduce diabetes prevalence should address both upstream and downstream risk factors emphasising physical activity, obesity, equity, and cultural considerations.

A social hierarchy is an ordered ranking of individuals that arises through their interactions and governs relative access to resources and social influence. This form of social organization is pervasive across animal species and has a crucial role in shaping survival and reproductive outcomes. Across species, the routes to high status vary widely. As social groups become more complex, the basis of hierarchy shifts from simple residency rules to fighting-based dominance and finally to alliance-based systems. In this Review, we first examine the neuroendocrine and subcortical mechanisms that support status transitions in residency-based hierarchies. We then discuss plasticity within hypothalamic and mesolimbic circuits that underlie fighting-outcome-based social learning, through which fighting-based hierarchies emerge. Finally, we explore alliance-based hierarchies in cognitively complex species, in which individuals attain status through coalition formation, cooperation and reputation. We review evidence that cortical regions encode information about the strengths, emotions, experiences and intentions of other individuals and use this to navigate complex social interactions and attain status. As social hierarchies have shifted from primarily fighting-based to increasingly alliance-based strategies over evolutionary time, neural control of status has, thus, transitioned from subcortical social behaviour circuits to a more elaborated cortical network in humans.

From hidden populations to social structure: Evolution of the Network Scale-Up Method, Aggregated Relational Data, and their applications

Social work is an interdisciplinary field aimed at enhancing the quality of life for individuals and societies, shaped on the foundation of social justice and human rights. The objective of this study is to evaluate the concept of social work through the case of Spain, which possesses an established system in Europe, and to elucidate the country's current practices alongside their outcomes. Designed as a review study, this article examines the relationship between the development of Spain's social policy and the evolution of its social structure from a historical perspective. It discusses how the church-centered assistance that began in the Middle Ages transformed into an institutional, decentralized, and rights-based structure through the industrialization process, the democratization of the 1970s, and the 1985 Social Services Law. The literature review indicates that the current system is shaped by the multi-layered collaboration of the state, local governments, and non-governmental organizations. While inclusive policies directed at the integration of Roma (Gitano) communities, education, and care programs for the elderly and people with disabilities such as IMSERSO are examined, attention is also drawn to economic challenges and access issues in rural areas. By presenting the evolution of social work in Spain through a holistic approach, this article provides a conceptual framework for social policy debates in Europe and contributes to the existing literature.

This study was grounded on a theoretical framework that integrates Bourdieu's concept of sociocultural capital with Blustein's Relational Theory of Working, which recognizes that social structures and interpersonal connections shape career trajectories. The main objective of this research was to investigate the relationship between students’ sociocultural backgrounds and their career resources, as well as the role of grit in this relationship. To accomplish this, a cross-sectional study was conducted on 2353 Portuguese Higher Education students. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was applied to define students’ sociocultural profiles and structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypothesis. The results evidenced that students’ sociocultural profiles did not present a direct effect on the environment factor of career resources, however an indirect effect — via grit — was found. For the other three career resources (knowledge and skills, motivation, and career management behaviors) students’ sociocultural profiles presented both direct and indirect effects (via grit). This interaction underscores that, while students' backgrounds shape career resources, grit can help bridge disparities. This study expands the existing literature by incorporating the impact of sociocultural factors and grit, advocating for higher education institutions to recognize diverse backgrounds and promote grit-enhancing initiatives. Such an approach could help mitigate socioeconomic disparities in higher education, offering insights into educational policies that foster equitable career development.

Social isolation (ISO) is a major risk factor for mood disorders, reflected in disrupted neurochemistry and social behavior. To test whether five days of ISO induce a depression-like state in male Drosophila melanogaster, we measured brain monoamines and social interaction networks (SINs), focusing on dopamine (DA) and octopamine (OA), key regulators of motivation and reward. ISO reduced DA, OA, and tyramine (TA) while increasing acetylcholine, and produced disorganized SINs marked by weaker, shorter interactions, reduced clustering and centrality, and hyperactive, uncoordinated locomotion. To test for rescue, male flies were fed L-DOPA (L-DA), OA, or both during ISO. All treatments improved monoamine levels, with the combined supplementation normalizing or exceeding DA and OA and reducing acetylcholine to control levels. A condition-specific SINs metrics enabled consistent, quantitative comparisons across groups. SINs analyses showed that L-DA or OA alone partially restored connectivity among individuals, whereas combined supplementation most effectively rescued network cohesion, clustering, and centrality, approaching or exceeding mixed sex controls. Null-model comparisons confirmed that the restored networks reflected genuine, non-random structure rather than chance co-movement. Our findings show that five days of ISO induce neurochemical and behavioral changes in male D. melanogaster that resemble depression, and that combined L-DA+OA supplementation robustly restores monoaminergic balance and complex social organization. These results suggest a mechanistic link between brain monoamines and group-level social behavior, highlighting the neurochemical basis of social deficits and their pharmacological rescue.

This study draws upon a corpus of primary Crimean Tatar sources in Arabic script, introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time, to reconstruct and offer a cultural-historical analysis of Ethem Feyzi’s authorial discourse as a representative example of economic modernization and institutional transformation within the social structures of the Crimean Tatar people during the years 1917–1920. The obtained results indicate that the main substantive and ideological dominant of Feyzi’s journalism is the development of an original model for the economic self-organization of Crimean Tatar society amid revolutionary crisis conditions. This orientation markedly distinguishes his intellectual stance from the predominant cultural-political inclinations of most contemporaries. To provide theoretical justification for national financial and credit institutions, Feyzi accomplished an intercultural synthesis by integrating and adapting key principles from classical European social thought to the conditions and requirements of the local historical context. Feyzi’s literary and public writings exhibit a notable intergeneric hybridity and a high degree of rhetorical mastery. This is evident in the skillful deployment of the triad of pathos, logos, and ethos, combined with a clearly structured narrative framework that guides the progression of thought from the diagnosis of systemic crisis to the justification of a program of national revival and restructuring. The texts derive particular semantic density and persuasive force from medico-anatomical metaphors, through which national reforms are interpreted as the essential and rationally grounded “healing” of the social organism. The most distinctive feature of Feyzi’s rhetorical strategy is the deliberate and systematic interweaving of complex socio-economic concepts with Islamic ethical traditions and elements of national folkloric knowledge. This approach fostered a strong emotional and axiological resonance with a traditionally oriented readership, thereby significantly enhancing the persuasiveness and legitimacy of the proposed reform program.

ABSTRACT Equity and justice-centered professional organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), often make statements about global and local political matters. Yet many of these organizations have neglected to speak out about Palestinian dispossession and claims for liberation. These silences dehumanize Palestinians and contribute to conditions that allow for genocide to occur. This article presents critical analysis of four statements related to Palestine issued by groups within NCTE to identify where power is evident in each text and how context and social structures shape texts. Analyses suggest NCTE groups presented conflicting social representations, claims to authority, and evidence. Implications to help professional organizations like NCTE move beyond rhetoric toward justice-centered praxis include: 1) limiting executive power through democratic processes; 2) building grassroots power through member organizing; and 3) grounding statements in an extensive evidentiary base.

Complex group behavior can emerge from simple inter-individual interactions, yet how prior social experience shapes these interactions remains unclear. Using naturalistic and virtual-reality experiments, we varied prior social experience by exposing zebrafish larvae to high or low group densities, then measured its effects on future social interactions and group structure. We find that inter-individual distances decrease after exposure to high population densities and increase after exposure to low densities. These adaptations develop gradually over tens of minutes and remain stable for hours. Mechanistically, larvae estimate group density from the frequency of neighbor-evoked retinal looming events and couple interaction strength to that estimate. A time-varying computational model incorporating previous visual-social experiences accurately describes our observations. Our findings show that inter-individual interactions are not static, but continuously evolve with social experience and environmental demands, establishing larval zebrafish as a model for studying the neurobiological mechanisms of experience-dependent modulation of collective behavior.

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explored age stereotypes and the age-stereotype paradox among older adults in Iran to inform efforts to reduce ageism. Fifteen older adults participated in semi-structured interviews, and data were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Two main types of ageism were identified: internalized ageism (self‑stigma) and external ageism (social bias and stereotypes). Overall, the findings demonstrate that ageism is sustained through the interaction between internal beliefs and external social structures. While some older adults internalize negative stereotypes and withdraw from social life, others maintain positive identities and continue to contribute to their families and communities. These results underscore the importance of interventions that promote positive representations of aging, encourage intergenerational interaction, and challenge stereotypes about older adults’ competence and social value. Strengthening such initiatives may help reduce age‑based prejudice and support healthier and more inclusive perceptions of aging in society.

Toxic behavior is a pervasive issue in multiplayer online games, affecting both player and community wellbeing. Prior research has focused largely on communicative abuse, overlooking the situated nature of toxicity in gameplay. The current study addresses this gap by analyzing 1137 publicly available Reddit posts from four team based competitive games: League of Legends, Marvel Rivals, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and Rocket League. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and manual review, nine themes were identified, including smurfing, AFK behavior, role conflicts, targeted harassment, misogyny, and ineffective moderation. Overall, findings show that competitive and social structures interact with game design to shape toxic behaviors in online games. We also demonstrate that topic modeling can extract meaningful themes from player-generated text, while highlighting challenges such as game-specific terminology, and overlapping topics. These results emphasize the need to consider game design, player behavior, and community norms when developing interventions to reduce toxicity.

As complex individualized behaviors in mice arise even when genes and environment are held constant, emerging social group structures should also depend on individual behavior. Adult hippocampal neurogenesis drives individual behavior and is involved in certain social behaviors. Would thus the emergence of social structure depend on adult-born neurons? To answer this question, we co-housed cohorts of female mice with intact and genetically diminished general adult neurogenesis in a large-scale automated tracking system for three months and analyzed the development of social behaviors over time. Not only did female mice develop stable hierarchies, we also found that, despite forming a functioning mouse society, their dominance behavior increasingly diverged over time. Specifically, neurogenesis-deficient mice showcased a greater increase in hierarchical behavior throughout the experiment. Within the social behaviors, mice showed no genotype-based preference, indicating intrinsic causes for behavioral differences. In mice with intact neurogenesis, social rank was positively correlated with adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Nevertheless, neurogenesis-deficient mice occupied higher ranks in the emerging hierarchy than their wild-type cohabitants, while displaying less individualization for this trait. The observed insistence on dominance might therefore reflect inflexible social strategies. Thus, social intelligence and flexibility, enabled by adult-born neurons, promote social adaptability, egality, and flatter hierarchies.

ABSTRACTAdvances in non‐invasive genetic sampling and long‐term genetic monitoring programmes have enabled collection of large individual genotype datasets for many wildlife populations, often accompanied by rich field metadata that place the genotyped individuals in time and space. These datasets allow reconstruction of multigenerational pedigrees and have the potential to provide valuable insights into population demography, reproduction, dispersal, social structure and genetic processes. But while the tools for construction of pedigrees keep improving, their interpretation remains challenging. Integrating multigenerational pedigree data with field metadata creates significant complexity, yet specialized tools to facilitate the interpretation of such datasets remain scarce. Here we introduce wild pedigree exploreR (wpeR), an R package designed to simplify exploration, organization and interpretation of complex pedigrees. The package enables users to link reconstructed pedigrees with genetic sample metadata, enabling evaluation of biological plausibility of inferred relationships, but also allowing exploration of other characteristics of individuals and populations in spatial and temporal contexts. wpeR implements a linear workflow through which the pedigree data is imported, formatted, organized into families and integrated with field metadata. The resulting dataset can be visualized through temporal plots that track individuals and families over time, as well as with spatial outputs representing parent–offspring relationships and individual movement patterns as geographic features that can be either directly visualized on maps within R, or exported to be further explored with common GIS tools. wpeR allows exploration of lineage relationships within their ecological context, bridging the gap between statistically reconstructed pedigrees and their biological interpretation. It provides a scalable and flexible framework for analyzing these complex data, providing a practical tool for researchers and managers working with genetic monitoring datasets.

Abstract Surabaya, Indonesia, is a city shaped by two types of urban heritage: colonial heritage and kampungs— former residential, irregular settlements of locals oriented towards community. However, most literature studies each component separately, despite their historical relationship under colonialism. This study proposes an interpretive urban heritage analysis at the conceptual level, in which colonial heritage and kampungs are mutually complementary in understanding the city’s memory and Surabaya’s historical identity. Based on Aldo Rossi’s Theory of the Urban Artifact, we studied three colonial areas of Surabaya: Kota Lama, Tunjungan, and Darmo. The interpretative analysis problematized the hierarchical social structure imposed on the urban form, highlighting the disparity between the colonial settlements and the kampungs. However, both elements also demonstrated to coexist in the same urban space, forming a hybrid heritage of two different societies and a memory that persists to this day. The interpretation also acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive heritage management in Surabaya that includes both components, avoiding the prioritization of colonial heritage over kampungs. The study positions itself as an interpretative framework for rethinking the concept of heritage in Surabaya as a hybridity, with direct implications for urban heritage management, postcolonialism, and critical heritage studies.

Parenting roles have grown more complex in today’s changing social structure. Parents protect their psychological health while supporting their children’s growth. Positive psychology concepts, such as meaning-centered coping and state desperation, play a crucial role in family dynamics. Positive psychotherapy focuses on strengths and enhances well-being. Group-based counseling provides social support and fosters self-awareness. This study examined how positive psychotherapy-based group counseling affected parents’ coping and desperation. Sixty parents participated: 30 in the experimental group and 30 in the control group. The findings showed that the experimental group experienced significant changes in coping and desperation scores across all test phases.

ABSTRACT Alternative justice systems and peacemaking criminology share a bond in addressing the root causes of crime, promoting healing and reconciliation, and fostering a more holistic understanding of justice. As a theoretical framework, peacemaking criminology challenges traditional punitive approaches to crime by advocating for nonviolent conflict resolution, social justice, and community empowerment. It views crime as a social problem rooted in structural inequalities, systemic violence, and interpersonal conflicts rather than solely as individual deviance deserving punishment. Alternative justice systems, such as restorative justice and transformative justice, align closely with the principles of peacemaking criminology. They prioritize repairing harm, rebuilding relationships, and addressing underlying social issues to avoid future conflicts and criminal behavior. These systems facilitate meaningful dialogue and decision-making among victims, offenders, and communities, as well as reconciliation, healing, and accountability. Furthermore, while both address crime and conflict, they also recognize the significance of social networks, support structures, and community resources in fostering resilience, rehabilitation, and long-term peacebuilding. This article investigates how peacemaking criminology, through alternative justice systems, can transform criminal justice systems around the world.