In psychological support and emotional companionship scenarios, the core limitation of large language models (LLMs) lies not merely in response quality, but in their reliance on local next-token prediction, which prevents them from maintaining the temporal continuity, stage awareness, and user consent boundaries required for multi-turn intervention. This stateless characteristic makes systems prone to premature advancement, stage misalignment, and boundary violations in continuous dialogue. To address this problem, we argue that the key challenge in process-oriented emotional support is not simply generating natural language, but constructing a sustainably updatable external situational structure for the model. We therefore propose LEKIA 2.0, a situated LLM architecture that separates the cognitive layer from the executive layer, thereby decoupling situational modeling from intervention execution. This design enables the system to maintain stable representations of the user's situation and consent boundaries throughout ongoing interaction. To evaluate this process-control capability, we further introduce a Static-to-Dynamic online evaluation protocol for multi-turn interaction. LEKIA achieved an average absolute improvement of approximately 31% over prompt-only baselines in deep intervention loop completion. The results suggest that an external situational structure is a key enabling condition for building stable, controllable, and situated emotional support systems.
Nicolas Bazine, Anne Pignault, Jean-Luc Bernaud
et al.
Policymakers, researchers and practitioners have recently drawn attention to the issue of employability among workers over 45 in the context of an aging workforce. Consequently, a review of the determinants of employability among these workers is both necessary and timely. This systematic review thus addresses the question, aims to provide an overview of the antecedents of employability of employees over 45 but also to highlight through which conceptualization employability has been studied. A systematic literature review following PRISMA guidelines was conducted using six databases relevant to the fields of work and organizational psychology, covering studies published between 1996 and 2025. In total, 39 studies met the inclusion criteria and were reviewed. Results showed that the determinants of employability of the older workers (+45) can be divided into four subsets of determinants: demographic, psychological, job characteristic and organizational. Our review highlighted the fact that most of the studies focused on demographic determinants and more specifically on age originating mostly from cross-sectional studies. Hence, many different conceptualizations and instruments used coexist, demonstrating a disparity in how determinants of employability have been studied.
This paper introduces Reflective Empiricism, an extension of empirical science that incorporates subjective perception and consciousness processes as equally valid sources of knowledge. It views reality as an interplay of subjective experience and objective laws, comprehensible only through systematic introspection, bias reflection, and premise-based logical-explorative modeling. This approach overcomes paradigmatic blindness arising from unreflected subjective filters in established paradigms, promoting an adaptable science. Innovations include a method for bias recognition, premise-based models grounded in observed phenomena to unlock new conceptual spaces, and Heureka moments - intuitive insights - as starting points for hypotheses, subsequently tested empirically. The author's self-observation, such as analyzing belief formation, demonstrates its application and transformative power. Rooted in philosophical and scientific-historical references (e.g., Archimedes' intuition, quantum observer effect), Reflective Empiricism connects physics, psychology, and philosophy, enhancing interdisciplinary synthesis and accelerating knowledge creation by leveraging anomalies and subjective depth. It does not seek to replace empirical research but to enrich it, enabling a more holistic understanding of complex phenomena like consciousness and advancing 21st-century science.
Jing Jie Tan, Ban-Hoe Kwan, Danny Wee-Kiat Ng
et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. This research introduces a novel "Prompting-in-a-Series" algorithm, termed PICEPR (Psychology-Informed Contents Embeddings for Personality Recognition), featuring two pipelines: (a) Contents and (b) Embeddings. The approach demonstrates how a modularised decoder-only LLM can summarize or generate content, which can aid in classifying or enhancing personality recognition functions as a personality feature extractor and a generator for personality-rich content. We conducted various experiments to provide evidence to justify the rationale behind the PICEPR algorithm. Meanwhile, we also explored closed-source models such as \textit{gpt4o} from OpenAI and \textit{gemini} from Google, along with open-source models like \textit{mistral} from Mistral AI, to compare the quality of the generated content. The PICEPR algorithm has achieved a new state-of-the-art performance for personality recognition by 5-15\% improvement. The work repository and models' weight can be found at https://research.jingjietan.com/?q=PICEPR.
Miriam Jacqueline Muñoz-Aucapiña, Rosa Elvira Muñoz-Aucapiña, Inmaculada García-García
et al.
Gender-based violence among young people is a pressing global problem, causing injury and disability to women and posing physical, mental, sexual, and reproductive health risks. This study aimed to psychometrically validate the Dating Violence Questionnaire—Revised (DVQ-R) in a sample of 340 Ecuadorian university students. The study included 340 male and female students from two universities in Ecuador. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were rigorously assessed by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which revealed a four-factor model as the most parsimonious solution (RMSEA = 0.012). The factors were labelled as follows: ‘emotional neglect and contempt’, ‘physical violence and aggression’, ‘coercion and control’, and ‘emotional manipulation and testing’. The validated scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha (α) of 0.839, with individual alpha values of 0.872, 0.764, 0.849, and 0.729 for each dimension. Convergent validity was established, as the mean variance extracted per factor exceeded 0.4. Divergent validity was confirmed, as the variance retained by each factor was greater than the variance shared between them (mean variance extracted per factor > ϕ<sup>2</sup>). These results indicate that the DVQ-R is a valid and reliable instrument to assess dating violence among Spanish-speaking young adults, which supports future research and prevention programmes.
Over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the development of mobile applications to deliver various services in sports, including psychological skills training (PST) for athletes. While there are numerous PST-related apps available, little attention has been given to their objective quality. This study aimed to assess the current offerings of PST apps in sports, rate their quality, and provide recommendations for future app development. A scoping review of PST-related apps available on the Apple App Store was conducted, resulting in the retention of 19 apps. The apps used different media types to develop the PST. Of the 19 apps, videos were used by 8 (42%), audios by 7 (37%), articles by 3 (16%), assessment by 4 (21%), ebook by 1 (5%), and both cognitive tasks and personalized journals by 2 (10%). Overall, the app quality measured through the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) failed to meet acceptable standards, with a mean rating of 2.78 and only 6 of the apps receiving a score that met the acceptable standards. The findings highlight the need for improvement in the development of PST apps to enhance their quality and usability.
Background: Rapid advancements in natural language processing have led to the development of large language models with the potential to revolutionize mental health care. These models have shown promise in assisting clinicians and providing support to individuals experiencing various psychological challenges. Objective: This study aims to compare the performance of two large language models, GPT-4 and Chat-GPT, in responding to a set of 18 psychological prompts, to assess their potential applicability in mental health care settings. Methods: A blind methodology was employed, with a clinical psychologist evaluating the models' responses without knowledge of their origins. The prompts encompassed a diverse range of mental health topics, including depression, anxiety, and trauma, to ensure a comprehensive assessment. Results: The results demonstrated a significant difference in performance between the two models (p > 0.05). GPT-4 achieved an average rating of 8.29 out of 10, while Chat-GPT received an average rating of 6.52. The clinical psychologist's evaluation suggested that GPT-4 was more effective at generating clinically relevant and empathetic responses, thereby providing better support and guidance to potential users. Conclusions: This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the applicability of large language models in mental health care settings. The findings underscore the importance of continued research and development in the field to optimize these models for clinical use. Further investigation is necessary to understand the specific factors underlying the performance differences between the two models and to explore their generalizability across various populations and mental health conditions.
As awareness of mental health issues grows, online counseling support services are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Detecting whether users express suicidal ideation in text-based counseling services is crucial for identifying and prioritizing at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific systems to facilitate fine-grained suicide detection and corresponding risk assessment in online counseling poses a significant challenge for automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. In this paper, we propose PsyGUARD, an automated system for detecting suicide ideation and assessing risk in psychological counseling. To achieve this, we first develop a detailed taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation based on foundational theories. We then curate a large-scale, high-quality dataset called PsySUICIDE for suicide detection. To evaluate the capabilities of automated systems in fine-grained suicide detection, we establish a range of baselines. Subsequently, to assist automated services in providing safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment, we propose to build a suite of risk assessment frameworks. Our study not only provides an insightful analysis of the effectiveness of automated risk assessment systems based on fine-grained suicide detection but also highlights their potential to improve mental health services on online counseling platforms. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyGUARD.
Stress is a pervasive global health issue that can lead to severe mental health problems. Early detection offers timely intervention and prevention of stress-related disorders. The current early detection models perform "black box" inference suffering from limited explainability and trust which blocks the real-world clinical application. Thanks to the generative properties introduced by the Large Language Models (LLMs), the decision and the prediction from such models are semi-interpretable through the corresponding description. However, the existing LLMs are mostly trained for general purposes without the guidance of psychological cognitive theory. To this end, we first highlight the importance of prior theory with the observation of performance boosted by the chain-of-thoughts tailored for stress detection. This method termed Cognition Chain explicates the generation of stress through a step-by-step cognitive perspective based on cognitive appraisal theory with a progress pipeline: Stimulus $\rightarrow$ Evaluation $\rightarrow$ Reaction $\rightarrow$ Stress State, guiding LLMs to provide comprehensive reasoning explanations. We further study the benefits brought by the proposed Cognition Chain format by utilising it as a synthetic dataset generation template for LLMs instruction-tuning and introduce CogInstruct, an instruction-tuning dataset for stress detection. This dataset is developed using a three-stage self-reflective annotation pipeline that enables LLMs to autonomously generate and refine instructional data. By instruction-tuning Llama3 with CogInstruct, we develop CogLLM, an explainable stress detection model. Evaluations demonstrate that CogLLM achieves outstanding performance while enhancing explainability. Our work contributes a novel approach by integrating cognitive theories into LLM reasoning processes, offering a promising direction for future explainable AI research.
Ivana Marasović Šušnjara, Maja Vejić, Julija Vejić
According to the World Health Organization, health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being, regardless of race, religion, political beliefs, economic and social status. Although we tend to believe it, health is not self-evident and is also conditioned by the factors beyond our control. Today, we share many leading public health problems globally. In solving them, various interventions are carried out, often with the absence of targeted results. Improving and preserving health is a big challenge and is the responsibility of the individual, the health system and other participants and is the result of their interaction. But, is the action of these participants coherent? Is their interaction constructive? What to do to prevent destruction? These are just some of the questions that should be answered in order for interventions to adequately respond to the challenges.
Communication. Mass media, Philosophy. Psychology. Religion
Three interconnected issues are addressed: whether philosophy of religion needs to move away from theism; what could replace it; and how nontheistic conceptions of the divine should be incorporated in the field’s future discussions. Among the central points made are these: that attention to theism should diminish as a large number of nontheistic topics receive discussion in the philosophy of religion; that theism’s dominance in the structuring of our discussions should be replaced by a more deliberate focus on the aims of philosophy of religion, including in particular certain higher-level aims involving the resolution of problems in other areas of philosophy and the evaluation of religious practice; and that some of the most potentially fruitful ideas of the divine are not alternative conceptions of it per se, but rather are quite general ideas offering a framework for the discussion of alternative conceptions including theism.
This book concerns the metasemantics of quantum mechanics (QM). Roughly, it pursues an investigation at the intersection of philosophy of physics and philosophy of language, and it offers a critical analysis of rival explanations of the semantic facts of standard QM. Two problems for such explanations are discussed: categoricity and permanence. New results include 1) a reconstruction of Einstein's incompleteness argument, which concludes that a local, separable, and categorical QM cannot exist, 2) a reinterpretation of Bohr's principle of correspondence, grounded in the principle of permanence, 3) a meaning-variance argument for quantum logic, which follows a line of critical reflections initiated by Weyl, and 4) an argument for semantic indeterminacy leveled against inferentialism about QM, inspired by Carnap's work in the philosophy of classical logic.
AbstractDespite the advances in studies conducted among healthcare professionals to explore the impact of the pandemic on their mental health, a large population still continues to display COVID-19 related psychological complaints. There has been recent awareness of moral injury related guilt and shame among doctors and nurses. However, the factors associated with moral injury have not received much attention, due to which the issue still persists. This study aims to explore the role of guilt-shame proneness, and locus of control in predicting moral injury among healthcare professionals. MISS-HP, PGI Locus of Control, and GASP scales were administered to a sample of 806 healthcare professionals. Pearson correlation coefficient indicated a significant positive relationship between moral injury and guilt-shame proneness, as well as the locus of control. Regression analysis indicated a significant role of guilt-shame proneness and locus of control in predicting moral injury. In conclusion, while studying moral injury, it becomes equally important to consider these factors to understand the concept better.
Given some links between Lyndon’s Interpolation Theorem, term distribution, and Sommers and Englebretsen’s logic, in this contribution we attempt to capture a sense of interpolation for Sommers and Englebretsen’s Term Functor Logic. In order to reach this goal we first expound the basics of Term Functor Logic, together with a sense of term distribution, and then we offer a proof of our main contribution.
E. A. Gradoboeva, Zh. S. Tyulko, A. V. Fadeev
et al.
Relevance. To date, no detailed analysis of the variants of the pathogen circulating at different times on the territory of the Omsk region has been carried out.Aim. Comparative analysis of the diversity of circulating variants of SARSCoV-2 based on molecular genetic data, determine the lines and time of their appearance, compare the data obtained with data from the GISAID database.Materials and methods. Genomewide sequencing of 222 primary and 5 culture (passages on Vero E6 and SPEV cell cultures) samples of SARS-CoV-2 from the Omsk region, collected from April 2020 to February 2022, on Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Illumina platforms, was carried out. Genetic lines were determined in Pangolin. The analysis was performed in MEGA7 and BioEdit.Results. 227 genomewide SARS-CoV-2 sequences were obtained. 222 genomes have been uploaded to the GISAID database. The lines to which the samples belong were determined, phylogenetic trees were constructed for various regions of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, the levels of virus homology were assessed and mutations in the Sprotein region were analyzed.Conclusions. According to the data obtained, it is possible to roughly judge the time of the appearance of a particular variant, its consolidation and distribution in the population, and observe the rare mutations and the circulation of some rare lines. To assess the possibility of significant geographically linked changes in the SARS-CoV-2 in the Omsk region, the data obtained are insufficient. Virus variants circulating in the region are grouped into one cluster with identical variants from other regions or countries. A more pronounced intracluster differentiation of the lines can be observed when analyzing the RBD region. The situation with COVID-19 in the Omsk region generally coincides with that in the whole country and the world. However, this does not exclude the parallel occurrence of certain mutations in remote territories from each other.
Topics of wedding plans can trigger disagreements in communication between young adults children and parents. Communication problems with parents can reduce the quality of relationships and increase stress on individuals, particularly if the issue has escalated into conflict. The quality of the relationship between young adults and their parents is significant to note in maintaining mental health by reducing stress. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of intergenerational communication-based intervention in reducing stress in young adults who experience communication problems with their parents regarding marriage plans. We conducted group intervention for young adults aged 18 to 29 with communication problems with their parents regarding marriage. Changes in the way of communication were assessed with the Global Perceptions of Intergenerational Communication Scale (GPIC) score, stress level with the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) score, and life satisfaction with the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) score given before and after the intervention. Results found that emotion regulation, perspective-taking, and assertive communication taught through group intervention effectively help improve intergenerational communication skills, reduce stress levels, and increase life satisfaction in young adults. Considering the contribution of conflict with parents to stress levels, interventions based on intergenerational communication are considered worthwhile in overcoming psychological distress.
Mégane Sartore, Stéphanie Buisine, Ioana Ocnarescu
et al.
In the Japanese philosophy of life, ‘ikigai’ broadly refers to having a ‘reason for living’, or a purpose in life. From a phenomenological and empirical viewpoint, ikigai is reported to increase human well-being and even life expectancy. However, it remains difficult to translate, define and formalize with regard to contemporary psychological theories. In this respect, the aim of this paper is twofold: to capture as accurately as possible what ikigai is, and to examine whether the concept applies to a professional context. We first offer a comprehensive overview of ikigai, bridge the gap between this specific body of literature and related psychological theoretical frameworks, such as those addressing motivation, well-being, and attention. On this basis, we conceptualize an integrated cognitive-motivational model of ikigai using an IPO (Input-Process-Output) framework: we organize dispositional or situational factors supposedly supporting ikigai as inputs, fueling the core process of ikigai (mainly built from motivational and attentional mechanisms), which produce outcomes (including well-being). A feedback loop completes the model and allows the process to maintain over time. This conceptual proposal is a first step towards applying and testing the model in professional contexts, in order to renew our approach of engagement, well-being, and performance at work as well as inspire workplace evolution.
Reinforcement learning (RL) for traffic signal control (TSC) has shown better performance in simulation for controlling the traffic flow of intersections than conventional approaches. However, due to several challenges, no RL-based TSC has been deployed in the field yet. One major challenge for real-world deployment is to ensure that all safety requirements are met at all times during operation. We present an approach to ensure safety in a real-world intersection by using an action space that is safe by design. The action space encompasses traffic phases, which represent the combination of non-conflicting signal colors of the intersection. Additionally, an action masking mechanism makes sure that only appropriate phase transitions are carried out. Another challenge for real-world deployment is to ensure a control behavior that avoids stress for road users. We demonstrate how to achieve this by incorporating domain knowledge through extending the action masking mechanism. We test and verify our approach in a realistic simulation scenario. By ensuring safety and psychologically pleasant control behavior, our approach drives development towards real-world deployment of RL for TSC.
The arrow of time refers to the curious asymmetry that distinguishes the future from the past. Reversing the Arrow of Time argues that there is an intimate link between the symmetries of 'time itself' and time reversal symmetry in physical theories, which has wide-ranging implications for both physics and its philosophy. This link helps to clarify how we can learn about the symmetries of our world; how to understand the relationship between symmetries and what is real, and how to overcome pervasive illusions about the direction of time. Roberts explains the significance of time reversal in a way that intertwines physics and philosophy, to establish what the arrow of time means and how we can come to know it. This book is both mathematically and philosophically rigorous yet remains accessible to advanced undergraduates in physics and philosophy of physics.