Search Results (138)

This review is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of modern forms of information warfare in the context of digitalization and global interconnectedness. The work considers fundamental theoretical foundations—cognitive distortions, mass communication models, network theories and concepts of cultural code. The key tools of information influence are described in detail, including disinformation, the use of botnets, deepfakes, memetic strategies and manipulations in the media space. Particular attention is paid to methods of identifying and neutralizing information threats using artificial intelligence and digital signal processing, including partial digital convolutions, Fourier–Galois transforms, residue number systems and calculations in finite algebraic structures. The ethical and legal aspects of countering information attacks are analyzed, and geopolitical examples are given, demonstrating the peculiarities of applying various strategies. The review is based on a systematic analysis of 592 publications selected from the international databases Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, covering research from fundamental works to modern publications of recent years (2015–2025). It is also based on regulatory legal acts, which ensures a high degree of relevance and representativeness. The results of the review can be used in the development of technologies for monitoring, detecting and filtering information attacks, as well as in the formation of national cybersecurity strategies. Full article

A common misconception is that behavioral economics rejects microeconomics. This entry explains how behavioral economics, despite challenging core assumptions of rationality, remains fundamentally aligned with the structure of microeconomics. Anchored in the insight that rational market outcomes can emerge even when individual behavior is non-rational, it revisits the explanatory role of constraints in economic theory. Rather than displacing microeconomics, behavioral economics extends it by incorporating bounded rationality while preserving key structural principles. Central to this integration is Say’s law, the macro-level notion that production generates income and thus the capacity for demand. This connection makes microeconomic constraints reflect deeper macroeconomic principles. Even when market behavior is distorted by correlated cognitive biases and their associated positive feedback dynamics—such as herding or bubbles—the fundamental identity that supply generates the income necessary for demand remains intact, provided that adjustments occur over the long run. The analysis also considers how behavioral deviations affect aggregate outcomes. Ultimately, this entry shows that behavioral economics is not a departure from microeconomics but its natural extension: by embedding bounded rationality within the framework of economic constraints, it preserves the structural coherence of microeconomics while adding psychological depth. Full article

In the digital age, the fear of missing out (FOMO) phenomenon is heightened by the frequent use of online stores and a constant stream of offers and digital interactions. This study explores how FOMO, amplified by digital commerce environments, influences shopping motivation and compulsive buying in young adults. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory, the FOMO scale, and cognitive–behavioral models, the study examines how FOMO interacts with push notifications, time-limited offers, and reward-based digital cues—which are associated with emotional urgency and may interfere with reflective decision-making. The research was conducted through a semi-structured questionnaire, combining Likert-scale measures with open-ended responses, employed on a sample of Romanian students (n = 258) of West University of Timisoara. A convergent mixed-methods design was applied, including Pearson correlation and qualitative thematic coding of open-ended responses. This study reveals the interaction between internal cognitive distortions and external marketing stimuli, contributes to a more nuanced understanding of online shopping behavior, and outlines key implications for the development of ethical communication practices in digital marketplaces. Full article

On social media, users often express their personal feelings, which may exhibit cognitive distortions or even suicidal tendencies on certain specific topics. Early recognition of these signs is critical for effective psychological intervention. In this paper, we introduce two novel datasets from Chinese social media: SOS-HL-1K for suicidal risk classification, which contains 1249 posts, and SocialCD-3K, a multi-label classification dataset for cognitive distortion detection that contains 3407 posts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation using two supervised learning methods and eight large language models (LLMs) on the proposed datasets. From the prompt engineering perspective, we experiment with two types of prompt strategies, including four zero-shot and five few-shot strategies. We also evaluate the performance of the LLMs after fine-tuning on the proposed tasks. Experimental results show a significant performance gap between prompted LLMs and supervised learning. Our best supervised model achieves strong results, with an F1-score of 82.76% for the high-risk class in the suicide task and a micro-averaged F1-score of 76.10% for the cognitive distortion task. Without fine-tuning, the best-performing LLM lags by 6.95 percentage points in the suicide task and a more pronounced 31.53 points in the cognitive distortion task. Fine-tuning substantially narrows this performance gap to 4.31% and 3.14% for the respective tasks. While this research highlights the potential of LLMs in psychological contexts, it also shows that supervised learning remains necessary for more challenging tasks. Full article

Loneliness is a significant challenge for millions worldwide, with chronic loneliness having harmful effects on physical health, mental well-being, and relationships. Cognitive distortions play an important role in perpetuating loneliness. Psychological interventions targeting such distortions have been effective at alleviating feelings of loneliness. However, less is known about which cognitive distortions are most prevalent among lonely individuals and how these distortions relate to loneliness and mental well-being. This exploratory study prescreened a Census-matched sample of 1000 U.S. adults for loneliness, then asked those in the top quartile (N = 237) to rate multiple patterns of cognitive distortion related to loneliness. Factor analyses identified six common and influential patterns of cognitive distortion (mindreading, future reward, catastrophizing, essentializing, deservedness, and externalizing). Essentializing was the most strongly endorsed factor, followed by mindreading and catastrophizing. Essentializing also evidenced the strongest correlation with loneliness. Additionally, the relationship between loneliness and participants’ stress was completely mediated by mindreading, catastrophizing, and essentializing. These findings highlight the importance of targeting specific cognitive distortions in loneliness interventions to effectively improve the mental well-being of lonely individuals. Full article

Background/Objectives: Muscle dysmorphia (MD), a subtype of body dysmorphic disorder, is prevalent among males who engage in the non-medical use of anabolic–androgenic steroids (AASs) and performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). These individuals often experience severe psychopathology, including mood instability, compulsivity, and a distorted body image. Despite its clinical severity, no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have evaluated structured psychological treatments in this subgroup. This study aimed to assess the efficacy of a manualized cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) protocol in reducing MD symptoms and associated psychological distress among male steroid users. Results: Participants in the CBT group showed significant reductions in MD symptoms from the baseline to post-treatment (MDDI: p < 0.001, d = 1.12), with gains sustained at follow-up. Large effect sizes were also observed in secondary outcomes including depressive symptoms (PHQ-9: d = 0.98), psychological distress (K10: d = 0.93), disordered eating (EDE-Q: d = 0.74), and exercise addiction (EAI: d = 1.07). No significant changes were observed in the control group. Significant group × time interactions were found for all outcomes (all p < 0.01), indicating CBT’s specific efficacy. Discussion: This study provides the first RCT evidence that CBT significantly reduces both core MD symptoms and steroid-related psychopathology in men engaged in AAS/PED misuse. Improvements extended to mood, body image perception, and compulsive exercise behaviors. These findings support CBT’s transdiagnostic applicability in addressing both the cognitive–behavioral and affective dimensions of MD. Materials and Methods: In this parallel-group, open-label RCT, 59 male gym-goers with DSM-5-TR diagnoses of MD and a history of AAS/PED use were randomized to either a 12-week CBT intervention (n = 30) or a waitlist control group (n = 29). CBT sessions were delivered weekly online and targeted distorted muscularity beliefs, compulsive behaviors, and emotional dysregulation. Primary and secondary outcomes—Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory (MDDI), PHQ-9, K10, EDE-Q, EAI, and BIG—were assessed at the baseline, post-treatment, and 3-month follow-up. A repeated-measures ANOVA and paired t-tests were used to analyze time × group interactions. Conclusions: CBT offers an effective, scalable intervention for individuals with muscle dysmorphia complicated by anabolic steroid use. It promotes broad psychological improvement and may serve as a first-line treatment option in high-risk male fitness populations. Future studies should examine long-term outcomes and investigate implementation in diverse clinical and cultural contexts. Full article

Striking belief distortions may accompany various disorders of awareness that are predominantly associated with right hemispheric cerebral dysfunction. Distortions may range on a continuum of pathological severity, from the unawareness of paralysis in anosognosia for hemiplegia, to a more startling disturbance in denial of paralysis where belief may starkly conflict with reality. The patients’ beliefs about their limitations typically represent attempts to make sense of limitations or to impart meaning to incongruous facts. These beliefs are often couched in recollections from past memories or previous experience, and are hard to modify even given new information. Various explanations of unawareness have been suggested, including sensory, cognitive, monitoring and feedback operations, feedforward mechanisms, disconnection theories, and hemispheric asymmetry hypotheses, along with psychological denial, to account for the curious lack of awareness in anosognosia and other awareness disorders. This paper addresses these varying explanations of the puzzling beliefs regarding hemiparesis in anosognosia. Furthermore, using the multi-dimensional nature of unawareness in anosognosia as a model, some startling belief distortions in other right-hemisphere associated clinical syndromes are also explored. Other neurobehavioral disturbances, though perhaps less common, reflect marked psychopathological distortions. Startling disorders of belief are notable in somatic illusions, non-recognition or delusional misattribution of limb ownership (asomatognosia, somatoparaphrenia), or delusional identity (Capgras syndrome) and misidentification phenomena. Difficulty in updating beliefs as a source of unawareness in anosognosia and other awareness disorders has been proposed. Processes of belief development are considered to be patterns of thought, memories, and experience, which coalesce in a sense of the bodily and personal self. A common consequence of such disorders seems to be an altered representation of the self, self-parts, or the external world. Astonishing nonveridical beliefs about the body, about space, or about the self, continue to invite exploration and to stimulate fascination. Full article

Aberrant salience, defined as the inappropriate attribution of significance to neutral stimuli, is increasingly recognized as a critical mechanism in the onset of psychotic disorders. In young individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis, abnormal salience processing may serve as a precursor to full-blown psychotic symptoms, contributing to distorted perceptions and the onset of psychotic ideation. This review examines current literature on aberrant salience among UHR youth, exploring its neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral dimensions. Through a comprehensive analysis of studies involving neuroimaging, cognitive assessments, and symptomatology, we assess the consistency of findings across diverse methodologies. Additionally, we evaluate factors contributing to aberrant salience, including neurochemical imbalances, dysregulation in dopamine pathways, and environmental stressors, which may jointly increase psychosis vulnerability. Identifying aberrant salience as a measurable trait in UHR populations could facilitate earlier identification and targeted interventions. Implications for clinical practice are discussed, highlighting the need for specialized therapeutic approaches that address cognitive and emotional dysregulation in salience attribution. Recent research underscores the importance of aberrant salience in early psychosis research and advocates for further studies on intervention strategies to mitigate progression to psychosis among UHR individuals. Full article

Background/Objectives: Individuals with eating disorders (EDs) experience stronger body illusions than control participants, suggesting that abnormalities in multisensory integration may underlie distorted body perception in these conditions. These illusions can also temporarily reduce body image disturbance. Given the centrality of the face to identity and social functioning—and emerging evidence of face image disturbance in EDs—this study examined, for the first time, whether individuals with EDs exhibit heightened susceptibility to a facial illusion (the enfacement illusion) and whether experiencing this illusion improves face and/or body image. Methods: White Australian female participants (19 with an ED and 24 controls) completed synchronous and asynchronous facial mimicry tasks to induce the enfacement illusion. Susceptibility was assessed via self-report and an objective self-face recognition task, alongside pre- and post-task measures of perceived facial attractiveness, facial adiposity estimation, and head/body dissatisfaction. Results: The illusion was successfully induced across both groups. Contrary to predictions, ED and control participants demonstrated comparable susceptibility, and neither group experienced improvements in face or body image. Notably, participants with EDs experienced increased head dissatisfaction following the illusion. Conclusions: These findings indicate that the multisensory integration processes underlying self-face perception, unlike those underlying body perception, may remain intact in EDs. Participant reflections suggested that the limited therapeutic benefit of the enfacement illusion for EDs may reflect the influence of maladaptive social-evaluative processing biases inadvertently triggered during the illusion. A novel dual-process model is proposed in which distorted self-face perception in EDs may arise from biased social-cognitive processing rather than sensory dysfunction alone. Full article

Domain shifts pose significant challenges for cross-domain semantic segmentation in high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Inspired by the cognitive mechanisms of the human brain, we propose a Brain-Inspired Style Transfer and Semantic Segmentation Collaborative Adversarial Framework (SAF), which mimics neural processes such as hierarchical perception, memory retrieval, and multimodal integration to enhance cross-domain feature alignment and segmentation performance. To achieve the joint optimization of style transfer and semantic segmentation networks, we introduce three key components: a Semantic-Aware Transformer Module (SATM) that dynamically captures and preserves essential semantic features during style transfer; a Semantic-Driven Multi-feature Memory Module (SMM) that stores and retrieves historical style and semantic information to improve domain adaptability; a Domain-Invariant Style-Semantic Center Space (DSCS) that aligns style and semantic features within a shared representation space, mitigating discrepancies between style and semantic domains. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that SAF effectively reduces distortions and semantic inconsistencies by achieving deep style–semantic alignment. Compared to leading approaches, SAF achieves a superior balance between style adaptation and semantic preservation, significantly improving model generalization in remote sensing applications. Full article

This study explores how ideological, relational, and sociodemographic factors predict women’s perceptions of severity and self-responsibility across different types of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using an intra-subject design, 257 women completed the measures of interest, 191 experiencing IPV and 66 non-victims, according to their responses to WHO instruments. Participants were recruited via dissemination of the study through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and institutional email. The results indicated that the primary predictors of perceived severity were ambivalent sexism in physical violence; favorable attitudes toward IPV (all forms of violence); feminist identity (physical violence and controlling behaviors); dependency (psychological violence); commitment (physical sexual, and controlling behaviors); education level (physical violence); and age (sexual violence). For attributed self-responsibility, ambivalent sexism and favorable attitudes toward IPV were predictors for controlling behaviors. Commitment and dependency, being a victim and age-influenced psychological violence, whereas being a victim predicted sexual violence. In addition, physical violence is perceived as the most severe and controlling behavior, eliciting greater levels of attributed self-responsibility than other forms of IPV. These results highlight the main predictors of cognitive distortions (perceived severity of violence and attributed self-responsibility), offering insight into the processes that victims in IPV situations undergo. Full article

The core characteristic of the bullwhip effect is that upstream companies overproduce or hoard inventory due to information distortion, leading to resource waste and increased carbon emissions, which severely affects the economic, environmental, and social efficiency of sustainable supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of retailers’ cognitive bias, namely, overconfidence, on the bullwhip effect in the sustainable supply chain. It characterizes retailers’ overconfidence from two aspects: overprecision and overestimation. This study finds that retailers’ overestimation biases distort demand forecasts, causing product orders and inventory decisions to significantly deviate from the rational optimal level, exacerbating the bullwhip effect in sustainable supply chains. In contrast, retailers’ overprecision bias reduces the forecast error, which has a mitigating effect on the bullwhip effect on inventory; however, this effect weakens as the level of overestimation increases. Furthermore, order lead time and the autocorrelation coefficient of demand moderate the bullwhip effect. Finally, through numerical simulation analysis, the interactive effects of overconfidence bias and operational parameters are effectively captured, providing strong validation for the theoretical results and research propositions. The conclusions of this study offer valuable managerial insights for mitigating the bullwhip effect of sustainable supply chain caused by irrational factors. It also provides policy recommendations for promoting the theoretical research and practice of sustainable supply chains. Full article

Scientific disinformation has emerged as a critical challenge at the interface of science and society. This paper examines how false or misleading scientific content proliferates across both social media and traditional media and evaluates strategies to counteract its spread. We conducted a comprehensive literature review of research on scientific misinformation across disciplines and regions, with particular focus on climate change and public health as exemplars. Our findings indicate that social media algorithms and user dynamics can amplify false scientific claims, as seen in case studies of viral misinformation campaigns on vaccines and climate change. Traditional media, meanwhile, are not immune to spreading inaccuracies—journalistic practices such as sensationalism or “false balance” in reporting have at times distorted scientific facts, impacting public understanding. We review efforts to fight disinformation, including technological tools for detection, the application of inoculation theory and prebunking techniques, and collaborative approaches that bridge scientists and journalists. To empower individuals, we propose practical guidelines for critically evaluating scientific information sources and emphasize the importance of digital and scientific literacy. Finally, we discuss methods to quantify the prevalence and impact of scientific disinformation—ranging from social network analysis to surveys of public belief—and compare trends across regions and scientific domains. Our results underscore that combating scientific disinformation requires an interdisciplinary, multi-pronged approach, combining improvements in science communication, education, and policy. We conducted a scoping review of 85 open-access studies focused on climate-related misinformation and disinformation, selected through a systematic screening process based on PRISMA criteria. This approach was chosen to address the lack of comprehensive mappings that synthesize key themes and identify research gaps in this fast-growing field. The analysis classified the literature into 17 thematic clusters, highlighting key trends, gaps, and emerging challenges in the field. Our results reveal a strong dominance of studies centered on social media amplification, political denialism, and cognitive inoculation strategies, while underlining a lack of research on fact-checking mechanisms and non-Western contexts. We conclude with recommendations for strengthening the resilience of both the public and information ecosystems against the spread of false scientific claims. Full article

Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence sensitive to substances that alter the local magnetic field, such as calcium and iron, allowing phase information to distinguish between them. SWI is a 3D gradient–echo sequence with high spatial resolution that leverages both phase and magnitude effects. The interaction of paramagnetic (such as hemosiderin and deoxyhemoglobin), diamagnetic (including calcifications and minerals), and ferromagnetic substances with the local magnetic field distorts it, leading to signal changes. Neurodegenerative diseases are typically characterized by the progressive loss of neurons and their supporting cells within the neurovascular unit. This cellular decline is associated with a corresponding deterioration of both cognitive and motor abilities. Many neurodegenerative disorders are associated with increased iron accumulation or microhemorrhages in various brain regions, making SWI a valuable diagnostic tool in clinical practice. Suggestive SWI findings are known in Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia, atypical parkinsonian syndromes, multiple sclerosis, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, hereditary ataxias, Huntington’s disease, neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This review will assist radiologists in understanding the technical framework of SWI sequences for a correct interpretation of currently established MRI findings and for its potential future clinical applications. Full article

Those accustomed to acting within ‘normal’ bureaucracies will have experienced the degradation, distortion, and stunting imposed by inordinate levels of hierarchical ‘decision structure’, particularly under the critical time constraints so fondly exploited by John Boyd and his followers. Here, via an approach based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories, we explore this dynamic in detail, abducting ideas from the theory of carcinogenesis. The resulting probability models can, with some effort, be converted into new statistical tools for analysis of real time, real world data involving cognitive phenomena and their dysfunctions across a considerable range of scales and levels of organization. Full article