Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Psychopathology and treatment — what a mental disorder is and how psychological treatment changes it — medical models of illness (biomedical, biopsychosocial, network), the philosophy of psychiatry, functional and transdiagnostic accounts of psychopathology such as experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility, and psychotherapies and their mechanisms of change (ADR-021).
74 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-538 | How effective psychological treatments work: mechanisms of change in cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond | Salkovskis, Sighvatsson & Sigurdsson, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 51(6):595–615, in the special issue “Disseminating CBT: 50 years and beyond” (issue dated November 2023, first published online 5 January 2024). A history of behaviour therapy and CBT as empirically grounded treatment development, an argument that common factors are not mechanisms of change, and a proposal: the mechanism of all effective therapies is a shift from a stuck, threat-laden meaning (“Theory A”) to a collaboratively built and tested alternative (“Theory B”), which the authors call a type of psychological flexibility. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-428), from the open-access (CC BY 4.0) publisher PDF; worth reading as a senior Beckian’s statement of a single mechanism of change for all effective psychological therapy, and for its clear separation of “common factors” from “mechanisms of change”. Its thesis is a proposal argued from the history of CBT and clinical examples, not a tested result: people are “stuck” in an exaggerated negative or threatening meaning (Theory A) kept alive by what it makes them do, and any effective therapy works by helping them build and test a less threatening alternative (Theory B). The paper calls this a particular type of psychological flexibility, without citing the ACT literature that uses that name. |
| LIT-539 | Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness | Kendler (2008), American Journal of Psychiatry 165(6):695–702. Psychiatry should explain by mechanisms, not laws. Psychiatric causes act at many levels, within and outside the person, and are non-aggregative and loop-ridden, as an alcohol-dependence sketch shows (gene–environment interaction, tolerance feedback, niche selection, aversive cultural transmission). So “hard reductionism” and “hard emergentism” both fail, but locally decomposable subsystems can still be studied and then reassembled. After Marr, biology will implement psychological functions, not replace them. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-432), from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central; filed as the readable substitute for Kendler’s 2005 “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry” (LIT-552), which has no lawful open copy. It opens by citing the 2005 paper for its premise that etiological models must be pluralistic, and develops two of the 2005 abstract’s propositions at length: piecemeal integration becomes “decomposition and reassembly” of multilevel mechanisms, and the mind–brain question becomes Marr-style implementation, in which “biology will implement but not replace psychology”. It does not restate the 2005 paper’s arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism, so it stands in for the pluralism, not for the whole of the earlier paper. |
| LIT-541 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, McHugh & Hayes (2004), International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy 4(2):355–375. RFT stated briefly: humans relate events bidirectionally and arbitrarily, as a generalized operant under contextual control, so words take on the functions of what they are related to. Frames combine into networks, networks are related to networks (metaphor), rules are networks that regulate behaviour, and the self is content, process and context of verbal relations. Psychopathology is read as verbal behaviour, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT interpretations. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-430), in place of the RFT book, LIT-549; worth reading as a short statement of Relational Frame Theory by two of the book’s editors, and as the paper that shows how RFT is meant to become a theory of psychopathology. Humans, unlike the animals of conditioning research, relate events bidirectionally, so a word acquires the functions of what it names. Relating is a generalized operant learned across exemplars, and its frames share mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment and the transformation of function. Rules are relational networks, and the self is three verbal relations to one’s own behaviour. ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are then reinterpreted in those terms. Its clinical examples are illustrations, not data, and it says its Part 3 is “no more than a heuristic”. |
| LIT-543 v2 | Examining Domains of Psychological Flexibility and Inflexibility as Treatment Mechanisms in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A Comprehensive Systematic and Meta-Analytic Review | Macri & Rogge (2024), Clinical Psychology Review 110:102432. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 77 records (67 studies, N = 9,123). ACT reduced global inflexibility, lack of present-moment awareness, fusion, experiential avoidance, self-as-content and inaction, and increased committed action/values, flexibility/acceptance and defusion, against waitlist and active comparators. Those changes were linked to drops in distress. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the PubMed abstract and Crossref, not read. The article is closed access at Elsevier, it is not in PubMed Central, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy. A web search for a PsyArXiv or OSF preprint found none, and the University of Rochester’s repository (UR Research) holds two dissertations from Rogge’s lab on the same question (Dubler 2018, Rolffs 2019) but not this review. ScienceDirect itself was not tried. A human reader with Elsevier access could promote this; it is the record’s only quantitative test of the ACT process model. |
| LIT-544 | The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy | Hofmann & Hayes (2019; online 2018), Clinical Psychological Science 7(1):37–50. The era of “protocols for syndromes” is over: thirty years of DSM-defined randomised trials never found the diseases the syndromes were meant to reveal. Evidence-based therapy should be redefined as process-based therapy, “evidence-based processes linked to evidence-based procedures”, with mediation and moderation as the evidence, functional analysis and idiographic networks as diagnosis, and named therapies and broad schools in decline. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-437), from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central; worth reading as the programme statement of process-based therapy by the leading figures of the two camps of CBT it reconciles. It replaces “protocols for syndromes” with one question: “What core biopsychosocial processes should be targeted with this client given this goal in this situation, and how can they most efficiently and effectively be changed?” It is a position paper with predictions, not a result. Its sharpest commitment is a falsification rule: an intervention whose specified process of change “cannot be shown to be consistently applicable” has an incorrect model, however well it works. |
| LIT-545 v3 | Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change | Bandura (1977), Psychological Review 84(2):191–215. The founding paper of self-efficacy theory: psychological treatments, whatever their form, are proposed to work by changing a person’s expectation that they can perform the needed behaviour. Unread: registered from bibliographic metadata, with no lawful abstract reachable. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref and PubMed, not read. The article is closed access at APA. Unpaywall and OpenAlex call it “green” open access, but their one location is a DOAJ record of an unrelated 2020 Jurnal Psikologi article on thalassemia screening that carries Bandura’s DOI by mistake. The copy Stanford hosted with Bandura’s papers (web.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/bandura/pajares/Bandura1977PR.pdf) now returns 403 Forbidden. Its archived snapshots are on the Wayback Machine, which this environment’s egress policy blocks, and the University of Kentucky mirror of the same collection now redirects away. A PDF of the published article is posted by the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance’s library (susana.org), a third party, so it was not read (only its first page was opened, to identify what it was). A human reader with APA access, or one who can open the archived Stanford copy, could promote this. |
| LIT-547 | A Network Theory of Mental Disorders | Borsboom (2017), World Psychiatry 16(1):5–13. Mental disorders are not common causes of their symptoms but states of networks of symptoms that cause one another, through “myriads of biological, psychological and societal mechanisms”. Five principles; the dynamic one is hysteresis: a strongly connected network, once activated by an external trigger, can sustain itself after the trigger is gone. Disorder is an alternative stable state of a strongly connected network, mental health the stable state of a weakly connected one. Comorbidity follows from bridge symptoms. Treatments are symptom, external-field or network interventions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-435); worth reading as the short, citable statement of the network theory of mental disorders by its main author. Five principles: disorders are complex systems of interacting components, the components are the symptoms of the diagnostic manuals, the network comes from direct causal connections between symptoms, disorders are the tightly connected clusters, and disorders arise through hysteresis, so a strongly connected network can stay “stuck” after its trigger is gone. Mental health, disorder, resilience and vulnerability are redefined as stable states and dispositions of weakly or strongly connected networks. Its evidence is indirect and it says so: the theory is offered as an “organizing framework” and a deliberate simplification, and the strict symptom-component correspondence of principle 2 is its own flagged weak point. |
| LIT-548 v2 | The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine | Engel (1977), Science 196(4286):129–136. The paper that named the biopsychosocial model. Its abstract says the dominant biomedical model of disease “leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness”, and proposes a biopsychosocial model as “a blueprint for research, a framework for teaching, and a design for action in the real world of health care”. Unread: registered from its PubMed abstract and Crossref; no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from its PubMed record and Crossref, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall lists no open copy of the Science article or of any of its five reprints (Dimensions of Behavior 1978, Holistic Medicine 1989, Family Systems Medicine 1992, The Health Psychology Reader 2002, Psychodynamic Psychiatry 2012), and Europe PMC holds the abstract only. science.org answered both the article page and the PDF with a Cloudflare “Just a moment” challenge, which I did not try to get past. The copies a web search turns up are on a private practitioner’s site and on document-sharing sites, neither an author nor an institutional deposit, so I did not open them. A reader with Science or AAAS access, or a library copy of any reprint, can read it lawfully; a reading would move this to Active. No shorter open work by Engel stating the same model was found (his 1980 American Journal of Psychiatry follow-up, “The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model”, DOI 10.1176/ajp.137.5.535, is closed in Unpaywall, and psychiatryonline.org answered it with HTTP 403 and a challenge page). |
| LIT-549 v2 | Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition | Hayes, Barnes-Holmes & Roche (eds.), Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2001. The founding book of Relational Frame Theory: human language and cognition are learned, generalized operant behaviour, the arbitrarily applicable relating of events (mutually, in combination, and with transformation of their functions) under contextual control. Eight chapters state the theory, from derived relations to rules and the self; five apply it to development, education, social processes, psychopathology and religion. Unread: registered from Crossref’s chapter records, with LIT-541 read in its place. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref’s book and chapter records, not read; LIT-541, a 21-page statement of the same theory by two of its editors, was read in its place. No lawful full text of the book was found. Springer’s book page returned a “Client Challenge” bot page, Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy, and Maynooth University’s repository (where Barnes-Holmes and Roche deposited many RFT papers) holds no chapter of it. A copy on an Ethiopian national-library server was not used, because it is not an author, institutional or publisher deposit. The editors’ own fourteen-page chapter 8, “Relational Frame Theory: A Précis” (pp. 141–154, DOI 10.1007/0-306-47638-x_8), is the part a human reader should take first; a reading of the whole book would move this to Active. |
| LIT-550 v2 | Emotion and Adaptation | Lazarus (1991), Emotion and Adaptation, Oxford University Press, New York (ISBN 0-19-506994-3). The book-length statement of Lazarus’s cognitive-motivational-relational appraisal theory; its chapter titles frame emotion through the person–environment relationship, motivation, coping and goal congruence. Eleven chapters run from definition and measurement through motivation and coping, cognition, causality, negative, positive and problematic emotions, development, social influence and health, to research, assessment, treatment and prevention. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref’s chapter records, not read, and no substitute was read either. The book (Oxford University Press, about 560 pages) is closed at the publisher. The shorter work by the same author that states the same theory, Lazarus (1991), “Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion” (American Psychologist 46(8):819–834, DOI 10.1037/0003-066X.46.8.819), has no lawful open copy. APA does not make it free, and Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list none. The only full text the web search found is in a bulk upload of Lazarus’s journal articles to the Internet Archive by a private user, which is not a lawful source, so I did not open it. Other Lazarus emotion papers (American Psychologist 1991 46(4); Smith & Lazarus 1993; Psychological Inquiry 1995; Journal of Personality 2006) are also closed. His 1993 Annual Review of Psychology chapter is listed as free at the publisher, but annualreviews.org answered with a bot challenge. A human with library access could read the 1991 American Psychologist paper and file it as the read substitute. |
| LIT-551 v2 | Experiential Avoidance and Behavioral Disorders: A Functional Dimensional Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment | Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette & Strosahl (1996), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64(6):1152–1168. Syndromal diagnosis has not found functional pathological processes, and functional analysis has not produced a replicable classification. The paper proposes functional diagnostic dimensions instead, and offers experiential avoidance as one: many disorders are unhealthy efforts to escape and avoid emotions, thoughts, memories and other private experiences. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the PubMed abstract and Crossref, not read. The article is closed access at APA, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy. Copies found online were all third-party postings: a clinician’s practice site (actmindfully.com.au), an Argentine ACT group’s site (grupoact.com.ar), and a CiteSeerX cache whose source could not be traced because CiteSeerX now redirects to the Wayback Machine, which this environment’s egress policy blocks. None is an author, institutional or publisher deposit, so none was used. The ACBS publication page (contextualscience.org) gives the citation and abstract but no file. A human reader with APA PsycArticles access, or the chapter of the same title in The Act in Context (Routledge, 2015, DOI 10.4324/9781315745138-20; Crossref lists it without authors, so that it is a reprint is an inference), could promote this. |
| LIT-552 v2 | Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry | Kendler (2005), American Journal of Psychiatry 162(3):433–440. Eight propositions for a philosophical frame for psychiatry, per the abstract: psychiatry is grounded in first-person experience; Cartesian substance dualism and epiphenomenalism are false; brain→mind and mind→brain causation are both real; psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, with no more “spirochete-like” discoveries to come; explanatory pluralism beats monism, especially biological reductionism; and the goal is “patchy reductionism” and “piecemeal integration”. Unread: registered from its PubMed abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from its PubMed abstract and Crossref, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall lists no open copy, Europe PMC and PubMed Central hold no full text, and psychiatryonline.org answered both the full-text page and the PDF with HTTP 403 and a Cloudflare “Just a moment” challenge, which I did not try to get past. A web search finds it only on a document-sharing site, which is not an author or institutional deposit. A reader with American Journal of Psychiatry access can read it lawfully; a reading would move this to Active. Its readable substitute is Kendler’s “Explanatory models for psychiatric illness” (Am J Psychiatry 165(6):695–702, 2008), filed and read in full as LIT-539. That paper cites this one for its pluralist premise and develops its piecemeal integration and its mind–brain propositions, but not its arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism. A later open paper, “The dappled nature of causes of psychiatric illness” (Mol Psychiatry 17(4):377–388, 2012, PMC3312951), was not read or filed. |
| LIT-553 | Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health | Kashdan & Rottenberg (2010), Clinical Psychology Review 30(7):865–878. Psychological health is not a ratio of positive to negative experience or a set of fixed strengths but flexibility: adapting regulation to the situation, balancing time perspectives and life domains, and acting on values while open to experience. Inflexibility marks depression (rumination, emotion context insensitivity) and anxiety (experiential avoidance), and cardiac vagal control is proposed as an integrating marker. Executive functioning, default states and personality underlie it, and dynamic measurement is needed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-436), in the NIH author manuscript on PubMed Central; worth reading as the review that took “psychological flexibility” out of the ACT literature and made it a general construct of health. Flexibility is adapting to situational demands, reconfiguring mental resources, shifting perspective and balancing competing desires and life domains. Its absence (rumination, emotion context insensitivity, experiential avoidance, low cardiac vagal control) runs through depression and anxiety. Executive functioning, default mental states and personality are its “building blocks”. It is a narrative synthesis: no meta-analysis of its own, the causal direction between inflexibility and disorder is left open by its own account, and it asks for dynamic measures in place of the global self-reports the ACT line relies on. |
| LIT-554 | The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review | Gross (1998), Review of General Psychology 2(3):271–299. Emotions are response tendencies (behavioural, experiential, physiological) called forth by evaluated situations and open to modulation. Emotion regulation is how people influence which emotions they have, when, and how they are experienced and expressed, and it is distinct from coping, mood regulation and defense. A process model places regulation at five points in emotion generation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change (reappraisal), and response modulation (suppression). The first four are antecedent-focused, the last response-focused. Dysregulation is said to figure in over half of the DSM-IV Axis I disorders and all of Axis II. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-429); worth reading as the founding statement of the process model of emotion regulation, the five-family scheme (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation) that later regulation research and many therapies are organised around. It defines emotion regulation as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions” (p. 275) and separates it from coping, mood regulation and defense. It is a conceptual review: no data of its own, and it says the scheme is “a set of working distinctions” (p. 282). |
| LIT-555 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes | Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda & Lillis (2006), Behaviour Research and Therapy 44(1):1–25. The ACT model: psychopathology is psychological inflexibility, produced when language (cognitive fusion) and experiential avoidance dominate direct contingencies, and ACT restores flexibility through six processes. A review of correlational, component, mediational and outcome studies finds the model “broadly supportive” but the literature immature, and the evidence suggests ACT works through different processes from traditional CBT. Read in an early author manuscript whose numbers differ from the published paper’s. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-431), but in an early manuscript, not the published text; worth reading as the canonical statement of the ACT model of psychopathology, “psychological inflexibility”, and of the six processes ACT targets. Cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance (from LIT-551) narrow behaviour, and acceptance, defusion, present-moment contact, self as context, values and committed action restore flexibility. The copy read is an author manuscript in Georgia State University’s repository that still carries “xx” placeholders, and its numbers differ from the published paper’s as Kashdan and Rottenberg report them (21 studies against 32; an AAQ correlation printed “.030” against “.42”). Use its model and argument, not its numbers. Its own verdict on the evidence is “broadly supportive” but “not mature”. |
| LIT-558 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Deci & Ryan (2000), Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227–268, target article. SDT’s case for innate psychological needs, for competence, relatedness and autonomy, defined as nutriments for growth, integrity and well-being and identified functionally, against Hull’s drives and Murray’s acquired needs. The “why” of a goal (autonomous or controlled regulation) and its “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic aspiration) each predict well-being, because each affects need satisfaction. Thwarted needs yield substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns. SDT grounds autonomy in the organism’s tendency to self-organize, argued to be an evolved advantage. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-439), from the authors’ own deposit of the published target article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the full statement of what SDT means by a “need” and why it posits three. Needs are “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 228), identified by what follows when they are satisfied or thwarted, not by how strongly people want them. Goals differ in their “why” (autonomous or controlled regulation) and their “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic content), and both matter because of need satisfaction. Thwarting produces need substitutes, controlled regulatory styles and rigid behaviour patterns. It is a target article: the commentaries and the authors’ reply in the same issue were not read. |
| LIT-559 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | Ryan & Deci (2000), American Psychologist 55(1):68–78. Self-determination theory in eleven pages. Three innate psychological needs, for competence, autonomy and relatedness, must be satisfied for growth, integration and well-being; their thwarting is “a principal source of human distress” (p. 74). Motivation differs in kind, not only amount: extrinsic motivation runs from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation, and becomes more autonomous as a regulation is internalized and integrated with the self. Autonomy is volition, not independence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-442), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the shortest statement of self-determination theory by its authors, and the one most cited. It gives the three basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness), the continuum of regulation from amotivation through external, introjected, identified and integrated regulation to intrinsic motivation, and the claim that autonomy is volition, “not … being independent, detached, or selfish” (p. 74). It is a review: every empirical claim is cited to other papers, nothing is tested here, and it states the reward-undermining result as settled by Deci, Koestner & Ryan (LIT-557), which Cameron, Banko & Pierce dispute (LIT-562, unread; by its abstract). |
| LIT-561 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | Vansteenkiste, Ryan & Soenens (2020), Motivation and Emotion 44(1):1–31. Two decades of basic psychological need theory. A basic need must be psychological, essential, inherent, distinct and universal, and its effects pervasive, content-specific, directional and explanatory. Need frustration is not merely low satisfaction: it predicts ill-being, compensatory behaviour and need substitutes, and may be transdiagnostic. Novelty, morality and beneficence are reviewed as candidate fourth needs; none is yet admitted. Universality holds for the effects of need satisfaction, not for how needs are supported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-440), from the publisher’s typeset PDF that the authors post on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the current statement of basic psychological need theory and of what would make something a basic need. It gives nine criteria (psychological, essential, inherent, distinct, universal; pervasive, content-specific, directional, explanatory), treats need frustration as distinct from low satisfaction and as a candidate transdiagnostic process in psychopathology, and restates universality as “universality without uniformity”: the effects of need satisfaction are claimed invariant, the ways needs are supported are not. It is an editorial introduction to two special issues, by SDT’s authors, and reviews selectively. |
| LIT-579 | Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model | Schwartz (undated, c. 2000s; IFS Institute). IFS views a person as “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, each wanting a valuable role but forced into extreme ones by experience: managers keep control, exiles carry pain, and firefighters douse exiles’ feelings by bingeing or numbing. Everyone has a Self that appears when parts “step back”, and is not a passive witness but an active leader and healer. Its qualities are the “eight Cs”. The goal is to differentiate the Self from the parts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-453); worth reading as Richard Schwartz’s own short statement of the IFS model, freely published by the IFS Institute, and the read substitute (with chapter 1 of the book, NOTE-457) for Internal Family Systems Therapy (LIT-591). IFS is “a new synthesis of two already-existing paradigms: systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind”. A person contains “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, forced into extreme roles (managers, firefighters, exiles) by experience. Everyone has a Self with “crucial leadership qualities”, summed up as eight Cs: calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage and connectedness. A practitioner’s essay: the evidence is clinical experience and one case. |
| LIT-583 v2 | Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2001), Cambridge University Press. The book-length statement of picoeconomics: hyperbolic discounting makes a person a population of bargaining interests, and will is the recursive bundling of choices into precedents. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the précis, LIT-586, which stands in for it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the publisher’s description and from the outline of the book given in its précis, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and no author deposit of the book was found (the author’s site, picoeconomics.org, carries the précis and articles, not the book). The owner suggested the précis instead, and it is read and filed as LIT-586 (NOTE-443), which follows the book’s three sections and twelve chapters. The book is kept as the citation others reach for. A human with library access could read chapters 5-8 (the bargaining model and its evidence) against the précis. |
| LIT-586 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2005), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5), the précis of Breakdown of Will (2001). People and other animals discount delayed rewards hyperbolically, so preferences reverse as a smaller, sooner reward comes near, and a person becomes a population of reward-seeking “interests” that must forestall one another. Willpower is the bundling of future choices by treating the present one as a precedent: an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma, not an organ or a top-down ego. The same recursion predicts the will’s costs: legalism, circumscribed “lapse districts”, motivated blindness to lapses, and rules that favour countable goals over subtle ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-443), as the substitute for the 2001 book (LIT-583), which the owner suggested and which the précis follows chapter by chapter. Worth reading as the shortest complete statement of picoeconomics in Ainslie’s own words. Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse as a smaller, sooner reward draws near, so a person behaves like a population of “interests” that bargain across time. Will is not a faculty above them but a recursive self-prediction: treating each choice as a precedent “bundles” future rewards, an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which “credibility is power”. The same mechanism predicts the will’s side effects: legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control. |
| LIT-591 v2 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Schwartz & Sweezy (2019/2020), Guilford, 2nd ed., the authoritative text of Internal Family Systems therapy. IFS synthesises “the plural mind, or the idea that we all contain many different parts, and systems thinking”. Extreme parts are protectors or burdened exiles, not pathology, and everyone has a Self that can lead the inner system once parts “step back”. Therapy restores trust in the Self’s leadership and unburdens exiles. Chapter 1 read; the rest unread. | Unavailable — chapter 1 read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-457, Skimmed), from the sample chapter Guilford posts; the other nineteen chapters unread. No lawful full text could be reached: the book is sold by Guilford, the Internet Archive’s scans are of the 1995 first edition and access-restricted, and Schwartz’s 2013 Journal of Clinical Psychology article and the 2023 Family Process article (Brenner, Schwartz & Becker) are closed, the latter’s author share-link behind a Cloudflare challenge. Chapter 1 gives the model’s origin and its eight “essentials”, and the IFS Institute’s “Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model” (LIT-579, read in full) gives Schwartz’s short statement of parts, roles and the Self. Filed because it is the canonical text of IFS. A reading of chapters 2–4 (systems, the Self, burdens) and 19 (research) would place it. |
| LIT-592 v2 | The Authentic Personality: A Theoretical and Empirical Conceptualization and the Development of the Authenticity Scale | Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis & Joseph (2008), Journal of Counseling Psychology 55(3):385–399. Unread. Per its abstract it builds the 12-item Authenticity Scale on a tripartite, person-centred conception (self-alienation, authentic living, accepting external influence), supported by exploratory and multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, with discriminant validity from the Big Five, nonsignificant correlations with social desirability, test–retest r = .78 to .91, and strong relations of every subscale to self-esteem and well-being. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the abstract on the University of Manchester research portal and the repository records, not read. Every lawful copy found is out of reach: Manchester’s portal lists a pre-peer-review manuscript (PRE-PEER-REVIEW.PDF, 143 KB) whose download is behind a JavaScript and cookie challenge, which I did not try to get past; Stirling’s STORRE holds the published version under a permanent embargo (“The publisher does not allow this work to be made publicly available”); Warwick’s WRAP and Lincoln’s repository records carry no file; ResearchGate refused the request. A human reader can open the Manchester manuscript in a browser, or ask an author for a copy through STORRE; either would move this to Active. |
| LIT-604 v2 | Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality–social, clinical, and health psychology | Carver & Scheier (1982), Psychological Bulletin 92(1):111-135. A review arguing, by its title, that control theory is a useful framework for personality-social, clinical and health psychology. Unread: no lawful open copy and no published abstract could be reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from bibliographic records, not read. No lawful free copy was found. Unpaywall reports no open copy. Semantic Scholar marks it closed and says the publisher has withheld the abstract. The APA landing page refused the request (HTTP 403). The authors’ University of Miami pages offer their self-report scales, not their papers. No shorter work by Carver and Scheier stating the control-theory model was found in a lawful open copy. The only open copies seen were on ResearchGate and similar sharing sites, which this record does not use. A human with APA PsycNet access could read it and move it to Active. |
| LIT-906 v3 | The effect of brief mindfulness training on momentary impulsivity | Dixon, Paliliunas, Belisle, Speelman, Gunnarsson & Shaffer (2019), Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science 11: 15–20. Twenty-three participants were randomised to a 5-minute mindful-breathing video or a music video. Monetary delay discounting decreased after the mindfulness video and did not change after the control. Small and brief. Unread beyond the abstract’s summary. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref metadata and the abstract as summarised on the Missouri State BearWorks record page. The article is closed. Filed as direct evidence on whether mindfulness changes discounting, which is the fork the record’s mindfulness claim turns on. |
| LIT-915 | One Giant Leap from Mouse to Man: The Microbiota–Gut–Brain Axis in Mood Disorders and Translational Challenges Moving towards Human Clinical Trials | Forssten, Ouwehand, Griffin & Patterson (2022), Nutrients 14(3):568. A narrative review of how gut microbes may affect mood, through the vagus, the immune system, the HPA axis and metabolites, and of why results in mice translate poorly to people. Faecal transplant from depressed humans partly transfers the phenotype to rodents. Human probiotic trials are mixed, with some reductions in subjective stress in healthy volunteers and several clean nulls. Written by employees of a probiotics manufacturer. | Active — read in full 2026-10-11 (NOTE-703) from the open-access text in Europe PMC (PMC8840472). Worth reading for the gap between mouse and human in microbiota–gut–brain research on mood: strong rodent effects, partial transfer of a depressive phenotype by faecal transplant into rodents, and repeated failures of preclinical probiotic effects to replicate in human trials. Note the source: all four authors were employed by a company that sells probiotics, and the review is narrative. |
| LIT-916 v3 | Brief Online Training in Mindfulness Meditation Momentarily Reduces Some Impulsive Behaviors: A Randomized Controlled Trial | Ge, Xie, Sun, Fan, Zhang & Liu (2024), Mindfulness 16: 448–464. An RCT with mindfulness, monitor and control groups, measuring impulsivity by Stroop, Go/No-Go and delay discounting. As summarised: some impulsive behaviours reduced momentarily, discounting not significantly improved relative to the comparison groups, and no effect sustained at follow-up. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref metadata and a search-result summary of the abstract. Springer’s page redirected to a login and the abstract was not read directly. Filed beside Dixon et al. (2019) because, as summarised, it dissociates the two: some impulsive behaviour reduced, delay discounting not improved. |
| LIT-959 v2 | A circuit-based framework for depression: Reshaping the pathological attractor | Yuan et al. (2026). The review conceptualizes major depressive disorder as a pathological attractor, a stable, self-reinforcing network configuration kept in place by maladaptive plasticity. It argues that the depressive state comes from a hierarchical failure of top-down prefrontal control, which lets subcortical hubs stabilize and drive anhedonia and motivational deficits. It recasts treatment as reshaping the brain’s functional landscape, with rapid-acting drugs and neuromodulation steering trajectories to adaptive states. Not read. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex: closed (PubMed record only); Unpaywall: not open access; Europe PMC: no PMC copy, “Subscription required”; cell.com returned 403 to this client, failing on access, not availability, though the review is a subscription article there; no preprint was found, and a web search found only Chinese news reports of its publication (5 May 2026 online) crediting Minmin Luo’s group. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-983 v2 | Impaired context disambiguation as a key determinant of post-traumatic psychopathology: A neurocomputational account | Linson et al. (2025), bioRxiv; read in version 2. Recasts PTSD as a failure of context disambiguation rather than of fear extinction. In an active-inference model, an overly precise prior that one is in a harmful context makes peripheral sampling look uninformative, so the agent attenuates it and the prior sustains itself. Illustrative simulations show the loop in a “vulnerable” agent, recovery under exposure, and relapse after a precision-lowering drug. No data are fitted; the neuromodulatory circuit it proposes is not modelled. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-766) in full, in version 2 (2025-08-04); version 3 (2026-05-13) could not be reached, as bioRxiv returned HTTP 429 to every request. Worth reading as a worked mechanism of a disorder that keeps itself in place: under active inference an overly precise prior for a harmful context makes exploring the periphery look uninformative, so the agent attenuates it, never gets the corrective evidence, and the belief sustains itself; exposure that restores sampling rebalances it, and a precision-lowering drug only suppresses symptoms. Read it knowing that every result is an illustrative simulation with unreported parameters, and that its two intervention arms differ in environment as well as mechanism. THEORY-285 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-1205 v2 | Radically Open-Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Disorders of Over-Control: Signaling Matters | Lynch, Hempel & Dunkley (2015). RO-DBT treats disorders of maladaptive over-control, such as anorexia nervosa, chronic depression and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and holds that their core problem is emotional loneliness from low openness and deficits of social signaling, not emotion dysregulation. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one is listed but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Europe PMC’s record (PMID 26160620) lists, from Unpaywall, a free copy at the publisher: https://psychotherapy.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/1 0.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2015.69.2.141. On 2026-10-29 it returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl and to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. OpenAlex reports the work closed, with no repository copy, which disagrees with Europe PMC’s listing; a browser fetch of the publisher’s PDF would settle both. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1218 v3 | Propagation, not aggregation: linking individual psychological flexibility to organizational functioning | Guida, Minutola & Presti (2026). A conceptual paper with no data. Organizational flexibility is not the aggregate of flexible individuals but a pattern of coordinated, values-consistent action that is retained and spread or absorbed and extinguished; whether a rise in a member’s flexibility reaches the organization depends jointly on that member’s leverage over the consequences colleagues meet and on whether the culture reinforces or penalizes such action. Bond’s (2018) leader-based route is the high-leverage special case. Five propositions and a factorial design are set out; the two measures a test needs do not yet exist. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1353) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Frontiers, CC BY); worth reading as the prior transfer of ACT’s psychological flexibility to the organization, which puts the problem as propagation, not aggregation, and makes it depend jointly on a member’s leverage over the consequences colleagues meet and on whether the culture reinforces values-consistent action, with Bond’s (2018) leader route as the high-leverage case. Read it knowing that it is a conceptual paper with no data, that the two measures its tests need do not exist, that its motivating evidence (Fleming 2024) is cross-sectional and bears on individual benefit more than on organizational transfer, and that two empirical sentences in §2.1 carry no citation. |
| LIT-1221 v2 | Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: A Cognitive Behavioral Approach to Parasuicide | Linehan (1987). Introduces Dialectical Behavior Therapy for chronically parasuicidal individuals, on a biosocial theory that treats parasuicide as problem-solving behavior for psychic distress, maintained by low distress tolerance and environments that reinforce it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed, with the Guilford DOI as its only location and no repository copy; Crossref carries no licence or full-text link. The Linehan Institute’s list of her published work gives no copy, and web searches for the title found only bibliographic records. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1223 v3 | Refractory depression – mechanisms and efficacy of radically open dialectical behaviour therapy (RefraMED): findings of a randomised trial on benefits and harms | Lynch et al. (2020). In a trial of 250 adults with refractory depression (162 to RO DBT plus usual care, 88 to usual care), RO DBT lowered Hamilton depression scores by 5.40 points at 7 months, the end of therapy, but the differences at the 12-month primary end-point (2.15) and at 18 months (1.69) were not significant; psychological flexibility and emotional coping were significantly better at 12 and 18 months, and all eight possibly related serious adverse reactions were in the RO DBT arm. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1358) in full, from the CC BY published version in PubMed Central (PMC7282863); worth reading as the first multicentre randomised trial of RO DBT and the main controlled evidence for it: RO DBT plus usual care beat usual care on depression at the end of six months of therapy and not at the 12-month primary end-point or at 18 months, while flexibility and emotional coping stayed better from 12 months on. Read it knowing that it selected on refractory depression and never measured overcontrol, that it was underpowered by its own account (therapist correlation 0.14 against 0.025 assumed), that the developer trained the therapists and six of sixteen authors have a financial interest, that its abstract’s “throughout” for the process gains is not what its Table 1 shows, and that its title’s mechanisms are not analysed. |
| LIT-1224 v2 | Applications and efficacy of radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO DBT): A systematic review of the literature | Hatoum & Burton (2024). The first systematic review of RO DBT, a transdiagnostic variant of DBT for excessive or maladaptive overcontrol: fourteen studies, across chronic depression, personality disorders and eating disorders. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the article as hybrid open access under CC BY-NC-ND at Wiley, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/jclp.23735; on 2026-10-29 it returned a Cloudflare challenge to curl and a 403 to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. It is not in PubMed Central (Europe PMC lists only the subscription DOI), and no repository copy was found. A browser fetch of the Wiley PDF is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1263 v2 | Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | Seth (2013), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):565–573, an Opinion article. Emotions are “interoceptive inference”: felt states are the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, compared with bottom-up prediction errors in the anterior insula. Prediction errors are also cancelled by action, as descending predictions set the reference points of autonomic reflexes, the visceral counterpart of active inference in motor control. The same scheme is applied to the experience of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion is a revision of the multisensory self-model under precision-weighted error. Low interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to it, and a virtual hand pulsing in time with the heartbeat is owned more. No direct test of the model is claimed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1000); worth reading as the short statement that put emotion and body ownership under one predictive-coding mechanism: felt emotion is the content of top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, the anterior insula is the comparator, and the experience of body ownership is what the brain infers to be “most likely to be me” from interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. It is an opinion article with no new data. Its evidence is indirect and cited, and its one figure is a study by the author’s own group, an augmented-reality rubber hand illusion whose virtual hand flashed in or out of time with the heartbeat. The record’s bridge from its interoception cluster to body ownership. |
| LIT-1427 | Psychopathy: A Clinical Construct Whose Time Has Come | Hare (1996), Criminal Justice and Behavior 23(1):25–54. The programmatic statement that psychopathy, once reliably measured by the PCL-R, is a clinical construct of real use to the criminal justice system, including for predicting recidivism and violence. Unread: the author’s ResearchGate copy refused this client. The construct is read in Hare & Neumann (2008). | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: a lawful copy exists but this client could not fetch it, so this failed on access, not availability. A full-text PDF is linked from the author’s ResearchGate profile (publication 280798957, under profile/Robert-Hare-2), apparently his own upload, but ResearchGate answered every request with HTTP 403, so neither the file nor its uploader could be confirmed. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy, the journal (SAGE) is closed, and the author’s own site, hare.org, lists the paper with a DOI link and no PDF. The construct it presents is read first-hand in Hare and Neumann’s 2008 review (LIT-1428), which gives the PCL-R items, their four factors and their two-factor grouping. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or ResearchGate can be reached, not on merit. |
| LIT-1428 | Psychopathy as a Clinical and Empirical Construct | Hare & Neumann (2008), Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 4:217–246. The PCL-R’s items form four correlated factors, Interpersonal, Affective, Lifestyle and Antisocial, explained by one superordinate factor; psychopathy is dimensional, and no component, affective or antisocial, is more essential than the others. Cleckley’s Clinical Profile, drawn from an unrepresentative sample, should not be the test of the construct. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1094): in full, from the copy Hare posts on his own site. Worth reading as the authors’ own statement of what the construct is, made while defending it against the charge that the PCL-R has “drifted” from Cleckley. The PCL-R’s 20 items fall, 18 of them, into four correlated factors: Interpersonal and Affective (together Factor 1) and Lifestyle and Antisocial (together Factor 2). A single superordinate factor explains them, and the authors hold that no component, the affective one included, is more essential than the others. That is the sharpest constraint the record has on borrowing only the affective features of psychopathy for a corporation. Hare receives royalties from the PCL-R. |
| LIT-1430 v2 | The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power | Bakan (2004), Free Press. Per its publisher, it “contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin”. Per the Publishers Weekly review, the corporation is legally mandated to pursue its own self-interest, and so, in Bakan’s words, “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others”. The remedy it proposes is regulation and the democratic control of corporations. Unread: filed from the two descriptions only. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: no lawful full text was reached. The author’s faculty repository at UBC (Allard Research Commons, commons.allard.ubc.ca/books/4) holds a record with the publisher’s description but no file, and the book is in print. It is the source of the thesis that the corporation is an “institutional psychopath”, which the record files as a question (QUESTION on corporate psychopathy, 2026-10-23) and does not take from this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1431 | The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis | Boddy (2011), J. Bus. Ethics 102:255–259. A “very short theoretical paper” arguing that “psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing” the global financial crisis. Its psychopaths are individuals in corporations, not the corporation. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: the article is closed (OpenAlex: no open-access copy, no repository full text), and no author copy was found. Filed to keep apart two theses that share a name: that psychopaths in corporations cause harm (this paper) and that the corporation itself is psychopathic (Bakan, LIT on The Corporation). Its abstract is enough for that; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1438 v2 | The current status of research on the structure of evaluative space | Norris, Gollan, Berntson & Cacioppo (2010), Biological Psychology 84(3):422–436. A review of the evaluative space model. The affect system has separable positive and negative channels whose joint output is a bipolar predisposition to approach or avoid. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together. Coactivation, simultaneous or by fast oscillation, is ambivalence, rare and arousing. Asymmetric activation functions give a negativity bias and a positivity offset, and recalibrate with context. Levels of the neuraxis can override one another. Clinical implications for depression and anxiety. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1101): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC2894997, NIHMS165251). Worth reading as the evaluative space model’s own later summary, written with Berntson and Cacioppo. Positivity and negativity are separable systems, whose combined output is a bipolar predisposition to approach or withdraw. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together, and coactivation is ambivalence. Ambivalence and neutrality give the same middling output from different underlying states. Negativity has the higher gain and positivity the higher intercept. It stands in for the unread 1994 and 1997 papers (LIT-1453, LIT-1456). |
| LIT-1449 | Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology | Carver (2018), Psychological Inquiry 29(3):139–144, a commentary on DeYoung and Krueger. Problems arise wherever a feedback loop’s input, reference value, comparison or output is extreme or biased. The five factors are read as sensitivities to classes of goals, not as loop parameters. Valence tracks the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value, so approach and avoidance can each yield either sign. Doubt and disengagement sit outside the loop itself. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1102): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC6707771, NIHMS1512534). A short commentary on DeYoung and Krueger’s cybernetic theory of psychopathology, and the nearest lawful first-hand statement found of Carver and Scheier’s control-process account of affect. Valence is read off the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value. An approach system and an avoidance system can each produce either sign. Many goals are in play at once, and their priorities are juggled. It stands in for the unread 1990 paper (LIT-1441). |
| LIT-1461 | Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction | Berridge & Robinson (2016), American Psychologist 71(8):670–679. ‘Wanting’ (incentive salience, mesolimbic and dopamine-related) and ‘liking’ (hedonic impact, small opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots) are dissociable. Repeated, especially intermittent high-dose, drug use can sensitize the ‘wanting’ system, making it hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, lastingly and perhaps permanently, while ‘liking’ need not rise and may fall. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose cognitive desire, run without report, and grow during abstinence. Its scope is said to extend, on emerging evidence, to behavioural addictions and to the compulsions of dopamine dysregulation syndrome. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1109): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC5171207, NIHMS816820). Worth reading as the authors’ own short statement, a quarter-century on, of the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Drugs, and perhaps unpredictable non-drug rewards, can make mesolimbic ‘wanting’ systems lastingly hyper-reactive to cues and contexts, and ‘liking’ need not rise with it. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose a person’s cognitive desire, operate without report, persist for years and grow during abstinence. It is a review of the authors’ programme. Filed for the record’s question whether potential of a proxy for maintenance is valence, and the form addiction and metric fixation share (QUESTION-267), to which it gives a mechanism on the personal side. |
| LIT-1465 | A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours | Flayelle, Brevers, King, Maurage, Perales & Billieux (2023), Nature Reviews Psychology 2(3):136–150. Reviews evidence linking design features to loss of control in online gaming, gambling, cybersexual activity, shopping, social networking and streaming. Proposes a taxonomy based on model-free and model-based learning and control. Model-free: reinforcement schedules (random-ratio rewards such as loot boxes and likes) and personalized triggers (push notifications, recommendations). Model-based: overvaluation of outcomes, features that interfere with deliberation (autoplay, countdowns), partial goal fulfilment (infinite scroll, levels, progress bars) and features that strengthen cognitive biases (near-misses, losses disguised as wins). Providers keep whatever raises use or revenue, and informational asymmetry lets them personalize it. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1096): in full, from the typeset article as deposited in the University of Lausanne’s repository (SERVAL/IRIS). Worth reading as a compact, theory-driven catalogue of the design features of games, gambling, pornography, shopping, social-networking and streaming services that may weaken users’ control. Features are sorted by whether they work on model-free learning (reinforcement schedules, personalized cues) or on model-based choice (overvaluation, features that interfere with deliberation, partial goal fulfilment, cognitive biases). It also names the selection process on the provider’s side: features that raise use, time-on-device or spending are kept, with no psychology needed. The evidence reviewed is mostly cross-sectional, qualitative or indirect, and the authors warn against pathologizing common behaviour. Filed for the record’s question whether potential of a proxy is valence (QUESTION-267), because it describes how a firm optimizing its own metric can install proxy-keyed potential in its users. |
| LIT-1477 v3 | A systematic review of human avoidance learning: Cognition, computation, and methods | Mancinelli & Bach (2026; preprint 2025). A systematic review of 116 studies of avoidance learning in healthy humans with primary reinforcers, analysed for the phenomena a theory must explain and their power to tell theories apart. The evidence contradicts two-factor and other associative theories and favours expectancy and inference-based accounts, though residual avoidance after the outcome is visibly removed contradicts a purely inferential one. An available avoidance response protects threat expectancy from extinction, more so the more effective it is. The common paradigms are simpler than real-world avoidance, so tasks with larger computational demands and more action options are needed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1134) from the PsyArXiv preprint, not the closed version of record; worth reading as the only systematic map of human avoidance learning, and for the finding, rated robust, that an available avoidance response protects threat expectancy from extinction, the more so the more effective it is. Avoidance is learned without ending the warning signal and transfers by inference, against two-factor theory; but some avoidance survives visible removal of the outcome, against a purely inferential account. Healthy volunteers with shock or noise only; nothing here is about anxiety disorders. |
| LIT-1479 v3 | Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty: implications for understanding maladaptive anxiety, anxious avoidance, and exposure therapy | Brown, Price & Dombrovski (2023; preprint 2022). A narrative review and proposal, with no new data or model run. Cognitive-behavioural accounts put exaggerated threat expectancy behind maladaptive anxiety, but the learning literature (seven computational studies, chosen without a systematic search) fits better a disorder of uncertainty learning: altered adjustment of learning rate to noise and volatility, mostly for aversive outcomes. They propose that in aversive settings avoidance of uncertain states keeps their uncertainty high and so perpetuates itself, that anxiety feeds this by misreading noise as change, and that exposure therapy works by reducing the uncertainty. For fear-based disorders, not GAD. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1120) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central, not the typeset version of record; worth reading as the clearest statement that anxious avoidance can be kept going by uncertainty that avoidance itself leaves unreduced, with no excess of learned threat needed. A narrative review and proposal: seven computational studies, chosen without a systematic search, show altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes; the avoidance loop and the account of exposure are argued in words and schematic figures, not modelled or tested. For fear-based disorders; by the authors’ statement it does not explain GAD. |
| LIT-1480 v2 | Skills‐homework completion and phone coaching as predictors of therapeutic change and outcomes in completers of a DBT intensive outpatient programme | Edwards, Kober, Rinne, Griffin, Axelrod & Cooney (2021). Medical records and diary cards of 56 of 88 patients in a DBT intensive outpatient programme, those who completed a four-month cycle and gave enough diary data, were coded for skills homework completed and phone-coaching calls. Homework completion correlated with larger falls in suicide and substance-use urges, and coaching with a larger fall in self-harm urges; neither with change in how often the behaviours occurred. Patients free of target behaviours in the final month had completed more homework; the coaching difference was not significant. The authors read both as active ingredients of DBT through generalization. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1121) from the version of record posted on the Yale lab site of the second author; worth reading as the first study to relate DBT skills homework and phone coaching to outcome, and for how little it can show. In a chart review of 56 of 88 patients in one intensive outpatient programme, homework completion went with larger falls in suicide and substance-use urges and coaching with a larger fall in self-harm urges (r of .31 to .37), neither with change in how often the behaviours occurred, and only homework with being free of them in month 4. Correlational, selected for completed cycles and adequate diary data, uncorrected for multiple comparisons, with no measure of skill use; the abstract states more than the results. |
| LIT-1483 v3 | The influence of anxiety on exploration: A review of computational modeling studies | Chou, Wilson & Smith (2024). A narrative review of computational modelling studies of how anxiety influences exploration, mostly in reward tasks and sub-clinical samples. In reinforcement-learning tasks directed, but not random, exploration may be raised by trait or cognitive anxiety and lowered by state or somatic anxiety; in foraging tasks anxiety is consistently associated with less exploration, including, in one study, less checking for a predator. Some differences may come from how anxiety modulates learning rates. Results are inconsistent and unreplicated, and tasks, anxiety measures and methods need to be made consistent. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1127) from the CC BY PsyArXiv preprint, not the closed version of record, whose abstract differs; worth reading as the map of how anxiety relates to exploration once both are split into kinds. In reward bandits directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety, random exploration shows no link, and in foraging, and in one task with a predator to check for, anxiety goes with less exploration. A narrative review of mostly sub-clinical, unreplicated studies with inconsistent tasks and measures. |
| LIT-1486 v2 | Target validation in dialectical behavior therapy skills group: Emotion regulation, mindfulness, and distress tolerance as mediators of outcome | Amestoy, Gulamani & Uliaszek (2025). Fifty-four university students were randomly assigned to a 12-week DBT skills group or a positive psychotherapy group. In mediation models of borderline personality disorder symptoms, impulse control and access to emotion-regulation strategies mediated the effect of group, more strongly for DBT, as did acting with awareness among the mindfulness facets; the other mindfulness facets and distress tolerance did not. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turns U10 and U11; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability: no lawful full text was found. The article is closed at Taylor & Francis (the full-text page answered 403). Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy; the PMC ID converter finds none for PMID 40601564; Europe PMC marks it subscription only and lists no preprint; Semantic Scholar gives no open PDF; OSF Preprints has no matching title; the University of Toronto repository (TSpace) holds other work by the first and last authors but not this article; and the last author’s faculty pages link no copy. Web searches found no author-posted version. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1490 v3 | Impaired action-safety learning and excessive relief during avoidance in patients with anxiety disorders | De Kleine, Hutschemaekers, Hendriks, Kampman, Papalini, Van Minnen & Vervliet (2023). In a computer-based avoidance task, 47 healthy controls were compared with 33 patients with OCD, 40 with panic disorder with agoraphobia and 66 with PTSD, before exposure treatment. OCD and PTSD patients avoided more during the safety cue and kept a higher expectancy of the aversive picture after the safety cue and after effective avoidance; PDA and PTSD patients reported more relief. The groups did not differ in avoiding the danger cues. The authors propose that low confidence in the safety that avoidance brings makes omissions surprising, and the extra relief reinforces avoidance. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1123) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading as, by its own count, the third experimental study of avoidance learning in anxiety patients, and the first to track what they learn from avoiding as well as how often they avoid. Against 47 controls, OCD and PTSD patients avoided a safety cue more and, after effective avoidance, still expected the aversive picture more; PDA and PTSD patients reported more relief at omissions; nobody differed on the danger cues. Cross-sectional, with no cost to avoiding; relief was already higher before avoidance was possible, and patients rated the pictures as more aversive. That the excess relief reinforces avoidance is the authors’ interpretation, not a finding. |
| LIT-1491 v3 | The standalone effect of safety behavior manipulations: A systematic review and meta-analysis | Goodson, Patel, Zech, Sala & Cougle (2026). Of 26 studies of standalone safety-behaviour manipulations outside exposure (2,048 participants, mean age 24.9), 19 were meta-analysed. Relative to control, reducing safety behaviours reduced them (d = 0.52, 95% CI 0.36–0.68, after one outlier was removed) and reduced symptoms (d = 0.43, 95% CI 0.27–0.59; 0.31 after trim-and-fill, Egger p = .012); increasing them, in five non-clinical experiments, raised safety behaviours (d = 2.96) and symptoms (d = 0.65). Only study type (for the effect on safety behaviours) and the size of the safety-behaviour change (for symptoms) moderated the effects. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1128) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central, not the closed version of record; worth reading as the first meta-analysis of safety-behaviour manipulations made outside exposure. Reducing them lowered symptoms against control (d = 0.43, about 0.31 after trim-and-fill, with significant Egger asymmetry), instructed increases raised symptoms (d = 0.65, five studies), and the size of the safety-behaviour change moderated the symptom effect. The literature is small, mostly appearance and social anxiety in young, largely non-clinical samples, and largely from the senior author’s group. It says nothing about how safety behaviours act. |
| LIT-1492 v3 | DBT Skills Training Manual | Linehan (2014). The second edition of the treatment manual for the skills-training component of dialectical behavior therapy: how to run skills groups, and the teaching notes for the four skills modules (mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance), with the handouts and worksheets published alongside. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U9; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability: the manual is a commercial book in copyright and no lawful full copy is open. Guilford sells it (print and e-book) and offers only a sample chapter and the author’s “How to Use This Book” free, which is not the work. The Internet Archive holds a scan of the 2015 printing restricted to print-disabled users, which this client cannot borrow; a separate upload there of the handouts and worksheets is not the publisher’s and was not used. Web searches for an open copy found only sale listings, library records and download sites of unknown standing, none used. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, for example through a library. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1496 v3 | Anxiety, Avoidance, and Sequential Evaluation | Zorowitz, Momennejad & Daw (2020; preprint 2019). A decision-theoretic analysis and reinforcement-learning simulations of maladaptive avoidance, with no data fitted. In sequential evaluation the chance to avoid danger later should make it less threatening now; a pessimistic false belief that one’s own later avoidance will fail, with the danger represented correctly, propagates fear and avoidance to situations far before the threat. This one bias reproduces qualitatively exaggerated threat appraisal, fear generalization, persistent avoidance and laboratory findings on approach–avoid conflict and loss avoidance, and predicts a reduced free-choice premium in anxiety. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1136) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading for the derivation that avoidance far from a threat needs no overestimate of the threat, only an expectation that one will fail to avoid it later, which spreads threat value backward across a decision process. Simulations only, matched qualitatively to published findings (earlier cash-out, behavioural inhibition, aversive pruning); the predicted loss of the free-choice premium is untested, and the persistence of avoidance after the misbelief is corrected is argued, not simulated. |
| LIT-1498 v3 | Behavior as information: “If I avoid, then there must be a danger” | Gangemi, Mancini & van den Hout (2012). Anxious participants (31 with obsessive-compulsive disorder, 22 with panic, 17 with social phobia) and 31 controls rated danger in scripts that varied objective danger and the presence of a safety behaviour. Anxious participants inferred danger from the safety behaviour as well as from objective information, while controls were influenced mainly by objective danger; the effect was disorder-specific for social phobia and OCD. Taking one’s own safety behaviour as evidence of danger may maintain anxiety. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23/24, shared at https://chatgpt.com/share/6adc1ece-bb28-83e9-a8f6-cadf0f8b7113, where it is cited at turn U15; a reading was attempted on 2026-10-24 and failed on availability: no lawful full text was found. The article is closed at Elsevier. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, Europe PMC and PubMed Central hold none, the University of Messina’s IRIS record (hdl 11570/2424621) has no file, and the Utrecht University research portal refused this client (403). Web searches found no preprint or accepted manuscript. One copy was found and not used: the publisher’s typeset PDF on the website of the Associazione di Psicologia Cognitiva, Rome, the first two authors’ institute. Its own cover sheet says it is an “Author’s personal copy” that may not be posted to “personal, institutional or third party websites”, so it is not a lawful open copy. Only the cover sheet was seen, and the file was deleted unread. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, through library access or a request to the authors. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1500 v4 | Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach | Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek & Vervliet (2014). A clinical translation of the inhibitory-learning model of extinction: the original threat association survives extinction, beside a competing inhibitory one, so fear can return; fear reduction during exposure does not predict outcome; and exposure should be designed to violate stated expectancies, not to reduce fear in session. Strategies: expectancy violation, deepened extinction, occasional reinforced extinction, removal of safety signals, variability, retrieval cues, multiple contexts and reconsolidation, with affect labeling as a further regulation strategy. Cognitive restructuring before exposure is held to blunt learning. Five illustrative cases; no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1137) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central, the accepted unedited version, not the closed version of record; worth reading as the standard clinical statement of the inhibitory-learning account of exposure: extinction adds a competing inhibitory association and leaves the original intact, fear reduction during exposure does not predict outcome, and exposure should be built to violate expectancies. It reports no data. Its strategies are cited to evidence of uneven strength, which the authors flag, and it reports the evidence against removing safety behaviours as well as for it. |
| LIT-1685 | Trauma, prejudice, large-group identity and psychoanalysis | A memorial lecture, not a study. Volkan defines a large group as thousands or millions of people who mostly never meet but share sentiments, and pictures large-group identity as a tent’s canvas worn over each member’s individual identity, with the leader as its pole. Membership in ethnic, national and religious groups begins in childhood, through identification with parents’ investment in the group and the images and “ego tasks” they deposit in the child; after adolescence a core large-group identity cannot be changed. From unofficial dialogues between conflicting groups (1980s to early 2000s), he reports that the central psychological factor in large-group conflict is the need to protect large-group identity, and that a participant who felt that identity threatened would speak with emotion of an injury suffered by ancestors centuries before. The shared image of such an event, “real, fantasized or even mythologized”, undergoes a change of function as it passes down the generations and becomes an identity marker: a chosen trauma. Chosen traumas feed entitlement ideologies and, in a “time collapse”, make the old event feel recent, as Milošević did with Kosovo 1389, with dehumanization and purification following. Recent traumas, the Holocaust among them, are not chosen traumas but undigested ones, bound up with large-group mourning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1250), in place of LIT-1727, which could not be reached; worth reading as Volkan’s late, short restatement of chosen trauma, its trigger in threatened identity and its distinction from the mourning of recent trauma, read in place of his 2001 paper; the evidence is his own clinical and diplomatic observation, without method or measure. |
| LIT-1692 | Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation | Yehuda et al. (2016). Holocaust survivors and their adult offspring, compared with Jewish families living outside Europe during the war, showed methylation differences at a site in the stress-related gene FKBP5, in opposite directions in parents and offspring. The samples are small, and the paper is widely cited and widely criticized. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: the publisher’s copy is free to read at biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com (doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005), listed by Unpaywall as bronze; it is not in PMC and has no author manuscript. On 2026-10-29 the publisher answered with a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403). A human reader can likely open it. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Youssef et al. 2018 (LIT-1725). |
| LIT-1694 | ”Surviving Early Childhood Trauma: Effects of the Holocaust on Survivors’ Psychological and Physiological Well-Being” | A Leiden thesis of four empirical papers on one Israeli sample drawn from the population registry: female child survivors who lost both parents in the Holocaust, matched women who emigrated from Europe to Palestine with their parents before it, and the daughters of both. More than 60 years on, survivors reported more dissociation, less life satisfaction, more cognitive impairment and more stress from recent life events. They had higher diurnal cortisol and an anomalous response to a laboratory stressor, and in an exploratory analysis this held only for ADRA2B wildtype carriers. Their daughters did not differ from comparison daughters on any psychological, cognitive, health or cortisol measure. The one intergenerational signal: daughters of more dissociative survivors had lower diurnal cortisol (n = 17 against 10). The introduction and discussions restate the authors’ two meta-analyses, which found no second- or third-generation traumatization in non-clinical, well-designed samples. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1291), in place of LIT-1718 and LIT-1770, which could not be reached; worth reading as the record’s only account, at second hand and by their own authors’ student, of the 2003 and 2008 meta-analyses (LIT-1718, LIT-1770, both Unavailable), and as a primary two-generation study whose matched design holds national identity constant and finds no family transmission. |
| LIT-1701 | International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma | Danieli (1998). The clinical handbook of multigenerational trauma: chapters on the descendants of Holocaust survivors, Armenian genocide survivors, Japanese-American internees, Native Americans, war veterans and others, with Danieli’s account of the “conspiracy of silence” between survivors and those around them as a route of transmission. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; it is Springer subscription content. A 2016 article by Danieli, Norris and Engdahl that tests the handbook’s framework is posted as the APA publisher PDF on a University of Minnesota page under APA’s personal-use notice; the owner approved that route the same day, and it was read in place of the handbook. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Danieli, Norris and Engdahl 2016 (LIT-1736). |
| LIT-1715 | Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms | Yehuda & Lehrner (2018). Reviews evidence that parental trauma raises offspring’s risk of PTSD and alters their stress physiology, and the putative routes: preconception germline effects, in utero exposure and postnatal care. Argues that such effects may be adaptive, and that their mechanisms in humans are not yet established. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-29, not read; set Unfetched the same day under ADR-053: a lawful free copy is in PMC (PMC6127768), and the publisher’s PDF is open at Wiley. On 2026-10-29 the PMC page answered with a reCAPTCHA, Europe PMC with HTTP 500, NCBI’s E-utilities refused because the publisher does not allow full-text XML, and Wiley with a Cloudflare challenge. A human reader can likely open it. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. |
| LIT-1718 | Are children of Holocaust survivors less well-adapted? A meta-analytic investigation of secondary traumatization | van IJzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg & Sagi-Schwartz (2003). A meta-analysis of studies comparing children of Holocaust survivors with others: in non-clinical samples the second generation showed no more psychological problems; differences appeared only in clinical samples, which are selected for problems. Secondary traumatization is not supported in general. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Leiden’s repository marks its record (hdl.handle.net/1887/2352) Closed Access, as it does the authors’ Dutch restatements; Haifa’s research system lists it without a file, and Erasmus’s repository answered with a Cloudflare challenge. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Fridman’s 2011 Leiden thesis (LIT-1694). |
| LIT-1725 | The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings | Youssef et al. (2018). A short narrative review of human studies of parental trauma and offspring DNA methylation, PubMed to March 2018. It finds two studies of parents and children: Rwandan mothers pregnant during the genocide (25 exposed, 25 abroad), with higher NR3C1 methylation and lower cortisol in mothers and children; and Holocaust survivors (32) and offspring (22) against 8 controls and their 9 offspring, with higher FKBP5 intron 7 methylation in survivors and lower in their offspring. Three more concern stress in pregnancy (Congo, intimate partner violence) and NR3C1 methylation in newborns and adolescents. The authors call the evidence accumulating but preliminary: small samples, cross-sectional designs, unmeasured confounds, possible publication bias. They use “transgenerational” for any parent-to-child effect, in utero exposure included. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1310), in place of LIT-1692, which could not be fetched here; worth reading as a brief, sympathetic account of the Holocaust FKBP5 study and the few human studies beside it, by authors not on that study (though Rutten has published with its second author, Daskalakis; ref. 13). |
| LIT-1727 | Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity | Volkan (2001). A large group’s shared mental representation of a trauma its ancestors suffered, a “chosen trauma”, is passed down the generations and becomes a marker of the group’s identity, reactivated in conflict; the Serbs’ memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 is his central example. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. Volkan’s site is a parked domain, and the University of Virginia’s archive lists the paper by title only. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Volkan 2021 (LIT-1685). |
| LIT-1736 | Multigenerational legacies of trauma: Modeling the what and how of transmission | A web survey of 422 adult children of Holocaust survivors, a convenience sample recruited through survivor and Jewish organizations, tests Danieli’s 1998 framework, Trauma and the Continuity of Self, as a path model. The children rated their parents’ posttrauma styles (victim, numb, fighter), their own “reparative adaptational impacts” and their family’s history. Parents’ Holocaust experiences, internment above all, were linked to the children’s impacts only indirectly, through the parents’ victim style, and those indirect effects were small (.05 to .06). Post-war family milieu mattered more than wartime history. Settling in Israel rather than North America, surviving grandparents, larger surviving families and religious continuity went with milder impacts. Broken generational linkages (rarely thinking of one’s murdered grandparents as one’s own, and remembering the family’s history “only in bits and pieces”) had the largest total effect, and the only direct one. There was no comparison group and every measure came from the child. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1307), in place of LIT-1701, which could not be reached; worth reading as the clinical tradition’s own quantitative test of the parenting route, and for its finding that descendants who count their murdered grandparents as their own fare better, not worse; read in place of the 1998 handbook (LIT-1701). |
| LIT-1770 | Does intergenerational transmission of trauma skip a generation? No meta-analytic evidence for tertiary traumatization with third generation of Holocaust survivors | Sagi-Schwartz, van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg (2008). A meta-analysis of studies of Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren finds no evidence that trauma passes to the third generation. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. It is not in Leiden’s repository, and Haifa’s search answered with a Cloudflare challenge. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Fridman’s 2011 Leiden thesis (LIT-1694). |
| LIT-1774 | Inter- and transgenerational inheritance of behavioral phenotypes | Jawaid & Mansuy (2019). A short review from Mansuy’s laboratory, the proponents’ side. Rodent studies show that parental trauma, stress, drugs and in-utero insults pass behavioural phenotypes to offspring, in some models to the third or fourth generation, and that parental environmental enrichment passes benefits, and can prevent the transmission of trauma’s effects. Germline dependence is shown by IVF and by injecting sperm RNA, which reproduces the phenotypes; non-coding RNAs are the best candidate carriers. Human studies of genocide survivors’ descendants are offered as similar, and the review itself tables them as intergenerational. How a stimulus reaches the germline, and how effects pass beyond the first generation, are unknown. Germline reprogramming and the sceptics’ objections are not discussed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1296), in place of LIT-1738, which could not be reached; worth reading as the proponents’ short statement of the rodent case for germline transmission of behaviour, read in place of Bohacek and Mansuy 2015 (LIT-1738), and for what it does not answer. |
| LIT-1793 | Cultural trauma and epigenetic inheritance | Lehrner & Yehuda (2018). Connects the sociology of cultural and historical trauma, shared by groups such as indigenous peoples and Holocaust survivors’ communities, with biological findings on intergenerational effects, and argues that a group’s narratives about its trauma and any biological transmission interact in how descendants come to carry it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; it is not in PMC, Cambridge Core is paywalled, and Mount Sinai Scholars lists it without a file. The authors’ open restatement of 2018 (Yehuda, Lehrner and Bierer, Environmental Epigenetics, PMC6051458) was refused this client: Oxford’s PDF by a Cloudflare challenge, the PMC page by a reCAPTCHA, Europe PMC with HTTP 500, and NCBI’s E-utilities because the publisher does not allow full-text XML. So no work was read in its place. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). |
| LIT-1830 | Organizational Flexibility: Creating a Mindful and Purpose-Driven Organization | Bond (2018), chapter 11 (pp. 185–199) of Wilson & Hayes (eds.), Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science, Context Press. The statement of Bond’s organizational flexibility model, the ACT-derived account that Guida, Minutola and Presti (LIT-1218) recast, with the leader as the high-leverage route. Not read; the record knows it only through Guida et al. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-29, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. It is a chapter of an in-copyright book (Context Press, an imprint of New Harbinger, 2018) with no DOI; Crossref and OpenAlex hold no record of it. The publisher’s page sells the book and offers no chapter. Goldsmiths Research Online, Bond’s institutional repository, lists 42 of his items and not this chapter (checked 2026-10-29). Searches for an author’s upload (ResearchGate, academia.edu, the ACBS site) found only the related thesis of Gascoyne (2019) and the ACBS slides on the organisational flexibility measure, which are not this work. A whole-book copy would not count (ADR-064). The book’s table of contents, from the Czech national library service obalkyknih.cz, confirms the chapter and its pages. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1838 v2 | Radically open dialectical behaviour therapy for refractory depression: the RefraMED RCT | Lynch et al. (2018), Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation 5(7). The full report of the RefraMED trial (250 adults, RO DBT plus usual care against usual care): 5.40 HRSD points better at 7 months, not significantly better at the 12-month primary end-point (2.15) or at 18 months, and not cost-effective (£220,000 per QALY). Its mechanism analysis, using randomised non-therapeutic features as instruments for sessions, alliance and skills, failed: the instruments were weak and the decomposition implausible. All eight serious adverse reactions were in the RO DBT arm, which the authors put down to unequal reporting. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1421) in full, from the NIHR Journals Library’s own PDF (open access); worth reading as the full report of the RefraMED trial and the only place its mechanism analysis is given: a trial that randomised RO DBT participants to three non-therapeutic features (therapy room, written feedback, mode of reimbursement) and to therapists, to serve as instruments for exposure, alliance and skills. The instruments were weak (Cragg–Donald statistics at most 1) and, by the authors’ own account, the instrumented estimates mean nothing. Read it knowing that the analysed mediators are sessions attended, alliance and DBT skills, not the flexibility and emotional-coping measures, that the mediators and the outcome are both at 7 months, that the unadjusted decompositions put the indirect effect several times the total with a direct effect of the opposite sign, that the planned analyses of temporal order were not reported, that its process-measure intervals are about half as wide as the BJP paper’s for the same differences, and that its adverse-event test (one-tailed Fisher, p < 0.01) does not reproduce from its own counts. |
| LIT-1844 | Identifying the Underlying Mechanisms of Change During Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): A Systematic Review of Contemporary Mediation Studies | Stockton, Kellett, Berrios, Sirois, Wilkinson & Miles (2019). A systematic review of twelve mediation studies, 2006–2015, of ACT against an active treatment. Psychological flexibility mediated mental-health outcomes in four of five studies, and acceptance was the one process that mediated across kinds of outcome and more for ACT than for the comparison. Defusion and committed action mediated without being specific to ACT. Present-moment contact and values were tested once each, and the self as context never. All studies were of moderate quality, almost all underpowered or silent on power, mostly self-report, and only three showed the mediator changing first. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1456) from the accepted manuscript on White Rose Research Online (https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/137915/, CC BY-NC-ND), whose deposit lacks the tables, figures and quality appendix; worth reading as the systematic review of ACT mediation studies from 2006 to 2015 that updates Hayes et al. 2006 (LIT-555), and as a record that no study in that period tested the self as context. Read it knowing that it is narrative, with no pooled estimate, that all twelve studies were rated of moderate quality, and that only three established that the mediator changed before the outcome. |
| LIT-1846 | Experimental reductions of delay discounting and impulsive choice: A systematic review and meta-analysis | Rung & Madden (2018). A systematic review and category-wise meta-analysis of 92 papers that tried to reduce delay discounting or impulsive choice by non-pharmacological means, in humans and animals. Most kinds of manipulation reduced discounting (Q(9) = 224.68, I² = 64%). Learning-based procedures such as bundling and delay fading gave the largest and longest-lasting effects. Framing and priming moved one-off choices. Clinical interventions moved discounting little: mindfulness and ACT (two studies) only at trend level, g = 0.32, p = .06. Formal mediation analyses were rare, so how any of these manipulations works is largely unknown. | Active — read in part 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1440, Skimmed) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC6112163, NIHMS963171), fetched as PMC XML through NCBI’s E-utilities after the PMC web page put up a reCAPTCHA; worth reading as the systematic review and meta-analysis of 92 papers on reducing delay discounting by non-drug manipulations, and for its finding that mindfulness and ACT moved discounting only at trend level. Read it knowing that effect sizes are pooled only within categories, that publication bias was not assessed, and that its search ended on 1 March 2016. |
| LIT-1860 | Pushing and Coasting in Dynamic Goal Pursuit: Coasting Is Attenuated in Bipolar Disorder | Fulford, Johnson, Llabre & Carver (2010), Psychological Science 21(7):1021–1027. In 21 days of experience sampling on three self-chosen goals (n = 24), progress beyond what was expected was followed by less effort on that goal and progress short of it by more. People with bipolar I disorder in remission coasted less than controls. The paper states Carver’s (2003) view that positive affect lets a goal take lower priority, but measured no affect and no shift to other goals. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1442), from a JSTOR download of the published article posted on a Boston University research group’s page (https://sites.bu.edu/amplab/files/2024/06/Goal-pursuit.pdf), a copy that counts under ADR-064. An experience-sampling study of 24 people, 12 with bipolar I disorder in remission, rating effort, progress and expected progress on three of their own goals three times a day for 21 days. Progress beyond expectation was followed by less effort on that goal (coasting) and progress short of it by more (pushing); the BD group coasted significantly less. Affect was not measured: the paper restates Carver 2003 (LIT-1445) that positive affect lets a goal take lower priority, and tests only the progress-to-effort link it predicts. |
| LIT-1870 | Altering Impulsive Decision Making With an Acceptance-Based Procedure | Morrison, Madden, Odum, Friedel & Twohig (2014). Thirty undergraduates selected for steep discounting were randomized to one 60–90 minute acceptance-and-values session or a one-week waitlist. Discounting of hypothetical money fell more in the trained group (AUC 0.26 to 0.44, against 0.22 to 0.25; interaction p = .04). The AAQ-II and distress tolerance did not change relative to control. Pooling both groups’ pre- and post-training scores, discounting (d = .57) and distress tolerance improved and the AAQ-II only approached significance. The waitlist group’s own change in discounting after training was not significant. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1425) from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC5661961, NIHMS906394), fetched as PMC XML through NCBI’s E-utilities after the PMC web page put up a reCAPTCHA; worth reading as the first test of an acceptance-based intervention on delay discounting, in which discounting moved while the AAQ-II, the ACT process measure, did not. Read it knowing that it is a pilot of 30 students against a waitlist, that the waitlist group’s own pre–post change in discounting was not significant, and that a Hawthorne effect is the authors’ first limitation. |
| LIT-1964 v2 | Psychological need frustration as a transdiagnostic process in associations of self-critical perfectionism with depressive symptoms and eating pathology | Campbell, Boone, Vansteenkiste and Soenens (2018), Journal of Clinical Psychology 74(10). Belgian adolescents, a cross-sectional study (N = 284) and a two-wave study six months apart (N = 608). Need frustration, the twelve BPNSFS frustration items, mediates self-critical perfectionism’s link to depressive (CDI) and eating disorder (EDI-II) symptoms, and absorbs their association: cross-sectionally their latent correlation falls from .50 to .42 with perfectionism and to a non-significant .18 with frustration; in latent change models their correlated change falls from .43 to .39 and then .24. The authors call the findings correlational and ask for experiments, clinical samples and externalizing outcomes. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1533), from the publisher’s early-view PDF posted on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the study THEORY-052 cites, through LIT-561 p. 12, for need frustration as transdiagnostic, and as the strongest form of that claim in the record: frustration statistically absorbs the association between depressive and eating symptoms. Its longitudinal study is two waves of correlated change, so it shows no temporal order, and its measure is the BPNSFS frustration scale (THEORY-1322). |
| LIT-1974 v2 | Unhappy or unsatisfied: distinguishing the role of negative affect and need frustration in depressive symptoms over the academic year and during the COVID-19 pandemic | Levine, Brabander, Moore, Holding and Koestner (2021), Motivation and Emotion 46(1). Two cross-lagged panel studies of students at a Canadian university: three waves over 2018–19 (N = 379) and two waves six weeks apart at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 235). Need frustration (nine BMPN items), negative affect (five adjectives) and depressive symptoms (CESD-R 10). Need frustration predicted later depression (β = .13, .17; .18) and later negative affect (.18, .16; .17); negative affect never predicted later depression; depression predicted later frustration at Study 1’s first lag (.20). Self-reported frustration predicted others’ reports of depression marginally (β = .14, p = .074). The authors call frustration an antecedent and a transdiagnostic risk factor; the design shows the first only in a traditional cross-lagged model and does not reach the second. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1510), from the version of record in PMC’s Open Access Subset via Europe PMC; worth reading as prospective evidence, in two student samples, that a need-frustration self-report predicts later depressive symptoms where negative affect does not (β .13–.18). It does not establish order (no random intercepts; the reverse path was as large at one lag) or a transdiagnostic role (THEORY-1349). |