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).
14 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-045 v4 | Is a mental disorder that outlasts its trigger a protective lock-in at the individual scale, a regime kept stable by behaviour that blocks its own disconfirmation while the capacity to leave it degrades, and does cutting the maintaining link, with the regime’s content held fixed, produce lasting change? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-079, CLAIM-025, CLAIM-099 and CLAIM-018. THEORY-058, THEORY-050, THEORY-052 and THEORY-053 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-056 | When the mechanisms composing a will-organization are described by control theory and executive-control research, does that description implement the will-organization account or replace it, and what result would show the agent-level description had become idle? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-024, CLAIM-021, CLAIM-122 and CLAIM-174. THEORY-048 answers it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-267 | When the ordering that prevails a system’s negotiation ranks its states by a proxy for its maintenance rather than by its maintenance, as a firm’s potential metric may, is that valence, and is it the form that metric fixation in organizations and addiction in persons share? | TERM-076 restricts valence to an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential of the system’s own states by their bearing on its maintenance. A potential ordering can instead rank them by a proxy that has come apart from maintenance. Wells Fargo’s cross-sell metric (CASE-151) is a candidate: treated as the firm’s standing, it was not its viability. The question is whether such potential is valence, and whether it is a common form of organizational metric fixation and of addiction. | Open |
| QUESTION-292 v2 | What evidence would show that a maintaining link, and not a regime’s content, keeps a disorder in place: does the efficacy of a treatment that targets the link count, or only change in the link that is specific and comes before the outcome? | The evidential part of QUESTION-045, split off by the status review of 2026-10-27 under ADR-049, because THEORY-053 (Active) settles it. A treatment’s efficacy is not evidence for its theory of change. Only change in the theorised process that is specific and comes before the outcome bears on it, and moving the process without moving the outcome counts against the theory. | Answered |
| QUESTION-297 | When the effects of trauma reach descendants who did not live through it, by which route do they travel: germline epigenetics, the womb, parenting, or a group’s narrative and identity; and on the identity route, does an ancestor’s injury become part of the descendant’s self? | The owner’s question of 2026-10-29, beside the legacy line: the past acting on later generations, where legacy is the living acting for them. Claims of epigenetic transmission of trauma rest on animal work (Dias and Ressler) and small human studies (Yehuda et al.), against a sceptical consensus that mammalian germline reprogramming blocks it. Meta-analyses find little general second- or third-generation harm among Holocaust survivors’ descendants. On the cultural route, a group’s past injury becomes part of its identity (chosen trauma, cultural trauma), which is the owner’s extended self running backward in time. | Open |
| QUESTION-303 | After cued traumatic recall, do people with persistent PTSD sample disambiguating peripheral context less than matched trauma-exposed controls, and does restoring that sampling during the same exposure produce lasting change that the exposure alone does not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-285, moved here when the eighth status review narrowed THEORY-285 to what its simulations showed and promoted it, as THEORY-178’s moved to QUESTION-172. The model makes the prediction; whether people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-307 | In dialectical behaviour therapy, do skills-homework completion and phone coaching predict falling urges and less frequent target behaviour once baseline functioning and motivation are controlled and patients with missing diary data are kept, and does skill use between sessions mediate the change? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-922, moved here when the tenth status review promoted THEORY-922, whose title claims only the correlations in one programme’s selected sample, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the associations replicate, and what carries them, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-325 | Is persistent avoidance in anxiety maintained by an inflated uncertainty estimate about the avoided states, as Brown, Price and Dombrovski propose, or by a pessimistic evaluation of one’s own future avoidance, as Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw propose, rather than by an inflated threat value? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-910 and THEORY-915, moved here together when the thirteenth status review promoted both, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. They are the two belief-maintained rivals CLAIM-446’s test must hold fixed. | Open |
| QUESTION-326 | Does reducing safety behaviours lower symptoms, and instructed increases raise them, in diagnosed anxiety disorders, in pre-registered trials with active controls and masked rationale or a larger meta-analysis, once publication bias and expectancy are accounted for? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-903, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-903, whose title claims only the meta-analytic estimates, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects survive bias, expectancy and diagnosed samples is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-327 | Does available avoidance leave threat expectancy uncorrected in proportion to how few unavoided disconfirming trials it allows, in people with anxiety disorders as in healthy controls, and does performing and then losing an unsignalled avoidance response raise threat expectancy for a stimulus never paired with harm, scaling with how much the person avoided? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-901 and THEORY-920, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to what Mancinelli and Bach’s review reports and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask what avoidance does to threat expectancy, outside the signalled, healthy-volunteer paradigms the review covers. | Open |
| QUESTION-329 | In people with fear-based anxiety disorders against controls, does a systematic search with meta-analysis, or a large preregistered study, find that what differs is the adjustment of learning rate to the kind of uncertainty, noise against volatility, mainly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation do not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-897, moved here when the thirteenth status review narrowed THEORY-897 to Brown, Price and Dombrovski’s reading of seven studies and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern holds in a systematic synthesis is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-330 | How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-907 and THEORY-917, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to Chou, Wilson and Smith’s review and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask whether the review’s patterns hold with facets, tasks and confounds separated. | Open |
| QUESTION-331 | In a second, preferably pre-registered sample with a cost attached to avoiding, do anxiety-disorder patients again avoid a safety cue more than controls but danger cues no more, keep a higher threat expectancy after effective avoidance, and report more relief at omissions, with rated aversiveness matched or controlled? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-912, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-912, whose title claims only what one cross-sectional study measured (ADR-047’s one-study ruling), as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern replicates is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-333 | Does how far fear falls within or across exposure or extinction sessions predict fear at follow-up once initial fear is controlled, in the studies Craske et al. 2014 cite or a later meta-analysis, and in well-powered clinical samples? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-921, moved here when the fourteenth status review narrowed THEORY-921 to what Craske et al.’s review reports and promoted it, as THEORY-920’s moved to QUESTION-327. The review reports the finding from six cited studies, mostly of analog samples; whether the primary studies and clinical samples bear it out is this question. | Open |