This qualitative study draws on 12 semi-structured interviews with Anabaptist pastors in Western Pennsylvania (July 2022) to examine how they responded to communicative pressure during the Covid-19 pandemic at a time when congregants disagreed sharply about risk, responsibility, appropriate church responses, and competing interpretations of public-health guidance (e.g. masking, gathering, vaccination). Pastors found that they were expected to address these conflictual issues and to serve as their congregations' public-facing spokesperson, although they often lacked medical expertise. These data suggested seven themes: rural constraints and technology adaptation; decision-making and spokesperson burden; exploring methods of outreach; reopening churches and facing changes; masks as a focal point for division; vaccinations as a focal point for division; and exit, loss, and post-crisis fatigue.
Recent work has replicated Zullow and Seligman's (1990) finding that presidential-candidate optimism predicts election outcomes (Blyler et al., 2026). The present preregistered study examines a broader proposition: whether a nine-construct embedding-based framework of presidential rhetoric — spanning optimism, humility, affiliative humor, cooperation, pessimism, fear-mongering, defensiveness, aggression, and antagonism — predicts within-administration approval change. 470,995 speaker-turn chunks from U.S. presidential news conferences and press briefings, 1945–2025, were scored via cosine similarities between text-embedding-3-large vectors and per-construct centroids built from psychological-scale anchors; the anchor set was validated by two large language models (Cohen's κ .71–1.00). Preregistered multilevel models found no relationship between net rhetorical valence and subsequent approval at 7-, 14-, or 28- day lags; the null was robust to outlier trimming, leave-one-administration-out resampling, and a linearity check. The nine constructs collapse to one latent dimension at daily aggregation (r = −.98). Exploratory analyses surfaced a base-mobilization pattern: Antagonism positively and Optimism negatively predicted co-partisan approval. Within this multi-dimensional framework, presidential rhetoric does not appear to predict daily approval change.
The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war has intensified mental health challenges in Ukraine, a country already marked by elevated rates of psychological conditions and Soviet-era stigma that discourages help-seeking. This context demands innovative approaches to clinician training and protocol development that equip practitioners with structured, evidence-based tools for trauma treatment. The aim of this research is to investigate the integration of BRAVEMIND Ukraine, an immersive virtual reality (VR)-based clinical environment under development, with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Through a review of existing literature and clinical experience, this paper identifies three theoretical integration points for immersive VR within the EMDR standard protocol and proposes that the future-template-building stage represents the most suitable entry point. The primary result is a practical EMDR Future Template script designed for use with BRAVEMIND Ukraine, providing clinicians with a step-by-step protocol for conducting EMDR procedures within an immersive VR environment. While VR has been increasingly explored in trauma treatment (including tools that deliver bilateral stimulation within a VR headset while still relying on imaginal exposure), no published protocol exists for conducting scripted EMDR procedures within fully immersive, navigable virtual environments, a gap this paper directly addresses. Although developed for BRAVEMIND Ukraine, the model is adaptable to other immersive VR platforms, offering a generalizable framework for clinician training in structured therapies delivered within immersive environments. Future empirical research, including randomized controlled trials, is recommended to establish efficacy and identify optimal patient populations
This chapter argues that meaningful healthcare reform requires returning to foundational questions about purpose and structure rather than incremental system adjustments. Three critical fractures impede reform: eroding public trust (declining from 51% to 32% between 2020-2025), failure to progress beyond goods and services delivery to patient transformation, and consolidation-driven system design that undermines patient-centered care while fueling physician burnout. Before proposing solutions, the authors insist healthcare leaders must address five worldview questions: What is healthcare for? What is a patient? What good are we pursuing? What does it mean to be a healer? What system best serves human dignity? Only then can leaders effectively apply the six-component Strategy Development Process: Strategic Foresight, Strategic Thinking, Strategic Innovation, Strategic Planning, Strategic Implementation, and Strategic Analysis and Assessment. This framework enables continuous adaptation in an era of exponential change while maintaining moral clarity and operational excellence.
Although abortion remains one of the most prevalent and controversial political and social issues in the United States, academic and policy research on the determinants of state abortion policies is surprisingly sparse, and most existing studies are cross-sectional. In our research, we utilize a new panel dataset on abortion policy covering the post-Casey years to explore these determinants. Our findings reveal that the Ranney Index, indicating the measure of Democrat control in state government, increases the likelihood of fewer abortion restrictions in the state, aligning with expectations and previous literature. Interestingly, liberal citizen ideology slightly decreases the odds of reducing abortion restrictions. Another surprising finding is that higher median household income and a greater share of the population that is college-educated are associated with restrictions to abortion services.
