IntroductionThe Supreme Court's 2022 New York State Rifle Pistol Association v. Bruen decision recognized a constitutional right to carry firearms in public. Its 2024 United States v. Rahimi decision applied Bruen's historical approach, considering the affrighting tradition's going armed laws prohibiting carrying weapons in a manner that terrorized the public. Little experimental research has examined fear responses to visibly carried firearms in ordinary public encounters. The current preregistered between-subjects experiment examined whether firearm visibility was associated with fear, hostile intent attribution, perceived proximity, and avoidance or reporting intentions. The study also examined hostile intent attribution and perceived proximity as potential mediators of the association between firearm visibility and fear, and rural identity as a potential moderator.MethodsParticipants were 415 U.S. adults recruited through Prolific in February 2026 (ages 18–81; M = 41.31, SD = 12.46). Of these, 54.0% were male and 44.3% female; 71.6% identified as White, 10.4% Black, 9.2% Asian, and 4.6% Hispanic. Participants were randomly assigned to view one of two 6-second videos showing the same individual in a public setting, either carrying a visible firearm (n = 205) or no firearm (n = 210). Welch's t-tests compared conditions, and a bootstrapped parallel mediation model examined indirect effects on fear. Moderated regression and moderated mediation tested rural identity as a moderator.ResultsParticipants who viewed the armed individual reported greater fear (d = 1.15), hostile intent attribution (d = 1.47), perceived proximity (d = 0.87), and avoidance or reporting intentions (d = 1.86) than those who viewed the unarmed individual. Hostile intent attribution measured judgments about the individual's intentions, while perceived proximity measured felt closeness or intrusion. Together, these variables statistically accounted for approximately 81% of the total effect of firearm visibility on fear. Gun owners and non-owners showed similar differences between conditions, with no significant moderation by firearm ownership. Rural identity did not moderate the proposed pathways in the predicted direction.DiscussionThe findings provide experimental evidence that viewing a visibly armed individual in the setting studied was associated with greater fear, a response relevant to the historical affrighting tradition.
Population aging has heightened the need for interventions that prepare middle-aged adults for social connectedness after retirement while addressing ageism. This study examined a brief online WOOP-SET intervention that combined Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan (WOOP) exercises for loneliness prevention with a Stereotype Embodiment Theory (SET)-based message emphasizing continuity between the present self and the future older self. Two online studies were conducted with middle-aged Japanese regular employees aged 40–64 years. Study 1 used a single-group pre-post design (N = 200) and showed pre-to-post increases in behavioral intentions to engage in loneliness-prevention actions and decreases in ageism following the intervention. Study 2 used a larger quasi-randomized controlled design (N = 759) comparing the WOOP-SET intervention with an unrelated control task. Participants in the intervention condition showed a significantly greater increase in self-reported loneliness-prevention intentions than those in the control condition, whereas no significant between-condition effect on ageism was observed. These findings suggest that the combined WOOP-SET intervention may increase immediate preparatory intentions concerning post-retirement social connectedness, whereas its effect on ageism remains uncertain.
Delusions have long served psychopathology as a paradigm of meaning-making under existential pressure. Classical accounts describe an initial phase of Wahnstimmung—a diffuse, unsettling transformation of reality—followed by a dynamic expansion of significance, the emergence of delusional intuitions, and a gradual process of concretization and systematization into an increasingly incorrigible worldview. In the digital age, comparable forms of world-building can be observed beyond the individual level, within networked conspiracy movements.This article proposes a conceptual dialogue between phenomenological psychopathology and systems theory to elucidate how delusion-like collective realities may emerge and stabilize in online environments. While individual delusion formation involves intrapsychic Wahnarbeit driven by affective urgency and the need for explanation, conspiracy world-building externalizes and distributes this interpretive labor across communities of communication. Meaning is collaboratively produced, reinforced, and immunized against correction through iterative narrative elaboration.Drawing on the notion of communicative closure, conspiracy movements can be understood as self-referential meaning systems in which disconfirming evidence is not experienced as falsification but is re-coded as further proof of hidden agency and systemic deception. The result is a resilient epistemic enclosure that persists even as individual participants may disengage.Using QAnon as an empirically grounded illustrative case, the analysis examines collaborative knowledge production, increasingly endogenous information circulation, and the reinterpretation of disconfirmed predictions. It thereby highlights structural homologies between delusion genesis and digitally mediated collective meaning-making, while emphasizing the ethical necessity of avoiding clinical pathologization of political belief. The framework offers implications for cultural psychiatry in conceptualizing contemporary forms of networked reality construction.
Schools are important social contexts for both students and teachers and play a critical role in students' political socialization. When controversial issues such as conspiracy theories are voiced in the classroom, teachers are particularly important actors, as they are often the ones who must immediately and professionally respond to them. While existing research highlights that teachers often feel insufficiently prepared to respond to conspiracy claims made by students, the role of their self-efficacy beliefs has not been studied yet, even though it is an important prerequisite for successful action. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 397), we therefore investigated whether exposure to a conspiratorial (vs. non-conspiratorial) student statement reduces pre-service teachers' self-efficacy and whether this effect is associated with emotional responses. Exploratory analyses showed that the pre-service teachers in the conspiracy condition reported lower self-efficacy than those in the non-conspiracy condition. In the pre-registered parallel multiple mediation model, this association was mediated jointly by heightened anger and anxiety, and reduced calmness (total indirect effect), however the specific indirect effects were not significant. In exploratory single mediator models, all emotions mediated the effect of conspiracy exposure on self-efficacy. Exploratorily, we also analyzed open-text responses from 329 pre-service teachers describing how they would respond in such a situation. Despite lower self-efficacy in the conspiracy condition, pre-service teachers still reported intended response strategies consistent with pedagogically recommended approaches, such as engaging students in discussion, acknowledging rather than singling out students, and promoting critical thinking. Overall, these findings highlight schools as important contexts in which the interpersonal consequences of conspiracy beliefs unfold and underscore the need to better prepare teachers to respond adequately to such statements.
Crisis communication is embedded in decisions about protection, acceptable burdens, and the conditions for changing course. The same protection statement can accompany procedures that support scrutiny and adaptation or procedures that discourage relevant challenge. This Hypothesis and Theory article proposes a function-sensitive process framework for examining these differences. Its unit is a bounded message–decision episode. The framework distinguishes objective hazard, perceived threats to health, livelihood, social connection and autonomy, affective distress, and experienced burdens. It incorporates authoritarian predispositions, political identity, recognized authority, competing messages, and feedback between communication and threat appraisal. Regulatory function is treated as a provisional interpretation of independently observed sequences, rather than a property inferred from the outcome it is supposed to predict. Six hypotheses address conditional evidence closure, immediate certainty and later information sampling, incremental prediction of updating, targeted burden mitigation, an added decision-and-review record, and trust following disclosure of adverse consequences. Proposed tests separate message wording, policy substance, source, procedures, and subsequent outcomes; strong comparisons include established accounts of threat, identity, risk, reactance, and procedural justice. Pandemic public health and social measures provide a worked domain, supplemented by explicitly hypothetical heat and flood examples. A bounded transfer to psychotherapeutic care concerns institutional communication, feedback, and decision review. The framework offers a researchable integration whose additional explanatory and practical value remains to be established. Its central test compares predictions of later evidence-sensitive adaptation with established alternatives using the same records and observation times.
