Personal expressiveness has its roots in eudaimonic identity theory, a neo-Eriksonian framework developed by psychologist Alan Waterman that connects identity development with well-being research. The theory draws on Aristotle’s idea of the daimon, the set of inherent potentials, capacities, and interests that give direction to a person’s development. When people engage in activities that express those potentials, they report a distinctive subjective fit, a feeling that the activity reflects their true self rather than merely producing pleasure or enjoyment. Decades of research have linked this experience to identity commitment, identity achievement, autonomy, flow, and positive emotion, while showing that it remains statistically distinct from hedonic enjoyment. In other words, personal expressiveness is not just feeling good; it is feeling real.

What has remained surprisingly unclear is how this experience relates to the social world. Classic studies of college students found that the activities rated as most personally expressive were often relational ones: spending time with friends, helping others, engaging with a romantic partner, or participating in religious and community life. Waterman himself concluded that activities experienced as personally expressive are likely to involve connections with others. Theoretical perspectives converge on the same intuition. Self-determination theory treats relatedness as a basic psychological need, the belongingness hypothesis frames social bonds as a fundamental human motivation, and Erikson’s lifespan model holds that identity is enacted and confirmed through participation in social roles. Yet almost no research had directly tested how personal expressiveness unfolds in the social contexts of adult daily life.

The first study addressed the question at the level of activities. Waxler analyzed cross-sectional data from 294 adults aged 23 to 78, with an average age of about 40, who each nominated an activity they considered important, meaningful, and descriptive of themselves. Participants had typically pursued these activities for roughly 18 years, underscoring how deeply embedded identity-relevant pursuits become in adult life. Each person rated the activity on the six-item feelings of personal expressiveness subscale of the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire, a measure asking, among other things, whether the activity feels like what the respondent is meant to do. Internal consistency was high, and participants also reported whether the activity was typically individual, group or team based, or both.

The results defied the pattern seen in younger samples. Personal expressiveness did not differ reliably across social formats, with the analysis of variance yielding an effect size near zero, and nonparametric robustness checks confirmed the null result. When activities were coded into domains and grouped into other-oriented categories such as socializing and religious or altruistic pursuits versus everything else, relational activities did show descriptively higher expressiveness, 5.81 versus 5.39 on a seven-point scale, but the difference fell short of statistical significance, partly because only 20 activities fell into the other-oriented group. Crucially, expressiveness also showed striking continuity across the adult lifespan: levels did not differ between emerging, established, middle, and later adulthood, and the link between activity characteristics and expressive classification held steady in every age group.

That null pattern at the activity level pointed to a possibility that broad categories may simply be the wrong lens. If personal expressiveness in adulthood is not strongly structured by whether an activity is typically done alone or with others, perhaps it varies moment to moment depending on the situation. The second study tested exactly that using experience sampling, a method that captures life as it happens rather than in retrospect. Fifty-two adults, averaging about 40 years of age, received six random prompts per day on their smartphones for seven days, drawn from a 14-hour window matched to their sleep schedule. Of 2,184 prompts, 1,478 were completed, a compliance rate of nearly 68 percent. At each signal, participants rated three adapted items measuring momentary personal expressiveness and reported whether they were alone or with others.

The momentary data told a very different story from the retrospective one. Across all observations, personal expressiveness averaged 4.55, but it was significantly lower when people were alone, 4.31, than when they were with others, 4.79, a moderate difference. More strikingly, 76 percent of the variability in expressiveness occurred within individuals across moments rather than between them, meaning that the feeling of being one’s true self fluctuates substantially over the course of a single day. To untangle the temporal dynamics, Waxler estimated a Bayesian lagged multilevel mediation model that asked whether above-average expressiveness at one moment predicted social presence at that moment, and whether social presence in turn carried forward to the next prompt.

The model’s estimates were precise and internally consistent. Above-average momentary expressiveness was associated with roughly 53 percent higher odds of being with others at the same prompt, with an odds ratio of 1.53 and a 95 percent credible interval well above one. Being with others at one moment, in turn, more than tripled the odds of being with others at the next prompt, an odds ratio of 3.42, reflecting the simple but powerful fact that social engagement tends to persist. The indirect effect of expressiveness on subsequent sociality through concurrent social presence was positive, with a posterior probability exceeding 0.99 that the effect exceeded zero, while the direct effect of expressiveness on later sociality was essentially zero. In plain terms, feeling deeply yourself and being with others travel together in the moment, and because social moments chain together, expressive moments are embedded in ongoing stretches of connection.

The combined findings reshape how scientists should think about authenticity in adulthood. Broad activity categories, it turns out, capture little of the action: by midlife, intrinsically motivated pursuits are so long-standing and integrated into the self that whether one paints alone or volunteers in a group matters less than theorists once assumed. Instead, personal expressiveness appears to function as a momentary process through which established identities are socially enacted. The pattern fits neatly with broaden-and-build theory, which holds that positive experiences expand thought-action repertoires and build social resources over time, and with self-determination theory, suggesting that expressiveness may mark the experiential integration of autonomy, competence, and relatedness during identity-congruent activity. It also echoes earlier diary research showing that eudaimonic activity predicts greater meaning the following day, hinting at upward spirals linking authentic engagement and connection.

The authors are careful about limits. The data are correlational, so the studies cannot determine whether being with others produces expressiveness, whether expressive people seek company, or whether both flow from unmeasured factors. The experience sampling sample was small and locally recruited, social context was reduced to a simple alone-versus-with-others distinction, and the first study relied on a single self-nominated activity per person. Still, this appears to be among the first research programs to measure personal expressiveness in real time, and the approach opens a window that retrospective questionnaires cannot provide. If the findings hold in larger and more diverse samples, they carry an arresting implication: the experience of being most fully oneself may be inseparable from the experience of being with others, a reminder that even the most inward sense of authenticity is, at root, profoundly social.

Subject of Research: Personal expressiveness as a momentary, socially embedded marker of eudaimonic identity functioning in adult daily life

Article Title: With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life

Article References: Waxler, E. A. (2026). With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life. Journal of Adult Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Keywords: personal expressiveness, eudaimonia, identity, experience sampling, social context, adult development, well-being, self-determination theory, authenticity, daily life, positive psychology, Journal of Adult Development

The distinction between role-play and real play may sound like a matter of semantics, but the research team argues it cuts to the psychological core of how therapy skills are actually acquired. Traditional role-play asks a resident to simulate a depressed patient while a colleague improvises therapeutic techniques at them. Both participants know the exercise is artificial, and that knowledge shapes behavior. The trainee-therapist may perform techniques mechanically, focused on hitting checklist items rather than responding to a human being. The trainee-patient, meanwhile, must fabricate distress, which can flatten the emotional texture that real clinical conversations demand. Real play attempts to close that gap. By inviting participants to discuss actual, self-selected experiences of a mild or moderate nature, the exercise preserves emotional authenticity while staying within safe boundaries, since no participant is asked to expose anything they are not willing to share.

The theoretical rationale for this approach draws on a substantial body of prior work. Reviews of clinical role-play in mental health education have documented both its value and its limitations: learners appreciate the opportunity to rehearse therapeutic communication, but they frequently report that simulated encounters feel stilted, unconvincing, or even embarrassing. Studies comparing peer counseling with role-playing in clinical psychology training have explored whether working with real, non-simulated material improves skill acquisition, and mixed-methods systematic reviews of cognitive behavioral therapy training have repeatedly flagged the emotional intensity of the learning process as a barrier for trainees. The Alberta team positioned their case study within this conversation, asking whether the emotional weight that residents carry into CBT training could be reduced by changing not the curriculum but the format of practice itself.

Methodologically, the study is a case study with a qualitative backbone, and the authors are transparent about that scope. The interventions were designed and delivered by Fu and Hibbard, while Pazderka contributed to the data analysis, and the team analyzed learner experiences using thematic analysis, the widely used method introduced by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke for identifying patterns of meaning across qualitative data. Their reporting follows established standards for qualitative research in medical education, which emphasize transparency about data collection, analysis, and the position of the researchers. Ethics approval to share the findings was granted by the human research ethics review board at the University of Alberta under protocol Pro00154080. The authors reported no conflicts of interest, and the data underlying the study are available upon request.

What emerged from the analysis, according to the study’s title and framing, are two linked outcomes: enhanced authenticity and reduced stress. The authenticity finding speaks to the felt quality of the practice sessions. When the conversation in a training exercise is anchored to a real experience rather than an invented one, the therapeutic micro-skills being taught, such as open questioning, reflective listening, guided discovery, and the collaborative shaping of a cognitive formulation, are exercised against genuine material. Learners reportedly found that this made the practice feel truer to what actual therapy demands, narrowing the notoriously difficult transfer gap between the classroom and the clinic. The stress reduction finding is equally consequential, because anxiety during supervised practice can itself interfere with learning, narrowing attention and encouraging defensive performance rather than open experimentation with new techniques.

The emotional dimension of CBT training is not a peripheral concern. Prior qualitative work with psychiatry residents has documented the lived experience of learning CBT as demanding and at times destabilizing, with trainees describing doubts about their competence and discomfort at being observed while attempting an unfamiliar therapeutic stance. Broader literature on impostor syndrome among physicians and physicians in training suggests that these feelings are common and can erode well-being across the trajectory of medical education. A scoping review published in 2025 extended that picture across medical undergraduates and postgraduate professionals, linking impostor feelings to measurable impacts on well-being. Against this backdrop, a training format that measurably reduces stress while preserving rigor has an obvious appeal, particularly in psychiatry, where national surveys as far back as 2007 have documented uneven and sometimes ambivalent resident perceptions of psychotherapy training.

The clinical context also matters. Cognitive behavioral therapy occupies a central position in evidence-based guidelines for major depressive disorder, including the 2022 clinical practice guidelines from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense and the 2023 update from the Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments. Teaching it well is therefore not an optional enrichment but a guideline-anchored obligation for residency programs. Yet the standard textbook accounts, exemplified by the widely used Beck and Beck volume now in its third edition, describe a sophisticated set of conceptual and technical skills that take years to integrate. If the rehearsal format itself adds avoidable anxiety, programs may be paying a hidden cost in both trainee well-being and skill consolidation. Real play offers a candidate for reducing that cost without diluting the material being practiced.

The authors are careful about the limits of what a case study can establish. Published as a case study in Academic Psychiatry, the work reports the experience of a specific educational intervention at a single institution rather than the results of a controlled comparison across cohorts. Thematic analysis captures patterns of meaning in participants’ accounts, not effect sizes, and the findings are shaped by the local curriculum, the facilitators, and the group involved. The team’s own reference list includes a systematic review of therapist resilience, underscoring that the well-being of clinicians in training is an active research field in its own right. What the case study contributes is a concrete, low-cost modification with a plausible mechanism, one that other programs can pilot, adapt, and evaluate rather than a definitive prescription for psychotherapy pedagogy everywhere.

Even so, the implications reach beyond a single residency seminar. Medical educators have long wrestled with the tension between simulation, which protects patients and allows safe repetition, and authenticity, which is what makes practice transfer to real encounters. Communication skills teaching in medicine has accumulated decades of guidance on maximizing the benefits of role-play, and interprofessional and counselor education have explored affective and relational pedagogies that engage learners’ genuine emotional lives. The Alberta findings align with a broader movement in health professions education that treats emotional authenticity not as a hazard to be managed but as a resource to be harnessed. If real play continues to show benefits in larger and more controlled studies, the humble swap of a fabricated patient for a real, carefully bounded personal experience could become a small but meaningful fix in one of psychiatry training’s most persistently stressful corners.

For now, the study stands as an invitation to experiment. Its authors suggest, through their design and framing, that the emotional architecture of skills training deserves the same careful engineering as the curriculum content itself. Residents learning CBT are being asked to do something genuinely difficult: to think in a new structured way while simultaneously attending warmly and flexibly to another person’s distress. Reducing the artificiality of the practice environment appears to lighten that double load, allowing trainees to be more fully present and, in the authors’ terms, more authentic. As psychotherapy remains a guideline-recommended treatment for depression and allied conditions, the question of how to train its practitioners humanely and effectively will only grow in importance. This case study offers an early, thoughtfully documented answer: make the play real, and the learning may follow.

Subject of Research: Real play versus role-play methods for reducing stress and enhancing authenticity in psychiatry residents' cognitive behavioral therapy training

Article Title: Real Play Enhances Authenticity and Reduces Stress in Learning Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Article References: Real Play Enhances Authenticity and Reduces Stress in Learning Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02427-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02427-4

Keywords: cognitive behavioral therapy, real play, role-play, psychiatry residency, medical education, psychotherapy training, qualitative research, thematic analysis, trainee stress, impostor syndrome, authenticity, University of Alberta

The research team, led by Neda Naqdi Babaee and Saeedeh Shamsaee of Mazandaran University of Science and Technology together with Mohammad Ali Shams of Babol University of Medical Sciences, adopted a qualitative design centered on the perspectives of the audience itself. Rather than analyzing advertisements from a purely rhetorical distance, the researchers asked the people who actually watch these clips what makes them work. Forty Iranian English teachers were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews, a sampling strategy that ensured participants had direct professional familiarity with both language teaching and the social media ecosystem in which teacherpreneurs operate. Each participant viewed and discussed ten highly viewed Instagram clips produced by prominent entrepreneurial teachers, providing a shared reference point that grounded the conversations in concrete, comparable material.

The technical backbone of the analysis was MAXQDA, version 2022, a widely used software package for qualitative data analysis. Interview transcripts were systematically coded, allowing the researchers to identify recurring patterns across forty distinct sets of perceptions and to move from individual impressions toward robust thematic categories. This kind of computer-assisted thematic coding is increasingly standard in applied linguistics and educational research because it imposes discipline on what can otherwise be a subjective interpretive process. By tagging segments of speech and clustering them into themes, the team could trace how often particular persuasive features were mentioned, in what contexts, and with what evaluative weight, producing a structured map of audience judgment rather than a loose collection of anecdotes.

Three factors emerged with particular force. Speaker credibility, emotional appeals, and varied sentence structures were identified as the elements that most significantly influenced the success of the advertisements. Credibility, in this context, was not simply a matter of credentials displayed in a bio. Teachers in the study judged teacherpreneurs by the confidence and professionalism of their delivery, the coherence of their message, and the sense that the person on screen genuinely knew the craft of language teaching. Emotional appeals operated alongside this expertise, with successful clips tapping into learners’ anxieties, aspirations, and desire for progress. Varied sentence structures, meanwhile, kept the delivery dynamic and engaging, preventing the monotony that quickly loses viewers in a fast-paced visual medium.

Underlying these surface features, the thematic analysis identified five main themes that organize how audiences make sense of teacherpreneur advertising: audience engagement strategies, the link between marketing and education, authenticity and effective communication, teacher credibility in the eyes of the audience, and educational effectiveness. The first theme captured the tactics teacherpreneurs use to hook and hold attention, from direct address to relatable classroom scenarios. The second highlighted a tension and a synergy: the best advertisements were seen not as pure sales pitches but as hybrid artifacts in which a genuine teaching moment doubles as a demonstration of the seller’s competence. When a short clip actually teaches something useful, it simultaneously advertises the teacher’s ability to teach, collapsing the traditional boundary between content marketing and instruction.

Authenticity proved to be perhaps the most delicate ingredient. Participants repeatedly emphasized that effective communication depended on an authentic, believable presentation, and that audiences appear remarkably sensitive to performances that feel staged or exaggerated. Clarity of message delivery was repeatedly named as a key factor affecting engagement, alongside the presenter’s credibility and the believability of the overall performance. This finding resonates with broader research on parasocial trust in influencer marketing, but it carries a distinctive educational twist. A language teacher who exaggerates results or oversells a method risks not only a lost sale but damage to the professional trust on which all teaching depends. The teachers in the study appeared to reward restraint and transparency as much as charisma.

The fifth theme, educational effectiveness, connects the study to larger debates about the commercialization of language education. Teacherpreneurship, in which educators build businesses around their personal brands, has grown explosively on platforms like Instagram, particularly in contexts such as Iran where private English education is a major industry and social media offers a direct channel to prospective students. The study suggests that this commercial ecosystem is not inherently at odds with pedagogical quality. On the contrary, the perceptions gathered here indicate that audiences evaluate teacherpreneur advertisements through an educational lens, asking whether the person behind the advertisement can actually deliver the learning outcomes being promised. Marketing that demonstrates real teaching skill earns approval; marketing that substitutes hype for substance invites skepticism.

The methodological choices of the study deserve attention for what they reveal about how such questions can be investigated. Purposive sampling of forty teachers ensured that every participant was positioned to comment meaningfully on both the linguistic and commercial dimensions of the clips. Semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to follow unexpected lines of thought while still covering a consistent set of prompts across participants, and the use of ten shared stimulus clips reduced the variability that plagues studies of social media content. The thematic coding in MAXQDA 2022 then transformed a large volume of conversational data into five coherent themes, a pipeline that other researchers studying educational influencers on TikTok, YouTube, or other platforms could readily adapt. The study was approved by the Mazandaran University of Science and Technology Ethics Committee, with informed consent obtained from all participants, and the authors report no competing interests and no external funding.

For teacherpreneurs themselves, the practical implications are direct. Credibility must be built and signaled, not merely claimed. Emotional connection matters, but it works best when anchored to genuine pedagogical substance. Delivery should be varied and clear, avoiding both monotony and theatrical excess. And authenticity, that most overused of marketing buzzwords, emerges here as a measurable audience expectation: viewers judge whether the presentation is believable, and their willingness to engage follows from that judgment. For teacher educators and researchers, the study opens questions about how prospective teachers should be prepared for a professional landscape in which self-presentation and marketing literacy are increasingly part of the job. For platforms and regulators, it hints at the standards by which educational advertising is informally policed by audiences themselves.

The broader significance of the work lies in its reframing of social media advertising as a site of educational perception. The teachers who watched these Instagram clips were not passive consumers but active evaluators, applying professional criteria to commercial messages. Their collective verdict, distilled through qualitative analysis, is that persuasion in educational marketing rests on a tripod of credibility, emotion, and craft, with authenticity as the load-bearing joint between them. As language teaching continues its migration toward digital and hybrid formats, understanding how teachers and learners judge the people who sell it online will only grow in importance. This study provides an early, carefully documented map of that judgment, drawn directly from the professionals who know best what good teaching looks like, even when it arrives in a sixty-second clip between advertisements for everything else.

Subject of Research: EFL teachers' perceptions of teacherpreneurs' persuasive techniques in Instagram advertisements

Article Title: EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram

Article References: Naqdi Babaee, N., Shamsaee, S., & Shams, M. A. (2026). EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Keywords: teacherpreneurs, TEFL, Instagram, persuasive techniques, marketing, EFL teachers, credibility, emotional appeals, authenticity, social media advertising, qualitative research, thematic analysis

The timing of the research could hardly have been more charged. In October 2025, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that AI had entered WWE’s creative process, and months later TKO Group Holdings President Mark Shapiro acknowledged that Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, uses AI in storylines. WWE clarified that its current AI use is largely confined to video edits, highlight packages and audio noise reduction, but for fans who had spent years reading between the lines of every backstage leak, the distinction felt almost irrelevant. The genie, as the researchers put it, was already out of the bottle.

Professional wrestling occupies a unique position in this debate because it is arguably the most liminal genre in popular culture, neither pure sport nor pure theatre but a hybrid resting on a fragile contract known as kayfabe. Kayfabe is the sustained illusion that rivalries and victories are real, even when everyone knows they are scripted. It is not about deception but about collective buy-in. The study asks what happens when the presumed writer is no longer human but an algorithm trained on decades of television transcripts, and whether AI in effect turns heel by breaking wrestling’s oldest covenant.

Using netnography, a form of ethnographic research adapted for online communities, the authors analysed public discourse across three subreddits, r/SquaredCircle, r/WWE and the satirical r/SCJerk, over a ten-week period between November 2025 and May 2026. They gathered live event threads, conducted keyword searches for terms such as AI and ChatGPT, and applied snowball sampling until every identified topic reached saturation. Reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase procedure produced three dominant themes, each revealing a different strategy by which fans negotiate algorithmic authorship.

The first theme the researchers call the forensic gaze, a heightened form of textual and visual inspection in which fans evaluate content not by whether it advances a storyline but by whether a human created it at all. The phenomenon crystallised around the April 2026 NXT video package featuring Zaria, which fans overwhelmingly condemned for its AI-generated appearance, citing asynchronous mouth movement, missing background blur and a plastic sheen on skin textures. More than 150 separate comment threads debated the package, with side-by-side comparisons to older, human-made WWE videos serving both as evidence and as demonstrations of community authority. The gaze extended to language itself, with fans claiming they could identify machine-written promos by their symmetric sentences, absence of colloquialisms and lack of heat behind the words.

Yet the forensic gaze also uncovered an uncomfortable truth. A minority of fans confessed that formulaic human writing had become so predictable that they could not reliably distinguish it from machine output. As one commenter asked, would AI really be worse than the fifteenth identical cookie-cutter promo of the year? This liminal case, the authors argue, suggests that algorithmic kayfabe can taint the viewing experience retrospectively, raising the possibility that humans have already been performing something close to algorithmic work long before machines arrived to formalise it.

The second theme centres on affective rejection, condensed in the label fans gave to unwanted AI content: AI slop. The term carries theoretical weight beyond its insult value, connoting waste, matter out of place and something generated without intent, care or craft rather than created. Outrage spiked after the NXT video packages, and 62 mentions of AI slop appeared on r/SquaredCircle compared with 34 on r/WWE and only 12, mostly sarcastic, on r/SCJerk. The researchers connect this fury to the moral economy of creative labour, noting comments such as the observation that WWE will pay Roman Reigns twenty million dollars but will not pay a video editor sixty thousand. Fans, the study finds, have become political economists of culture, framing AI authorship not merely as poor output but as dispossession.

Beneath the anger lies what the authors identify as an ontological violation. Fans distinguished carefully between the first fake, the deliberate theatrical artifice of kayfabe in which they knowingly participate, and a second fake, an algorithmic simulation of that artistry with no human intention behind it. One fan summarised it bluntly: the problem is not that wrestling is fake, which is obvious, but that when AI writes it, there is no human performance behind it at all. Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis, the researchers describe this as a keying of a keying, a simulation of a simulation that audiences cannot trace and therefore cannot re-enter, rupturing the ritual contract between performer and spectator.

The third and most theoretically generative theme is parodic absorption, exemplified by r/SCJerk, where fans neither detect nor rage but instead swallow the AI threat whole through elaborate comedy. Users crafted a fictional AI-written return storyline for Bobby Lashley obsessed with Japanese culture, an absurd promo that mocked the real AI’s ignorance of wrestling continuity while exceeding its failures with deliberate ridiculousness. By producing funnier AI promos than the machines themselves, fans affirmed their own creative agency, and the community’s memes, such as the phrase AI is the new authority, allowed members to engage with the technology through strategic ambiguity, never committing to acceptance or rejection. The researchers call this an anti-affordance, a community-enforced discursive constraint that channels suspicion into irony, and they describe humour here as grassroots ontological repair, a communal mechanism for managing anxiety about a future no individual fan can control.

The study’s culminating contribution is the concept of dialectical algorithmic kayfabe. Rather than a single rupture in wrestling’s ritual contract, the authors argue that algorithmic kayfabe unfolds as an ongoing oscillation between detection, outrage and ironic repair, moments that coexist across platforms and can even be experienced by the same fan in the same evening. The framework extends affordance theory by showing that platform norms shape not just how fans speak but which emotions are legally acceptable in each space, and it advances Foucault’s author function by revealing its forensic side, in which fans deny authorship to any text lacking traces of human labour. As the researchers conclude, machines may increasingly help produce wrestling’s stories, but they hold no jurisdiction over togetherness, the collective performance of fandom that remains stubbornly, defiantly human.

Subject of Research: How WWE fans on Reddit perceive and negotiate AI-generated or AI-assisted wrestling storytelling on streaming platforms

Article Title: A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms

Article References: Pandey, S., & Roy, A. (2026). A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Keywords: WWE, artificial intelligence, netnography, fandom, streaming platforms, kayfabe, authenticity, Reddit, AI slop, algorithmic kayfabe, creative labour, digital culture