The dispute concerns a gill-bearing aquatic caudate that Laurenti described from “lacus, qui est in alpe Etscher,” a lake on Mount Ötscher in Lower Austria. Stejneger noted in 1936 that the animal was soon recognized as the larva of Laurenti’s own Triton alpestris. Most later authorities also accepted that identification, and Ichthyosaura became the oldest available genus name for the Alpine newt when the former genus Triturus was divided into four genera.

Mutz and Böhme reopened the taxonomic debate in 2025. They argued that Proteus tritonius should not be identified with T. alpestris and designated specimen ZFMK 104202, a larva of S. salamandra collected in a creek near Nesselberg in the Ötscher region, as a neotype. This review examines their arguments and the proposed designation rather than surveying the entire history of the name. It assesses the original description, the reported type locality, climatic and ecological context, Laurenti’s own discussion, and the consistency of the proposed neotype with the original account.

The review accepts the central point underlying the renewed debate: ecological conditions during Laurenti’s lifetime may have differed from those today, making current climatic observations relevant to an assessment of the historical record. Austrian temperature records beginning in 1767 indicate, however, that it was highly improbable for more thermophilic urodeles to have occupied places that are now too cold, particularly around 1760. The authors also describe the northeastern lake below Mount Ötscher’s summit as the only lake on the mountain visible on maps or aerial photographs, and therefore identify it as the lake in Laurenti’s original locality.

Mutz and Böhme question that identification by interpreting differences in Laurenti’s phrases, including “Etschero monte” and “alpe Etscher,” and by suggesting that the muddy habitat and difficulty of access described by Laurenti point to a lower-altitude water body. The review disputes these interpretations. It argues that “alpe Etscher” more plausibly denotes the region of alpine pastures on the mountain, consistent with Laurenti’s references to cattle and herders drinking from water filled with the animals throughout summer. It also reports that the lake contains fine organic sediment and that, with a slightly higher water level, the water would extend into marginal grass. The historical condition of the lake remains unknown, but the authors note that it may have been larger and deeper, with a swampy littoral zone produced by cattle trampling.

The claim that reaching the lake was arduous is also qualified. Although a previous report described an approach from the north over a rocky ridge and scree slope, the authors state that the lake can be reached more comfortably by trails from the south. A nineteenth-century tourist guide described the surrounding rocky terrain as interrupted by rich pastures. The authors infer that the site was connected to other locations by well-trodden paths and was probably inhabited during the herding season, rather than being the inaccessible habitat proposed by Mutz and Böhme.

Laurenti’s own reasoning is central to the review’s conclusion. He explicitly considered and rejected the possibility that P. tritonius was the larva of T. alpestris, placing the animal with the olm in Proteus because it appeared permanently gill-bearing. However, his rejection was qualified: he invited anyone who could present better arguments to do so. The species epithet tritonius nevertheless indicated that he recognized similarities to newts. The review interprets Laurenti’s position as accepting that, if the animals were larvae, they would most plausibly be T. alpestris because he identified no other species in the region that fit the alternative.

Modern observations address two features that Laurenti regarded as unusual. Alpine newt larvae can overwinter, accounting for their presence in the lake in autumn and throughout the year, and the simultaneous presence of functional gills and lungs occurs regularly during development in many amphibian species. The authors also note that Laurenti’s written description places the beginning of the dorsal fin at the nape, which rules out S. salamandra and leaves T. alpestris and Lissotriton vulgaris among species known from the region. Although Laurenti’s illustration cannot be assigned unequivocally, the authors argue that its morphology remains compatible with an Alpine newt larva, including a rounded tail and a regenerating tail fin.

The proposed neotype is challenged on location, species and consistency with the original description. The authors maintain that the type locality is the lake in “alpe Etscher,” not an unspecified lower-altitude water body, and that a creek selected as a replacement locality conflicts with Laurenti’s account of herders and cattle using the lake during summer. They further argue that the salamander larva is inconsistent with the dorsal-fin description. Under article 75.3 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, a neotype must be consistent with what is known of the original name-bearing type from the original description; the authors conclude that specimen ZFMK 104202 does not meet that requirement. They state that an application to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to set aside the neotype under article 75.6 is in preparation.

Subject of Research: Taxonomic identity and neotype designation of Laurenti’s Proteus tritonius

Article Title: The identity of Proteus tritonius Laurenti, 1768: comments on a really doubtful case of literary interpretation

Article References: Gollmann, G., & Gollmann, B. (2026). The identity of Proteus tritonius Laurenti, 1768: comments on a really doubtful case of literary interpretation. Herpetozoa, 39, 17-21. https://doi.org/10.3897/herpetozoa.39.e178255

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/herpetozoa.39.e178255

Keywords: Proteus tritonius, Alpine newt, Triton alpestris, taxonomic review, neotype designation, Mount Ötscher, Laurenti 1768, Ichthyosaura, Salamandra salamandra, nomenclature, identity, Proteus

The analysis begins with Leibniz’s principle of the identity of the indiscernibles: if two objects share every property, they are identical. Its contrapositive holds that any two distinct objects must differ in at least one property. Although this formulation is logically stringent, the paper argues that it relies on a naïve separation of an object from the state and environment in which it exists. Properties are also difficult to compare without specifying the resolution, boundary conditions, initial conditions and time at which they are measured. Information about every possible property is necessarily incomplete, making the apparent universality of Leibniz’s original criterion problematic.

Quantum mechanics makes the difficulty particularly clear. Electrons and photons of the same type cannot, in principle, be distinguished as individuals solely by assigning them different properties or histories. As physicist Hermann Weyl put it, “Even in principle one cannot demand an alibi of an electron.” Quantum entanglement further weakens the idea that an object can be evaluated independently of its surroundings. Measuring one member of an entangled pair immediately changes the state associated with the other, even when the members are widely separated. Under these conditions, the connected entity and its state may have to be considered together rather than as an autonomous object opposed to an external environment.

The paper distinguishes bosons from fermions as a starting point for a physical account of individuality. Bosons, including photons, can occupy the same quantum state, and a boson combined with a particular delocalized state may itself be indistinguishable from another equivalent combination. Fermions, including electrons, cannot occupy the same quantum state because of the exclusion principle. This prevents two electrons from being in precisely the same state, but it does not make “electron” a personal name. Electrons can move between states and roles during chemical reactions, allowing the particle to be identified independently of a particular state. The term “electron” is therefore treated as a generic designation rather than a name reserved for an individual.

To accommodate this feature, the proposed identity criterion embeds each object in an environment that defines its state. The environment can be local, such as the elastic and electric effects surrounding an impurity atom in a crystal, or it can extend beyond a local region in the limiting case of quantum entanglement. Two objects are considered identical only when exchanging them leaves all relevant properties of the sufficiently large zone unchanged across relevant embeddings and, for time-dependent properties, throughout the relevant time. The formal exchange test also requires transferability: an object must remain identifiable when placed in different roles or states. This modified approach evaluates an object together with its state-defining surroundings rather than assuming that the two can be separated cleanly.

The distinction between constituents and compound objects becomes important at larger scales. Two impurity atoms can be identical if they produce the same properties in the bulk of a crystal and at its surface. By contrast, a crystal containing an immobile impurity in its bulk may remain distinct from one containing the same impurity at the surface, even though a thought experiment could imagine transferring the atom between the two positions. The paper calls this virtual transferability: the constituent can be considered transferable for purposes of identifying the particle, but the two constituted crystals are not genuinely interchangeable. A dislocation or other defect can also be decisive at low temperatures, yet disappear at sufficiently high temperatures and long waiting times. Irreversibility and individuality are therefore not absolute yes-or-no properties; they depend on physical parameters, including temperature and the relevant time scale.

Macroscopic comparisons introduce averaged properties and what the author calls statistical identity. Two crystals may appear identical in average composition, shape or defect concentration while differing in their microscopic arrangement. Enlarging the zone under examination incorporates more particles and interactions, making additional microscopic differences relevant. The transition between microscopic and macroscopic identity is thus controlled in part by the size of the region considered. Some properties, such as percolative properties or properties highly sensitive to tiny deviations from a perfect state, reveal microscopic differences that broader averages conceal. A measurement that establishes statistical identity therefore does not necessarily establish strict identity in every microscopic respect.

Following increasing complexity, the framework traces a progression from elementary particles to atoms, molecules, condensed matter, crystals, cells, organisms and people. Small, defect-free ice crystals may remain reproducible and interchangeable, whereas larger crystals can develop cracks, boundaries, dislocations, inclusions and other frozen structural features that make them singular. Snowflakes illustrate how unique surface morphology can arise, although the author notes that individuals are not ordinarily given personal names because snowflakes are still treated as reproducible. The Cullinan diamond is presented differently: its exceptional size and unique frozen features were understood to be unreproducible, making an individual name appropriate. Even here, however, the boundary between a feature that is negligible and one that justifies individual naming is not completely sharp.

Irreversibility by itself is therefore insufficient in the analysis; irreproducibility is also required. A stable dislocation can distinguish a defective crystal from a perfect one, but a comparable feature might be recreated under suitable conditions, weakening the case for a personal name. A person, by contrast, accumulates an extensive sequence of structural changes through a particular history. Ageing is relevant under the paper’s physical meaning of irreversibility as a frozen, non-equilibrium condition, although the author distinguishes this usage from other biological meanings of irreversibility. Twins and clones do not erase the effects of their separate histories: accumulated differences cannot be reversed or reproduced in full. The same reasoning can apply to transient but uniquely structured events, which helps explain why individual hurricanes are commonly given personal names.

The analysis also clarifies the difference between generic designations and personal names. A designation such as methane identifies molecules treated as identical under specified conditions, while a taxonomic term such as “bear” identifies a group of similar individuals without singling out one. A personal name marks an entity whose individuality is practically or culturally relevant. Uniqueness alone does not guarantee that naming is reasonable: people do not usually name individual mosquitoes or plants, although they commonly name pets. The paper’s illustrative sequence moves from mammals to bears, then to a particular bear family, and finally to one family member, showing how narrowing the properties retained in a description produces increasing individuation. Overall, the framework remains a philosophical proposal rather than a quantitative model or an experimentally tested law. Its central claim is that philosophical principles become useful for physical reality only when their terms are reconciled with physics: strict indistinguishability calls for generic designations, irreversible structure enables individuation, and irreproducibility makes personal naming appropriate.

Subject of Research: A theoretical framework for physical identity, individuality and personal naming

Article Title: Identity, individuality and naming

Article References: Maier, J. (2026). Identity, individuality and naming. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 13(1), Article 1844. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09507-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09507-8

Keywords: identity of indiscernibles, quantum indistinguishability, personal naming, irreversibility, irreproducibility, many-body systems, philosophy of physics, statistical identity, quantum entanglement, ageing, Identity, individuality

Published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, the research by Şahin Palta, Eren Baş, and Zekeriya Yavaşcı of Bartın University examined AMF spore density, community composition, and rhizosphere soil properties across five plant families in a natural rangeland. The findings challenge the assumption that soil chemistry alone dictates which mycorrhizal fungi thrive where. Instead, plant family identity emerges as a decisive driver, shaping fungal abundance and diversity in patterns that could reshape how we manage rangelands worldwide.

The numbers tell a dramatic story. AMF spore density peaked in soils beneath Asteraceae, the daisy family, at 609.8 spores per 50 grams of soil. At the opposite extreme, Urticaceae, the nettle family, hosted just 77.6 spores per 50 grams, a nearly eightfold difference. That gap is not a minor variation; it suggests that the plant above ground exerts a powerful influence on the reproductive output of fungi below, possibly through differences in root architecture, carbon allocation, or the chemical signals each family releases into the rhizosphere.

Correlation analysis added another layer of intrigue. AMF spore density showed a positive association with soil pH (r = 0.47), hinting that slightly alkaline conditions favor sporulation. But the fungi responded negatively to electrical conductivity (r = −0.49), available potassium (r = −0.44), and total nitrogen (r = −0.40). In other words, richer soils with more nitrogen and potassium actually hosted fewer spores. This counterintuitive pattern aligns with a growing body of evidence that mycorrhizal fungi invest less in reproduction when plants, flush with nutrients, depend less on fungal partners for mineral acquisition.

Five fungal species appeared in the rhizosphere soils of all five plant families: Acaulospora tuberculata, Claroideoglomus etunicatum, Funneliformis geosporum, Glomus sp., and Rhizophagus clarus. Their broad distribution across host groups suggests these are generalist symbionts, capable of partnering with a wide range of plants. Yet the study also found that community structure varied among plant families, indicating that host identity filters which species dominate even when the same core species are present everywhere.

Diversity metrics revealed further complexity. Species richness was highest in Urticaceae, despite that family hosting the fewest spores overall. Shannon diversity and evenness peaked in Lamiaceae, the mint family. Fabaceae and Asteraceae showed lower diversity values, and Jaccard similarity was highest between Fabaceae and Asteraceae, meaning their fungal communities overlapped more than any other pair. These patterns suggest that plant family identity shapes not just how many fungi are present, but which species coexist and how evenly they are distributed.

Soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, available potassium, and CaCO₃ content also varied among the sampled plant groups, reinforcing the idea that each plant family modifies its own rhizosphere environment. These modifications, in turn, feed back into fungal community dynamics. The result is a complex interplay between biotic and abiotic factors, where plant identity and soil chemistry jointly determine the belowground fungal landscape.

The implications extend far beyond Turkish rangelands. Mycorrhizal fungi are increasingly recognized as critical components of belowground biotic networks, influencing plant productivity, soil carbon sequestration, and ecosystem resilience. If plant family identity drives fungal community structure, then shifts in vegetation composition, whether from grazing, climate change, or land-use conversion, could cascade through soil food webs in unpredictable ways. Rangeland managers may need to consider not just which plants are present, but which families, to maintain healthy fungal communities.

The study also highlights the value of natural rangelands as living laboratories for understanding mycorrhizal ecology. Unlike agricultural systems, where fertilization and tillage disrupt soil structure, natural rangelands preserve the intricate relationships between plants and fungi that have evolved over millennia. By sampling across five plant families in a single rangeland, the researchers isolated the effect of host identity from broader environmental gradients, offering a cleaner test of how plant families shape their fungal partners.

As climate change and land degradation threaten rangelands globally, understanding the drivers of mycorrhizal fungal communities becomes ever more urgent. This study adds a crucial piece to the puzzle: the plant family above ground is not a passive backdrop but an active architect of the fungal world below. The next chapter in this research will likely explore the mechanisms behind these patterns, from root exudates to carbon allocation, unlocking new strategies for restoring degraded soils and sustaining the invisible partnerships that keep rangelands alive.

One reason spore counts offer such a revealing window into mycorrhizal ecology is that spores are not simply byproducts of fungal activity but the principal propagules through which many AMF species persist between growing seasons and disperse to new hosts. A spore is a thick-walled resting structure, often packed with lipid reserves, that can survive in soil for months or years until favorable conditions and a suitable host root coincide. When researchers count spores in a soil sample, they are therefore measuring not just fungal presence but the accumulated reproductive investment of the fungal community over time. The wet sieving and decanting approach traditionally used to extract these spores, first formalized in the 1960s, remains a standard technique because it separates spores from soil particles by density differences, allowing morphological identification under a microscope based on wall structure, color, and size.

It is worth noting that spore abundance does not always track the total amount of fungal activity inside roots. A plant family might support extensive hyphal colonization of its root system while producing relatively few spores, or conversely, a modest root infection might coincide with heavy sporulation. Different fungal genera follow different strategies in this respect. Some members of the Glomeraceae, for example, are known for rapid colonization of root tissue and abundant spore production, whereas species of Acaulospora tend to sporulate more slowly and may peak in abundance at different times of year. This means the patterns observed in the rangeland study reflect a snapshot of community structure that could shift with season, and repeated sampling across a full growing cycle would help establish whether the family-level differences are stable or transient.

The negative association between spore density and soil nitrogen deserves particular attention because it connects to a well-documented feedback in plant-fungal economics. When soil nitrogen and phosphorus are plentiful, plants can reduce the carbon they allocate to root exudates and to the fungal partners themselves, since the marginal benefit of the symbiosis declines. Fungi, receiving less carbon subsidy, may respond by reducing both vegetative growth inside roots and the production of spores. The rangeland soils beneath families associated with higher fertility may therefore have hosted fungi that were metabolically active but reproductively restrained, while the poorer soils beneath other families pushed fungi toward sporulation as a survival strategy. This trade-off between growth and reproduction helps explain why the most spore-rich soils were not necessarily the most nutrient-rich ones.

Electrical conductivity, which reflects the total concentration of dissolved salts in the soil solution, has long been recognized as a constraint on mycorrhizal communities. Studies from saline environments, including work in the salt-affected soils of Iran and semiarid Mediterranean regions, have shown that elevated salinity can suppress sporulation and shift community composition toward salt-tolerant fungal taxa. The negative correlation observed in the Turkish rangeland, though modest in magnitude, is consistent with this broader literature and suggests that even moderate variation in salinity within a single landscape can leave a measurable imprint on the fungal community.

The presence of the same five fungal species across all five plant families raises interesting questions about what ecologists call assembly rules. If host identity were the only filter operating, one might expect entirely distinct fungal suites beneath each family. Instead, the data suggest a two-tier structure: a cosmopolitan core of generalist symbionts present everywhere, overlaid by family-specific differences in the relative abundance of species and in the occurrence of rarer taxa. This layered pattern mirrors findings from other ecosystems, where a handful of dominant AMF species often account for most of the community while a long tail of infrequent species contributes to differences between habitats. The higher Jaccard similarity between Fabaceae and Asteraceae hints that these two families, despite their very different biology, may impose similar rhizosphere filters, perhaps through comparable root traits or exudate chemistry.

The contrast between richness and abundance in Urticaceae is especially instructive. Hosting the greatest number of species while producing the fewest spores suggests that many fungal taxa persisted there at low densities, possibly as opportunistic residents rather than dominant partners. Nettle family plants are often associated with nitrogen-rich soils, and the nutrient conditions they create may suppress the competitive dominance of a few aggressive sporulators, allowing more species to coexist at low levels. This decoupling of richness from abundance illustrates why diversity indices must be interpreted alongside raw counts, since a community can be diverse precisely because no single species thrives.

Future work building on these findings would benefit from molecular approaches, such as sequencing of fungal DNA directly from roots and soils, which can detect species that never sporulate during the sampling period and can quantify relative abundance more precisely than spore counts alone. Combining morphological spore identification with molecular community profiling, along with measurements of root colonization intensity and hyphal length in soil, would paint a fuller picture of how plant families shape not only fungal reproduction but the entire symbiotic economy of the rangeland belowground.

Subject of Research: Soil Microbiology

Article Title: Plant family identity drives arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal spore abundance and community structure in natural rangelands

Article References: Palta, Ş., Baş, E., & Yavaşcı, Z. (2026). Plant family identity drives arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal spore abundance and community structure in natural rangelands. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(11), Article 1214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-16087-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-16087-2

Keywords: mycorrhizal fungi, rangelands, soil ecology, plant-fungal symbiosis, rhizosphere, biodiversity, Plant, family, identity, drives, arbuscular, mycorrhizal

The researchers, a conservation social scientist and a licensed mental health practitioner both based in Lafayette, propose that climate and ecological disruption, when experienced repeatedly across generations, becomes culturally embedded in shared community identities. They call the underexamined consequence of this embedded trauma ecological dissociation, defined as a reduced capacity for relational connection with the more-than-human world. Crucially, they argue this is not merely a matter of attitudes or beliefs. Drawing on polyvagal theory and stress physiology, they suggest that chronic survival-oriented processing narrows access to the autonomic states associated with curiosity, social engagement, and reciprocal connection, meaning trauma becomes an embodied way of being in the world, not just a shared historical narrative.

The theoretical model traces two historically distinct pathways into the same cycle. For Indigenous peoples and communities displaced by climate change or biodiversity loss, ecological disconnection emerges through the traumatic severance of reciprocal relationships with ancestral lands and place-based ways of knowing, a rupture associated in the literature with enduring disparities in depression, posttraumatic stress, and chronic disease, and potentially with epigenetic mechanisms that transmit stress adaptations across generations. For communities whose collective narratives are organized around domination, extraction, and human exceptionalism, dissociative patterns such as moral disengagement and emotional distancing reinforce the very systems that produce further harm. In both cases, the authors argue, trauma narrows physiological and psychological capacity for connection while environmental degradation simultaneously threatens health and community resilience, leaving few offramps from the loop.

Forest bathing, or Shinrin-Yoku, entered this framework as the operational intervention. Introduced in Japan in the 1980s as a preventative medicine practice, it comprises structured invitations to connect with nature primarily through sensory experience. Since its global spread, field experiments across Japanese forests and numerous reviews have documented psychological and physiological outcomes, including reduced anxiety, altered heart rate variability, and lower physiological stress. What has been missing, the authors contend, is attention to how such programs might function as community-level interventions addressing the relational dimensions of collective trauma, rather than simply aggregating individual benefits.

Acadiana Forest Bathing was built to test that proposition in place. The nine-parish Acadiana region, home to roughly 700,000 residents, is a landscape of layered collective histories: the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States, has sustained the Chitimacha, Atakapas, and Opelousas peoples since time immemorial, while colonization, the forced expulsion of French Acadiens from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s, and two-and-a-half centuries of reliance on enslaved African labor shaped the region’s cultural narratives. Those histories now intersect with recurrent hurricanes, flooding, saltwater intrusion, extreme heat, and pollution from historical and ongoing energy extraction. The authors deliberately position the program not as a way to make individuals more resilient, but as an opportunity to build connection among self, community, and place within an already adaptive social landscape.

The program’s mechanics translate the theory into sensory practice. Free self-guided trails, each created in partnership with a local community leader, present a deliberately sequenced series of written or audio invitations. Participants begin by grounding awareness in the body, perhaps noticing the soles of the feet against the Earth, then progress through deep breathing and attention to smell, temperature, humidity, and movement on the skin. Invitations then move toward connection with specific entities, a fallen tree, a blooming flower, a perched bird, before closing with reflective prompts about how humans and nature mirror one another. The authors map each component to a theoretical disruption: grounding and sensory invitations target disconnection from the body, place-based invitations cultivate ecological belonging, free self-guided access restores choice and agency, and moments of awe and gratitude support meaning-making in the face of ecological grief.

Guided group walks, lasting from thirty minutes to two hours, extend the individual experience into a social setting. A trained guide sets a tone emphasizing participant agency and avoids prescribing outcomes, while the group moves through solo, paired, and shared activities with built-in opportunities to reflect aloud. This facilitation approach, the authors write, creates shared attention, normalization, and community connection, directly countering the social fragmentation that their model identifies as a programmatic target. Notably, they acknowledge a current gap in engaging Indigenous leaders in the initial programming and describe plans for a community advisory group spanning the Chitimacha Nation, Black and Hispanic communities, hunters and anglers, and medical practitioners across generations.

The place-based adaptations are as telling as the theory. In a landscape defined by swamps, bayous, heat, mosquitoes, and summer thunderstorms, facilitators encourage participants to notice responses to discomfort with curiosity rather than overcome them, treating changing weather as part of the sensory experience itself. The practice expands beyond forests to the region’s increasingly rare Tallgrass prairie remnants, historically logged cypress-tupelo swamps, and waterways such as Bayous Teche and Vermilion, with emerging kayak trails offering water-based pathways. The authors also describe adaptations for younger participants, incorporating play, movement, and imagination to counter rising climate anxiety, and for older adults, accommodating mobility and pace to address social isolation and sedentary lifestyles. A proposed project, Sounds of Acadiana, would explore how residents perceive and remember the region’s acoustic experience, from summer rains to evening cicadas, as research increasingly links anthropogenic noise to diminished health benefits of biodiverse soundscapes.

The authors are candid about constraints. No formal data collection has yet been applied, and the program is presented as a preliminary proof of concept rather than evidence of effectiveness. They position forest bathing not as a new discovery of relational connection but as one contemporary approach alongside longstanding Indigenous traditions, and they explicitly state it is not a substitute for addressing the structural causes of trauma. For future evaluation, they propose a multi-method design: brief pre- and post-walk surveys assessing physical and emotional health and nature-connectedness, focus groups on meaning-making, and participatory methods such as oral history and photovoice that position residents as co-authors. Validated scales for ecological identity, sense of place, and ecological grief exist, but the authors argue evaluation must move beyond whether individuals feel better to examine at a population level how, for whom, and through which pathways change occurs, potentially including partnerships with healthcare settings and community-wide trends in ecological stewardship.

What makes the case study conceptually ambitious is its reach toward collective constructs. The authors suggest holistic evaluation could eventually demonstrate collective effervescence, the shared feeling of energy and harmony across people, or collective flourishing, introduced by Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen as the fundamental relationality that generates responsibility for ecological stewardship. As Acadiana faces continued environmental change while becoming a receiving community for people displaced from elsewhere in coastal Louisiana, the authors argue that accessible, place-based nature practices could become one component of a broader community health and climate-resilience infrastructure. No single intervention can resolve the structural conditions generating collective trauma, they conclude, but forest bathing offers one practice within that larger effort: an invitation to slow down, notice, and renew a relationship with the more-than-human world of which communities are already a part.

Subject of Research: Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study

Article Title: Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study

Article References: Guilbeau, K. G., & Dietzway, K. (2026). Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1981874. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1981874

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1981874

Keywords: Forest, bathing, pathway, toward, ecological, identity, community, case, scientific research

Walhout’s starting point is a close reading of how the word radicalization actually functions, both in popular discourse and in the academic literature. In public debate, the term tends to carry an implicit geography: there is assumed to be a reasonable political center, and radicalization describes movement away from it toward the extremes. Scholars of extremism have long noted the analytical difficulties with this framing. Work by researchers such as Donatella della Porta, Stefan Malthaner, and Kylie McDonald has emphasized that radicalization is better seen as a relational and evolving process than as a linear march from moderation to violence. Walhout pushes this critique further, suggesting that the field should stop measuring radical beliefs against an imagined political midpoint altogether.

Instead, he proposes a different yardstick. What matters, in his account, is not where an individual lands on a left-right spectrum but the nature and degree to which that person seeks to radically transform the self. Radicalization, on this view, is primarily an inwardly focused undertaking, a campaign to remake one’s own identity, even when it borrows the language of political struggle. This inversion has practical consequences: if the driving engine is internal rather than ideological, then interventions aimed purely at countering extremist ideas may be addressing the surface of the problem while leaving its psychological core untouched.

The engine of that internal drive, Walhout argues, is an internalized sense of failure, often entangled with humiliation. His argument draws on a body of scholarship that connects violent extremism with wounded masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s research on how young men enter and exit violent extremist movements, and more recent work by Lucas Gottzén on remasculinization as both an individual and a political project, suggests that extremist movements can offer aggrieved men a kind of restoration: a story in which personal failure is reframed as collective victimhood and violence becomes a route to recovered status. Studies of humiliation as a self-conscious emotion likewise document how profoundly it can reorganize a person’s sense of self and social worth.

To give this inward transformation a conceptual vocabulary, Walhout reaches back more than a century, to William James’s classic 1902 lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, treated conversion not as a niche theological event but as a general psychological process: the divided self, torn by guilt, failure, and inner conflict, undergoes a sudden or gradual unification around a new center of energy. What was once sick and fragmented becomes whole, and the convert typically experiences the change as a rebirth. James’s account was built from hundreds of first-person testimonies, and it deliberately bracketed the question of which tradition the conversion served, treating the transformation itself as the phenomenon worth explaining.

Read through James, contemporary radicalization acquires a familiar shape. The recruit arrives at an extremist milieu carrying a divided self, a painful gap between who he is and who he feels he should be. The movement supplies a total interpretive framework, a new community, and a narrative in which the convert’s failures are explained, dignified, and redirected. The resulting change of identity can be as psychologically complete as any religious conversion, complete with a new name for oneself, new loyalties, and a cleaned-up moral account of one’s past. Walhout suggests that the widespread prevalence of this inner divided self among those who radicalize would become clear if case studies were examined closely, and he points to recent incidents described in public reporting as the kind of cases that invite this reading.

The comparison is not merely historical color. It changes what counts as an intervention. If radicalization is a conversion, then deradicalization is also a matter of transformation rather than simple persuasion. Here Walhout offers his most distinctive proposal: prevention itself should be understood as a different kind of conversion, one in which the individual converts not to a new ideology but to a new way of relating to his own perceived failures and humiliations. Rather than recruiting the wounded self into a crusade, a successful intervention helps the person metabolize failure without needing to annihilate it, joining a long pastoral tradition of counseling that treats shame and loss as materials for growth rather than ammunition for war.

This framing situates the paper within a growing body of work that treats spiritual and identity struggles, particularly among boys and men, as serious objects of study. Walhout’s own field has explored these themes before; Robert Dykstra’s essay on the spiritual quest of the loser and his recent reflection on whether life is still worth living both examine how failure and despair shape the inner lives of men. By connecting that pastoral literature to the empirical study of extremism, the paper builds a bridge that security-focused research has rarely attempted, and it echoes earlier theoretical concerns about liberty and self-development that stretch back to John Stuart Mill.

The approach also aligns with recent scholarship that pushes back against top-down models of radicalization. Hilary Pilkington’s edited volume on young people’s journeys through radicalizing milieus documents how individuals resist, negotiate, and reinterpret the extremist narratives around them, reinforcing the point that radicalization is never simply a matter of absorbing doctrine. Walhout’s contribution sharpens that insight by locating the decisive transformation inside the person: doctrine is less a cause than a vehicle for a project of self-remaking that was already underway.

The paper, received in August 2026 and published in October, does not claim to have solved the problem of extremism, and its evidence base is conceptual rather than experimental; the author notes that no datasets were generated or analyzed. Its value lies in the reframing it offers. If violent radicalization is, for many who undergo it, a conversion in William James’s sense, then the most important questions may not be about ideology at all, but about failure, humiliation, and the human need to turn a broken self into a whole one. And if prevention can become its own kind of conversion, one that offers the humiliated a different relationship to their pain, the pastoral tradition may have something practical to say to one of the most urgent policy problems of the age.

Subject of Research: Radicalization understood as self-transformation and conversion through a pastoral theological lens

Article Title: Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective

Article References: Walhout, K. (2026). Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Keywords: radicalization, conversion, William James, pastoral theology, masculinity, extremism, humiliation, self-transformation, deradicalization, Pastoral Psychology, identity, prevention

The research team, led by Adam Daly of Dublin City University together with colleagues at University of Zurich and Victoria University of Wellington, searched seven databases including PsycINFO, Medline, CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, with the final search completed in February 2026. Following PRISMA reporting guidelines, the team screened 9,093 papers, removed 5,136 duplicates, and ultimately included sixteen studies: ten quantitative and six qualitative, representing data from more than 747 tattooed cancer survivors across diverse cancer types and eleven countries, from Italy and the United States to South Korea, Brazil, and Australia. Rather than performing a meta-analysis, the researchers used a convergent integrated thematic synthesis, transforming quantitative findings into textual descriptors so that numerical and narrative data could be coded together, following the Synthesis Without Meta-analysis guidelines for replicability.

A central methodological contribution of the review is conceptual. Previous syntheses focused almost exclusively on one narrow slice of the practice, namely nipple and areola complex tattooing after breast cancer-related mastectomy. The new review instead adopts the broader framework of therapeutic tattooing, defined as tattooing undertaken to improve aesthetic and psychosocial outcomes, and applies a four-part typology based on two decisions: whether the tattoo is placed on scarred or compromised skin (medical) or unscarred skin (non-medical), and whether the design reconstructs lost body parts or adds new decorative imagery. This yields four categories, from scar camouflage to a phoenix inked over treatment scars to a cancer ribbon on an untouched limb, and the review is the first to synthesize evidence across all of them.

The synthesis identified six themes describing the psychosocial outcomes and experiences of tattooed survivors: fulfilment, wellbeing, feelings about one’s body, perceived design quality, processing feelings about cancer, and reconceptualised identities. The wellbeing findings are among the most striking. Across the included studies, survivors reported feeling happier, experiencing emotional relief, and showing significantly reduced perceived stress. One study found that anxiety and depressive symptoms were significantly reduced and predicted by whether survivors had received a therapeutic tattoo. Relationship and sexual wellbeing also improved, with survivors reporting significantly higher sexual wellbeing after tattooing and reduced concern about scars affecting their relationships. In one study, a partner of a survivor got a matching cancer-related tattoo, communicating that they were, in the survivor’s words, in this together. Notably, no studies reported negative wellbeing outcomes.

Body image and embodiment, the sense of identification with one’s physical body, showed more mixed results. Several studies found survivors felt more confident, more comfortable showing their bodies to others, and better able to look at themselves in mirrors, and one study reported significantly lower body image distress among those with medical tattoos compared to those without. Yet two studies found some survivors were unable to integrate their tattoos as part of their bodies or breasts at all, suggesting an unresolved psychological process that may determine whether a tattoo becomes part of the self or remains a foreign mark. The authors caution that improper tattooing can actively disrupt body image, and that the mechanisms underlying successful versus failed integration remain unknown.

Perhaps the most novel analytical move in the review is its treatment of tattoos as works of art with measurable quality dimensions. Drawing on art interpretation terminology, the researchers identified three facets of perceived design quality that shaped satisfaction: formal elements such as colour, shape, and projection; composition, including positionality and symmetry; and aesthetic value, including overall appearance and naturalness. The data here are largely quantitative and dominated by nipple and areola tattoos, where a three-dimensional projection is desired, in contrast to scar camouflage, where a flat, two-dimensional result is the goal. Eight studies reported satisfactory colouration or colour matching, but five reported dissatisfaction with colour being too light or too dark, and fading emerged as a distinct driver of regret. In two studies, survivors were dissatisfied with the overall aesthetic even though they had received the design they asked for, a finding that underscores how technical execution can undermine even a well-chosen design.

The qualitative studies revealed something deeper: tattooing as emotional processing. Survivors described finding closure, with tattoos acting as a finale to their cancer experience or a way of closing the door on it, and as a conduit for being able to talk about their emotions. Regaining control emerged as a second subtheme, with survivors describing the choice to put something on their body as an act of bodily autonomy reclaimed after months of decisions made by clinicians. Importantly, the sense of control was tied to the entire design process, from choosing whether to proceed to selecting colour, design, and placement, rather than to any single step. One survivor even reframed the decision as deliberately giving up control, doing something permanent that she could not change, illustrating how individual the psychology of the practice can be.

The sixth theme concerned identity. Survivors used tattoos to construct three distinct self-narratives: the survivor, marked with symbols such as pink ribbons or, in one remarkable case, the chemical formula for Herceptin, the antibody used to treat her breast cancer; the metamorph, whose designs such as growing branches or butterflies symbolised transformation into a new self; and the fighter, whose boxing gloves and defiant slogans framed survival as a won battle. These identities were not tied to any specific design but assembled from culturally and personally meaningful imagery, including one survivor who used the Irish language to express the strength she drew from having survived. The review also notes that identity meanings can shift over time, with one survivor reporting diminished pride in her survivor tattoo as she reflected that surviving cancer is something many people do.

The review is candid about its limitations. Fourteen of the sixteen studies concerned breast cancer survivors only, and the evidence base is dominated by white, Western populations, raising serious questions about cross-cultural generalisability given that bodies and tattooing carry different meanings across cultures. No studies examined non-medical reconstructive tattoos such as eyebrow tattooing, and the qualitative and quantitative literatures remain siloed, limiting the depth of integration. Quality assessment found the quantitative studies acceptable on average, with common weaknesses including the absence of control groups and inadequately described measures, while qualitative studies scored well overall but were often weak on researcher reflexivity. Prior reconstructive surgeries and adjuvant treatments were not accounted for, despite evidence that these influence outcomes.

Nevertheless, the practical implications are significant. For survivors, the review offers an evidence-based picture of both the potential benefits, including improved wellbeing, body image, closure, and identity work, and the risks, including decisional regret, dissatisfaction with design quality, and failed bodily integration. One cautionary finding deserves particular attention: in one study, regret arose because a tattoo unexpectedly interfered with diagnostic imaging of a new lesion, a consequence many survivors and even tattoo artists may never have considered. The authors argue that advancing understanding of therapeutic tattooing will empower survivors to make informed decisions about their bodies after treatment, and that further research is urgently needed to guide policy and training in a practice whose popularity is growing far faster than the evidence supporting it. As survivorship rates continue to rise worldwide, the question is no longer whether survivors will seek ink as medicine, but whether the science, and the safeguards, will catch up in time.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial outcomes and experiences of therapeutic tattooing among cancer survivors

Article Title: A mixed-methods systematic review of the psycho-social outcomes and experiences of therapeutic tattooing for cancer survivors

Article References: Daly, A., Walsh, I., Karl, J., Gallagher, P., & Dunne, S. (2026). A mixed-methods systematic review of the psycho-social outcomes and experiences of therapeutic tattooing for cancer survivors. Journal of Cancer Survivorship. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-026-02114-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11764-026-02114-1

Keywords: therapeutic tattooing, cancer survivorship, body image, psycho-oncology, nipple tattooing, systematic review, wellbeing, embodiment, identity, scar camouflage, medical tattooing, breast cancer

The numbers from the study provide the skeleton of the story. Of the twelve women, seven, or 58 percent, opted for RRSO, accepting, planning, or completing the procedure, while five, or 42 percent, declined it. Among those who moved toward surgery, three carried BRCA1 pathogenic variants and four carried BRCA2 variants, suggesting that both major high-risk genotypes were represented among those choosing prophylactic surgery. The researchers also observed descriptive trends: RRSO acceptance or planning appeared more common among women aged fifty or older, and among women with one or two children, who accounted for 71 percent of those in the accepted group. Because the sample was small, the authors explicitly refrained from inferential statistical testing, and they caution that these patterns are trends only, not demonstrated associations with parity, education, employment, menopausal status, or family history.

What elevates the study beyond a simple tally is its methodological architecture. The team used an exploratory, convergent mixed-methods design in which qualitative findings were given interpretive priority, meaning the interviews did not merely decorate the statistics but drove the study’s overall conclusions. Demographic and clinical variables were summarized descriptively as frequencies and percentages, while the interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis, a rigorous qualitative technique in which researchers code the data, cluster codes into themes, and refine those themes iteratively until they capture the underlying structure of participants’ experiences. The two strands were then integrated, with the qualitative themes providing context and explanation for the descriptive quantitative patterns. This design is particularly well suited to decision-making research, where the reasons behind a choice often matter more than the choice itself.

The facilitators that emerged from the interviews form a coherent picture of what empowers women to say yes to preventive surgery. Awareness of cancer risk was paramount: women who understood the magnitude of ovarian cancer risk conferred by BRCA variants, and who grasped that this cancer is often detected at a late stage with poor survival, were more inclined toward surgery. Family support played a decisive role, as did explicit recommendations from clinicians, underscoring that a physician’s counsel can tip the scales in a genuinely shared decision. Practical surgical considerations mattered too, including the availability of minimally invasive approaches and combined procedures that could address multiple concerns in a single operation. Finally, prior treatment experience, meaning the women’s existing journeys through breast cancer diagnosis and therapy, appeared to normalize the surgical pathway and reduce its perceived threat.

The barriers were equally revealing, and they cluster around what the researchers describe as concerns about surgical menopause and its consequences for fertility, emotional wellbeing, and social and womanhood-related roles. Removing the ovaries induces immediate menopause regardless of a woman’s age, bringing hot flashes, sleep disruption, cardiovascular and bone health implications, and, for younger women, the abrupt and irreversible end of reproductive potential. For women who had not yet completed their families, or who attached deep personal meaning to fertility and to their sense of themselves as women, these costs could outweigh even a substantial reduction in cancer risk. The study’s emphasis on womanhood-related roles reflects a broader truth in psycho-oncology: preventive surgery does not merely remove tissue, it reshapes body image, sexuality, and social identity in ways that clinical guidelines rarely capture.

The context of the study is itself significant. Most research on RRSO decision-making has been conducted in high-income Western settings, where genetic counseling infrastructure is relatively mature and where cultural framings of cancer, fertility, and family differ from those in South Asia. By examining these questions among Pakistani women, the Aga Khan team adds an underrepresented population to the evidence base. In many low- and middle-income countries, genetic testing is expanding faster than the counseling and psychosocial support systems that accompany it, leaving women to absorb complex risk information with limited scaffolding. Understanding what facilitates and obstructs RRSO uptake in such settings is therefore not an academic exercise; it directly informs how genetic services should be designed as they scale.

The study’s conclusions point toward concrete clinical interventions. The authors argue that decision-making around RRSO is multifactorial, shaped simultaneously by clinical and psychosocial factors, and they call for personalized counseling, psychosocial support, decision aids, and family-centered discussions to help women reach informed choices. Decision aids, structured tools that present risks, benefits, and values-based questions in accessible formats, have shown promise in oncology for reducing decisional conflict and improving knowledge without pushing patients toward any particular option. Family-centered discussions acknowledge that in many cultures, and indeed in many families everywhere, the decision to remove ovaries is not made by the patient alone but negotiated with spouses, parents, and children who will live with its consequences.

It is worth pausing on the biology that makes this decision so urgent. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are tumor suppressor genes central to homologous recombination, the cellular machinery that accurately repairs double-strand breaks in DNA. Pathogenic variants disable this repair pathway, and cells that lose it must rely on error-prone backup mechanisms, accumulating mutations rapidly. This is why BRCA carriers face dramatically elevated lifetime risks of breast and ovarian cancer, and why ovarian cancer in particular is so feared: it typically produces no symptoms until advanced stages, and effective screening tools remain elusive. Prophylactic removal of the ovaries and fallopian tubes, the tissue of origin for most high-grade serous ovarian cancers, is currently the most powerful risk-reduction strategy available, which is precisely why understanding why women decline it matters so much.

The study’s limitations are candidly acknowledged and worth keeping in view. Twelve participants cannot support statistical inference, and the authors themselves label their findings exploratory, presenting age and parity patterns as descriptive trends rather than tested associations. The qualitative strand, while rich, reflects the experiences of women treated at a single tertiary-care institution, and the researchers note that complete anonymity is difficult to guarantee in qualitative work of this kind. Yet exploratory studies of this type serve a crucial function: they generate hypotheses, identify themes, and surface patient perspectives that larger quantitative studies often miss. The consistency between the qualitative findings and the descriptive quantitative patterns lends credibility to the overall interpretation.

Ultimately, the research delivers a message that resonates far beyond its sample size. A woman weighing RRSO is not simply comparing a number, her cancer risk, against a procedure; she is weighing surgery against fertility, longevity against identity, and her own life expectancy against her roles within a family. The Karachi study shows that the women who choose surgery tend to be those who understand their risk, feel supported at home, trust their clinicians, and can access less invasive techniques, while those who hesitate are often wrestling with the menopause that surgery would impose and with what it would mean for their sense of self. For clinicians counseling BRCA-positive breast cancer patients, the implication is clear: the conversation must extend beyond oncology into reproductive counseling, psychological support, and honest family dialogue. As genetic testing becomes routine in cancer care worldwide, studies like this one remind the medical community that the hardest part of precision medicine is often not the science, but the deeply human decisions that follow from it.

Subject of Research: Decision-making about risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy among BRCA1/2-positive breast cancer patients

Article Title: Decision-making around risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy among BRCA1/2-positive breast cancer patients: an exploratory mixed-methods study

Article References: Chishti, U., Pervaiz, N., Aziz, A. B., Khan, R. S., Shalwani, B., Irfan, S., & Akbar, F. (2026). Decision-making around risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy among BRCA1/2-positive breast cancer patients: an exploratory mixed-methods study. BMC Cancer. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-026-16919-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12885-026-16919-x

Keywords: BRCA1, BRCA2, breast cancer, risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy, ovarian cancer, surgical menopause, genetic counseling, decision-making, mixed-methods, thematic analysis, preventive surgery, Pakistan

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

For centuries, moral philosophy has wrestled with the definition of harm. The idea that one person’s actions can damage another’s well-being underpins applied ethics, moral theory, and most systems of law, yet the fine details remain hotly disputed. Kandlbinder’s starting point is the observation that three well-established accounts dominate the debate. The counterfactual comparative account, championed by Derek Parfit and Joel Feinberg, holds that an event harms someone if they end up worse off than they would have been had the event not occurred. The temporal comparative account defines harm as being worse off after an event than before it. The non-comparative, or causal, account—defended by philosophers such as Elizabeth Harman and Seana Shiffrin—says an event is harmful simply if it causes a person to be in an objectively bad state. None of these is canonically accepted, and each has attracted serious criticism, but all continue to shape moral reasoning in bioethics, law, and policy.

To see how these accounts work, Kandlbinder offers a simple illustration. A man hit on the head with a beer bottle in a bar fight is straightforwardly harmed. On the counterfactual account, he is worse off than he would have been had he stayed home that evening. On the temporal account, he is worse off after the fight than he was at work beforehand. On the non-comparative account, concussion and a painful laceration are objectively bad states, and the bottle caused them. The example seems airtight—but epigenetics, she argues, reveals cracks that run far deeper than this apparently clean case of cause and effect.

The trouble begins with identity. Person-affecting views of harm assume that for an event to count as a harm, it must be harmful to a specific someone with a distinct numerical identity. For much of the twentieth century, that identity was assumed to be fixed by genetics: the unique set of nuclear DNA in each cell, established at conception, defined the biological individual. This genetic essentialism still lingers in legislation and regulation of reproductive technologies. Yet developmental biology has rendered it untenable. Epigenetic mechanisms—chemical modifications that regulate which genes are switched on or off—respond to environmental circumstances, shape phenotypical traits such as appearance, behavior, stress response, and disease susceptibility, and begin operating as early as the embryonic stage. As scholars such as Daniela Cutas and Andrea Smajdor have noted, the new science blurs the boundary between genetics and environment, dissolving the old dichotomies of nature versus nurture and biological versus social.

This shift has consequences for the notorious non-identity problem, introduced by Parfit in 1984. The problem holds that existence-constituting events cannot make a person worse off, because without those events the person would not have existed at all to be harmed. Traditionally confined to reproductive and population ethics, the problem now leaks into the lives of existing people. If even modest environmental shifts alter gene expression, and if such changes are taken to alter identity, then arguably ‘new’ people are being produced all the time—which would make it impossible to classify everyday events as person-affecting harms or benefits on either comparative account. Smajdor has warned that numerical genetic identity can no longer sustain the weight the non-identity problem expects it to bear.

The non-comparative account escapes this identity trap, since it measures harm absolutely—being caused to be in a bad state—rather than by comparison. But it stumbles over two other requirements: a fixed categorization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ states, and a strict criterion of causation. Both falter under epigenetic scrutiny. Critics including Elisabeth Carlson, Johan Johansson, and Olle Risberg have questioned whether intrinsic harms exist at all, and disability scholarship has shown that lived experience of biological traits is far more ambiguous than generalized intuitions suggest—a caution against embedding anti-disability bias into philosophical definitions of the ‘bad’ state. Epigenetics compounds the ambiguity: as Carlo Dupras and Vardit Ravitsky have observed, an epigenetic change may be adaptive in one context yet harmful in another. Metabolic shifts toward insulin sensitivity triggered by prenatal malnutrition, for instance, can help a fetus survive early life while raising the risk of type 2 diabetes decades later. Moreover, Erla Moormann has argued that epigenetic changes rarely trace back to a single causal event, undermining causation-based accounts that presume the neat linearity of a beer bottle to the skull.

The paper’s most provocative claim goes further still. Drawing on feminist phenomenology—from Iris Marion Young’s account of embodied spatiality to Judith Butler’s argument that identity is co-constituted through relationality—Kandlbinder contends that lived experience, embodiment, and gene expression form a circular system that collectively constitutes identity itself. Environment shapes gene expression; gene expression shapes phenotype; phenotype shapes how a person is perceived and how they move through the world; those experiences in turn reshape biology and identity. On this view, there is no ‘original’ identity that exists prior to and apart from the events that befall a person, which means any account of harm that separates who someone is from what happens to them is conceptually doomed to chase its own tail.

To make the stakes vivid, Kandlbinder constructs a hypothetical figure named Mona, a woman in her thirties who carries epigenetic changes triggered by her mother’s malnutrition during pregnancy. Living in a higher-weight body, she faces chronic weight-based discrimination rooted in social norms; the resulting stress elevates her risk of anxiety, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease; those conditions limit her employment options, deepening financial precarity, which further raises stress levels—all well-studied ‘social determinants of health’ largely outside her control. Where, Kandlbinder asks, in this cascade of entwined circumstances stretching from the prenatal period onward, could one pinpoint a discrete harmful event that made Mona worse off, on any of the three accounts? Her harms are, at the same time, inseparable from who she is.

The proposed way out is methodological rather than destructive. Kandlbinder endorses multi-dimensional accounts of harm, such as Moormann’s, which incorporate lived experience and relationality, and urges that they be merged with relational conceptions of identity like Françoise Baylis’s, in which the self is co-constructed through iterative cycles of private and public interaction—now understood to operate at the molecular as well as the social level. Such a framework would treat benefit and harm as more than additions or subtractions to a person’s well-being, recognizing instead that events constantly reshape identity without thereby dissolving the person altogether. Even the humble bar fight looks different through this lens: rather than a unilateral cause acting on a pre-existing victim, it becomes one strand in a web of sociocultural and embodied conditions. As debates over germline genome editing and epigenetic editing intensify—framed by bodies such as the World Health Organization around imperatives to maximize benefits and minimize harms—philosophy may need to abandon the comfortable fiction of a fixed biological self. What epigenetics ultimately teaches, Kandlbinder concludes, is that harming and benefiting someone cannot be understood apart from understanding who they are becoming.

The timing of Kandlbinder’s analysis is notable. Bioethical attention since the advent of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing has concentrated overwhelmingly on alterations to the nuclear DNA sequence itself, even though germline alterations can also arise through changes to molecular structures other than DNA. Epigenetic editing, which modifies gene expression rather than genes, can influence phenotypic outcomes without touching the underlying sequence, and the article argues that debates about the ‘potential benefits of human genome editing research’ must therefore expand to cover these non-sequence-based mechanisms of biological change.

The epigenetic paradigm also carries implications beyond philosophy seminars. Epigenetic mechanisms influence phenotypic markers including appearance, behavior, stress response, and disease susceptibility, and these processes begin acting as early as the embryonic stage. Because some epigenetic states can be shaped by nutrition, stress, and other environmental conditions, the boundaries between individual responsibility, parental influence, and societal obligation become harder to draw. A trait that diminishes well-being in one sociocultural setting may be neutral or adaptive in another, which complicates any regulatory framework that assumes harms can be identified and attributed in a straightforward manner.

Kandlbinder’s intervention also situates epigenetics within a longer philosophical tradition. The margins of life—its beginning and its end—have long been recognized as especially troublesome for theories of benefit and harm, and questions about whether a person can be harmed before existing or after dying remain unresolved. What the epigenetic paradigm adds is the recognition that such puzzles are no longer confined to the edges of a lifespan. If embodied experience, epigenetic change, and identity are co-constitutive throughout life, then the conceptual work of defining harm must become multi-dimensional and relational, integrating biological, embodied, and sociocultural dimensions rather than treating them as separate spheres.

Subject of Research: The philosophical implications of epigenetic mechanisms for conceptualizing benefit and harm to individuals.

Article Title: Philosophical complications of epigenetic benefit and harm

Article References: Kandlbinder, A. E. (2026). Philosophical complications of epigenetic benefit and harm. Epigenetics Communications, 6(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43682-026-00049-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s43682-026-00049-3

Keywords: epigenetics, harm, benefit, identity, non-identity problem, bioethics, gene expression, well-being, feminist philosophy, genetic essentialism, social determinants of health, philosophy of biology