The centrality of the collective to Syrian identity and the ability of war to disrupt community ties have led to significant violations of Syrians’ pre-war assumptions about themselves, the world, and their place in the world. Guided by the integrated meaning-making model, this qualitative cross-sectional study assessed Syrian refugees’ meaning trajectories through their reappraisals of the war, attempts to repair community-informed shattered meanings, and those processes’ outputs  and outcomes . We conducted semi-structured cognitive interviews with 39 Syrian war-exposed adults living in urban communities across Portugal, most of whom were beneficiaries of higher education programs for refugees. Interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis. Results suggest that the war severely disrupted Syrians’ sense of collective self, and that they repeatedly engaged in search for meaning, appraisals of the war, and reappraisals of shattered beliefs, life goals, and sense of purpose, both during wartime and in resettlement. In Portugal, despite persistent negative beliefs about the collective and ongoing and distressing searches for meaning, participants’ lived experiences concomitantly informed positive meaning reappraisals, including progressive restoration of worldviews, new opportunities for self-realization, and newly-found purpose, leading to perceived psychological benefits and growth. These findings suggest that meaning-making is both a trajectory and a dynamic process, informed by place and sociopolitical context. Clinical work to facilitate adaptive meaning-making and meaning-informed psychosocial interventions that help restore refugees’ shattered beliefs about safety, predictability, trust, and belonging, may be helpful directions to promote positive psychological adjustment and improve long-term integration prospects in refugees. War and other forms of collective violence can threaten individual and community assumptions of safety, predictability, and control, disintegrate the fabric of society, and lead to the mass displacement of civilians from their communities and countries in search of safety ,2. In poSince 2011, the Syrian civil war has caused the forced displacement of more than half of its 22 million pre-war population . What stPsychological adjustment in the aftermath of trauma has been posited to require cognitive adaptation efforts that enable individuals to restore or exceed pre-trauma levels of psychological functioning . AccordiAlthough both searching for and finding meaning in the aftermath of trauma are essentially individual, intrapsychic processes, meaning-making also occurs on a relational level through discussions with others . In popuThere have been important advances in meaning-making research with refugee populations, where investigators have tested some of its theoretical propositions, such as meanings-made of trauma, reappraisals of core beliefs, cognitive and emotional processing, or generational appraisals of collective trauma ,25,26. HIn the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis, Portugal committed to hosting unprecedented—despite symbolic in the larger European Union context—numbers of asylum-seekers relocated from Greece and Italy following Aegean and Mediterranean Sea crossings, as well as UNHCR resettled refugees . By the Considering the centrality of the collective to Syrian identity, and the ability of war to disrupt community ties, this study aims to assess community-informed posttraumatic cognitive reappraisals, understood as socially construed meanings, in a sample of war-exposed Syrian civilians living in Portugal. To do so, we conducted an exploratory qualitative study to capture a diversity of meaning trajectories that focused on examining reappraisals of the Syrian war in resettlement, attempts to repair shattered meanings, and those processes’ outputs  and outcomes .This study utilizes data from a larger research project that examines how survivors of the refugee experience make meaning of past experiences and achieve psychological adjustment in post-displacement settings. Guided by Park’s integrated meaning-making model , this crM = 27.1; SD = 4.8). Thirty-one individuals were student refugees , five were relocated from Greece, and three were spontaneous asylum-seekers. Participants’ median length of stay in Portugal was 32.7 months (SD = 27.9), ranging from 11 to 67 months. Twenty-four student refugees travelled directly to Portugal largely from Beirut, whereas the remaining 15 individuals spent between two and 59 months in transit, with a mean of 23.2 months (SD = 18.3). Thirty-four participants were single (87.2%) and five (12.8%) were married. Eighty-four percent (n = 33) had some form of higher education, including doctoral , master’s  and bachelor’s  degrees, and the remaining six (15.4%) had 12th grade education. Family-inherited religious background was: Muslim-Sunni , Muslim-other/non-specific , Alawite , Ismaili , Druze , Christian-Catholic , and Christian-Orthodox .Participants were recently arrived Syrian adults living in urban communities across Portugal. Eligibility criteria included (1) having Syrian nationality or background , (2) being 18-year-old or older, (3) being in Portugal for a minimum of six months, and (4) being Arabic speaker with English or Portuguese fluency. Prospective participants were excluded if they manifested acute psychological distress or had apparent cognitive deficits. The sample was recruited across continental Portugal through a combination of intentional and snowball sampling. A total of 40 individuals were interviewed between January and May 2019, with one Kurdish man dropping out after becoming distressed during the interview. The final sample thus consisted of 39 participants: 20 men (51.3%) and 19 women (48.7%) between the ages of 19 and 37 (The study protocol included: (1) a sociodemographic questionnaire developed for the purposes of the study and administered as a structured interview; and (2) a semi-structured interview designed to guide participants through posttraumatic reappraisals of beliefs, goals, and sense of purpose. The Syrian war was set as baseline for a pre- and post-trauma global meaning structure, and individuals were invited to reflect on changes to their cognitions and self through the opening question, “when you think back on your life before the war and now, can you describe how it changed?”. Subsequent questions invoked changes to specific aspects of global meaning. For example, on eliciting narratives about sense of purpose, the question “what was life about before the war?” invoked pre-trauma cognitions, with the following probes if participants appeared stuck: “what is it that you lived for before the war, and what is it that you live for now?”.Due to the target population being recently arrived, expected high exposure to extreme trauma and significant stressors, and reported research fatigue among the community, outreach strategies were iteratively discussed with, and mediated by, key community leaders and resettlement agencies. Arabic language information materials were disseminated through leaders’ and agencies’ informal networks, and through postings on the research project’s social media accounts . Study materials were developed in English, forward translated to Arabic by a Syrian research consultant, and pre-tested in Focus Groups prior to data collection. To accommodate concerns expressed by participants during protocol pre-testing related to anonymity within the community, individual interviews were conducted without assistance of an Arabic language interpreter, in either English or Portuguese according to participant fluency. Print Arabic versions of all materials were available to participants. Detailed community-, trauma-, and ethics-informed findings from research protocol testing are published elsewhere .n = 18), in central Aveiro and Coimbra (n = 10) and the capital Lisbon (n = 10), and southern Évora (n = 1). Researcher and participants met in quiet places of participants’ convenience, namely university offices or city parks, for an average of 90 min, and interviews were audio recorded. Prior to enrolling, individuals were informed of the purpose of the study and the voluntary nature of their participation. Bounds of anonymity and confidentiality of information were reviewed, and individuals were given an opportunity to ask questions and clarify any doubts prior to signing consent forms. Although the purpose of the interview was not to narrate PTEs, there was potential for distress and retraumatization as participants reflected on past events and the impact of those experiences on their global meaning. The sample was thus instructed on the nature of symptoms and normal reactions to the retelling of their stories and informed of the possibility of being referred for pro-bono psychosocial support, as needed. At the end of the interview, participants were offered a €10 gift card. Interview follow-up included a message to check on participant wellbeing after revisiting their past for the purposes of the research. The study received ethics approval by ISPA—Instituto Universitário’s Ethics Committee (Ref. D/004/09/2018).All interviews were conducted by the Lisbon-based Lead Researcher (first author) who is experienced in interviewing survivors of refugee trauma, and who travelled to meet participants in the northern cities of Braga, Guimarães and Oporto , Beliefs about Syria , and Community- and family-informed life goals .Participants emphasized two intertwined aspects of their collective identity pertaining to religion and to their Syrian cultural identities. With a large majority Muslim sample, being “Muslim by heritage”  was a sentiment expressed by several participants, who spoke of being raised in religious families that often conformed to cultural expectations. Despite her family not being “really religious”, 23-year-old GH reported that “we pray and everything like all Syrians”. Religion shaped identities and community relations: “on Friday, everyone goes [to the mosque] to meet their friends and talk with each other. They’re not going because of the religion” .The cultural context provided the structure through which to live and interpret life. Prior to the onset of the war, Syria was predominantly—proudly and longingly—recollected as beautiful and diverse, as well as peaceful and prosperous. As with many others, BM  spoke of wealth and prosperity, “everything was available to us, anything you can dream of, you could get before the war”, whereas KK  emphasized its cosmopolitan nature, “in Syria, the diversity is amazing! In Damascus, especially. You are walking down the street, you can see girls with skirts, girls with hijab, (…) the diversity is really amazing”. On the other hand, there were some participants who reflected on the cycles of violence in the region and Syria’s predestination to be targeted by other powers. One woman explained, “if you look at the history, you’ll see so much aggression. Wars and stuff. This is something that is transmitted over generations” , and the sentiment was echoed in the words of another participant who stated, “we are under attack, always” .Participants admitted to rarely giving much thought to how they expected their lives to develop. Most envisaged living a normal and peaceful life, which included studying, getting a house, marrying, having children, etc., which one participant equated to living regular lives “like in Portugal right now” . He added: “we had our routines, go to work, university, meet our family and friends”. Life essentially conformed to family and cultural expectations, which MS  equated to “[living] by inertia, moving with the culture, doing what everybody else did”.We examined participants’ accounts for perceived extent of threat, causes of the war, implications for the future of the community, and acceptance and integration of the event. Three themes were identified and are discussed below: Shattered past life (subtheme: Staying in Syria no longer an option), Search for meaning , and Meaning of the war .“When the war started, everything changed” . The onset of the war in 2011 caused severe violation of participants’ expectations of safety and predictability, and shattered life’s continuity. Participants drew a clear before-and-after the war line where pre-war lives were largely recalled with longing, and the growing violence and terror around them, forced confinements, and severe disruptions of their daily lives were retold with shock and disbelief. NM  emphasized his alarm by stating: “I was living the maximum happiness I could. Going through something that threatened my life or losing things I used to [take for granted] was a big shock for me”. Participants discussed the sudden—for some—or progressive—for others—realization that what they had idealized for the future had ceased being an option, and that their ability to “complete” their lives in Syria was no longer a possibility. Flight decisions were informed by perceived imminent danger, men’s fear of being forcibly recruited into the army, collapsing systems and institutions and ensuing lack of future prospects, and realization of the community’s mass exodus. One participant explained that, although she had always considered the possibility of one day studying in Europe, with the war, that was “no longer just an option, it’s a need. What small opportunity you had to stay [in Syria], is now gone. You need to go” .The extreme nature of the conflict and repeated challenges to pre-war assumptions triggered in Syrians the need to make sense of the events around them. Because the experience was not just personal, it needed to be examined and interpreted by and within the collective. In our sample, participants reported meeting in small groups to discuss the war, whether within the family or with their friends and others in the community, and, as such, attempting to understand what was going on and find a narrative that helped fit the war into their worldviews. BS  explained: “we had deep discussions about these things. In our small places, we could analyze what was going on. We noticed that it was a big countries game”.A common formulation as individuals sought comprehensibility amidst the war entailed asking why, articulated not just in the singular , but in the plural . “What was happening to us raised a lot of questions”, painfully recalled AG , “why? Why us? Why me? Why my family? Why are these things happening?”. Other ruminative formulations included questioning the fairness and justice of it all, which, in a majority-Muslim country, included reaching out to God and examining their religious beliefs. KK  observed: “with the war, people started to lose their faith. Everybody started asking, ‘why is this happening? Oh God. Where’s God?’ Just like, ‘if there is a God, He would not allow this to happen’”.“At the time, I didn’t have time to ask myself [why], because we were just receiving information, watching the news, trying to understand what was going on, why people are getting killed, disappearing, why people became zombies suddenly and started killing others. This was hard for me because we were always a country where people loved each other.”As the war expanded and became protracted, these ruminative processes appeared to subside or be purposefully postponed as individuals and the community focused on survival and the daily challenges of life in wartime. One man described the barrage of information and exposure to extreme events on a daily basis that led him to question his pre-war beliefs about the community:The narrative that had sustained individuals during the challenges of the war was subsequently challenged by the compounding forced migration experience, which appeared to reactivate searches for comprehensibility and significance. There were some participants who shared distressing accounts of wanting to find purpose in their experiences, often amidst significant living difficulties in Portugal. Filled with sorrow, RA  stated: “We were forced to leave our country. The future we were building there. [Others] didn’t have to leave their countries. They didn’t go through these things”.In trying to find worth in their suffering, one final element in the search for meaning emerged, as some participants shared occasionally contemplating what their lives would have been as if had there been no war. Our sample was largely composed of individuals who were adolescents and coming into adulthood as the war broke, which led participants to reflect on their developmental time and how the conflict had shaped their sense of self. ME  explained: “let’s say in a virtual reality there was no war. Would I have developed the same way or am I this way because of war?”. The forced migration experience compounded by forced separation from loved ones led YK  to wonder what life would have been like if had had she been born in Portugal, a country with no war, where she could be “with [her] family, and all [her] friends”. She added: “what if I didn’t have to separate from anyone I love?”.The war began with an uprising within the larger regional context of the Arab Spring and was largely welcomed as an opportunity for change. There was a shared community purpose and hope that the uprise would lead to needed “change [in] the institutions, change [in] the mentality,” . In a hope- and excitement-filled account, AK  explained how the revolution made room for needed growth and knowledge in the society: “there were really good ideas. People teaching each other about civil society, separation of religion and state laws, how we can have human rights. All these human rights that we had no idea about!”.However, as the violence escalated, the need to create narratives that helped Syrians make sense of the war increased. Many participants initially appraised the war as being the result of brewing tensions in the community and fueled by corrupt powers. Despite living in peaceful coexistence, as some knew, and others realized, “there was a sort of aggression between Syria’s sub-communities that was there for years, which no one had addressed” . As the conflict grew and worsened, participants spoke of realizing that they were pawns in a game controlled by political and religious powers that fomented discord in the community. Even if unable or unwilling to assign blame beyond naming an overpowering “they”, YK  expressed her frustration as follows: “they made people fight against each other. (…) And it’s a game. I don’t know the rules of this game, but it’s a dirty game. And they are playing with souls”. The process of uncovering the perceived truth evidenced by war was lengthy for some, with NM  admitting that it had “[taken him] a long time to realize the bad things the regime was doing”, whereas for a number of others watching “the army shooting people”  was the trigger for their own realization. Especially concerning in a majority-Muslim society was the perception, by the community, of the part religious groups and leaders, both in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, played in the war. AK , who was then a practicing Sunni Muslim, stated: “we started to see—me and the community, my friends, my family—how religious leaders were involved in the conflict. So we lost trust in these people”.Despite perceiving significant discrepancies between the events around them and their pre-war beliefs about Syria and their community, some participants were able to integrate and narrate the war as inevitable, and accommodate it within cyclical, generational violence. Several individuals provided similar narratives of regional geopolitics, where their homeland was perceived as a target. SS  stated: “we were raised to know that we were living near the enemy, which is Israel. So, we always knew that there was going to be a war. Now, later, it’s going to happen”. Despite the preparedness for war, the escalating violence defied expectations. MK , who at the beginning of the war was 14 years old, promptly referred back to family-inherited Syrian history: “I understood [what was happening] right away, because my parents went through something similar in the 1980s. Similar, but not as devastating”.got used to [emphasis added] seeing people dead” .Lastly, as the war progressed, it overwhelmingly became too absurd to comprehend, and yet something with which they had to learn to live. In their youth and despite living under constant threat, numerous individuals recounted defying parental instructions to stay home, accepting the possibility of death, as well as painfully realizing that they had learned to accept and live with the horrors of war: “The first time I saw people dead was hard. But the worst was when I “I think the war plays a big role in questioning what you believe in”. With this statement, MA  insightfully captured the meaning-making processes triggered by the war as an event that overwhelmed individuals’ cognitive structures. Wartime trauma and daily stressors, and the difficulties associated with displacement were repeatedly appraised against participants’ global meaning structures. We identified two themes of wartime meaning reappraisals—Lost collective self and Loss of faith and trust in others—and five themes of reappraisals in resettlement: Learned suspicion and loss of trust; Learned community helplessness ; Ambivalent sense of belonging; New opportunities for self-realization ; and Reappraised purpose .During the War“We started to feel, ‘oh, he is Sunni, he hates me, and I hate him.’ It’s a very bad thing. Because we have never been like this in Syria. We live with Christians and Muslim and Kurdish and every religion, and we were very happy. And I think every person agrees with me. In Syria, we were very happy, but I don’t know what happened…”The war was understood as having created or evidenced tensions along religious and political lines, which were hard to reconcile with pre-war community beliefs and sense of a cohesive collective. As neighbors and colleagues turned on each other, “you realize that something was wrong from the beginning” , and that Syrians’ previously harmonious lives were, in fact, “a lie”. As with AK , many felt that the collective self had been artificially held together through repression: “we lived in a lie. That we are a unity, we are one piece. Actually, people hated each other, inside, deeply. We were just not allowed to say it”. Whereas others longed for their lost beloved community:As the fabric of the community disintegrated, generalized suspicion took hold. Participants shared deep, sorrow-filled accounts of losing faith in their leaders and losing trust in each other. “There was a feeling of having lost the trust we had”, as GH  put it. She added, “after the [onset of the] war, I lost faith in my friends”, which carried over into Syrians’ lives in exile: “I believe that people now have a problem trusting each other”.In ResettlementIn resettlement, years after initial post-war reappraisals, participants spoke at length about changed beliefs, goals, and purpose, informed by their new setting.In Portugal, the war continued to be understood as the result of the will of the regime and religious groups, as well as outside powers. With some time and geographic distance, some participants assigned blame squarely on their own community and culture. “We created the war!” decried AK , “we have to confess that we are responsible for this damage. We throw responsibility around, but this is craziness! We are an integral part of this war. Our mentality, our vision, our way…” Suspicion and distrust therefore continued to severely disrupt community relations. Despite well-intended efforts by host organizations to create spaces for community dialogue and healing, with unresolved tensions and the war still active, Syrians did not appear equipped to engage in fruitful dialogue: “we had summer school this year in my university and there were a lot of Syrians—the theme was “rebuilding Syria”—and all the time people were arguing and fighting. There was all this tension because of the war” .Perceived community helplessness derived from the realization that the still ongoing war was fueled by geopolitics, where outside countries continued to dictate the fate of Syria—“[the war] is not in the hands of Syrians anymore. Maybe we started it, but we can’t finish it now” —, and of Syrians—“my dream was to study in a US university, because they are the best in the world. But then I lost my scholarship. I believe they didn’t issue me a visa because I’m Syrian” . As nationals of the largest refugee-source country, Syrians are often depicted for their vulnerabilities and weaknesses, which was largely shown to humiliate and hurt participants’ sense of pride. “Before the war, nobody heard about Syria, but now everybody talks about us, poor people”, explained BS . SS , who gave unwavering accounts of the strength of her people and pride in her community and heritage, related feeling hurt when she heard other Syrians in exile say that they do not want to go back after the war:“Okay, I know our country is not that good and maybe you don’t want to go back, but don’t say it. Because when other people hear it, they will say, ‘what kind of country is it that their own people want to leave it?’”As participants attempted to reconcile past lives and shattered identities with the opportunities before them in the new country, they struggled with understanding where they now fit in. This theme was characterized by ambivalence and a diversity of experiences, where most participants were still reconciling their loss with their newly found affiliations, often negotiated within family and community expectations. BS , who had grown used to the European and Portuguese cultures and struggled to imagine the possibility of adjusting back to life in Syria, shared a recent conversation with his mother. As they revisited the delicate subject of his potential return, she replied: “‘who said you will ever come back?’ She was prepared for it! She wants me to come back, but she [finally understands] that it’s better to live here”. Others, such as student refugee ME , conveyed distressing accounts of lost belonging. After traveling back to Syria for summer break, ME recounted: “I came here [to Portugal] and didn’t fit in. So I always thought that when I go back [to Syria] I would fit in more. But I went there and I didn’t. Now I don’t fit anywhere, and I don’t know what to do”. Lastly, an important few reported opposite-end allegiances, be it finding, in Portugal, their new home, be it through strengthened allegiance to the homeland. SS  declared: “I feel more connected to my homeland! (…) My [Portuguese] boyfriend knows that, for me, Syria is my final destination”.Students in our sample shared guilt-laden accounts of attempting to resolve the discrepancy between the destruction caused by the war and the opportunity the war provided for them to study abroad. They struggled with the benefit they derived from all the destruction: “there are opportunities because of the war. I will not say that’s a good thing, but it’s one thing that would never have happened without the war” . As participants discussed negotiated identities and place in the new country, they narrated rich accounts of the possibilities offered by the resettlement setting, with many talking about the ability to live free and safe in Portugal. AO  reported telling his fiancée back home that “we can have a good life [in Portugal], find a good job, and feel safer”. Coming from a majority Sunni-Muslim country with strict rules about women’s behavior, some young women passionately shared experiences of newly found freedom and identity. KK  stated:“I survived a controlled society. I feel like I had one life before and now I have a new life. So, I survived a society where they judge people and judge girls for what they wear. And now I am free.”When reflecting on beliefs of justice, kindness, or perceived control over one’s life, participants seldom gave unequivocal answers. As one woman put it when asked if the world was fair, “it’s like you’re asking me if the world is black or white. I can’t answer that question. It’s a really wide range of colors!” . This type of thought process reflected not only the complexity of participants’ experiences, but also evidenced layered meaning systems. There was ambivalence in worldviews regarding safety , benevolence , and fairness .Life in resettlement provided a unique opportunity to rebuild their lives in peace and safety, as well as to restore individuals’ sense of purpose. Because the majority of participants were working towards graduate and undergraduate degrees, in our sample, subjective purpose accounts were often informed by their student refugee identities. “I’m here studying because war happened in my country, because people suffered, and this is a responsibility that I don’t take lightly. I cannot remove this from who I am, and I have to give something back” . This feeling was shared by many students, who struggled to reconcile the guilt they felt for their privilege as beneficiaries of student programs, an overwhelming sense of responsibility to succeed, and a perceived obligation to work towards Syria’s post-war reconstruction and healing. In the privacy and anonymity of the research interview, however, a few students guiltily admitted to having changed their original plans of return: “I don’t think I’m going back. Honestly, I’ve been thinking about bringing my sisters. Here we can build a better future. I’m really sad and I’m sorry for that, but we have to think about our future” .Having lived through the unpredictability of war and displacement, many participants learned to be cautious about the future and to focus on immediate, tangible goals. As some envisioned a future in Portugal, their lives were now guided by the need to prove themselves to the host community: “the Portuguese gave me this opportunity of a lifetime, and I need to prove to them and to the world that I deserve it” . In the case of others, after all the struggles and suffering, their current purpose was informed by survival and restoration of their pre-war self: “I want to find a job and be totally independent. Focus on myself, my efforts, my skills. This is my new goal: to return again to who I once was” .Although the lessons learned from the war and the refugee experience led participants to report often feeling anxious and depressed, with a small number of them reporting clinically-significant posttraumatic stress disorder . Another spoke of the newly acquired freedom and “courage to talk about [her] beliefs” . As beneficiaries of higher education programs for refugees, several students and former students also perceived benefits from the new skills acquired. AO  summed it up and spoke of optimism: “here I learned languages, I have new skills, and now I’m working. So, I look at the future in a really optimistic way”.The second subtheme was characterized by especially moving and love-filled narratives: “you feel that you need to be with people who really love you, who really support you. (…) The war made us more emotional towards each other, more supportive of each other”, recounted YK . As she integrated the ambivalence of reappraised worldviews and spoke of learned unfairness, RJ  added: “at the same time [the war] makes you a better person, because you suffered a lot and you do not want someone else to suffer. So, yes, I feel motivated to do more and be better”.“When I feel depressed, I close my eyes and remind myself that I’m in Europe and that I am actually working on my dreams. So, I always remember that. (…) People here [in Portugal] surround us and they are very good with us so we can feel more at peace. So right now, I feel like I’m healing.”As they wrapped up their interviews, a few participants shared pride-filled accounts as to how far they had come in the aftermath of a war and forced displacement. They narrated ways in which they had been able to integrate their past into their rebuilt selves. When facing bouts of sadness or distress, AK  reminded himself to think “rationally”. He explained, “‘rationally’ means respecting the experience I had. (…) It built me. I’m a different person. I told you, I’m proud of this journey”. Despite their youth, they also gave insightful narratives of healing as a journey fostered by safety, peace, and kindness in the host country:Understanding meaning-making processes in the aftermath of collective violence as relational and informed by culture, community, and place is essential to advance evidence-based practices of trauma recovery and healing in refugee populations ,18,32. TOur sample was generally young, with participants coming into late adolescence/early adulthood at the onset of the war, and also highly educated. The latter was unsurprising considering Syria’s massive investment in higher education opportunities, especially for women and in the fields of science and technology . Albeit Participants’ meaning-making trajectories were examined in relation to the war as the overall collective stressor, despite individual exposure to different types of potentially shattering trauma and losses and focused on perceptions of the collective self and community functioning. Pre-war beliefs were often prefaced with “we always knew that”, followed by aligned statements about regional geopolitics, which offered an initial narrative structure into which to integrate the war. However, as the conflict expanded and violence intensified, previous assumptions about a unified collective were violated and perceived as flawed and maintained by a repressive regime that quieted dissent . In our One salient aspect of this search pertained to the urge many felt to see worth in the war and in their post-war lived experiences. This intentional cognitive reframing evidenced the disruption the war had imposed on prior expectations of continuity  and, wheMuch as with the war, shattered beliefs and goals also required reappraisals at different points in the journey, thus confirming our two initial propositions that meaning-making is both a trajectory and a dynamic process that can be triggered by new violations or by a setting that allows survivors time to make meaning of their pasts. In the early months and years after resettlement, refugees are often focused on the daily challenges of adjusting to their new lives with little ability to address past losses and trauma and to engage in difficult reflections . This foConsidering the centrality of religion to Syrian identity, group belonging, and place in society , we wereIn our study, participants’ subjective negative reappraisals about their own community remained unresolved and a source of significant distress, which reinforced the uprootedness of the displacement experience and perceived lost sense of belonging . DespiteAlthough it is possible that the ongoing war and recent arrival to Portugal may have contributed to incomplete meaning-making processes at the time of data collection, the coexistence of negative, positive, and ambivalent meanings-made points to meaning-making in the aftermath of refugee trauma as a dynamic process with no defined end, where collective identity and narrative are reshaped both over time and across generations ,27. LiviThus far, mental health research with Syrian refugees has mostly centered on negative psychological outcomes of exposure to collective trauma for the self and the community . This quOur work makes important contributions to the meaning-making literature by introducing a trajectory analysis of meaning-making from pre-trauma global meaning through post-settlement psychological adjustment. Theoretical propositions suggest that meaning-making occurs within the context of the culture and the community , which iThis study is not without limitations. Participants were interviewed eight years after the onset of the war, therefore their retrospective recollections of pre-war and wartime beliefs and goals are likely influenced by multiple biases, including individually experienced traumas, displacement journeys, and life circumstances. Further, although in some ways having a sample comprised primarily of student refugees was advantageous in terms of participants’ abilities to give in-depth accounts of their meaning-making processes, this group’s experiences may not be representative of those of other war-exposed Syrians living in Portugal, despite the sample’s geographic diversity and our attempts to include Syrian nationals regardless of legal status. The interviews were not conducted in participants’ native Arabic, which may have posed difficulties for participants to fully and accurately express the nuances of their meaning-making efforts. Lastly, this study only focused on the impact of the war as baseline for meaning violation and on meaning trajectories related to the collective, and hence does not represent the totality of individuals’ meaning-making experiences, including the wealth of individually-experienced traumas, intrapersonal reappraisals, and coping strategies, namely those related to religion, faith, and spiritual dimensions of healing, that may facilitate or hinder adjustment. Future research should investigate intrapersonal meaning-making trajectories in the aftermath of the collective trauma, including reappraisals in transit countries, to comprehensively capture refugees’ journeys in meaning.The Syrian war has profoundly and critically severed community ties and Syrians’ collective identity. Adaptive meaning-making of those shattered cognitive structures will require ongoing and iterative reappraisals, possibly over generations, as displaced Syrians attempt to make sense of the war, find benefit in their experiences, and rebuild narratives that can restore their lost sense of self. Host communities are key to promoting adaptive psychological adjustment, by providing: welcoming and safe places that help repair refugees’ lost sense of humanity and rebuild community trust; designing host programs that incorporate opportunities for self-realization and purpose ; and providing healing opportunities for within- and inter-community exchanges that help facilitate meaning-making and psychological growth in survivors of refugee trauma.


Team communication is considered a key factor for team performance. Importantly, voicing concerns and suggestions regarding work-related topics—also termed speaking up—represents an essential part of team communication. Particularly in action teams in high-reliability organizations such as healthcare, military, or aviation, voice is crucial for error prevention. Although research on voice has become more important recently, there are inconsistencies in the literature. This includes methodological issues, such as how voice should be measured in different team contexts, and conceptual issues, such as uncertainty regarding the role of the voice recipient. We tried to address these issues of voice research in action teams in the current literature review. We identified 26 quantitative empirical studies that measured voice as a distinct construct. Results showed that only two-thirds of the articles provided a definition for voice. Voice was assessed via behavioral observation or via self-report. Behavioral observation includes two main approaches  that are methodologically consistent. In contrast, studies using self-reports showed significant methodological inconsistencies regarding measurement instruments . The contents of instruments that assessed voice via self-report varied considerably. The recipient of voice was poorly operationalized . In sum, our findings provide a comprehensive overview of how voice is treated in action teams. There seems to be no common understanding of what constitutes voice in action teams, which is associated with several conceptual as well as methodological issues. This suggests that a stronger consensus is needed to improve validity and comparability of research findings. Consider a junior employee at a marketing team meeting and a nurse working on an emergency response team who voice their concerns regarding incorrect procedures. Both speak up about work-related topics Morrison  with theThese situations—a junior employee and a nurse stating their concerns—are typical examples for the expression of “voice” at the workplace. In general, voice has been defined as “informal and discretionary communication by an employee of ideas, suggestions, concerns, information about problems, or opinions about work-related issues to persons who might be able to take appropriate action, with the intent to bring about improvement or change” Morrison , p. 174.Despite the clear importance of voice in action teams, the literature on this topic is rather heterogeneous and characterized by a plethora of different conceptual and methodological approaches to assess voice  trainings focusing on non-technical skills in the 1980s that are now recommended by all large national and international airlines  As one of the pioneers of voice research in action teams, Edmondson  assessedAddressing the lack of investigating “real behavior”, a growing body of research has investigated team communication—especially in action team context—via behavioral observation . We combined search terms for voice  up or speak(ing) out, upward communication, upward feedback, employee silence, or organizational silence) with terms for team composition  and terms for action teams that work in high-reliability contexts . This initial step yielded 1395 articles. In a second step, abstracts and titles were screened by the first author of this review. Each article that did not match the extent of this review was excluded. Concretely, we included empirical, peer-reviewed works that investigated voice  quantitatively in an action team context . We excluded the article types meta-analysis, review articles or systematic reviews, conceptual/theoretical articles, qualitative articles, commentary without original results, book chapters without original results, and articles that were written in a language foreign to us . In cases of ambiguity , articles were initially included. This second step resulted in 159 articles. In a third step, both authors of this review read titles, abstracts, and full texts carefully to identify relevant articles. Discrepancies were resolved by discussion. We also personally contacted voice researchers and performed a reference check of the existing reviews on voice to identify additional papers. A total of 26 articles met the inclusion criteria, including five articles identified through hand-searching.variables measured  provided a definition of voice  did not explicitly clarify their main variable. For example, in the healthcare domain, voice was defined as “stating concerns  involved) rather than saying nothing”  and behavioral observation (n = 13). Self-report was based mainly on self-assessments, whereas behavioral observation referred to an external evaluation .In our review, we distinguished between two types of measurement: self-report measures (n = 11) to self-constructed scales and items (n = 7). Some scales were slightly adapted or modified versions of already validated scales (n = 3), whereas other scales represented a mixture of self-constructed items and validated items from already existing scales (n = 4). Three of 25 measurement instruments contained one single item to assess voice. The number of items on the instruments ranged from 1 to 27 .Overall, self-report studies assessed 18 voice variables by means of 25 instruments , attitudes toward voice (n = 5), current voice behavior (n = 4), voice climate (n = 7), and likelihood/willingness to voice (n = 5). In contrast to the other key topics, investigation of the likelihood/willingness to voice was always related to a vignette that illustrated typical situations  in which the expression of voice would have been necessary . One study used a validated instrument  and language-focused (n = 6). Event-focused voice refers to the identification of voice itself , whereas language-focused refers to studies in which the formulation of voice is analyzed in more detail . Except for two studies . In only one case was event-focused coding used to also predict voice quality  or a combination of voice quality and frequency (n = 2). In only one case was language-focused voice used to assess voice frequency . For example, “In my clinical area, it is difficult to speak up if I have a patient safety concern”  in terms of being in higher positions in the organization. For example, “Junior team members should not question the decision made by n = 4), as someone in the group (n = 2), as higher status and not specified (n = 2), or not specified at all (n = 12). Compared to voice definitions, actual measurements of voice involved even more different combinations of voice recipients: higher status (n = 11), higher status and group (n = 6), higher status, group, and recipient not specified (n = 3), higher status and recipient not specified (n = 2), group (n = 5), and group and recipient not specified (n = 3). Finally, in only two of 30 measurements (7%), the recipient was both explicitly mentioned in the definition of voice and operationalized accordingly. Considering studies that did not provide a definition of voice but used terms for their measured variables such as “challenging authority” and “speaking up” that indicated hierarchical relationships between sender and recipient, there would be five additional cases in which the recipient was adequately operationalized  investigated voice by means of self-report and by behavioral observation. Whereas behavioral observation instruments were consistently based on either of two theoretical approaches, self-report instruments were more heterogeneous. Another issue concerns the voice recipients; recipients were not consistently defined or measured, which resulted in poor operationalization of the voice recipient. This is the first time that the treatment of voice in action teams has been systematically analyzed in terms of conceptual as well as methodological approaches. Our findings indicate several challenges and implications for voice research in action teams, which we discuss in the following sections.More than one-third of the articles reviewed do not provide a definition of voice. This is problematic, as in general variables that are investigated in research articles should be clarified and distinguished from similar constructs in advance Suddaby . A possiIn addition, the aspects mentioned in definitions of voice vary considerably. For example, studies mention sender, recipient, how voice should be made, context, and intention of voice in different combinations and use them very inconsistently. Nevertheless, voice content represents the only common aspect of every definition. Although voice content is always mentioned, there is much room for interpretation, in particular when definitions were borrowed from Morrison  e.g., “, p. 97. Types of voice measurements  were equally distributed in the studies in our literature review. The investigation of voice by means of self-report appears to be highly inconsistent, as the instruments varied from self-constructed items to validated scales.In sum, nearly the half of the self-report studies used self-constructed instruments or even single items to investigate voice , suggesting a lack of content validity  frequency and quality  or if the recipient is a single person or a group .Apart from a few exceptions, our findings indicate that the recipient of voice was not clearly defined in either definitions or measures. More specifically, most studies did not explicitly clarify Previous research considers voice as challenging the status quo  and methodological approaches  would be important to increase the validity and comparability of results of investigations of voice in action teams.Second, our review offers the opportunity to gain insight into the measurement instruments that have been used to assess voice in action teams. This contributes to an overview of existing methodological approaches and thereby supports the planning of future studies. Moreover, the overview might provide information on the advantages and disadvantages of instruments, indicating that behavioral observation could be more suitable than self-report  and prohibitive voice (e.g., preventing hazardous situations; Liang et al. Our work has several limitations. First, our study focused on voice in action teams and did not involve other team settings. Broadening the range of literature would have led to a more comprehensive conceptual and methodological overview. However, by highlighting the importance of voice in action teams, we concentrated on research in high-reliability environments. Second, we are aware of potential search terms that we did not employ in our literature search. For example, there are similar concepts to voice such as assertiveness or assertive communication that have been associated with error detection and challenging authority in earlier aviation literature (Chute and Wiener In addition to the issues mentioned above, future research on voice in action teams might profit from considering the role of non-verbal behavior—both in expressing concerns as well as in receiving voice. In the context of healthcare action teams, non-verbal behaviors such as monitoring other team members (Burtscher et al. This is the first systematic review of the literature on voice in action teams, which also critically considers the treatment of voice in practice. First, our review highlights that concepts and methods are very heterogeneous. For this reason, we would like to emphasize the need for developing a shared understanding of voice in future studies such that a better comparability and integration of research findings will be possible. Second, by showing which instruments have been employed to measure voice, we hope to contribute to an overview—especially for practitioners—that supports future research on voice in action teams. Finally, our review indicates that high-reliability organizations could benefit from conceptualizing voice as a dynamic team process, which includes considering both sender as well as recipient. We hope that this review contributes to a more complete understanding of voice in action teams, particularly regarding the challenges associated with investigating voice in field settings. Ideally, the review should help closing the gap between research and practice and thus contribute to error reduction and improved organizational performance.


The following reports on research undertaken concerning the “misinformation problem” on social media during the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections in 2020. Employing techniques borrowed from data journalism, it develops a form of cross-platform analysis that is attuned to both commensurability as well as platform specificity. It analyses the most engaged-with or top-ranked political content on seven online platforms: TikTok, 4chan, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google Web Search. Discussing the extent to which social media platforms marginalize mainstream media and mainstream the fringe, the analyses found that TikTok parodies mainstream media, 4chan and Reddit dismiss it and direct users to alternative influencer networks and extreme YouTube content. Twitter prefers the hyperpartisan over it. Facebook’s “fake news” problem also concerns declining amounts of mainstream media referenced. Instagram has influencers  dominating user engagement. By comparison, Google Web Search buoys the liberal mainstream (and sinks conservative sites), but generally gives special interest sources, as they were termed in the study, the privilege to provide information rather than official sources. The piece concludes with a discussion of source and “platform criticism”, concerning how online platforms are seeking to filter the content that is posted or found there through increasing editorial intervention. These “editorial epistemologies”, applied especially around COVID-19 keywords, are part of an expansion of so-called content moderation to what I call “serious queries”, or keywords that return official information. Other epistemological strategies for editorially moderating the misinformation problem are also treated. While scholars of hearsay, rumor and conspiracism would point to the history of its staying power , the sprThe misinformation problem differs per platform. On such youthful platforms as TikTok and to a lesser extent Instagram, misinformation may be delivered sarcastically or insincerely, making it difficult to characterize intent . On the The research provides a technique for “cross-platform analysis”, or the examination of a single phenomenon  across a variety of social media. It thereby addresses critiques of “single platform studies”, where societal trends or phenomena are seen through one social media lens without the benefit of a comparative perspective that would furnish a baseline . Engagement analysis of a single subject matter  is considered one robust cross-platform approach since it captures each platform’s top content, which refers to the posts or web URLs that receive the most interactions (directly or indirectly). It has the benefit of being more global in its outlook compared to other cross-platform approaches that rely on seeking one or more digital objects shared across platforms  and comparing resonance .But the cross-platform approach put forward here is not blind to platform specificities. It seeks to account for differing platform metrics, vernaculars of use and user subcultures. Accounting for this “medium specificity” is performed in at least three ways. The first is that engagement is measured distinctively per platform, as discussed in some detail below. Second, social media manipulation  also differs per platform. One is interested in fake followers on Instagram and bots on Twitter, for example. Being attuned to platform vernaculars, finally, rests on the study of cultures of use. For example, certain sound effects or facial gestures on TikTok suggest disbelief or mistrust. In all, commensurability thereby relies on both the cross-platform study of engagement as well as individual platform analyses imbued with a medium-specific approach.In the following I first introduce the current misinformation problem online as bearing some resemblance to the quality of information debates from early web history. The contemporary concerns, however, flow from the “fake news” crisis of 2016, together with the continual study of the extent to which the platforms have addressed the issue . Moreover, these debates have not escaped the politicization of “big tech” and its supposed “liberal bias” , a claimIndeed, designating certain information as problematic may be political (and increasingly politicised), because, as others before us also have found , it is mThe web historically has been thought of as a space for the unsubstantiated, authored by rumour-mongers, conspiracy theorists and all manner of self-publishers and fringe contributors. Indeed, one could argue, as it was put in 1994, that on the web the “eminent and the crackpot” stand side-by-side, a feature once celebrated as a productive collision . Indeed,The recent uptick in attention to the study of problematic content online could be attributed as well to the “fake news crisis” of 2016, where it was found that so-called fake news outperformed mainstream news on Facebook in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections that year . That fiMore broadly there has been a rise in the study of “computational propaganda” and “artificial amplification” which the platforms refer to as “inauthentic behavior” , and have been deplatformed, a somewhat drastic step that follows (repeated) violations of platform rules and presumably temporary suspensions . “DemoneOn the interface, where the metrics are concerned, there may be follower factories behind high follower and like counts . The marHaving touched upon the current state of uncertainty online, I would like to turn to how problematic information manifests itself in social media platforms around specific issues. The following recounts a cross-platform analysis into the “misinformation problem” in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. As noted above, the overall approach is to study most engaged-with content with a sensitivity to platform metrics, vernaculars of use and user subcultures. It relates a set of empirical studies that enquire into the extent to which platforms are again mainstreaming the fringe, examining more specifically those spaces conjured through “serious queries” that contain election-related as well as COVID-19 information . When quHere I take the most salient findings per platform in turn, before concluding with a discussion of the emergence of editorial epistemologies put into use by social media platforms as well as search engines. Editorial source adjudication is a remarkable transformation in how these platforms sift and filter sources, indicating an exceptional information state, a point upon which I conclude.TikTok is not usually considered a site for political encounter, but recently the short video sharing platform, used predominantly by youth, has posted rules about political content, indicating its growing presence there. It also warns against “misleading information” and urges users to “verify facts using trusted sources”, suggesting that misinformation could be worthy of investigation on the platform . Apart fTikTokers employ a range of creative expression such as singing, dancing, duet, lip-syncing, mimicking, finger dancing, viral sounds and facial expressions. Some have specific connotations for TikTok insiders and make for trends. Having queried election related hashtags, such as #trump2020 and #biden 2020, it was found first that TikTokers make copious use of political hashtags, attaching both Trump and Biden-related hashtags to the same video, thereby striving to maximize the audience and view counts, rather than identify with one candidate or another. In the analysis, the researchers undertook a format and content analysis of the top 30 videos per hashtag query, examining which forms of creative expression are used in political videos and where misinformation may be imparted.Three forms stood out: lip-synching, viral sounds and facial expressions. TikTokers match the lip movements of the candidates, often sarcastically, for example when the comedian, Sarah Finally, the facial expression that approximates the doubtful emoji is another creative expression often encountered. In these videos news footage may be cut into the shots, such as multiple clips of Joseph Biden hugging women, with the intention to sew doubt about his fitness for presidential office. Here we found many of the political videos instilling mistrust in news clips through sarcastic and doubtful facial expressions. Such a finding prompted consideration of adding “instilling mistrust” as a category to the spectrum of misinformation types developed by Unlike public-facing platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where users cultivate an online self, 4chan and Reddit are so-called masked spaces of anonymous users . ParticuHere, in the context of the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections of 2020, the research enquired into the extent to which U.S.-based political boards and forums on 4chan and Reddit share misinformation and “junk” content, and more specifically imposter news and other types of “pink slime” websites, termed as such for the use of low-cost, newspaper-like sites often publishing repurposed content . We alsoNo pink slime sites were encountered, suggesting either their lack of significance (despite returning high in Google queries) or the media literacy of the users on the boards and communities (or both). Scant amounts of problematic sources were found but like in previous research copious YouTube links were identified, which led to the inquiry into whether YouTubers from the alternative influence network are significantly present in those online cultures. The alternative influence network is described here as a set of YouTube channels fluctuating between “news and personality-centric vlogging, spreading misinformation-laden commentary” . Indeed,Like Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram, Twitter also has been the focus of public attention concerning misinformation around the 2016 United States presidential elections and beyond. Twitter, rather unlike the other two platforms, has aided researchers in its study through providing curated data sets of Russian and alleged Iranian trolls and influence campaigners, or what are referred to as inauthentic users . Thus, iHere we revisit these claims through a study of the content and users on “political Twitter” in the early run up to the 2020 United States presidential elections, where we examine result sets of queries for election-related hashtags and keywords, together with the users most active in deploying them . How mucThe content under study are the URLs (hosts) that are referenced in the tweets, and the most active users defined as those who tweet the most. In a three-week timeframe prior to and just after Super Tuesday (March 2020), when a cluster of election primaries and caucuses were held, we compared the hosts to a list of problematic sources curated by combining pre-existing labeling sites, including  “the ChaFor the study of the most active users, we analyzed “authenticity” with the aid of Buzzfeed News that so-called fake news was liked and shared more than mainstream news on the social media platform in the three months prior to 2016 U.S. presidential elections , which is roughly the first of the three timeframes under consideration in the original Buzzfeed News piece entitled, “viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook”  then Facebook’s fake news problem has worsened slightly. Compared to the same period in 2016 the proportion of “fake news” engagement to that of mainstream news has increased from roughly 1 in 4 to 1 in 3.5. If, however, we tighten the definition, as Facebook has done, to “false news” and include in that category only the sources or stories flagged as “problematic” the scale of the problem drops substantially to 1 in 9. It should be noted that we encountered no imposter news sites, which may suggest that they are well targeted by Facebook or that they are not significantly resonating among users.Nonetheless, in the last period under study in 2016, when Silverman found that “fake news” performed well, imposter sites (as the Denver Guardian) comprised a majority of those most interacted-with. One implication of the finding is that efforts to identify imposter sites (and other “pink slime”) continue to have value, despite the fact that they are not yet well consumed. Another implication is that if the problem remains of a smaller scale, scaled-up fact-checking may continue to find its place among the counter-initiatives, rather than only mass content moderation and automation.Instagram had been one of the more understudied and under-appreciated social media platforms when it came to misinformation. That changed with the release of two major reports on the Russian disinformation campaigning surrounding the 2016 United States presidential elections . In factIn the study of election-related Instagram posts in the early run-up to the 2020 United States presidential elections (Jan-April 2020), we enquired into the amount of divisive and ambivalent posts, compared to non-divisive and earnest ones . How sarPerhaps counter-intuitively, we found that the vast majority of the top posts concerning the candidates as well as the social issues are earnest and non-divisive. Virtually no posts were found to be divisive and ambivalent. Indeed, most posts were sincere expressions of support. Of the few divisive posts which the coders additionally found to be earnest, half were by Donald Trump or Donald Trump, Jr, and most of the rest concern Trump or gun control. Apart from a few posts pushing a conspiracy theory surrounding 5G and COVID-19 (including one post that ranked second in engagement), no other misinformation was encountered. The top 5G related post, by an influencer, debunked the conspiracy. Indeed, with a few exceptions we also found that the influencers were posting responsibly and earnestly.In a separate exercise we studied the authenticity of the followers as well as the political parties, employing the While Google Web Search could be considered the dominant information machine online, among the major platforms and online services it has been one of the least studied for misinformation. Recognizing the potential for its spread during the pandemic, or what the head of the WHO called the “infodemic” , Google In order to start to answer these questions, we queried candidate names, political parties and a host of election-related issues in Google, with results from the “United States region” from January 12, 2019 to March 23, 2020 . In an eIn all we found that the Google results for our nearly 120 queries resulted in scant problematic information returned. Hardly present as well were official sources that we defined as federal or local government, intergovernmental agencies, politicians, or campaign websites. Special interest sites, a broad category ranging from think tanks to advocacy groups, have an outsized presence in the results, however. These sites tend to specialize in an issue or industry, which is also an indication of how Google values information sources. Most significantly, when considering the political leanings of sources, it is striking that Google could be said not to seek “balance”. That is, liberal sources outnumber conservative ones in the results for all queries made. Employing the “ample” categorization, the results were 6:1 in favor of liberal sources, and 3:1 when employing the narrower scheme.At the outset the question to be addressed concerned the extent to which social media is “mainstreaming the fringe”, not so unlike the early web, prior to the development of epistemologies that placed it on firmer ground. Among those mentioned were the wisdom of the crowd such as Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but there were others. For instance, Yahoo! and DMOZ employed librarianship in their directory-making, Google used hyperlink analysis scientometrically, and the early United States blogosphere constituted a kind of fact-checking, epistemic community, most famously uncovering faked documents held up as authentic by an authoritative TV news program (60 Minutes), in what has become known as the “Killian documents controversy” . Here weIn order to grapple with that question, I briefly sum up the findings with respect to the relationship between the mainstream and the fringe per platform and draw conclusions from our cross-platform approach. Generally speaking, social media and its users appear to be marginalizing the mainstream. Subsequently, I discuss the prospects of source adjudication in terms of results curation or otherwise managing which content is allowed to remain on social media platforms. It is a form of “platform criticism” that speaks to the various emerging epistemologies on offer to stabilize social media.The social media platforms under study have varied relationships with mainstream media, at least with respect to those sources or posts most interacted with in the early run-up to 2020 United States presidential elections. Broadly speaking, TikTok parodies it, 4chan and Reddit dismiss it and direct users to alternative influencer networks and extreme YouTube content. Twitter prefers the hyperpartisan over it. Facebook’s “fake news” problem also concerns declining amounts of mainstream media referenced. Instagram has influencers  dominating user engagement. By comparison, Google Web Search buoys the liberal mainstream (and sinks conservative sites), but generally gives special interest sources, as they were termed in the study, the privilege to provide information rather than official sources.Given the decline of what one could call “mainstream authority” online, how to characterize the contemporary approaches to source adjudication, when considering problematic information? That platforms are manually editing results (for certain queries) indicates what I would call an “exceptional information state”.Recently, social media platforms and Google web search have begun to curate the results of such “serious queries” as coronavirus, COVID-19 and similar terms related to the global pandemic. Such filtering may explain the scant amount of outwardly problematic information such as conspiracy websites encountered in the top results for coronavirus queries across the platforms. It does, however, raise the question of the epistemology behind the authority that is being applied, and whether it puts paid (for example) to the signals approach of algorithms, and instead puts forward “editing in” official sources as the top content recommended.Source list or results curation is laborious work and fell into decline with the overall demise of the human editing of the web and the rise of the back-end, and algorithmic signals, taking over from the editors . COVID-1So far, the pandemic and (for some) election-related matters are “serious queries” in the sense that the information returned should not be fully in the hands of current trends in algorithmic culture but returned to editors. With content reviewers and moderators, there is currently a blurring (and in a sense cheapening) of editors, however. Their low-wage, outsourced work to date has had to do with violent and pornographic content rather than the “quality of information” . There is the question of the journalistic training and qualifications for the editing work . The proThere are advocates of an editorial recovery online. Source adjudication techniques on offer these days for results curation are, among others, journalistic balance, the absence of biased sources, fact-checked stories, and “longue durée” expertize, be it official and/or established. Crowd-sourcing users to flag inappropriate content or only checking trending content are also available approaches. All mark the return of qualitatively determining the worthiness of source appearance and could be dubbed editorial epistemologies. Each requires particular judgements in advance of the moment of gaveling the A/B or ignore/delete decision, as platforms are wont to decide to allow a post or not.  There is also the question of handling the volume of posts to be scrutinised.When curating results or otherwise managing outputs, to undertake “balanced list” work implies making political or partisan source distinctions, and continually returning to the outputs to check the weight of each side per substantive query. An approach seeking an “absence of biased sources” presupposes classification and monitoring and likely relying on official, institutionalized information. Fact-checking, rather than on a source level, switches the efforts to the individual story, and subsequently researches, archives and labels them. At least as it has been performed on Facebook posts by DPA and AFP, the German and French news agencies respectively, it is such meticulous work that it outputs a total of about four fact-checks per day, if their production prior to the 2021 Dutch elections is exemplary . RelyingAnother starting point is to take an active audience approach, and assume that another, perhaps more significant instance of filtering lies with the user or what was once known as the “wisdom of the crowd”. Users are able to “flag” or report content on various platforms and label it as inappropriate, misleading, etc. Taking such user reporting practices a step further, as mentioned above, Twitter’s “Birdwatch” program seeks dedicated users  to sift content and enforce platform rules.As demonstrated in the empirical research reported above, engagement measures that take into account rating (liking), circulating (sharing) and commenting (reading) are another means to determine the activity of audiences. On Facebook, but also on Twitter (retweeting), one may inquire into the stories about the coronavirus and other issues making audiences active. Adjudicating only those posts with the highest engagement would allow liking and sharing to trigger editorial interest.just violence but its “glorification”  in situations where the risks of harm (…) are less severe but where people may still be confused or misled by the content . Setting


I cried out ow, ow, and someone came and helped me.” “Ow” and “crunch” are examples of onomatopoeia – words that sound like the things they describe. Every language has these kinds of mimetic words, which are often used to express an impression in a personal, emotional manner and are considered indispensable in everyday conversation. Indeed, onomatopoeia can help to better explain events, give a more vivid description of emotions, and provide the receiver with a richer understanding of intent and meaning [A patient may report to a physician:  meaning . (fizz) or the cry of a goose (honk). These “sound-like” words are also called echoic, from the mythological echo [Onomatopoeia is a literary device like metaphor and simile in that it identifies something that is like something else. In the case of onomatopoeia, the “something” sounds like the noise made by the verbal utterance, for instance, to describe when a bottle of carbonated beverage is opened cal echo . Some eccal echo . As a group of simulation-based healthcare educators working in various countries, we were prompted by the context of our Japanese colleague. We learned that in Japan there are more than a thousand general mimetic words in use . Our dis“ow” in English, “aua” in Germany, “ahia” in Italy, or “aiyo” in Chinese [“gan gan” denotes a severe headache, “zuki zuki” refers to back pain or to pain in several other body parts. Another colleague from Togo, West Africa, explained that various mimetic words can be used to describe different kinds of pain in his country too. He named a few examples, “gbo gbo” denotes headache pain, “poupoupou” conveys pulsating pain. Togo, like Japan, is a country where onomatopoeia is widely used and understood. We discovered that vocal responses related to the expression of pain seem phonologically similar between some countries, with cross-linguistic analogues such as  Chinese . These wAlthough the official language in Togo is French, the country is multilingual, and over 40 languages and dialects are spoken. Some patients are not sufficiently fluent in French to articulate their concerns precisely in that language. In turn, doctors and nurses cannot speak and understand all the languages and dialects spoken in Togo, so onomatopoeia plays a large part in their diagnosis. The sounds of these words cross traditional linguistic boundaries and convey meanings that are widely understood. This response resonates with the well-known Bouba/Kiki effect, where people from a wide range of cultures and languages are presented with drawings of two shapes (a softly rounded one and a jagged angular one) and asked to pair each with the made-up sounds of “bouba” or “kiki”. Almost all associate “bouba” with the rounded shape and “kiki” with the spiky one . It is sometimes thought that onomatopoeia is the preserve of children who have not yet mastered a sophisticated vocabulary. Indeed, there are many onomatopoeia in Japanese nursery rhymes. Kasai  analysed “gan gan” (severe) pain. The student now has to interpret “gan gan” as a headache which is severe and must provide the required treatment to the patient. However, we challenge the view that onomatopoeia is intended for use by children only, arguing that the precise use of onomatopoeia for describing pain in countries such as Japan and Togo demands a different interpretation. Indeed, teaching awareness of the role of onomatopoeia in Japanese clinical settings using standardized/simulated patient (SP) methodology is an established part of the medical school curriculum . SP-baseWe suggest that onomatopoeia can be framed as an intuitive form of expression, often culturally and/or linguistically specific, through which patients communicate their concerns to healthcare providers. Carefully designed encounters with SPs, like those developed in Japan, provide excellent opportunities for trainees to practise recognizing and clarifying the meaning of these utterances. Becoming aware of the subtleties and precision of mimetic word utterances may allow clinicians to understand their patients’ needs more fully and provide appropriate treatment. When a patient’s facial cues are hidden behind a mask, such as has been the case in the recent pandemic, listening can become an even more important skill for healthcare providers to demonstrate. The pandemic notwithstanding, the increasing globalisation and movement of people between linguistic cultures means that awareness and interpretation of onomatopoeia may become an increasingly important diagnostic skill for clinicians, especially paediatricians, to master to understand what patients are trying to communicate to them. As such, simulation-based healthcare education with SPs related to patient use of onomatopoeia should be included in health professional training curricula. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.


A Book Review onPandemics, Politics, and Society: Critical Perspectives on the Covid-19 Crisisby Gerard Delanty (Berlin: De Gruyter), 2021, 215 pages, ISBN: 978-3110713237.The pandemic has made amateur epidemiologists and, later, vaccinologists of us all. Social science has been more in the background: in the United Kingdom, for example, a group of social and behavioural scientists was called on by government mainly to advise about the prospects of public compliance with restrictive measures. Gerard Delanty has however risen to the challenge of confronting the questions which the pandemic poses to social and political theory, initially with a journal article  and now As Delanty notes (p. vii) the pandemic is arguably the most significant social transformation since the end of Soviet communism. As with what Claus Offe called at that time a ‘triple transition’, there is now a triple crisis: ‘a health and medical crisis, an ecological one, and a crisis in capitalism and globalization.’ (p. 2) As with a Covid test, the pandemic has imposed an invasive and painful test of current practices of agriculture and globalised agribusiness and travel, and produced a positive, in other words a bad result. ‘The pandemic has become a metaphor for a flawed world’ (p. 19).In a neat fit with the theme of this special section, Delanty suggests the possibility, based on the experience of earlier pandemics such as the Black Death and the 1918 flu, ‘that out of the current crisis will come some improvements in public policy and a more humanized kind of capitalism than the current precarity that predominates. But such gains took decades if not centuries…’ (p. 17).The book is divided into three sections, on expertise, globalisation and the social. In the first, Claus Offe points to the different categories of people divided by the pandemic and the policies for its mitigation, focusing in particular on those who cannot afford to isolate and ‘are forced into a trade-off of life and livelihood.’ (p. 34) Something like the same dilemma confronts public authorities, though those which delay introducing restrictive measures end up having to make them more severe and prolonged. Stephen Turner, who has worked substantially on the politics of expertise, explores the paradoxes of its current politicisation, as do Jan Zielonka, drawing on recent analyses of the opposition between technocracy and populism and the emergent phenomenon of ‘technopopulism’ , and Danlongue durée perspective on the ‘political theology of Covid-19’ and earlier pandemics, while Daniel Chernilo, like Frédéric Vandenberghe and Jean-François Véran, stress its global nature. When Marcel Mauss wrote about the ‘total social fact’ of the gift, he was not thinking of a gift (in the German sense of poison) affecting the whole world, and now even Antarctica, at more or less the same time. ‘Like the collars and shells of the Kula or the animal furs of the potlatch, it circulates freely within social relationships and brings into movement the whole of society…’ (p. 175) As Chernilo points out, ‘At its peak, lockdowns, quarantines, restrictions of travel, work and education reached around 80% of the world’s 7 billion of inhabitants.’ (p. 167) While Véran, who had worked with Médecins sans Frontières in Paris and contracted Covid, Vandenberghe, less dramatically, ‘endured the anguish of social isolation. We were experiencing, perhaps, the inversion of Sartre’s formula: hell, after all, might be the absence of other people.’ (p. 186).In the second part of the volume, the sociologist of science Helga Novotny points to the way the pandemic contributes to digitalisation and datafication, and Eva Horn to its implications for the ecological crisis of the anthropocene age. ‘If the pandemic can teach us a lesson for managing the future in the Anthropocene, it is not only about tipping points. It is also about the immense cost of dithering and of scepticism towards scientific findings.’ (p. 135) Bryan Turner also adopts a In the third and final part, Sylvia Walby shows how social democracy can mitigate the social consequences of the pandemic, and Donatella della Porta suggests that emergencies such as the current one can open up opportunities for social movements, as well as curtailing their activities. The political economist Sonja Avlijaš argues that, in a context where we are all more or less seriously threatened, ‘the coronavirus pandemic has made a big dent in the already weakened ideology that the “competitive society” does not need security and protection’ (p. 240). Albena Azmanova takes a similar line that the ‘battlegrounds of justice’ against inequality and catastrophic climate change now include a third battleground directed against precarity resulting from social polarisation: ‘the pandemic showed precarity to be the real grievance of the 99 per cent...’ (p. 254).This wide-ranging book is a timely and extremely important contribution which will stand comparison with the host of subsequent books on the topic which we can expect to follow.


The quantum ergotropy quantifies the maximal amount of work that can be extracted from a quantum state without changing its entropy. Given that the ergotropy can be expressed as the difference of quantum and classical relative entropies of the quantum state with respect to the thermal state, we define the classical ergotropy, which quantifies how much work can be extracted from distributions that are inhomogeneous on the energy surfaces. A unified approach to treat both quantum as well as classical scenarios is provided by geometric quantum mechanics, for which we define the geometric relative entropy. The analysis is concluded with an application of the conceptual insight to conditional thermal states, and the correspondingly tightened maximum work theorem. Generalrmations . In part passive ,4,5,6. I passive .thermodynamic value of genuine quantum properties [The quantum ergotropy plays a prominent role in quantum thermodynamics . In partoperties ,9,10,11,operties ,13, coheoperties ,15, or qoperties ,17, it hoperties . Note thclassical ergotropy, which quantifies the maximal amount of work that can be extracted from inhomogeneities on the energy surfaces, which have been shown to be analogous to quantum coherences [In this paper, given that the quantum ergotropy can be written as the difference of quantum and classical relative entropies , we define a herences ,19.geometric relative entropy. With this, it becomes particularly transparent to characterize the one-time measurement approach to quantum work [conditioned on the initial energy. Here, we identify the distinct contributions to the thermodynamic cost of projective measurements by separating out the coherent and incoherent ergotropies, and the population mismatch in the conditional statistics.In a second part of the analysis, we turn to a unified framework, namely geometric quantum mechanics. Exploiting this approach ,21,22, wtum work ,25,26,27tum work ,44,45,46Hence, by expressing the quantum ergotropy as a difference of relative entropies, we are able to (i) generalize the notion to classical scenarios, and to (ii) elucidate the thermodynamics of projective measurements. This analysis further cements ergotropy as one of the salient pillars of quantum thermodynamics.The paper is organized as follow. In H and quantum state We begin by deriving a simple expression for the quantum ergotropy, which does not explicitly depend on the optimization over unitary maps. To this end, consider a quantum system with Hamiltonian fined as (1)Eρ≡trOur goal is now to express Equation  as a difLet In principle,  entropy  Ei(ρ)Here, we call fined as (10)trτH to ref.  for morecoherent ergotropy The oherence (11)C(ρ) in ref.  and EquaHence, we conclude that there are three distinct contributions to the coherent ergotropy. Namely, work can be extracted not only from the coherences directly, but also from the population mismatch between the completely decohered state and the corresponding thermal state. However, the total extractable work is lowered by the fact that generally classical ergotropy, which quantifies the maximal work that can be extracted from inhomogeneous distributions under Hamiltonian dynamics, i.e., under the classical equivalent of unitary maps.Remarkably, the above discussion of the quantum treatment can be generalized to purely classical scenarios. It was recently recognized that distributions that are inhomogeneous on the energy surfaces can be considered the classical equivalent of quantum states with coherences ,19. TherA; we then let B, given that AWe start with the classical distribution, BIn complete analogy to the quantum case, we now consider the relative entropy of We can writeEquation  is a divAs before, we then seek a “transformed” joint distribution Then, we have Accordingly, we define the classical ergotropy as quantum  as well βEclass20)). Thegeometric quantum states [Only very recently, Anza and Crutchfield ,21,22 rem states ,51,52 wed is the dimension of the Hilbert space. Note that d can also be infinite [We proceed by briefly outlining the main notions of geometric quantum mechanics, which is well developed ds2=It is easy to recognize that pure states are represented as generalized delta functions on the projective space. In particular, for We are now equipped to return to the expressions for the quantum and classical ergotropies, Equations  and 20)20), respgeometric relative entropy is then defined asThe  entropy . Therefo entropy  as(31)βRemarkably, also the classical case can be fully treated within the geometric approach. To this end, note that for any classical distribution, we can construct the corresponding geometric quantum state. Therefore, it now becomes a fair comparison to consider the difference of quantum and classical ergotropy, lso ref. ), yet a irreversible work, and we have To this end, imagine a closed system that is driven by the variation of some external control parameter. We denote the initial Hamiltonian by  driving . If the ving [ΔF . The difr=W−ΔF≥0 . Only rar=W−ΔF≥0  as well r=W−ΔF≥0  systems In particular, the following was shown ,26(32)βal state (33)ϱB≡∑Finally, Equation , the sigEquation  was undegeometric canonical ensemble as proposed by Anza and Crutchfield [Remarkably, it is not hard to see that tchfield ,22. The tchfield . Specifitchfield ,22(35)PThus, to maintain the consistency of the presentation, we continue to employ the geometric formulation of quantum states. Now, consider the geometric representation of quations  and 38)ϱB(37)ϱBThe natural question arises as to whether any work can be extracted from the geometric ensemble. To this end, consider the corresponding ergotropy (39)βEβal state  is nothial state  becomes In conclusion, motivated by the desire to express the maximally extractable work in a form independent of the optimization over unitary operations, we have obtained several results. Given that the quantum ergotropy can be expressed as the difference of the quantum and classical relative entropies, we identified three distinct contributions to the coherent ergotropy, of which the relative entropy of coherence and the population mismatch between thermal state and fully decohered state are the most important. This insight was extended to classical systems, in which inhomogeneities in the energy distribution play the role of quantum coherences. To quantify how much work can be extracted from classical states, we introduced the classical ergotropy, and we postulated that the genuine quantum contribution to the ergotropy is given by the difference of the quantum and classical expressions. Our analysis provides a consistent approach to maximum work extraction in both quantum and classical systems. In particular, we have not only shown that classical inhomogeneities play the role of “classical coherence", but also that work can be extracted that is quantified by the classical ergotropy. This was solidified by exploiting the geometric approach to quantum mechanics, in which quantum and classical states can be treated in a unified framework. As an application, we demonstrated that the recently introduced notion of “conditional thermal state” actually belongs to the family of geometric canonical ensembles and that, hence, the corresponding sharpened maximum work theorem becomes easy to interpret. This demonstrates that understanding quantum as well as classical ergotropies is an essential pillar of modern thermodynamics with a myriad of potential applications. Finally, these results demonstrate that the geometric approach can be regarded as a methodology of unifying the quantum and classical approaches to the second law of thermodynamics.