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Purpose: Humanity has a weakness in how we approach the “challenge” of using outer space. This paper aims to show how the global and national frameworks that address our planetary activities and crises are inadequate for the opportunities and challenges of life in outer space. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw on multidisciplinary perspectives to refine an organising governance framework that better showcases the challenges and pathways needed for living and thriving in space-age. The authors prioritise two key pillars and overview the practical and social implications that space-age humanity must address. Findings: Social sciences and humanities are vital to problematising post-war colonial legacies of governance by distinguishing the unique and overlooked challenges for thriving and working offworld and identifying progressive research agendas. Research limitations/implications: The highlighted agenda has implications for collaborative research institutes and project design. As the vital basis for continuous learning, university-based research institutes span bodies of knowledge, experience, convention and imagination that can support vibrant and overdue debate on good governance that is out of this world. Practical implications: This expansive approach has practical implications for the decision-making processes and subjects of spacescape, from reconciling the space commons with prospecting and human occupation to potential governance regimes that capitalise on the zeal for moving beyond merely “existing” off-world. Social implications: Examining the governance deficit as we pursue developing spacescape frontiers is an enriching (not reductionist) agenda that deliberately troubles the existing and emerging regime for governing our scientific and imagined off-world society. Originality/value: This framework appeals to humanity’s highest evolution in co-producing a fair and flourishing off-world governance framework (beyond replicating planetary regimes).

Chronic pain and insomnia symptoms are highly comorbid; however, the psychological mechanisms driving this comorbidity are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to assess whether 2 cognitive biases that occur separately in chronic pain and insomnia, that is, interpretation bias and attentional bias, are heightened in people with comorbid chronic pain and elevated insomnia symptoms. A final sample of N = 109 people with chronic pain and N = 79 people without pain who varied in insomnia symptoms were recruited through Prolific Academic to complete this cross-sectional study. Participants completed measures of sleep and pain-related interpretation bias (ambiguous sentences task) and attentional bias (dot-probe task), as well as questionnaires assessing insomnia symptoms, pain symptoms, and general psychological symptoms. We found an interaction between pain status and insomnia symptoms for sleep-related interpretation bias. That is, people with chronic pain showed greater sleep-related interpretation bias than those without pain, but only when insomnia symptoms were also elevated. This interaction did not extend to pain interpretation bias or attentional bias, although we did find an elevated pain interpretation bias in people with chronic pain compared to pain-free individuals. We also found that both pain and sleep-related interpretation bias were associated with depression symptoms, suggesting that interpretation bias could potentially drive a trimorbidity of chronic pain, insomnia, and depression. Taken together, these findings suggest promise for the role of interpretation bias in the mutual maintenance of chronic pain and insomnia symptoms and the importance of also considering depression.

Anxiety vulnerability is associated with an attentional bias to threat. When threat cues signal dangers that can be mitigated through behavioural action, vigilance for these threat cues can have an adaptive function. It is unknown, however, whether the anxiety-linked attentional bias is maintained or eliminated in contexts where threat cues signal dangers that can be mitigated. The current study used a probe task to assess anxiety-linked attentional bias to threat cues signalling a danger (noise burst) that in one condition could and in another condition could not be mitigated. Results showed that high trait anxious participants exhibited a larger attentional bias to threat than low trait anxious participants, and importantly, this anxiety-linked attentional bias did not differ as a function of danger mitigability. These findings suggest that anxiety-linked attentional bias is a rather pervasive processing style that may be insensitive to contextual variation in the adaptiveness of attending to threat.

Attentional bias for sleep-related negative information is believed to contribute to symptoms of insomnia by elevating arousal during the presleep period. In the present study, we examined whether the delivery of an attentional bias modification (ABM) procedure in the presleep period could produce transient benefits for sleep-disturbed individuals by reducing presleep cognitive arousal and improving ease of sleep onset. In a counterbalanced repeated A-B design, participants alternated completing an ABM training task and a nontraining control task across six nights and reported on presleep cognitive arousal and sleep onset latency. Significant reductions in presleep cognitive arousal and sleep onset latency were observed on nights where the ABM task was completed relative to nights where the control task was completed. These results suggest that delivery of ABM can attenuate cognitive arousal and sleep onset latency and highlights the possibility that targeted delivery of ABM could deliver real-world benefits for sleep-disturbed individuals.

A picture naming experiment in Dutch tested whether disfluencies in speech can arise from difficulties in lexical access. Speakers described networks consisting of line drawings and paths connecting these drawings, and we manipulated picture name agreement. Consistent with our hypothesis, there were more pauses and more self-corrections in the low name agreement condition than the high name agreement condition, but there was no effect on repetitions. We also considered determiner frequency. There were more self-corrections and more repetitions when the picture name required the less frequent (neuter-gender) determiner “het” than the more frequent (common-gender) determiner “de”. These data suggest that difficulties in distinct stages of language production result in distinct patterns of disfluencies.

•We review the cognitive bias mechanisms of co-morbid chronic pain and insomnia•Preliminary research supports attentional bias and interpretation bias as candidate mechanisms•Expectancy and memory bias research is lacking, although promising in these conditions separately•Our novel model of cognitive biases in this co-morbidity generates hypotheses for future research