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1 .1 Background The Indigenous life expectancy gap is a major public health challenge for Australia. The persistent severity of the health differential and comparisons on an international scale demonstrate that Australia's response to this issue to date has been insufficient. Renewed political resolve has been generated by the commitment of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to 'close the gap within a generation. However, in light of the timeframe needed to resolve many of the underlying issues contributing to the health gap, this aim may not be achievable. A shorter-term focus on rigorous and wide-spread implementation of evidence-based process measures is needed. This will increase the transparency and accountability of the health reconciliation process. However, the question of how best to allocate resources in order to maximise the public health benefits remains unresolved. One approach is to focus on the areas that contribute significantly to the health gap. Obesity is an important chronic disease risk factor and accounts for 16% of the gap in morbiditiy and mortality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The health consequences of obesity can be severe, notably due to the increased risk of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease (CVD ) and type 2 diabetes. Reducing obesity prevalence through prevention therefore warrants more concerted effort on behalf of all stakeholders in Indigenous health. The purpose of this paper is to report on and critically examine the evidence surrounding the effectiveness of potential obesity prevention strategies targeted to Indigenous Australians. A secondary aim is to compare this evidence base to existing federal policy concerning strategies that contribute, both directly and indirectly, to the prevention of obesity in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This process will allow identification of the strengths and gaps in these policies . The evidence base was broken up into six main categories: 1. health promotion; 2. food security; 3. maternal and child health; 4. the indigenous health workforce; 5. t he environmental determinants of weight, and; 6. research and data collection. Key findings from the literature review and comparison with current policy, categorised according to the above themes, are as follows. 1.2 Key Findings Health Promotion • The concept of 'culturally appropriate' interventions is valuable but in many cases requires further research for clarification of meaning. • Health promotion initatives related to traditional activities and connection with homelands such as natural resource management have great potential for obesity prevention. • Community control is a key component of successful and sustainable interventions. Food Security • Achieving and maintaining food security for all community members is an essential service and underpins the success of other obesity prevention programs. • Access to health food can be seen as an essential service that may require subsidisation Maternal and Child Health • Evidence supporting the effectiveness of health promotion programs targeted to children is not strong, however childhood represents an important opportunity to initiate prevention before excess weight begins to appear. • Ante- and post-natal care programs allow health workers to impart infant and child nutrition information to mothers as well as to minimize intrauterine and early life obesity risk factors. The Indigenous Health Workforce • Capacity building in the Indigenous health workforce is necessary to support obesity interventions in Indigenous communities. The Environmental Determinants of Health • Evidence for the effectiveness of short-term projects such as income management that attempt to circumvent the socioeconomic determinants of obesity is not strong. • Household and community structure to facilitate preparation and storage of food and physical activity respectively are necessary in order to avoid the creation of obesogenic environments. Research and Data Collection • Further research specific to Indigenous Australians is needed, particularly the systematic evaluation of interventions. • National systems which collate data and compile information concerning interventions and their outcomes may help to ensure greater transparency and accountability in regards to achieving the aim of closing the life expectancy gap within a generation. • Quantity and allocation of funding may be a barrier to effective intervention research.

China's One-Child Policy has been scrutinized by many people from different countries since it was established by the Chinese Communist government in the late 1970s. The outside countries see only the fact that a husband and wife are allowed to have just one child and not the crisis that the Chinese government wanted to alleviate. Since this subject tends to be presented in different written works with a biased perspective, it can be difficult for an outsider to get a true understanding of the policy. People do not see what events in China's history may have been the reason for the establishment of the policy, what China's government wanted to gain from the policy and how it has changed China's population for (what seems to be) the better. The One-Child Policy prevented economic problems for the people of China because a large number of the people were persuaded to follow the policy.

This paper adopts an intergroup perspective on helping as collective action to explore the ways to boost motivation amongst people in developed countries to join the effort to combat poverty and preventable disease in developing countries. Following van Zomeren, Spears, Leach, and Fischer's (2004) model of collective action, we investigated the role of norms about an emotional response (moral outrage) and beliefs about efficacy in motivating commitment to take action amongst members of advantaged groups. Norms about outrage and efficacy were harnessed to an opinion-based group identity (Bliuc, McGarty, Reynolds, & Muntele, 2007) and explored in the context of a novel group-based interaction method. Results showed that the group-based interaction boosted commitment to action especially when primed with an (injunctive) outrage norm. This norm stimulated a range of related effects including increased identification with the prointernational development opinion-based group, and higher efficacy beliefs. Results provide an intriguing instantiation of the power of group interaction (particularly where strengthened with emotion norms) to bolster commitment to positive social change.

This article focuses on the recent resurgence of concerns regarding fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning even women not trying to conceive to abstain from alcohol completely if not using contraceptives, and a medical article covered by the New York Times that claims that rates of FAS are much higher than previously thought, have reignited anxiety over FAS, even though there remains substantial gray area in the relationship between alcohol and pregnancy outcomes. Not only is there scant evidence that less than a drink a day affects offspring, and none that an occasional drink during pregnancy has any effect, even among alcoholic women, FAS is more than 10 times more likely to strike the children of poor alcoholics than those of higher means who drink excessively. We explore why researchers, physicians, and public health officials continue to hyperbolize the effects of drinking alcohol leading to recommendations that target not just alcoholic women, but all women, pregnant or not. Building on past authors' suspicion of previous overblown cautioning about FAS, we do in-depth tracing of the bibliographic lineage of these warnings, highlighting the problems with the medical researchers' and health agencies' recommendations including extending the scope of the problem and relying on misleading statistics. We argue that while policing women's bodies to insure compliance with "proper" feminine behavior is an ongoing phenomenon, these new attacks on women's autonomy veiled in scientific language must be unmasked and challenged.

The past decade has witnessed burgeoning efforts amongst governments to prevent people from developing a commitment to violent extremism (conceived of as a process of radicalization). These interventions acknowledge the importance of group processes yet in practice primarily focus on the idiosyncratic personal vulnerabilities that lead people to engage in violence. This conceptualization is problematic because it disconnects the individual from the group and fails to adequately address the role of group processes in radicalization. As an alternative, we advance a genuinely social psychological account of radicalization. We draw on recent developments in theory and research in psychological science to suggest that radicalization is fundamentally a group socialization process through which people develop identification with a set of norms – that may be violent or non-violent – through situated social interactions that leverage their shared perceptions and experiences. Our alternative provides a way of understanding shifts towards violent extremism that are caused by both the content (focal topics) and process of social interactions. This means that people's radicalization to violence is inseparable from the social context in which their social interactions take place.

In this introduction to the special section on rapid societal change, we highlight the challenges posed by rapid societal changes for social psychology and introduce the seven papers brought together in this special section. Rapid societal changes are qualitative transformations within a society that alter the prevailing societal state. Recent such changes include the election of right-wing populist governments, the Arab Spring revolutions, and devastating civil wars in the Middle East. Conceptually, such events require consideration of how societal-level events relate to more proximal psychological processes to bring about the often abrupt, nonlinear (as opposed to incremental and linear) nature of rapid societal change. They also require empirical approaches that allow such qualitative transformations to be captured and studied. This is true both in terms of directly addressing rapidly-unfolding societal events in research, and in terms of how rapid, discontinuous change can be analysed. The papers in the special section help to address these issues through introducing novel theoretical and methodological approaches to studying rapid societal change, offering multiple perspectives on how macro-level changes can both create, and be created by, micro-level social psychological phenomena.

Viral social media content has been heralded for its power to transform policy, but online responses are often derided as "slacktivism." This raises the questions of what drives viral communications and what is their effect on support for social change. We addressed these issues in relation to Twitter discussions about Aylan Kurdi, a child refugee who died en route to the European Union. We developed a longitudinal paradigm to analyze 41,253 tweets posted 1 week before the images of Aylan Kurdi emerged, the week they emerged, and 10 weeks afterward—at the time of the Paris terror attacks. Tweeting about death before the images emerged predicted tweeting about Aylan Kurdi, and this, sustained by discussion of harm and threat, predicted the expression of solidarity with refugees 10 weeks later. Results suggest that processes of normative conflict and communication can be intertwined in promoting support for social change.

In this article the authors explore the social psychological processes underpinning sustainable commitment to a social or political cause. Drawing on recent developments in the collective action, identity formation, and social norm literatures, they advance a new model to understand sustainable commitment to action. The normative alignment model suggests that one solution to promoting ongoing commitment to collective action lies in crafting a social identity with a relevant pattern of norms for emotion, efficacy, and action. Rather than viewing group emotion, collective efficacy, and action as group products, the authors conceptualize norms about these as contributing to a dynamic system of meaning, which can shape ongoing commitment to a cause. By exploring emotion, efficacy, and action as group norms, it allows scholars to reenergize the theoretical connections between collective identification and subjective meaning but also allows for a fresh perspective on complex questions of causality.

In this article the authors explore the social psychological processes underpinning sustainable commitment to a social or political cause. Drawing on recent developments in the collective action, identity formation, and social norm literatures, they advance a new model to understand sustainable commitment to action. The normative alignment model suggests that one solution to promoting ongoing commitment to collective action lies in crafting a social identity with a relevant pattern of norms for emotion, efficacy, and action. Rather than viewing group emotion, collective efficacy, and action as group products, the authors conceptualize norms about these as contributing to a dynamic system of meaning, which can shape ongoing commitment to a cause. By exploring emotion, efficacy, and action as group norms, it allows scholars to reenergize the theoretical connections between collective identification and subjective meaning but also allows for a fresh perspective on complex questions of causality.

Participating in collective actions, or acts of social protest, is one of the primary means that citizens have of participating in democracy and seeking social change. In this article, we outline the ways in which: social identity provides a psychological foundation for collective actions; social norms shape the mobilization and particular direction (disruptive vs. conventional) of that protest; and participating in collective actions is psychologically consequential and sociopolitically complex. We use this platform to put forward a series of practical implications for activists, social movement and nongovernmental groups, and authorities, who seek to mobilize consequential collective action. We conclude that collective action is a fundamental tool in the battle for social equality and justice. To better understand, and engage with this phenomenon, policy makers and practitioners need to attend to its origins in collective, group‐based psychology.

McCauley (this issue) develops an analysis of the predictors of sympathetic, incipient support for terrorism. While we endorse the conceptual focus on terrorism as a process, our concern is that the data reported by McCauley do not address predictors of sympathy for terrorism. Rather, aspects of that contribution conflate opposition to the War on Terror with incipient support for terrorism. This is intensely problematic not least because the data reported actually suggest that opposition to the War on Terror and sympathy for terrorism are distinct.