The social identity approach to stress has shown how intragroup support processes shape individuals' responses to stress across health care, workplace, and community settings. However, the issue of how these 'social cure' processes can help cope with the stress of intergroup contact has yet to be explored. This is particularly important given the pivotal role of intergroup threat and anxiety in the experience of contact as well as the effect of contact on extending the boundaries of group inclusion. This study applies this perspective to a real-life instance of residential contact in a divided society. Semi-structured interviews with 14 Catholic and 13 Protestant new residents of increasingly mixed areas of Belfast city, Northern Ireland, were thematically analysed. Results highlight that transitioning to mixed communities was fraught with intergroup anxiety, especially for those coming from 'single identity' areas. Help from existing residents, especially when offered by members of other religious denominations, signalled a 'mixed community ethos' to new residents, which facilitated adopting and sharing this identity. This shared identity then enabled them to deal with unexpected intergroup threats and provided resilience to future sectarian division. New residents who did not adopt this shared identity remained isolated, fearful, and prone to negative contact.

The study of citizenship has increasingly focused on the ways in which spatialized understandings of the concept can be used to marginalise and exclude social groups: exclusive constructions of national boundaries, local neighbourhoods and public spaces can

Research on political apologies spans sociopolitical contexts and disciplines and methodological frameworks. In the rise of interest in political apologies, especially in light of 'the age of apologies', social psychologists strive to understand mechanisms of issuing, perception and evaluation of political apologies from many perspectives. This special issue aims to highlight the important role of social psychological theory in understanding political apologies and deepening knowledge in this field. The papers, which comprise the special issue, offer a detailed and comprehensive study of political apology, including both theoretical and methodological lens to enrich understanding of the topic. Concluding, all the papers of this special issue can be of interest in academics and researchers, as well as policy-makers and other stakeholders beyond academia.

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Political apologies have been theorized to play an important role in healing and reconciliation processes in postconflict settings. Whether they actually fulfil this function, however, remains unclear as the voices and perspectives of victim communities have largely been underrepresented in research. To address this, we examined the role of apologies that were offered for the El Mozote massacre (El Salvador), the Jeju 4.3 massacres (Republic of Korea) and Bloody Sunday (United Kingdom), according to members of these communities and the broader public. Although we anticipated that victim community members should find the apology more valuable and meaningful and should, therefore, be more positive about its role in healing and reconciliation processes, we found that this varies across countries. This variation could be explained by people's trust in the country's institutions. Across the samples, we found that the apology was seen as a relatively important gesture. For the apology to be perceived as impactful, however, it had toThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.