scholarly journals Emotions in the face: biology or culture? – Using idiomatic constructions as indirect evidence to inform a psychological research controversy

2018 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Langlotz

Research on the facial expression of emotions has become a bone of contention in psychological research. On the one hand, Ekman and his colleagues have argued for a universal set of six basic emotions that are recognized with a considerable degree of accuracy across cultures and automatically displayed in highly similar ways by people. On the other hand, more recent research in cognitive science has provided results that are supportive of a cultural-relativist position. In this paper this controversy is approached from a contrastive perspective on phraseological constructions. It focuses on how emotional displays are codified in somatic idioms in some European (English, German, French, Spanish) and East Asian (Japanese, Korean, Chinese [Cantonese]) languages. Using somatic idioms such as make big eyes or die Nase rümpfen as a pool of evidence to shed linguistic light on the psychological controversy, the paper engages with the following general research question: Is there a significant difference between European and East Asian somatic idioms or do these constructions rather speak for a universal apprehension of facial emotion displays? To answer this question, the paper compares somatic expressions that are selected from (idiom) dictionaries of the languages listed above. Moreover, native speakers of the East Asian languages were consulted to support the analysis of the respective data. All corresponding entries were analysed categorically, i. e. with regard to whether or not they encode a given facial area to denote a specific emotion. The results show arguments both for and against the universalist and the cultural-relativist positions. In general, they speak for an opportunistic encoding of facial emotion displays.

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 132-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Zubow ◽  
Richard Hurtig

Children with Rett Syndrome (RS) are reported to use multiple modalities to communicate although their intentionality is often questioned (Bartolotta, Zipp, Simpkins, & Glazewski, 2011; Hetzroni & Rubin, 2006; Sigafoos et al., 2000; Sigafoos, Woodyatt, Tuckeer, Roberts-Pennell, & Pittendreigh, 2000). This paper will present results of a study analyzing the unconventional vocalizations of a child with RS. The primary research question addresses the ability of familiar and unfamiliar listeners to interpret unconventional vocalizations as “yes” or “no” responses. This paper will also address the acoustic analysis and perceptual judgments of these vocalizations. Pre-recorded isolated vocalizations of “yes” and “no” were presented to 5 listeners (mother, father, 1 unfamiliar, and 2 familiar clinicians) and the listeners were asked to rate the vocalizations as either “yes” or “no.” The ratings were compared to the original identification made by the child's mother during the face-to-face interaction from which the samples were drawn. Findings of this study suggest, in this case, the child's vocalizations were intentional and could be interpreted by familiar and unfamiliar listeners as either “yes” or “no” without contextual or visual cues. The results suggest that communication partners should be trained to attend to eye-gaze and vocalizations to ensure the child's intended choice is accurately understood.


Author(s):  
Vera Yakubson ◽  
Victor Zakharov

This paper deals with the specialized corpora building, specifically academic language corpus in the biotechnology field. Being a part of larger research devoted to creation and usage of specialized parallel corpus, this piece aims to analyze the initial step of corpus building. Our main research question was what procedures we need to implement to the texts before using them to develop the corpus. Analysis of previous research showed the significant quantity of papers devoted to corpora creation, including academic specialized corpora. Different sides of the process were analyzed in these researches, including the types of texts used, the principles of crawling, the recommended length of texts etc. As to the text processing for the needs of corpora creation, only the linguistic annotation issues were examined earlier. At the same time, the preliminary cleaning of texts before their usage in corpora may have significant influence on the corpus quality and its utility for the linguistic research. In this paper, we considered three small corpora derived from the same set of academic texts in the biotechnology field: “raw” corpus without any preliminary cleaning and two corpora with different level of cleaning. Using different Sketch Engine tools, we analyzed these corpora from the position of their future users, predominantly as sources for academic wordlists and specialized multi-word units. The conducted research showed very little difference between two cleaned corpora, meaning that only basic cleaning procedures such as removal of reference lists are can be useful in corpora design. At the same time, we found a significant difference between raw and cleaned corpora and argue that this difference can affect the quality of wordlists and multi-word terms extraction, therefore these cleaning procedures are meaningful. The main limitation of the study is that all texts were taken from the unique source, so the conclusions could be affected by this specific journal’s peculiarities. Therefore, the future work should be the verification of results on different text collections


Author(s):  
Patrick Sze-lok Leung ◽  
Bijun Xu

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) has been perceived as a sign of a new East Asian power order, but the legitimacy of the war has yet to be clarified. The Japanese foreign minister Mutsu’s Kenkenroku shows that the reasons claimed by Japan were only pretexts for its ambition to put Korea under its control. The 1885 Convention of Tianjin, which was used to justify the Japanese behaviour, needs to be reinterpreted. The Chinese reaction can be understood by exploration into Confucianism, which opposed wars between equal peers. Meanwhile, the Western powers which invented and developed international law were self-interested and did little to prevent the war. The incident shows that international law, empowered by the strong states, failed to maintain peace efficiently in the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
B. G.-Tóth ◽  
E. M. T. Hendrix ◽  
L. G. Casado

AbstractOver the last decades, algorithms have been developed for checking copositivity of a matrix. Methods are based on several principles, such as spatial branch and bound, transformation to Mixed Integer Programming, implicit enumeration of KKT points or face-based search. Our research question focuses on exploiting the mathematical properties of the relative interior minima of the standard quadratic program (StQP) and monotonicity. We derive several theoretical properties related to convexity and monotonicity of the standard quadratic function over faces of the standard simplex. We illustrate with numerical instances up to 28 dimensions the use of monotonicity in face-based algorithms. The question is what traversal through the face graph of the standard simplex is more appropriate for which matrix instance; top down or bottom up approaches. This depends on the level of the face graph where the minimum of StQP can be found, which is related to the density of the so-called convexity graph.


Author(s):  
Dasari Tejaswini ◽  
Suhas Kulkarni ◽  
Dolar Doshi ◽  
Adepu Srilatha

AbstractBackgroundAesthetic alterations in the face can be self-perceived and can affect quality of life in young adults.ObjectiveTo assess the impact of malocclusion on self- perceived oro-facial behaviour among young adults.MethodsA Cross sectional study was conducted among 638 young adults (aged 18–21 years) of Hyderabad city. One college from each of the five zones of the Hyderabad city (five colleges) were selected by simple random sampling procedure. A 21-item Oro-facial investment scale (OFIS) questionnaire assessing self-perceived oral health knowledge, attitude, practice and Dental Aesthetic Index (DAI) assessing the severity of malocclusion was used. Data were analysed with standard statistical software (SPSS, Statistical package for the social sciences, version 20.0). p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsMales had higher mean scores for knowledge (2.90 ± 0.49) than females (2.73 ± 0.82) and was statistically significant (p = 0.002*). No statistically significant gender differences were found in relation to attitude and practice. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that there was a significant difference in all the three scores (knowledge, attitude, practice) with respect to age, with significantly high score for knowledge and practice among 18 year old subjects (p = 0.0001*; p = 0.0003* respectively) and attitude among 21 year old subjects (p = 0.0049*). No statistically significant age, gender differences were found in relation to DAI scores. Upon correlation, DAI significantly and positively correlated with knowledge (p = 0.03*) and attitude (p = 0.0001*).ConclusionThis study has shown significant impact of malocclusion on the self-perceived oro-facial behaviour.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. ii26-ii26
Author(s):  
Emma Toman ◽  
Claire Goddard ◽  
Frederick Berki ◽  
William Garratt ◽  
Teresa Scott ◽  
...  

Abstract INTRODUCTION Controversy exists as to whether telephone clinics are appropriate in neurosurgical-oncology. The COVID-19 pandemic forced neuro-oncology services worldwide to re-design and at the University Hospitals Birmingham UK, telephone clinics were quickly implemented in select patients to limit numbers of patients attending hospital. It was important to determine how these changes were perceived by patients. METHODS A 20-question patient satisfaction questionnaire was distributed to patients who attended neuro-oncology clinic in person (“face-to-face”), or via the telephone. Fisher’s exact test was used to determine significance, which was set at p&lt; 0.05. RESULTS Eighty questionnaires were distributed between June 2020 and August 2020. Overall, 50% (n=40) of patients returned the questionnaire, 50% (n=23) of face-to-face and 50% (n=17) telephone patients. Of those who received telephone consultations, 88% (n=15) felt the consultation was convenient, 88% (n=15) were satisfied with their consultation and 18% (n=3) felt they would have preferred to have a face-to-face appointment. Of those who attended clinic in person, 96% (n=22) felt their consultation was convenient, 100% (n=23) were satisfied with their consultation and 13% (n=3) would have preferred a telephone consultation. Within the face-to-face clinic attendees, only 13% (n=3) were concerned regarding the COVID risk associated with attending hospital. There was no significant difference in patient convenience or satisfaction (p=0.565 and p=0.174 respectively) between face-to-face and telephone clinics. There was no significant difference in whether patients would’ve preferred the alternative method of consultation (p &gt; 0.999). CONCLUSION Our study suggests that careful patient selection for neuro-oncology telephone clinic is not inferior to face-to-face clinic. Telephone clinic during COVID-19 pandemic proved to be convenient, safe and effective. This global health crisis has transformed telephone neuro-oncology consultations from an experimental innovation into established practice and should be continued beyond the pandemic in select cases.


Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 95
Author(s):  
Drozdstoy Stoyanov ◽  
Katrin Aryutova ◽  
Sevdalina Kandilarova ◽  
Rositsa Paunova ◽  
Zlatoslav Arabadzhiev ◽  
...  

We constructed a novel design integrating the administration of a clinical self-assessment scale with simultaneous acquisition of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), aiming at cross-validation between psychopathology evaluation and neuroimaging techniques. We hypothesized that areas demonstrating differential activation in two groups of patients (the first group exhibiting paranoid delusions in the context of paranoid schizophrenia—SCH—and second group with a depressive episode in the context of major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder—DEP) will have distinct connectivity patterns and structural differences. Fifty-one patients with SCH (n = 25) or DEP (n = 26) were scanned with three different MRI sequences: a structural and two functional sequences—resting-state and task-related fMRI (the stimuli represent items from a paranoid-depressive self-evaluation scale). While no significant differences were found in gray matter volumes, we were able to discriminate between the two clinical entities by identifying two significant clusters of activations in the SCH group—the left Precuneus (PreCu) extending to the left Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC) and the right Angular Gyrus (AG). Additionally, the effective connectivity of the middle frontal gyrus (MFG), a part of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) to the Anterior Insula (AI), demonstrated a significant difference between the two groups with inhibitory connection demonstrated only in SCH. The observed activations of PreCu, PCC, and AG (involved in the Default Mode Network DMN) might be indirect evidence of the inhibitory connection from the DLPFC to AI, interfering with the balancing function of the insula as the dynamic switch in the DMN. The findings of our current study might suggest that the connectivity from DLPFC to the anterior insula can be interpreted as evidence for the presence of an aberrant network that leads to behavioral abnormalities, the manifestation of which depends on the direction of influence. The reduced effective connectivity from the AI to the DLPFC is manifested as depressive symptoms, and the inhibitory effect from the DLPFC to the AI is reflected in the paranoid symptoms of schizophrenia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003329412098809
Author(s):  
Paul K. Miller ◽  
Sophie Van Der Zee ◽  
David Elliott

In recent years a considerable body of psychological research has explored the relationship between membership of socio-cultural groups and personal pain perception. Rather less systematic attention has, however, been accorded to how such group membership(s) might influence individual attitudes towards the pain of others. In this paper, immersion in the culture of competitive sport, widely regarded as being exaggeratedly tolerant of risky behaviours around pain, is taken as a case-in-point with students of Physical Education (PE) in tertiary education as the key focus. PE students are highly-immersed in competitive sporting culture both academically and (typically) practically, and also represent a key nexus of cross-generational transmission regarding the norms of sport itself. Their attitudes towards the pain that others should reasonably tolerate during a range of activities, sporting and otherwise, were evaluated through a direct comparison with those of peers much less immersed in competitive sporting culture. In total, N=301 (144 PE, 157 non-PE) undergraduate students in the UK responded to a vignette-based survey. Therein, all participants were required to rate the pain (on a standard 0-10 scale) at which a standardised “other” should desist engagement with a set of five defined sporting and non-sporting tasks, each with weak and strong task severities. Results indicated that PE students were significantly more likely to expect others to persevere through higher levels of pain than their non-PE peers, but only during the sport-related tasks – an effect further magnified when task severity was high. In other tasks, there was no significant difference between groups, or valence of the effect was actually reversed. It is argued that the findings underscore some extant knowledge about the relationship between acculturated attitudes to pain, while also having practical implications for understanding sport-based pedagogy, and its potentially problematic role in the ongoing reproduction of a “culture of risk.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roksolana Mykhaylyk ◽  
Elinor Ytterstad

Aims and research questions: This paper presents a new study addressing the issue of cross-linguistic influence in acquisition of referring expressions. The main research question is how to predict directionality of this influence in a dual language development. Methodology: The method is an elicited production task. We consider the phenomenon of direct object referring choices, i.e. noun, pronoun and null element, in a ‘null-object’–‘overt-object’ language pair (Ukrainian and English). Data and Analysis: Participants of the experiment are 4–6-year-old Ukrainian–English bilinguals (N20) and Ukrainian monolinguals (N21). The data are analyzed in the statistical program R, utilizing the R-library function lme4. The results are presented as odds ratios (ORs) of each direct object type. Findings: Our data reveal that while there is no significant difference in Ukrainian object types in most of the age groups, there is a considerable amount of null object usage in English at the ages of four to five. Originality: The innovative nature of this study lies in: (i) the consideration of a licit object omission at a later stage of language development (from 4 to 6 years of age); (ii) the examination of an under-investigated language combination (i.e. English and Ukrainian); and (iii) the innovative approach to linguistic data analysis (e.g. comparing OR values). Implications: Our findings suggest that the directionality of influence in dual language acquisition depends on the developmental stage, language-specific means of syntax–pragmatics interaction, and extra-linguistic input-related factors. At the early stages of development, the null-object language is likely to influence the overt-object language, especially under conditions of limited exposure to the latter.


QJM ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 114 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Abd Elnaeem Sallam ◽  
Khaled El Zawahry ◽  
Abdul Rahman Muhammed Ali Mustafa

Abstract Background Acne scars, is a challenge for dermatologists, despite having multiple treatment modalities like microneedling, dermabrasion, Fractional CO2 Laser, dermal fillers, etc. However, monotherapy has been hardly satisfactory because of the polymorphism seen with the scars. Objective Comparison between microneedling with platelet rich plasma versus Fractional carbon dioxide laser with platelet rich plasma in treatment of atrophic post acne scars. Patients and methods This study was carried out in department of dermatology, venereology and andrology, in Kobry El-Kobba Military complex during the period (from September 2018 to July 2020 ) on 20 patients of both sexes aged from 20 to 60 years old presenting with Goodman and Baron Grade II, III, IV acne scars . Results The study revealed a statistically significant difference (p = 0.017) between Goodman and Baron scar grades on the right side of the face before and after treatment indicating that microneedling with platelet rich plasma was effective in improving acne scars. Also, there is a statistically significant difference (p = 0.010) between Goodman and Baron scar grades on the left side of the face before and after treatment, indicating that fractional CO2 laser with platelet rich plasma was effective in improving acne scars. Conclusion and recommendation Further controlled and randomized studies are needed to validate our findings in a larger cohort of patients and longer follow up. Also, number of sessions might be more than 3 sessions.


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