EXPRESS: The Influence of Three-Dimensional Cues on Body Size Judgements

Research has shown that body size judgements are frequently biased, or inaccurate. Critically, judgement biases are further exaggerated for individuals with eating disorders, a finding that has been attributed to difficulties integrating body features into a perceptual whole. However, current understanding of which body features are integrated when judging body size is lacking. In this study, we examine whether individuals integrate three-dimensional (3D) cues to body volume when making body size judgements. Computer-generated body stimuli were presented in a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Participants (N = 412) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: in one condition the to-be-judged body was displayed binocularly (containing 3D cues to body volume), in the other, bodies were presented monocularly (2D cues only). Across 150 trials, participants were required to make a body size judgement of a target female body from a third-person point of view using an unmarked visual analogue scale (VAS). It was found that 3D cues significantly influenced body size judgements. Namely, thin 3D bodies were judged smaller, and overweight 3D bodies were judged larger, than their 2D counterpart. Furthermore, to reconcile these effects, we present evidence that the two perceptual biases, regression to the mean and serial dependence, were reduced by the additional 3D feature information. Our findings increase our understanding of how body size is perceptually encoded and creates testable predictions for clinical populations exhibiting integration difficulties.

Paradigmatic Uniformity: Evidence from Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Subject-verb agreement mismatches have been reported in the L2 and heritage literature, usually involving infinitives, analyzed as default morphological forms for fully specified T-heads. This article explores the mechanisms behind these mismatches, testing two hypotheses: the default form and the surface-similarity hypotheses. It compares non-finite and finite S-V mismatches with subjects with different persons, testing whether similarity with other paradigmatic forms makes them more acceptable, controlling for the role of verb frequency. Participants were asked to rate sentences on a Likert scale that included (a) infinitive forms with first, second and third person subjects, and (b) third person verbal forms with first, second and third person subjects. Two stem-stressed verbs (e.g., tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’) and two affix-stressed verbs (e.g., me.ti-o ‘introduced.3p.past’), varying in frequency were tested. Inflectional affixes of stem-stressed verbs are similar to other forms of the paradigm both phonologically and in being unstressed (tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’ vs. trai.g-o ‘bring.1 p.pres’), whereas affixes of affix-stressed verbs have dissimilar stress patterns (me.ti-o ´introduced.3p.past’ vs. me.t-o ‘introduce.1p.pres’). Results show significantly higher acceptability for finite vs. non-finite non-matching, and for 1st vs. 2nd person subjects. Stem-stressed verbs showed higher acceptability ratings than affix-stressed ones, suggesting a role for surface-form correspondence, partially confirming previous findings.

Distanced self-talk increases rational self-interest

Does stepping back to evaluate a situation from a distanced perspective lead us to be selfish or fair? This question has been of philosophical interest for centuries, and, more recently, the focus of extensive empirical inquiry. Yet, extant research reveals a puzzle: some studies suggest that adopting a distanced perspective will produce more rationally self-interested behavior, whereas others suggest that it will produce more impartial behavior. Here we adjudicate between these perspectives by testing the effects of adopting a third-person perspective on decision making in a task that pits rational self-interest against impartiality: the dictator game. Aggregating across three experiments (N = 774), participants who used third-person (i.e., distanced) vs. first-person (i.e., immersed) self-talk during the dictator game kept more money for themselves. We discuss these results in light of prior research showing that psychological distance can promote cooperation and fairmindedness and how the effect of psychological distance on moral decision-making may be sensitive to social context.

The role of Function Words to build syntactic knowledge in French-speaking children

The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distribution in relation to Mean Length Utterance (MLU) an index of syntactic complexity in a large naturalistic sample of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4 year-old. The data was annotated with a Part Of Speech Tagger (POS-T), belonging to computational tools from CHILDES. While eighteen FWs strongly correlated with MLU expressed either in word or in morpheme, stepwise regression analyses showed that subject pronouns predicted MLU. Factor analysis yielded a bifactor hierarchical model: The first factor loaded sixteen FWs among which eight had a strong developmental weight (third person singular verbs, subject pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, modals, demonstrative pronouns and plural markers), whereas the second factor loaded complex FWs (possessive verbs and object pronouns). These findings challenge the lexicalist account and support the view that children learn grammatical forms as a complex system based on early instead of late structure building. Children may acquire FWs as combining words and build syntactic knowledge as a complex abstract system which is not innate but learned from multiple word input sentences context. Notably, FWs were found to predict syntactic development and sentence complexity. These results open up new perspectives for clinical assessment and intervention.

Psycholinguistic Markers of Therapeutic Rupture Types

This study was designed to further understand rupture events that counselors encounter during a counseling session that ultimately impact the quality of the therapeutic alliance. We employed a cross-sectional analysis of a linguistic corpus created from mock counseling transcripts embedded in a website administered by a peer-reviewed expert in the psychology field and three video recorded sessions of Carl Rodgers, Fritz Pearls, and Albert Ellis. The content of the corpuses was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The results showed a significant difference between she/he words, or third-person singular pronouns, and certainty words when comparing withdrawal and mixed rupture corpuses with a confrontation rupture corpus. In addition, we found a significant differences between positive emotion words and discrepancy words when comparing a rupture-infused psychotherapy corpus to a general psychotherapy corpus. Several implications for counseling and research are provided in response to these findings. Keywords: corpus linguistics, therapeutic alliance, alliance rupture, rupture event, LIWC

Seeing What I Did (Not): Cerebral and Behavioral Effects of Agency and Perspective on Episodic Memory Re-activation

Intuitively, we assume that we remember episodes better when we actively participated in them and were not mere observers. Independently of this, we can recall episodes from either the first-person perspective (1pp) or the third-person perspective (3pp). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we tested whether agency and perspective modulate neural activity during memory retrieval and subsequently enhance memory performance. Subjects encoded a set of different episodes by either imitating or only observing videos that showed short toy stories. A week later, we conducted fMRI and cued episodic retrieval by presenting the original videos, or slightly modified versions thereof, from 1pp or from 3pp. The hippocampal formation was sensitive to self-performed vs. only observed actions only when there was an episodic mismatch. In a post-fMRI memory test a history of self-performance did not improve behavioral memory performance. However, modified videos were often (falsely) accepted as showing truly experienced episodes when: (i) they were already presented in this modified version during fMRI or (ii) they were presented in their original form during fMRI but from 3pp. While the overall effect of modification was strong, the effects of perspective and agency were more subtle. Together, our findings demonstrate that self-performance and self-perspective modulate the strength of a memory trace in different ways. Even when memory performance remains the same for different agentive states, the brain is capable of detecting mismatching information. Re-experiencing the latter impairs memory performance as well as retrieving encoded episodes from 3pp.

ETHICS: THE JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF A SATISFYING LIFE.

Background: Health professionals must change the ethics of the "third person", where moral actions carried out by other people are judged as correct / incorrect, for the ethics of the first person oriented to personal excellence, vocation to good and to dignity of a person. Objective: To explore the knowledge and ethical training of health professionals working in the field of Nephrology. Method: A survey of 37 items on the basic notions of ethics was applied to the participants of the annual IMIN Meeting. Results: 85 surveys were obtained, 79% think that the laws enacted today respond to economic interests; 82% express that we cannot accept moral absolutes, however, 89% think that practical reason that directs our behavior recognizes human good in search of plenitude. 44% feel that it is not possible to act according to justice on a regular basis, and 94% express that virtue ethics look to the integral good of the person. Conclusions: The philosophical reflection, so typical of the human being, constitutes an ethical requirement in search of the truth of the good that must be chosen to achieve fullness, in the work of health agents in the field of Nephrology. Keywords: bioethics, nephrology, personal autonomy.

Building an Extended Reality Pedagogical Continuum Through 180° First-Person Point-of-View Video

The advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology for educational instruction and curricular (re)design have become highly attractive and newly demanding areas of both the technology and healthcare industries. However, the quickly evolving field is still learning about each of the associated VR technologies, whether they are evidence-based, and how they are validated to decrease cognitive load and in turn increase student/learner comprehension. Likewise, the instructional (re)design of the content that the student/learner is exposed to in VR, and whether it is immersive, and promotes memorable content and experiences can influence their learning outcomes. Here the Revinax® Handbook content library that is displayed in an immersive virtual reality application in first-person point-of-view (IVRA-FPV) is contrasted with third-person point-of-view (IVRA-TPV) through VR headsets to an individual, and computer displays to many individuals along with augmented reality (AR) are evaluated as emerging advancements in the field of VR and AR.