The perceived casual relations between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety symptoms in autistic adults

Rates of anxiety are inordinately high in autistic adults. Sensory reactivity differences, such as hyperreactivity (e.g., strong reactions to sound), hyporeactivity (e.g., no, or slower reactions to pain), and seeking (e.g., fascination with spinning objects) are a diagnostic criterion of autism and have been linked with anxiety. Understanding how individuals perceive these to be causally related can impact assessment and treatment of anxiety. Therefore, we examined the perceived causal relations between sensory reactivity differences and anxiety in autistic adults.246 autistic adults aged 18 – 76 years took part in an online study. They completed self-report assessments of sensory reactivity differences, and anxiety, followed by the perceived causal relations scale; indicating if they perceived their sensory reactivity differences to be more of a cause or an effect of their anxiety symptoms.Sensory reactivity differences were found to be significantly related to anxiety. Furthermore, total sensory hyperreactivity and visual, auditory, and olfactory hyperreactivity was perceived to be more of a cause of anxiety, whilst total sensory seeking and tactile and vestibular seeking was perceived to be more of an effect of anxiety. Therefore, sensory hyperreactivity and sensory seeking may be important to consider in anxiety treatments for autistic individuals.

Predicting online participation through Bayesian network analysis

Despite the fact that preconditions of political participation were thoroughly examined before, there is still not enough understanding of which factors directly affect political participation and which factors correlate with participation due to common background variables. This article scrutinises the causal relations between the variables associated with participation in online activism and introduces a three-step approach in learning a reliable structure of the participation preconditions’ network to predict political participation. Using Bayesian network analysis and structural equation modeling to stabilise the structure of the causal relations, the analysis showed that only age, political interest, internal political efficacy and no other factors, highlighted by the previous political participation research, have direct effects on participation in online activism. Moreover, the direct effect of political interest is mediated by the indirect effects of internal political efficacy and age via political interest. After fitting the parameters of the Bayesian network dependent on the received structure, it became evident that given prior knowledge of the explanatory factors that proved to be most important in terms of direct effects, the predictive performance of the model increases significantly. Despite this fact, there is still uncertainty when it comes to predicting online participation. This result suggests that there remains a lot to be done in participation research when it comes to identifying and distinguishing factors that stimulate new types of political activities.

Time-space duality in 2D quantum gravity

An important task faced by all approaches of quantum gravity is to incorporate superpositions and quantify quantum uncertainties of spacetime causal relations. We address this task in 2D. By identifying a global Z2 symmetry of 1+1D quantum gravity, we show that gravitational path integral configurations come in equal amplitude pairs with timelike and spacelike relations exchanged. As a consequence, any two points are equally probable to be timelike and spacelike separated in a universe without boundary conditions. In the context of simplicial quantum gravity we identify a local symmetry of the action which shows that even with boundary conditions causal uncertainties are generically present. Depending on the boundary conditions, causal uncertainties can still be large and even maximal.

Induction, Experimentation and Causation in the Social Sciences

Inductive thinking is a universal human habit; we generalise from our experiences the best we can. The induction problem is to identify which observed regularities provide reasonable justification for inductive conclusions. In the natural sciences, we can often use strict laws in making successful inferences about unobserved states of affairs. In the social sciences, by contrast, we have no strict laws, only regularities which most often are conditioned on ceteris paribus clauses. This makes it much more difficult to make reliable inferences in the social sciences. In particular, we want knowledge about general causal relations in order to be able to determine what to do in order to achieve a certain state of affairs. Knowledge about causal relations that are also valid in the future requires experiments or so called ‘natural experiments’. Only knowledge derived from such experiences enable us to draw reasonably reliable inferences about how to act in order to achieve our goals.

СЪСТОЯНИЕТО КАТО ПРИЧИНА: КОНСТРУКЦИИТЕ С КАКЪВТО И КАКТО С ПРИЧИННО ЗНАЧЕНИЕ / STATE AS A CAUSE: CAUSAL CONSTRUCTIONS WITH КАКЪВТО AND КАКТО

Apart from their main function, the Bulgarian constructions with какъвто and както can express causal relations between the situations described in the main clause and the subordinate clause. The paper shows that in the causal use of both constructions the subordinate clause expresses a static feature, serving as a justification of the situation presented in the main clause. In addition, there is a semantic differentiation between the two models: какъвто normally expresses a usual (permanent) feature, while както denotes mostly a temporary (episodic) feature. Observations on the means used by Russian translators to convey this kind of causal meaning are also put forward. Keywords: state, causal relations, relative clauses, manner clauses, Bulgarian, Russian

A cognitive account of subjectivity put to the test: using an insertion task to investigate Mandarin result connectives

This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary to the commonly used corpora analyses, we employed crowdsourcing to tap native speakers’ intuitions about causal coherence, focusing on four result connectives kějiàn ‘therefore’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘so/for this reason’ and yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’. The analysis shows systematic differences regarding the use of connectives in relations that differ in terms of subjectivity, demonstrating that native speakers make use of subjectivity to encode and decode different types of causal relations in discourse. Moreover, our study evidences that a comprehensive model of subjectivity should include the epistemic dimension of certainty about the subjectivity scale that might be indicated by other linguistic elements. In-depth analyses of the test items revealed that the presence/absence of modality words in the result segments are related to different preferential patterns for the connectives. There is a trade-off between the epistemic dimension of certainty and the expression of subjectivity in the four connectives involved.

Elementary pre-service teachers’ conscious lack of knowledge about technical artefacts

This study aims at characterizing elementary pre-service teachers’ conscious lack of knowledge about familiar technical artefacts and its relation to their knowledge about these artefacts. The participants were asked to state what they knew and also what they did not know about a sample of familiartechnical artefacts such as a fan or a lock. The results showed a difference between the structure of the student teachers’ lack of knowledge of these artefacts and the structure of their actual knowledge. These differences were analyzed in relation to Kroes’ (Camb J Econ 34:51–62, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep019) model of technical artefacts. Firstly, the student teachers’ conscious lack of knowledge was mainly focused on the artefacts’ behavior rather than on their components and materials. Secondly, the participants found the function features of the artefacts unproblematic. Thirdly, unknown features about the origin of the artefacts were more frequently cited than the corresponding knowledge features. Finally, non-perceptual properties of the artefacts and the causal relations in which they or their parts are involved were important components both of the students’ knowledge and of the students’ unknowns.