Linguistic Markers in Individuals With Symptoms of Depression in Bi-Multilingual Context

Depression has been identified as the most prevalent mental disorder worldwide. Due to the stigma of mental illness, the population remains unidentified, undiagnosed, and untreated. Various studies have been carried out to detect and track depression following symptoms of dichotomous thinking, absolutist thinking, linguistic markers, and linguistic behavior. However, there is little study focused on the linguistic behavior of bilingual and multilingual with anxiety and depression. This chapter aims to identify the bi-multilingual linguistic markers by analyzing the recorded verbal content of depressive discourse resulting from life situations and stressors causing anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Different contextual domains of word usage, content words, function words (pronouns), and negative valance words have been identified as indicators of psychological process affecting cognitive behavior, emotional health, and mental illness. These findings are discussed within the framework of Beck's model of depression to support the linguistic connection to mental illness-depression.

Deep Learning based Speech Emotion Recognition System

Emotions are elementary for humans, impacting perception and everyday activities like communication, learning and decision-making. Speech emotion Recognition (SER) systems aim to facilitate the natural interaction with machines by direct voice interaction rather than exploitation ancient devices as input to know verbal content and build it straightforward for human listeners to react. During this SER system primarily composed of 2 sections called feature extraction and feature classification phase. SER implements on bots to speak with humans during a non-lexical manner. The speech emotion recognition algorithm here is predicated on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, which uses varied modules for emotion recognition and classifiers to differentiate feelings like happiness, calm, anger, neutral state, sadness, and fear. The accomplishment of classification is predicated on extracted features. Finally, the emotion of a speech signal will be determined.

HEROIC DEMOCRACY IN HIGH RELIEF: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND MONUMENTAL IMAGERY IN FIFTH-CENTURY ATHENS

In recent decades, political theorists have significantly revised their understanding of Athenian democratic thinking. By opening up the canon, shifting their focus from abstract principles to democratic practices, and employing an increasingly diverse range of interpretive approaches, they have collectively reconstructed a more robust and multi-faceted account of the Athenian democratic public sphere. Despite its ecumenical ambitions and manifest successes, however, this project has been fettered by a singular focus on language as the medium of democratic politics. As can be seen in the gloss of one of its contributors, this body of work effectively limits the democratic public sphere to ‘the domain in which judgments and public opinion are shaped and formed through speech’. This logocentric demarcation of democratic practice does not harmonize well with our own experience of modern politics, however, where public monuments, political imagery, and civic spaces play a critical role in the formation of political understanding and judgment, as well as starting points for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It seems similarly out of tune with what we know about the ancient Greeks, who demonstrated a readiness to move between visual and verbal content in reflecting on political and ethical life, and who developed the very idea of theôria out of an extension of the process of seeing. If, as political theorists, we can temper our habitual logocentrism and learn to attend more closely to the visual culture of Athenian democracy, we stand to add new dimensions to our collective reconstruction of the democratic public sphere and, in turn, to enhance our understanding of those texts that have long preoccupied our attention.

Text, context, affect and effect: Fairy tales in the UNICEF advertising campaign against paedophilia

By conveying traditions and moral values fairy tales constitute an important part of our lives and cultural identities. Fairy tale motifs and allusions have been repeatedly employed for commercial and non-commercial purposes by advertisers around the world. This paper looks at the UNICEF anti-sexting advertising campaign that features two classic fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood. Sexting is a growing problem among young people these days. According to the recent EU Kids Online 2020 survey carried out in 19 European countries, 22 percent of children aged 12-16, on average, have had some experience with receiving sexual messages or pictures. Through an analysis of the visual and verbal content of selected advertisements, the present study investigates how the advertisers creatively make use of the famous fairy tales to raise public awareness of the issue.

Nonverbal Auditory Cues Allow Relationship Quality to be Inferred During Conversations

The claim that nonverbal cues provide more information than the linguistic content of a conversational exchange (the Mehrabian Conjecture) has been widely cited and equally widely disputed, mainly on methodological grounds. Most studies that have tested the Conjecture have used individual words or short phrases spoken by actors imitating emotions. While cue recognition is certainly important, speech evolved to manage interactions and relationships rather than simple information exchange. In a cross-cultural design, we tested participants’ ability to identify the quality of the interaction (rapport) in naturalistic third party conversations in their own and a less familiar language, using full auditory content versus audio clips whose verbal content has been digitally altered to differing extents. We found that, using nonverbal content alone, people are 75–90% as accurate as they are with full audio cues in identifying positive vs negative relationships, and 45–53% as accurate in identifying eight different relationship types. The results broadly support Mehrabian’s claim that a significant amount of information about others’ social relationships is conveyed in the nonverbal component of speech.

On the ability of visual representation of ideas and verbal contents

Using the examples of displayed works of art, painting and music, this article discusses the ability of visual representation of ideas and verbal contents. The author compares two stages in the development of art: the early XX century with the popular were popular ideas of cosmism and the advent of the new world; and the present time characterized by pessimism due to the crisis of modernism. Analysis is conducted on the examples of artworks characteristic of each stage. The author dwells on why in the beginning of the XX century the artists were able visually create a complex verbal content and ideas, while at the present day it is quite challenging. The article determines two techniques of visualization of verbal contents ‒ works with the conceptual verbal explanations, which still do not allow to organically synthesize visual and verbal-conceptual planes; and complex work on conceptualization of verbal narratives. As the case for clarification of the second method, the author chooses the theatrical-musical-dance action projected and implemented by the psychologist Aida Aylamazyan, and offers the analysis of this technique as promising for solution of the problem of visual representation of ideas and verbal contents. The author believes that solution of such tasks requires creating the concept of artistic reality of the intended work, taking into account available visual means, potential audience, and personal aesthetic attitudes.

Emotion-modulated recall: Congruency effects of nonverbal facial and vocal cues on semantic recall

The current study investigated whether automatic integration of crossmodal stimuli (i.e. facial emotions and emotional prosody) facilitated or impaired the intake and retention of unattended verbal content. The study borrowed from previous bimodal integration designs and included a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task, where subjects were instructed to identify the emotion of a face (as either ‘angry’ or ‘happy’) while ignoring a concurrently presented sentence (spoken in an angry, happy, or neutral prosody), after which a surprise recall was administered to investigate effects on semantic content retention. While bimodal integration effects were replicated (i.e. faster and more accurate emotion identification under congruent conditions), congruency effects were not found for semantic recall. Overall, semantic recall was better for trials with emotional (vs. neutral) faces, and worse in trials with happy (vs. angry or neutral) prosody. Taken together, our findings suggest that when individuals focus their attention on evaluation of facial expressions, they implicitly integrate nonverbal emotional vocal cues (i.e. hedonic valence or emotional tone of accompanying sentences), and devote less attention to their semantic content. While the impairing effect of happy prosody on recall may indicate an emotional interference effect, more research is required to uncover potential prosody-specific effects. All supplemental online materials can be found on OSF (https://osf.io/am9p2/).

The Role of Emoticons in the Comprehension of Emotional and Non-emotional Messages in Dyslexic Youth – A Preliminary Study

The study explored how well-dyslexic youth deals with written messages in an environment simulating popular social network communication system. The messaging systems, present more and more in pandemic and post-pandemic online world, are rich in nonverbal aspects of communicating, namely, the emoticons. The pertinent question was whether the presence of emoticons in written messages of emotional and non-emotional content changes the comprehension of the messages. Thirty-two pupils aged 11–15 took part in the study, 16 had a school-approved diagnosis of dyslexia and were included in the experimental group. Sixteen controls had no diagnosed disabilities. Both groups viewed short messages of four types (each including seven communicates): verbal-informative (without emoticons and emotional verbal content), verbal-emotive (without emoticons, with emotional verbal content), emoticon-informative (including emoticon-like small pictures, but without emotional content either verbal or nonverbal), and emoticon-emotive (with standard emoticons and including verbal-emotional content). The participants had to answer short questions after quick presentation of each message that tested their comprehension of the content. RTs and accuracy of the answers were analyzed. Students without dyslexia had shorter response times to the questions regarding all types of messages than the dyslexic participants. The answers of the experimental group to the questions about the emoticon-informative messages were less correct. The study pointed tentatively to the beneficial role of emoticons (especially the nonstandard, i.e., of non-emotional kind) in reading short messages with understanding.

Localization and Internationalization of Texts of the Media Discourse

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the original and secondary texts of media discourse aimed at identifying the ways to localize and internationalize the verbal content of news websites. The study has been conducted on the material of news hypertexts in four languages – Russian, English, German and French, posted on the international Internet resource rt.com, Business Insider news portal, National Review newspaper, RTD Documentary Channel, L'Express journal. The authors substantiate the importance of using the terms 'localization' and 'internationalization' in translation studies to name inter-language transformations used in creating news messages, and analyze the definitions of these concepts in the frameworks of linguistics. The analysis shows that in many cases the standard translation model "source text – translation text", which presupposes a certain level of semantic equivalence, loses its relevance, since the secondary text is a new verbal product. It has been shown that the localized verbal space of the analyzed international media websites is created through the use of the following translation techniques: addition / omission of information in accordance with the pragmatic characteristics of readers, inclusion of culture-specific vocabulary in the secondary text, explication of toponyms and proper names, neutralization of imagery, omission of precision vocabulary, indication of a personal viewpoint of a secondary text's author, historical reference to allusions. It has also been revealed that internationalization of texts is performed through omission of cultural markers, addition of phrases emphasizing the view on the country "from outside", explication of toponyms, replacing proper names with generalized lexemes, as well as by indicating the positions of English-speaking countries on topical issues.

Gender Differences in Identifying Facial, Prosodic, and Semantic Emotions Show Category- and Channel-Specific Effects Mediated by Encoder's Gender

Purpose The nature of gender differences in emotion processing has remained unclear due to the discrepancies in existing literature. This study examined the modulatory effects of emotion categories and communication channels on gender differences in verbal and nonverbal emotion perception. Method Eighty-eight participants (43 females and 45 males) were asked to identify three basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, and anger) and neutrality encoded by female or male actors from verbal (i.e., semantic) or nonverbal (i.e., facial and prosodic) channels. Results While women showed an overall advantage in performance, their superiority was dependent on specific types of emotion and channel. Specifically, women outperformed men in regard to two basic emotions (happiness and sadness) in the nonverbal channels and only the anger category with verbal content. Conversely, men did better for the anger category in the nonverbal channels and for the other two emotions (happiness and sadness) in verbal content. There was an emotion- and channel-specific interaction effect between the two types of gender differences, with male subjects showing higher sensitivity to sad faces and prosody portrayed by the female encoders. Conclusion These findings reveal explicit emotion processing as a highly dynamic complex process with significant gender differences tied to specific emotion categories and communication channels. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15032583