Causally Related Research Articles

Causality and the interpretation of epidemiologic evidence.

There is an ongoing debate regarding how and when an agent’s or determinant’s impact can be interpreted as causation with respect to some target disease. The so-called criteria of causation, originating from the seminal work of Sir Austin Bradford Hill and Mervyn Susser, are often schematically applied disregarding the fact that they were meant neither as criteria nor as a checklist for attributing to a hazard the potential of disease causation. Furthermore, there is a tendency to misinterpret the lack of evidence for causation as evidence for lack of a causal relation. There are no criteria in the strict sense for the assessment of evidence concerning an agent’s or determinant’s propensity to cause a disease, nor are there criteria to dismiss the notion of causation. Rather, there is a discursive process of conjecture and refutation. In this commentary, I propose a dialogue approach for the assessment of an agent or determinant. Starting from epidemiologic evidence, four issues need to be addressed: temporal relation, association, environmental equivalence, and population equivalence. If there are no valid counterarguments, a factor is attributed the potential of disease causation. More often than not, there will be insufficient evidence from epidemiologic studies. In these cases, other evidence can be used instead that increases or decreases confidence in a factor being causally related to a disease. Even though every verdict of causation is provisional, action must not be postponed until better evidence is available if our present knowledge appears to demand immediate measures for health protection.

Does a causal relation exist between the functional hemispheric asymmetries of visual processing subsystems?

Past research indicates that specific shape recognition and spatial-relations encoding rely on subsystems that exhibit right-hemisphere advantages, whereas abstract shape recognition and spatial-relations encoding rely on subsystems that exhibit left-hemisphere advantages. Given these apparent regularities, we tested whether asymmetries in shape processing are causally related to asymmetries in spatial-relations processing. We examined performance in four tasks using the same stimuli with divided-visual-field presentations. Importantly, the asymmetry observed in any one task did not correlate with the asymmetries observed in the other tasks in ways predicted by extant theories. Asymmetries in shape processing and spatial-relations encoding may not be due to a common causal force influencing multiple subsystems.

Perceived Causality as a Cue to Temporal Distance

The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.

Eruptive and Quasi-Eruptive Disappearing Solar Filaments and Their Relationship with Coronal Activities

Abstract By measuring the 3-D velocity fields of 35 disappearing filaments (Disparition Brusques: DBs) on the solar disk, we studied the causal relationship between the motions of $\mathrm{H}\alpha$ DBs and the associated coronal phenomena. Using the derived 3-D velocity fields of the DBs, we developed a method to judge whether a DB is ejected into interplanetary space or whether it remains in the solar atmosphere. We compared the DB type thus obtained with the presence of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and other associated coronal activities. It is inferred that eruptive filaments are always followed by the formation of arcades, while most quasi-eruptive events are followed by localized changes in soft X-rays and the EUV. A close causal relation between eruptive filaments and CMEs was also found: of 15 DBs for which Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph data were available, all eight of the eruptive ones were associated with CMEs, while no CMEs were found following any of the 7 quasi-eruptive ones. These observational results indicate that the motions of $\mathrm{H}\alpha$ disappearing filaments are causally related to the associated coronal activities and also to the appearance of CMEs, and that an accurate analysis of their 3-D velocities is important not only for a better understanding of their acceleration and heating mechanisms, but also for predicting the occurrence of CMEs and geomagnetic storms.

A single administration of testosterone improves visuospatial ability in young women

Previous research has documented correlations between endogenous testosterone levels and visuospatial cognitive function. Some causal relations have also been established in treatment designs in which testosterone was administered to elderly subjects for a number of weeks. Particularly, one study reported a selective effect of a single administration of testosterone on some aspects of spatial memory in 15 women. The present study tested the hypothesis whether a single administration of 0.5 mg of sublingual testosterone would improve visuospatial ability in healthy young women on a test that has consistently been associated with male superiority. Twenty-six women participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over trial of single administration of testosterone and placebo. Subjects were tested in the same phase of the menstrual-cycle. Four to five hours after both administrations, subjects completed a standardized measure of visuospatial ability (3-D Mental Rotations Test). Visuospatial ability improved significantly after testosterone administration compared to placebo, after controlling for learning effects due to repeated testing. Testosterone is suggested to be causally related to visuospatial ability in young women.

Causal relationship: a new tool for the causal characterization of Lorentzian manifolds

We define and study a new kind of relation between two diffeomorphic Lorentzian manifolds called a causal relation, which is any diffeomorphism characterized by mapping every causal vector of the first manifold onto a causal vector of the second. We perform a thorough study of the mathematical properties of causal relations and prove in particular that two given Lorentzian manifolds (say V and W) may be causally related only in one direction (say from V to W, but not from W to V). This leads us to the concept of causally equivalent (or isocausal in short) Lorentzian manifolds as those mutually causally related and to a definition of causal structure over a differentiable manifold as the equivalence class formed by isocausal Lorentzian metrics upon it.Isocausality is a more general concept than the conformal relationship, because we prove the remarkable result that a conformal relation ϕ is characterized by the fact of being a causal relation of the particular kind in which both ϕ and ϕ−1 are causal relations. Isocausal Lorentzian manifolds are mutually causally compatible, they share some important causal properties, and there are one-to-one correspondences, which are sometimes non-trivial, between several classes of their respective future (and past) objects. A more important feature is that they satisfy the same standard causality constraints. We also introduce a partial order for the equivalence classes of isocausal Lorentzian manifolds providing a classification of all the causal structures that a given fixed manifold can have.By introducing the concept of causal extension we put forward a new definition of causal boundary for Lorentzian manifolds based on the concept of isocausality, and thereby we generalize the traditional Penrose constructions of conformal infinity, diagrams and embeddings. In particular, the concept of causal diagram is given.Many explicit clarifying examples are presented throughout the paper.

Subjectivity in causal connectives: An empirical study of language in use

The linguistic categories apparent in people’s everyday language use provide us with interesting insights into the working of the mind. In this article we study the way in which Dutch speakers categorize causally related events by expressing them with the connectives dus ‘so’ or daarom ‘that’s why’. These two connectives both express volitional and epistemic causal coherence relations. Their overlapping contexts of use raise the question of why two separate, highly grammaticalized linguistic items exist to express similar relationships. We propose an analysis of these connectives, clarifying their similarities and diAerences, in terms of subjectivity: the amount of speaker involvement. Empirical support for this analysis is presented from corpus studies and experiments in which language users were asked to state their preference for one of the connectives in contexts displaying diAerent degrees of subjectivity.

Using cause-effect relations in text to improve information retrieval precision

This study attempted to use semantic relations expressed in text, in particular cause-effect relations, to improve information retrieval effectiveness. The study investigated whether the information obtained by matching cause-effect relations expressed in documents with the cause-effect relations expressed in users’ queries can be used to improve document retrieval results, in comparison to using just keyword matching without considering relations. An automatic method for identifying and extracting cause-effect information in Wall Street Journal text was developed. Causal relation matching was found to yield a small but significant improvement in retrieval results when the weights used for combining the scores from different types of matching were customized for each query. Causal relation matching did not perform better than word proximity matching (i.e. matching pairs of causally related words in the query with pairs of words that co-occur within document sentences), but the best results were obtained when causal relation matching was combined with word proximity matching. The best kind of causal relation matching was found to be one in which one member of the causal relation (either the cause or the effect) was represented as a wildcard that could match with any word.

Serious adverse events after measles-mumps-rubella vaccination during a fourteen-year prospective follow-up.

Several disorders have been attributed to measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination during the past decade. The aim of this prospective follow-up study was to identify serious adverse events causally related to MMR vaccination. When the MMR vaccination program was launched in Finland in 1982, a countrywide surveillance system was set up to detect serious adverse events associated with MMR. To obtain detailed case histories vaccinees' clinical charts were reviewed. Serum samples were analyzed to trace concurrent infections. All hospitals and health centers in Finland from 1982 through 1996. Immunization of 1.8 million individuals and consumption of almost 3 million vaccine doses by the end of 1996 gave rise to 173 potentially serious reactions claimed to have been caused by MMR vaccination. In all, 77 neurologic, 73 allergic and 22 miscellaneous reactions and 1 death were reported, febrile seizure being the most common event. However, 45% of these events proved to be probably caused or contributed by some other factor, giving an incidence of serious adverse events with possible or indeterminate causal relation with MMR vaccination of 5.3 per 100,000 vaccinees or 3.2 per 100,000 vaccine doses. Causality between immunization and a subsequent untoward event cannot be estimated solely on the basis of a temporal relation. Comprehensive analysis of the reported adverse reactions established that serious events causally related to MMR vaccine are rare and greatly outweighed by the risks of natural MMR diseases.

Causal Status as a Determinant of Feature Centrality

One of the major problems in categorization research is the lack of systematic ways of constraining feature weights. We propose one method of operationalizing feature centrality, a causal status hypothesis which states that a cause feature is judged to be more central than its effect feature in categorization. In Experiment 1, participants learned a novel category with three characteristic features that were causally related into a single causal chain and judged the likelihood that new objects belong to the category. Likelihood ratings for items missing the most fundamental cause were lower than those for items missing the intermediate cause, which in turn were lower than those for items missing the terminal effect. The causal status effect was also obtained in goodness-of-exemplar judgments (Experiment 2) and in free-sorting tasks (Experiment 3), but it was weaker in similarity judgments than in categorization judgments (Experiment 4). Experiment 5 shows that the size of the causal status effect is moderated by plausibility of causal relations, and Experiment 6 shows that effect features can be useful in retrieving information about unknown causes. We discuss the scope of the causal status effect and its implications for categorization research.

GONADAL AND ADRENAL SEX STEROIDS IN ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS

A role for sex steroids in the pathogenesis of AS is suggested by the male predominance, the peak age of onset in young adults, the increased number of first manifestations and flares after pregnancy, and the fact that sex steroids may modulate immune functions. There is a theoretic possibility that (normal levels of) androgens are indeed relevant in the male sex skew of AS. It has been reported that men with AS have higher than normal androgen levels; however, the evidence that serum testosterone levels are elevated in patients with AS is not robust. Elevated DHEAS and 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone levels have been reported in male AS patients; these may be secondary to inflammation and stress but may theoretically also be causally related to AS. These elevations might result from a partial late onset 11 beta- or 21-hydroxylase deficiency. Current data on sex steroid hormones provide no straightforward explanation for the male predominance in AS. It is fair to say that present data in patients with long-standing AS are too limited to suggest a role for androgens in the perpetuation of the disease, but a role in the initiation and the early stages of AS cannot be excluded. Such information can only be obtained from prospective studies. Cross-sectional studies cannot clearly distinguish causal relation from secondary disease effects, because blood sampling to test these hypotheses only takes place many years after the onset of disease. The impact of sex steroids on these features of AS is still unresolved. There is as yet no rationale for the use of medication that modifies sex steroid hormones in the management of AS. Alternative explanations for the higher male prevalence of AS may be found in the different chromosomal configuration and body composition of men and women.

Aristotle on the philosophical nature of poetry

In Poetics chapter 9, Aristotle claims that the poet's function differs from the historian's. The historian should describe what has happened, but the poet should say ‘what sorts of thing might happen, that is, the things possible according to likelihood or necessity’ (1451a36–8). The difference is not between fiction and non-fiction. Some past events happened according to likelihood and are thereby candidates for poetic representation (1451b29–32). Rather, the poet differs from the historian with respect to the level of abstraction at which he considers the actions and experiences of agents. The historian should engage in accurate and thorough ἱστορ⋯α—‘research’ or ‘fact-gathering’—by carefully recording his or others' observations of particular events. The poet, on the other hand, looks for causal relations among fictional or non-fictional events, for he cares whether his composition has a plot with events that happen because of other events and not merely after them (cf. 1452a20–l). The poet may discern in the historian's materials some causally related events fit for dramatic or epic representation, but that is not the historian's concern. As Aristotle says in chapter 23, the historian should report ‘whatever befell one or more people during a particular period of time, each of the events relating to the others by chance’ (1459a23–4). The last clause is an overstatement; we have just noticed Aristotle's admission that some past events were likely to happen. Also, he elsewhere says that ‘future events will for the most part be like past events’, presumably because they share a similar causal structure (Rh. 1394a8). The remark's point is clear enough, though: the historian should report what happened whether or not the events exhibit explanatory coherence.

Story comprehension in children with ADHD.

A wealth of research is available examining children's story comprehension. However, little attention has been directed toward understanding the story comprehension of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The present paper attempts to integrate the developmental literature on children's story comprehension with the little that is known about the story comprehension processes of children with ADHD. This review is guided by a network model of story representation that emphasizes the structure of causal and enabling relations between story events. Examination of the available studies indicates that children with ADHD lag behind their peers in their understanding of causal relations, and that their attentional problems may contribute to difficulties in understanding factual information in the preschool years and causally related information in the elementary years. Some evidence also is presented suggesting that children with ADHD are less effective in taking advantage of story structure features in guiding their recall of story events. Suggestions for future research are offered that would elaborate our knowledge of the developmental progression in the processing of complex information by children with ADHD.

Newly Discovered Galactic H 2O Masers Associated with Outflows

The authors have discovered 17 new H 2O masers in searches of known molecular outflows in regions of star formation and have investigated their time variations. The authors have also made extensive surveys of the literature to enumerate all previous H 2O masers and outflows and have examined the IRAS Point Source Catalog for IRAS sources toward these objects. Together with the results of a survey for molecular outflows in directions of known H 2O masers, the authors are able to assess the success ratio for detections of masers toward known outflows, and for detections of outflows toward known masers. Conclusions about the causal relations between IRAS objects, masers, and outflows are drawn. In particular, the authors suggest that lifetimes and formation conditions for H 2O masers and outflows are similar, or causally related. This is consistent with models of H 2O masers in star-forming regions in which the masers are formed and pumped by gas heated by dissociative shocks, assuming that the shocks are produced by the outflows. The new information on H 2O maser time variations suggests that such variations are unimportant in making these conclusions

Predicting Change in Marital Satisfaction from Husbands' and Wives' Conflict Resolution Styles

Identifying what specific conflict resolution styles are linked to change in marital satisfaction is important because managing conflict is one of the central tasks of maintaining a marriage (Gottman, 1994) and because declines in marital satisfaction herald a series of processes indicative of a deteriorating marriage (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). Findings regarding the concurrent link between conflict resolution styles and marital satisfaction have been consistent in indicating that each spouse's marital satisfaction is positively related to the frequency with which each spouse uses constructive strategies to resolve conflict (such as agreement, compromise, and humor) and negatively related both to the frequency with which each spouse uses destructive strategies to resolve conflict (such as conflict engagement, withdrawal, and defensiveness) and to the joint frequency with which the wife uses conflict engagement and the husband uses withdrawal (the demand-withdraw pattern). This pattern of findings has been obtained regardless of whether conflict resolution styles were assessed by means of brief behavioral observations (Gottman & Krokoff, 1989; Heavey, Layne, & Christensen, 1993; Noller, Feeney, Bonnell, & Callan, 1994) or by means of self-report and partner-report questionnaire data (Christensen, 1988; Heavey et al., 1993; Huston & Vangelisti, 1991; Noller et al., 1994). Given that the concurrent link between conflict resolution styles and marital satisfaction is well-established, researchers have used longitudinal data to assess the plausibility of two causal relations involving conflict resolution styles and marital satisfaction. The first causal relation--the assumption that the use of certain conflict resolution styles causes marital satisfaction--is based on interdependence theory (Rusbult, 1983) which posits that perceived rewards to a relationship (such as the frequent use of constructive conflict resolution strategies) and perceived costs to the relationship (such as the frequent experience of negative conflict resolution styles) determine satisfaction with the relationship. The longitudinal data consistent with this causal relation would indicate that the frequency with which certain conflict resolution styles are used at Time 1 predicts change in marital satisfaction. The second causal relation--the assumption that the level of marital satisfaction is causally related to the frequency with which certain conflict resolution styles are used--is based on self-fulfilling prophecy theory (e.g., Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977) which posits that one's attitude (e.g., level of satisfaction with the marriage) provides a psychological environment that elicits behavior (e.g., conflict resolution styles) that reinforces and is consistent with the initial attitude. The longitudinal data consistent with this causal relation would indicate that the level of marital satisfaction at Time 1 predicts the degree of change in the frequency with which certain conflict resolution styles are used. Unfortunately, longitudinal findings relevant to the plausibility of either causal relation have been inconsistent (Gottman & Krokoff, 1989; Heavey et al., 1993; Huston & Vangelisti, 1991; Noller et al., 1994). In part, this could be due to four methodological and two conceptual limitations of these studies. Regarding the methodological limitations, first, because Gottman and Krokoff (1989) and Heavey et al. (1993) used measures of marital satisfaction that also tapped frequency of conflict and disagreement, the correlations from these measures may have been inflated (see review by Fincham & Bradbury, 1987). Second, only Huston and Vangelisti (1991) reported that marital satisfaction scores changed appreciably over the time interval studied, raising the possibility that, in the other studies, a restriction of range accounted for nonsignificant findings. Third, because the first assessments made by Huston and Vangelisti (1991) and Noller et al. …

Significant increase in trisomy 21 in Berlin nine months after the Chernobyl reactor accident: temporal correlation or causal relation?

To assess whether the increased prevalence of trisomy 21 in West Berlin in January 1987 might have been causally related to exposure to ionising radiation as a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident or was merely a chance event. Analysis of monthly prevalence of trisomy 21 in West Berlin from January 1980 to December 1989. Confines of West Berlin. Owing to the former "island" situation of West Berlin and its well organised health services, ascertainment of trisomy 21 was thought to be almost complete. A cluster of 12 cases occurred in January 1987 as compared with two or three expected. After exclusion of factors that might have explained the increase, including maternal age distribution, only exposure to radiation as a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident remained. In six of seven cases that could be studied cytogenetically the extra chromosome was of maternal origin, confirming that nondisjunction had occurred at about the time of conception. On the basis of two assumptions--(a) that maternal meiosis is an error prone process susceptible to exogenous factors at the time of conception; (b) that owing to the high prevalence of iodine deficiency in Berlin a large amount of iodine-131 would have been accumulated over a short period--it is concluded that the increased prevalence of trisomy 21 in West Berlin in January 1987 was causally related to a short period of exposure to ionising radiation as a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident.

Network representations of causal relations in memory for narrative texts: Evidence from primed recognition

This study investigated how adult readers represent causal relations among events in a narrative. Existing models of text comprehension describe the representation either as a linear chain of text components that are adjacent in the surface structure of the text or as a network that includes relations between nonadjacent as well as adjacent text components. These models were tested in three priming experiments. In each experiment subjects read brief narratives and received a speeded‐recognition test of their memories for story events. Each story could be represented either by a linear chain or by a network. On each trial in the recognition procedure, subjects read a priming sentence that reminded them of either a story (general prime) or a specific event in a story (specific prime). The specific primes were either causally related or unrelated to the subsequent target event and they were either adjacent or nonadjacent to the target in the surface structure of the text. Across the three experiments, positi...

Relational properties and memory-based category construction.

Although many experiments have investigated factors that constrain perceptual category construction, there have been no investigations of factors that constrain memory-based (MB) category construction. Six experiments examined the extent to which perceptual and MB sorting were influenced by correlated dimensions, family resemblance principles, and conceptual knowledge. Sensitivity to many types of relational information (e.g., correlated features, causal relations, interactive properties of objects, and family resemblance relations) was observed with perceptual sorting, but these properties were rarely used to organize information in MB sorting conditions. Instead, there was a clear preference to organize categories around single dimensions. Even when perfectly correlated features were causally related, Ss in memory conditions did not use correlations to construct categories. The strengths and limitations of MB analyses and categorizations are discussed.

Visiting the Wizard: Children's Memory for a Recurring Event

The development of children's scripts for a recurring event was examined. 24 girls--2.5, 4, and 5.5 years of age--repeatedly experienced an initially novel episode (a trip to the "wizard's room") in a laboratory setting. Based on parents' ratings, the episode was defined as consisting of 26 actions organized into 7 activities. The sequential, spatial, and causal relations among the activities remained constant across episodes. Each child's knowledge of the recurring event was assessed by 4 probe conditions: free recall, prop reenactment, in-context reenactment, and in-context deviations. Results support conclusions that during early stages of script formation: (a) more actions and activities are included with age in children's scripts, (b) causally related activities are sequenced at all ages but temporal ordering is age-related, (c) hierarchical organization of actions within activities emerges gradually over the preschool years, and (d) probe conditions strongly influence performance for the younger but not for the older children.

McGinn on the Mind- Body Problem

Colin McGinn ('Can we Solve the Mind-Body Problem?', Mind i969, p. 349) argues as follows. The determination of states of consciousness by the brain seems to us mysterious and unintelligible. But since it happens, it must have an explanation. The explanation must involve some property P of the brain, whereby brain-states produce states of consciousness. P is unknown to us, and must always remain unknown, because sensation, which is our only source of information about material objects, reveals to us only their spatial properties, and P is not such a property. Therefore we can never understand how the brain produces consciousness, and the relation between them must remain mysterious. Our bafflement arises from the complete diversity of the two entities to be causally related, as far as we can understand them. The brain is described by modern physicists purely in spatial terms motions, tendencies to move, and the capacity to make other things move; and this kind of description is completely inapplicable to consciousness. As McGinn says (p. 357) Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial processes'. So consciousness cannot be fitted into the structure of the world as described by physics. I agree that this description cannot be complete, though it does seem to be sufficient for the purpose of causally accounting for what happens in the material world, including (there is reason to believe) human nervous systems. Nothing can be completely described by its spatial properties only; what moves must be something of some sort. I agree also that we have no means of access to any other properties of matter, not because spatial properties are the only ones presented to us in sensation, but because we have no good reason for attributing the others to material things. It is therefore plausible to argue that the mysteriousness of brain-mind causation is due to our ignorance of the nature of material objects in general and brains in particular, and that if only we could know the other properties the bafflement would disappear. But if the basic problem is the discrepancy between the properties of the brain and those of consciousness, I am not convinced that McGinn's property P could solve it. If variations in P can occur independently of the spatial properties of the brain, it cannot play its intended part as a mediator between brain and consciousness in a theory accounting for the physical determination of conscious states. If, on the other hand, its variations are wholly determined by these spatial properties, shall we not have the same sort of misfit between cause and effect which disturbed us in the causal relation between brain and consciousness? If we cannot make sense of a causal relation between heterogeneous entities, then to allay our disquiet P has to be sufficiently homogeneous with the physical to be a plausible effect of physical causes, and sufficiently homogeneous with consciousness to be a plausible cause of conscious effects. I doubt whether these requirements could both be met.