Communication Episodes Research Articles

TESTIMONY, RECOVERY AND PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY: A RESPONSE TO PEET

ABSTRACTAccording to telling based views of testimony (TBVs), B has reason to believe that p when A tells B that p because A thereby takes public responsibility for B's subsequent belief that p. Andrew Peet presents a new argument against TBVs. He argues that insofar as A uses context-sensitive expressions to express p, A doesn't take public responsibility for B's belief that p. Since context-sensitivity is widespread, the kind of reason TBVs say we have to believe what we're told, is not widespread. Peet doesn't identify any problem with his own argument though he does attempt to limit its sceptical potential by identifying special contexts in which TBVs stand a chance of success. A more general defence of TBVs can be provided by showing Peet's argument to be unsound. I argue that Peet's argument is unsound because it requires us to wrongly suppose that speakers do far less labour than their audiences in context-sensitive linguistic communication. I aim to show why – in the context of the epistemology of testimony and the philosophy of language – it's important to recognize the labour that speakers can do, and so can be held responsible for not doing, in episodes of context-sensitive linguistic communication.

Measuring Language Mindsets and Modeling Their Relations With Goal Orientations and Emotional and Behavioral Responses in Failure Situations

Some people ascribe successful language learning to an innate aptitude that cannot be further developed, at least after a certain young age (i.e., an entity mindset), while other people believe that language learning ability can be improved (i.e., an incremental mindset). The purpose of this research is to (a) introduce the Language Mindsets Inventory (LMI), and (b) test the mindsets–goals–responses model, which maintains that learners’ mindsets predict the goals that they set for language learning, and that these goals in turn affect how they respond to difficult academic and communication episodes. Correlational and factor analyses provided evidence of the LMI's valid and reliable use in research with university‐level language students. Path analyses showed that regardless of their competence level, greater endorsement of an incremental mindset was associated with the goal of learning more about the language, and this learning goal in turn predicted greater mastery and less helpless responses in failure situations. Greater endorsement of an entity mindset predicted the goal of demonstrating competence (i.e., performance approach goals) when students believed that they had stronger language skills. The use of the LMI in future research and the importance of supporting incremental mindsets for language education are discussed.

Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

Early American archives abound with references to episodes of communication, translation, and interpretation, and with a diverse array of Native-language texts. They provide evidence both of practical and philosophical colonial projects and of the ways in which Native people used their languages to mediate colonization. Scholars have uncovered a range of methods that diverse peoples employed to communicate with one another, the contexts that shaped the meanings of the words and messages exchanged, and the broader significance of those exchanges for figures far from the point of encounter. The texts and commentaries that flowed from efforts at language learning and linguistic collection bear testimony to ways Native languages shaped Euro-American intellectual, cultural, and religious history. They also transform previous rubrics for understanding American Indian resistance to linguistic imperialism into a social fact with an archive and a material history. Colonial-indigenous language encounters influenced the cultural and intellectual history of Native individuals and communities, providing new media for linguistic expression and new frames through which to consider their own tongues.

Reflexivity, repetition, and language-making online

This paper considers the reflexivity of language and its value to linguistic analysis. The focus is on the metalinguistic concept of ‘repetition’ and on how repetition is implemented as an integral part of the communication process by participants engaged in written online communication. The conditions that govern repetition in episodes of communication are explored, and analytically relevant aspects for the processes of situated sign-making are identified. With an example from a longitudinal (retrospective) study of a Danish online forum it is shown how the continuity of such processes may be analysed, based on the digital traces of reflexive episodes left by participants over a period of 5 years (2009–2014). Everyday metalinguistic practices are not generally placed high on the linguistic research agenda, and linguists tend to be more concerned about the fact that linguistics itself ultimately depends on the reflexivity of language. However, it is argued that the reflexivity of language does not logically invalidate linguistics. On the contrary, it holds the solution to situated linguistic analysis.

Capgras-delusion in a female patient with schizophrenia: A case report and study of the literature

BackgroundThe Capgras syndrome is a rarely observed condition in patients with different psychiatric diseases, which is characterized with delusional misidentification of people, places, objects, etc.ObjectiveIn this case report we aim to describe the clinical characteristics and manifestation of Capgras syndrome in a female patient with schizophrenia, perform a literature search on the topic and compare our report to literature findings.Results and discussionA 50-year-old female patient was verbally and physically aggressive to her family members upon admission to our center. The onset of disease was marked 2 years ago when she first started feeling deserted and isolated and had a prescribed therapy for her condition which she did not follow. During the current admission a psychiatric assessment was performed. Delusional misidentification of her family members was observed and consequent food and sleep self-deprivation due to psychosis was noted. The patient denied being suicidal but was intense and psychotic, and reported different objects to have started disappearing mysteriously from her home. The patient was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was treated with haloperidol, olanzapine, chlorpromazine, and biperiden. The patient was discharged in an improved condition, without episodes of obsessive delusions and improved communication with her relatives.ConclusionAlthough according to the literature organic substrate may be found in some patients with Capgras syndrome, in the case presented here it is the dominant psychotic theme, which determined the content of the disease.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Standardizing communication from acute care providers to primary care providers on critically ill adults.

To increase the frequency of communication of patient information between acute and primary care providers. A secondary objective was to determine whether higher rates of communication were associated with lower rates of hospital readmission 30 days after discharge. A validated instrument was used for telephone surveys before and after an intervention designed to increase the frequency of communication among acute care and primary care providers. The communication intervention was implemented in 3 adult intensive care units from 2 campuses of an academic medical center. The frequency of communication among acute care and primary care providers, the perceived usefulness of the intervention, and its association with 30-day readmission rates were assessed for 202 adult intensive care episodes before and 100 episodes after a communication intervention. The frequency of documented communication increased significantly (5/202 or 2% before to 72/100 or 72% after the intervention; P < .001) and the communication was considered useful by every participating primary care provider. Rates of rehospitalization at 30 days were lower for the intervention group than the preintervention group, but the difference was not statistically significant (41/202 or 23% vs 16/88 or 18% of discharged patients; P = .45; power 0.112 at P = .05). The frequency of communication episodes that provide value can be increased through standardized processes. The key aspects of this effective intervention were setting the expectation that communication should occur, documenting when communication has occurred, and reviewing that documentation during multiprofessional rounds.

Acknowledgment, Justice, and Communication Ethics

This essay explores how communication and ethics are intertwined, that ethics emerges within transactional episodes of communication between mutually responsive communicators, focusing on how justice is created within the communication act of acknowledgment. Using Hyde's analysis of acknowledgment as a life-giving gift, the essay examines the social construction of justice as harmony, both as an alternative form of justice and as a starting point for social construction of traditional notions of justice as fair or deserving. This analysis is juxtaposed with moral development theory and research of infants and children regarding the moral emotions of empathy, the equality bias, and disgust, which provides insight into dynamics of the social construction of ethical practices. This juxtaposition of philosophical ethics, communication and moral psychology offers a view of the dynamic entwinement of communication and ethics in transactional acts and episodes of communication that socially construct ethical practices and, over time, ethical principles, values and theories. The social construction of ethics points to the role each generation plays in teaching the next communication practices that promote practice and understanding of ethical principles, values and theories.

Adaptive management? Observations of knowledge coordination in the communication practice of Swedish game management

Modern management of natural resources is guided by the normative theory of adaptive management (AM). Behind this theory lies a strong, albeit implicit, expectation that organisations aiming for AM have the capacity to communicate in a way that facilitates the required coordination of the knowledge perspectives involved. The aim of this article is to discuss the extent to which the communication practice of Swedish game management organisations facilitates coordination of knowledge corresponding to AM. Based on operationalizations of communicative rationality and agonistic pluralism, we use the concepts ‘discursive closure’ and ‘discursive opening’ to investigate how the coordination of knowledge is carried out through communication in relatively recently established organisations, the Swedish Game Management Delegations (GMDs). We analyse four communication episodes from GMD meetings and notice that multiple perspectives were expressed (discourse openings) but were not evaluated in a communicative rational way before being closed. The consequences of these closures were that knowledge perspectives with potential relevance, but with unclear validity for game management, were not elaborated upon, in terms of their truth, intelligibility, legitimacy or sincerity, which inhibited AM. The concepts of discursive closure and discursive opening proved useful for investigating communicative capacity. An important question which needs to be addressed to improve communicative capacity for AM is whether it would be practically possible to keep to the agenda and rules of the GMD meetings and still admit discursive openings about differences in perspectives.

Роль полиперспективных репрезентаций в процессах совместного внимания

The aim of our work was to test the hypothesis that one's identification of objects of attention in an observed individual depends on his/her understanding of the context of a communicative situation based on the comparison of the participants' points of view. In the first experimental study the subjects (N=74) carried out visual search for objects of attention of participants of non-verbal communication scenes with/without information on the communication context provided, and with short/prolonged display of information for assessing gaze direction of the participants. Understanding the context resulted in a higher efficiency of iden¬tification and saccadic detection of the participants' objects of attention in the subjects, regardless of their access to the information on gaze direction. In the second experiment the subjects (N=32), after watching videos of communication episodes, were asked to search for changes of different objects in the scenes. Those subjects who had a clear understanding of the context of communication first of all noticed the changes in the future objects of attention of the participants, in spite of the absence of any 'hints' like head or eye orientation. The outcomes of the research are discussed within the framework of concepts focusing on the significance of polyperspective representations for the understanding of communicative signals.

Self-disclosure and new communication technologies

The reported study examined the implications of receiving superficial self-disclosures from a friend. A total of 199 adults reported on communication episodes initiated by a friend during the previous 7 days via five communication technologies and completed measures of liking, relationship satisfaction, and willingness to provide social support to their friend. The results revealed significant interactions between the total volume of self-disclosures received and proportion of superficial disclosures for liking and relationship satisfaction. Among respondents who received a relatively greater volume of self-disclosures, the proportion of superficial disclosures received was inversely associated with relationship satisfaction and liking. Perceived costs mediated the preceding relationships.

Cerebral coherence between communicators marks the emergence of meaning.

How can we understand each other during communicative interactions? An influential suggestion holds that communicators are primed by each other's behaviors, with associative mechanisms automatically coordinating the production of communicative signals and the comprehension of their meanings. An alternative suggestion posits that mutual understanding requires shared conceptualizations of a signal's use, i.e., "conceptual pacts" that are abstracted away from specific experiences. Both accounts predict coherent neural dynamics across communicators, aligned either to the occurrence of a signal or to the dynamics of conceptual pacts. Using coherence spectral-density analysis of cerebral activity simultaneously measured in pairs of communicators, this study shows that establishing mutual understanding of novel signals synchronizes cerebral dynamics across communicators' right temporal lobes. This interpersonal cerebral coherence occurred only within pairs with a shared communicative history, and at temporal scales independent from signals' occurrences. These findings favor the notion that meaning emerges from shared conceptualizations of a signal's use.

Integrating, sharing, and sourcing knowledge in an ERP usage context

This study focuses on the impact of three knowledge management processes – knowledge integration (KI), knowledge sharing (KS) and knowledge sourcing – on business process performance in an integrated system usage context. Using a controlled research environment, we analysed 72 communication episodes and performance data within six integrated business process teams that used a real enterprise resource planning system to support their decisions. Results show that communication behaviours executed to integrate individuals’ knowledge had a positive impact on process performance, whereas KS and knowledge sourcing behaviours between individuals inhibited process performance.

Applying the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model to Micro-Level Analyses of Marital Partner Affect During Couple Conversations: An Exploratory Investigation

For years observational techniques along with other methods have sought to explore the relationships of couple interactional exchanges to marital quality and longevity. However, many of the previous methodological procedures used might be inadequate at capturing the influential micro-dimensional nuances of interpartner couple affective stability and reciprocity. This study explored the dyadic patterns in 23 married couples' continuous affect ratings during two communication episodes. Multilevel modeling was used to assess the structure in the stability of one's own affect and the influence of partner affect over 3-, 6-, and 9-second time lags. Implications regarding the use of nested models to explore patterns of actor and partner effects are discussed.

An Evaluation of the Impact of Clinically Embedded Reading Rooms on Radiologist-Referring Clinician Communication

The aim of this study was to investigate whether locating reading rooms in clinical areas at a large tertiary care, academic hospital in the United States corresponds with increased rates of direct communication between radiologists and clinicians. Data recorded included the frequency, form, duration, and general purpose of communications. Two-tailed Fisher's exact tests were used to determine the statistical significance of differences between the frequencies of communication methods for the reading rooms included in the study. During the observation period, there were a total of 175 episodes of communication between radiologists and referring providers in the 4 study reading rooms. There was a highly significant difference (P < .0001) in the percentage of visits and critical test result management messages sent between embedded and nonembedded reading rooms, while the differences in the proportion of calls both to and from referring providers was not significant (P = .4468). Although the purpose of this study was to assess the impact of reading room location on radiologists' communications with referring providers, several alternative hypotheses could also explain the results. The value of this study emerges from the documentation of the high degree of variability among institutions in communication practices among different kinds of radiologists and referring physicians. The extent of these different practices among the 4 reading rooms has important implications for future studies of communication patterns between radiologists and referring providers as well as for designing effective interventions to enhance the role of radiologists as consultants.

Direct Numerical Simulation of Incompressible Flows on Unstructured Meshes Using Hybrid CPU/GPU Supercomputers

This paper describes a hybrid MPI-CUDA parallelization strategy for the direct numerical simulation of incompressible flows using unstructured meshes. Our in-house MPI-based unstructured CFD code has been extended in order to increase its performance by means of GPU co-processors. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to take advantage of the current hybrid supercomputers to increase our computing capabilities. CUDA is used to perform the calculations on the GPU devices and MPI to handle the communications between them. The main drawback for the performance is the slowdown produced by the MPI communication episodes. Consequently, overlapping strategies, to hide MPI communication costs under GPU computations, are studied in detail with the aim to achieve scalability when executing the code on multiple nodes.

Organizations as Networks of Communication Episodes: Turning the Network Perspective Inside Out

Over the last decades, the idea that communication constitutes organizations (CCO) has been gaining considerable momentum in organization studies. The CCO perspective provides new insights into key organizational issues, such as the relation between stability and change, between micro-level and macro-level phenomena, or between emergence and control. However, despite various theoretical advancements, the CCO perspective’s range of methodologies is still limited to analyzing local communication episodes, rather than studying organizations as broader networks of communication episodes. In this paper, we present a new methodological approach to the study of the relation between organization and communication, based on network analysis. Following a discussion of existing network approaches, we incorporate the fundamental assumptions of the CCO perspective into a methodology that places communication at the center of network analysis by turning the prevalent network perspective inside out, so that the vertices of the network represent communication episodes and the edges represent individuals. We illustrate our methodology with an empirical case study, in which we examine the structures and dynamics of an actual organization as a network of communication episodes.

Workplace Dignity in a Total Institution: Examining the Experiences of Foxconn’s Migrant Workforce

In 2010, a cluster of suicides at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group sparked worldwide outcry about working conditions at its factories in China. Within a few short months, 14 young migrant workers jumped to their deaths from buildings on the Foxconn campus, an all-encompassing compound where they had worked, eaten, and slept. Even though the language of workplace dignity was invoked in official responses from Foxconn and its business partner Apple, neither of these parties directly examined workers’ dignity in their ensuing audits. Based on our analysis of media accounts of life at Foxconn, we argue that its total institution structure imposed unique indignities on its workers that both raised questions of their self-respect and self-worth, as well as gave rise to multiple episodes of disrespectful communication. We interpret our findings in light of the larger cultural context and meanings of work in China to understand more fully the experience of dignity of Foxconn’s migrant workforce.

Perceptions of Coercion, Discrimination and Other Negative Experiences in Postpartum Contraceptive Counseling for Low-income Minority Women

Using in-depth qualitative methods, we investigated negative contraception counseling experiences, including those felt to be coercive or discriminatory, in a population of postpartum urban minority women. Brief surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 consenting postpartum women who had received care at a Medicaid-funded obstetrics clinic. In-person one-on-one interviews were then reviewed for themes using an iterative process of qualitative analysis. In this sample of African American (63%) and Hispanic (37%) women (median age 26), 73% had unplanned pregnancies. Features of negative counseling experiences included having insufficient, non-physician-directed and impersonal counseling. Most women had experienced episodes of poor communication with providers; 10 described feeling coerced or perceiving racially-based discrimination in counseling. Negative experiences with contraceptive counseling may affect contraception utilization. Contraceptive education should respect each individual's autonomy, culture, and values.

Privacy–solidarity conflict: the communication with the support group

Actually guidelines require that patient must be informed about his condition so that he can choose the persons he wants to share these information with. Nonetheless, the caregiver usually gets an intermediary role in doctor-patient communication thus becoming the doctor's main conversation partner and claiming to be given more information than the patient himself. A more complex situation is about brain tumours patients sometimes affected by cognitive deficiencies, compromising their comprehension skills or their capability of keeping the information they are being given. A preliminary study allowed to submit separately to brain tumour patients and their family members a semi-structured interview. Although doctors communicate diagnosis and therapeutic plans, patients and their family members often do not seem to remember the information they are given. An important percentage of patients and their carers cannot tell correctly what they was said by the doctors. Only a minor percentage of patients do not want to know all details of their disease. Instead, most of the family members, would rather their beloved were given just partial information on their conditions or even not given information at all. Communication with patients and their carers requires careful re-negotiation in a multiple time-points, rather than a one-off communication episode.

Functionally referential and intentional communication in the domestic dog: effects of spatial and social contexts

In apes, four criteria are set to explore referential and intentional communication: (1) successive visual orienting between a partner and distant targets, (2) the presence of apparent attention-getting behaviours, (3) the requirement of an audience to exhibit the behaviours, and (4) the influence of the direction of attention of an observer on the behaviours. The present study aimed at identifying these criteria in behaviours used by dogs in communicative episodes with their owner when their toy is out of reach, i.e. gaze at a hidden target or at the owner, gaze alternation between a hidden target and the owner, vocalisations and contacts. In this study, an additional variable was analysed: the position of the dog in relation to the location of the target. Dogs witnessed the hiding of a favourite toy, in a place where they could not get access to. We analysed how dogs engaged in communicative deictic behaviours in the presence of their owner; four heights of the target were tested. To control for the motivational effects of the toy on the dogs' behaviour and for the referential nature of the behaviours, observations were staged where only the toy or only the owner was present, for one of the four heights. The results show that gazing at the container and gaze alternation were used as functionally referential and intentional communicative behaviours. Behavioural patterns of dog position, the new variable, fulfilled the operational criteria for functionally referential behaviour and a subset of operational criteria for intentional communication: the dogs used their own position as a local enhancement signal. Finally, our results suggest that the dogs gazed at their owner at optimal locations in the experimental area, with respect to the target height and their owner's (or their own) line of gaze.