Surprisal Research Articles

MeSsy identities: an ethnographic exploration of a multiple sclerosis support group.

The following is an ethnographic study of a multiple sclerosis (MS) support group. This study underscores the importance of access to counternarratives for individuals with chronic illness and disabilities through organizational structures such as support groups. This work can help those with disabilities/chronic diseases, such as MS, because it provides a space for discussing the communicative forces that shape individual experiences of living with disability and chronic illness. Thus, this study seeks to understand how pharmaceutical representatives' and doctors' grand medical narratives influence the communication of MS support group attendees and their construction/performance of self. This study shows that participation in support groups provides a space to renegotiate identity in which new forms of self can develop external to the dominant discourse. The support group becomes a space where counternarratives of empowerment develop in the face of master narratives.

Influences of heart rate feedback and autistic traits on affective mindreading

Although mindreading is an important prerequisite for successful social interactions, the underlying mechanisms are still matter of debate. It is unclear, for example, if inferring others’ and own mental states are distinct processes or are based on a common mechanism. Using an affect-induction experimental set-up with an acoustic heart rate feedback that addresses affective mindreading in self and others, we investigated if non-autistic study participants relied on similar information for self- and other-directed mindreading. We assumed that due to altered mindreading capacities in autism, mainly individuals with low autistic traits would focus on additional sensory cues, such as heart rate, to infer their own and their gambling partner’s affective states. Our analyses showed that the interpretation of a heart rate signal differed in self- and other-directed mindreading trials. This effect was modulated by autistic traits suggesting that individuals with higher autistic traits might not have interpreted the heart rate feedback for gambling partner ratings and differentiated less between self- and other-directed mindreading trials. We discuss these results in the context of a common mechanism underlying self- and other-directed mindreading and hypothesize that the weighting of internal and external sensory information might contribute to how we make sense of our and others’ mental states.

Neurophenomenology and Neuroepistemology Approaches to Integrating Constructivist, Perennialist, and Universalist Perspectives on Mystical Experiences

Differences among constructivist, perennialist, and universalist perspectives on mystical experiences are bridged with neurophenomenology and neuroepistemology perspectives that illustrate constructivist and deconditioning processes and universal innate experiences. These approaches show that phenomenal similarities and differences in the features of meditative experiences are related to specific brain functions and processes. This illustrates that recurrent forms of mystical consciousness involve the activation or suspension of specific brain functions and their forms of knowing. Meditators’ deliberate modifications of brain processes engage constructivist and deconditioning processes that provide access to intrinsic states understood as mystical experiences. Deconditioning of habitual cognitive processes through meditation changes habitual attention and cognition, permitting access to preconceptual awareness and normally unconscious intrinsic mental processes. Different mystical experiences involve changes in specific neurologically mediated forms of self that provide the basis for universal forms of mystical experience. Neuroepistemological perspectives on qualia of meditative states and their relations to mental processes and brain features provide a framework for understanding recurrent forms of mystical experiences as natural brain states.

Do Human Assertions Really Adhere Strictly to Norms? The Effect of Threatening Content in Information on Personalized Norm Perception.

Assertion is the use of declarative sentences to convey information, which necessitates meeting the "justified-belief norm" as a prerequisite. However, a significant amount of misinformation that did not meet these conditions was spread during COVID-19, leading to a reintroduction of the assertion norm. One possible hypothesis is that the threatening content of the misinformation influenced the perception of the norm. However, this remains unclear to researchers. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to investigate the effect of threatening content in information on individuals' perceptions of norms. In all the experiments, participants read backstories with and without threatening content, followed by answering assertion questions. It was observed that people do follow a looser assertion norm for information that contains threatening content. Additionally, further exploration revealed that threatening factors also lead individuals to more easily perceive the related content as truth and reduce the probability of being blamed. These two outcomes provide some explanation for the underlying mechanism of threatening factors' influence. The research results further refined the theory of assertion norms, offering a certain basis for information management.

“I used to be a storyteller”: the perspectives of people with primary progressive aphasia on the communication needs for themselves and their family members

ABSTRACT Background Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) refers to a group of neurological disorders characterised by the progressive deterioration of language functions. The primary avenue of support for the wide-ranging impacts of PPA on the lives of people with PPA and their family members is the delivery of communication care from speech-language pathologists. To align the provision of communication care services and the development of communication interventions with the peoples’ and family members’ needs, it is important to understand those needs from the perspectives of key stakeholders, particularly individuals with PPA. Aims The aims of the current study were to explore (a) the communication needs of people with PPA in the early and middle stages, and (b) the communication needs of their family members, from the perspectives of people with PPA. Methods & Procedures Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with seven people with PPA (all variants of PPA) from one to 96 months post diagnosis. The qualitative data was analysed using qualitative content analysis to identify codes and categories that related to the study’s research aims. Outcomes & Results Qualitative content analysis yielded six categories of communication need pertaining to people with PPA: Diagnosis and disclosure; Wanting information for self and the general public; General communication difficulties; Impact on communication in everyday life; Impact on psychosocial wellbeing; and Future planning. In contrast, only one category of need pertaining to family members was identified: Impact on family and others. Conclusion This study has yielded a breadth of findings on the communication needs of people with PPA and an initial contribution on those of their family members, implicating a range of health and social care professionals and other system level supports, as well as community members and family and friends, in addition to speech-language pathology services. Speech-language pathologists supporting this population might consider needs in areas such as impact on working life, impact on driving, coping with a changing self-perception of their identity (e.g. as a storyteller), and managing fluctuation in communication abilities. Future research can build on these findings to inform clinical practice and to develop interventions which address the needs of this population.

Discharge Against Medical Advice Among Neonates Admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of a Tertiary Care Hospital

Discharge against medical advice is a condition where patient leaves the hospital against physician’s advice and is a serious public health issue, especially among neonates and a challenge faced commonly by physicians. It is a risk factor that can lead to adverse events like mortality and readmissions in neonatal units. To decrease neonatal mortality rate, it is necessary to investigate the causes leading to self-discharge. This study aimed to find out prevalence and reasons for discharge against medical advice among neonates admitted to neonatal intensive care units of a tertiary care hospital. A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among neonates admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Units who were discharge against medical advice (DAMA) from 15th March 2022 to 14th March 2023 after obtaining ethical approval from the Institutional Review Committee (Reference number: F-NMC/544/078-079). Neonatal demographic information and reason for self discharged were recorded. A convenience sampling method was used among neonates who met eligibility criteria. Data were presented as frequency with percentage. A point estimate with 95% confidence interval was calculated. Out of 910 neonates admitted to NICU, 86 (9.4%; 95% CI:7.62-11.53) were discharged against medical advice. Among these, 72 (83.7%) were outborn neonates and 51 (59.3%) male. The most common morbidity was sepsis 53 (61.6%). The common reasons for parents to take DAMA was poor financial condition 72 (83.7%). The prevalence of discharge against medical advice among neonates admitted in the neonatal intensive care units was similar to other studies done in similar settings.

Exploring the role of Dynamic Presencing in a group coaching training context for fostering transformative leadership development in disruptive times.

With the growing array of challenges humanity has been experiencing since the global pandemic, knowledge workers at all levels of organizations are experiencing a noted increase in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) conditions of their work and lives. This has brought about significant changes in ways of working and associated ways of being that have become more fragmented and virtual. Disruptive change continues to unfold on many levels of society, from the organizational to the individual level, with multiple and often unintended consequences. This article outlines how the body of work of Dynamic Presencing in a group coaching context facilitates responsive forms of personal development as well as a deeper transformation of one's leadership identity in the face of such change, which in turn serves as an approach that can be useful in navigating VUCA conditions that are becoming increasingly prevalent. The transformative process of Dynamic Presencing develops core inner leadership capabilities with a noted increase in the quality of internal and interpersonal forms of self-,presence-, and presencing-awareness. Overall, Dynamic Presencing serves as a critical enabler of presencing mastery, which instills deeper confidence and resourcefulness in working with the VUCA conditions of our global world by deepening our presencing process and refining our methods for inner leadership development in turbulent times.

Highly dispersive optical solitons with generalized quadratic—cubic form of self—phase modulation by Sardar sub—equation scheme

AbstractThe highly dispersive optical solitons with generalized quadratic–cubic nonlinear self–phase modulation are the subject of this research. The governing model was reduced to an ordinary differential equation using the Sardar sub-equation method, which was then examined in two different ways. To provide a strong framework for the answers, the parameter limits were also listed.

Проблемы реализации принципов социальной ответственности бизнеса в России

Business social responsibility is a form of self–regulation of business, which is aimed at achieving social, environmental, and philanthropic goals jointly with society and at the same time contributing to strengthening the brand's reputation. The principles of Business Social responsibility (SOB), or corporate social responsibility of business organizations, are now steadily spreading around the world, involving new countries and organizations - from small enterprises to multinational companies. Although the principles of the SOB are uniform, they acquire the characteristics of the country whose companies implement them in their activities. Priorities in the development of the state, the political structure, the state of the economy in the country, and key global problems leave their mark. In Russia, the concept of CSR has appeared relatively recently, at the moment there is an active process of forming an integrated approach to this phenomenon, which causes the emergence of a significant number of problems related to various aspects of the process under consideration. The purpose of the study is to analyze the dynamics of the development of social responsibility of Russian business through the prism of non–financial reports provided and to formulate the main problems of CSR implementation at the present stage. Research results: the concept, essence and basic principles of corporate social responsibility are considered, the main stages of the formation of CSR principles in Russia are studied. The dynamics of the provision of non-financial reports over the past 10 years has been analyzed, the structure of the submitted reports has been evaluated by industry characteristic of companies and by the share of organizations providing reports on a regular basis. The main disadvantages of the introduction of CSR principles from the point of view of entrepreneurship are studied. The main problems of CSR implementation at the current stage of development of the Russian economy are formulated and disclosed in detail. In the final part of the work, the main advantages of forming an integrated approach to the concept of CSR at the national level are formed, the main advantages of this process are presented.

Shadow Lives: Disrupting Gender Patterns in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle and Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor

The decades that followed Irish independence witnessed a doubling down of efforts to reinforce established gender roles and conservative systems of power in the fledgling state. The tensions that emerged between the cosmopolitanism outside of Ireland and the increasingly isolationist policies within found suitable expression in the contradictory treatment of Kate O’Brien’s work, lauded outside of Ireland, yet subjected at home to the stringent censorship laws that saw both Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) banned upon publication. While, across the Atlantic, Maeve Brennan, then at the very outset of her career, was undergoing a form of self–censorship writing her first extended work, later to be published as The Visitor (2000). In the mid-twentieth century, Brennan and O’Brien explored depictions of women living on the margins of normative domestic life, beyond the institutions of marriage and motherhood. And in this, they paved the way for the radical cultural and spatial re-formations that would signal a new Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I consider Kate O’Brien’s novel Mary Lavelle (1936), alongside recently uncovered drafts of Brennan’s roughly contemporaneous novella, as a challenge to the patriarchal hegemony that emerged in the newly conceived Free State. And I suggest that in drafting her first extended work of fiction, Brennan was conscious of the proscriptions that O’Brien had fallen foul of in Ireland.

Eyes of the beholders: Multi-method relationships between internalizing and externalizing symptom dimensions and aggression risk.

Although aggression occurs across a range of disorders, associations between dimensions of psychopathology and self- and other-directed aggression are not well understood. Investigating associations between psychopathology dimensions and aggression helps further understanding about the etiology of aggression, and ultimately, can inform intervention and prevention strategies. This study adopted a multi-method approach to examine associations between internalizing and externalizing dimensions of psychopathology and self- and other-directed aggression as a function of reporter (participant and informant) and modality of aggression measurement (subjective and objective). Participants were an unselected sample of 151 racially diverse adults recruited from the community. Dimensions of psychopathology were assessed using interview and questionnaire reports from participants and collateral informants, and forms of aggression were measured via subjective reports and an objective, laboratory aggression paradigm. Analyses of participant-reported psychological symptom data consistently linked externalizing symptoms to other-directed aggression, and internalizing symptoms to self-directed aggression. Results across informant and participant reporters replicated prior findings showing a significant interaction between internalizing and externalizing dimensions in predicting intimate partner violence. Most other effects in informant models were nonsignificant. The findings uncover consistency in and replicability of relationships between dimensions of psychopathology and certain manifestations of aggression and highlight the importance of examining multiple forms of aggression in etiological research. Examining aggression through a transdiagnostic lens can help us better understand and intervene upon processes implicated in devasting forms of self- and other-directed aggression.

#Fail: the quality and accuracy of nutrition-related information by influential Australian Instagram accounts

BackgroundSocial media is a popular source of information about food and nutrition. There is a high degree of inaccurate and poor-quality nutrition-related information present online. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality and accuracy of nutrition-related information posted by popular Australian Instagram accounts and examine trends in quality and accuracy based on author, topic, post engagement, account verification and number of followers.MethodsA sample of posts by Australian Instagram accounts with ≥ 100,000 followers who primarily posted about nutrition was collected between September 2020 and September 2021. Posts containing nutrition-related information were evaluated to determine the quality and accuracy of the information. Quality was assessed using the Principles for Health-Related Information on Social Media tool and accuracy was assessed against information contained in the Australian Dietary Guidelines, Practice-based Evidence in Nutrition database, Nutrient Reference Values and Metafact.ResultsA total of 676 posts were evaluated for quality and 510 posts for accuracy, originating from 47 Instagram accounts. Overall, 34.8% of posts were classified as being of poor quality, 59.2% mediocre, 6.1% good and no posts were of excellent quality. A total of 44.7% of posts contained inaccuracies. Posts authored by nutritionists or dietitians were associated with higher quality scores (β, 17.8, CI 13.94–21.65; P < 0.001) and higher accuracy scores (OR 4.69, CI 1.81–12.14, P = 0.001) compared to brands and other accounts. Information about supplements was of lower accuracy (OR 0.23, CI 0.10–0.51, P < 0.001) compared to information about weight loss and other nutrition topics. Engagement tended to be higher for posts of lower quality (β -0.59, P = 0.012), as did engagement rate (β -0.57, P = 0.016). There was no relationship between followers or account verification and information quality or accuracy and no relationship between engagement and accuracy.ConclusionsNutrition-related information published by influential Australian Instagram accounts is often inaccurate and of suboptimal quality. Information about supplements and posts by brand accounts is of the lowest quality and accuracy and information posted by nutritionists and dietitians is of a higher standard. Instagram users are at risk of being misinformed when engaging with Australian Instagram content for information about nutrition.

Thinking the Self through Hooks, Needles, and Scalpels: Body Suspensions, Tattoos, and other Body Modifications

Body modifications such as tattoo, scarification and body suspension represent not only aesthetic interventions, they can also be social practices with which to challenge and transcend the body’s limits, operating on the perception of wellbeing and moulding specific forms of self. In this Research Article, based on research on body suspension in Europe, I aim to analyse body modifications as a means to voluntarily intervene in human perceptive abilities, shaping individual lives through unconventional sensory experiences. In these practices, pain is signified as a threshold for sensory turmoil, capable of shaping the protagonists into a ‘sensory poiesis’. Through such sensory experiences the individual embarks on a process of ‘self-design’ to achieve a better state of being, combining suspensions with other body modification techniques. Suspension practitioners act on the flesh and skin with hooks, scalpel, and ink in order to process events, to trigger new versions of the self, and to enhance how they feel. In doing so, they produce unique and original ‘projects of humanity’, that is, new forms of humanity created by the individuals themselves.

Psy Fever/Psycho-Boom: The Mental Picture of a Transforming China

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a boom of popular participation in psychotherapy and training in urban China, which has attracted the attention of anthropologists who called this phenomenon a “psycho-boom” or “psy fever.” This article is a review of anthropological studies on this issue and discusses how psychotherapeutic knowledge and practice with western origin has been indigenized by Chinese psychotherapists as well as the emergence of a new form of self in this psycho-boom. Critical anthropologists tend to emphasize the connection between this psy fever and governmentality. This article shows the insights and blind spots of this perspective, calling for attention to the heterogeneity and agency of participants in this psy fever as well as the potentiality of psychotherapy as both expression and intervention for sufferings in the context of drastic social transformation.

An Improved LSTM-Based Failure Classification Model for Financial Companies Using Natural Language Processing

The Korean e-commerce market represents a large percentage of the global retail distribution market, a market that continues to grow each year, and online payments are rapidly becoming a mainstream payment method. As e-commerce becomes more active, many companies that support electronic payments are increasing the number of franchisees. Electronic payments have become an indispensable part of people’s lives. However, the types of statistical information on the results of electronic payment transactions are not consistent across companies, and it is difficult to automatically determine the error status of a transaction if no one directly confirms the error messages generated during payment. To address these issues, we propose an optimized LSTM model. In this study, we classify the error content in statistical information based on natural language processing to determine the error status of the current failed transaction. We collected 11,865 response messages from various vendors and financial companies and labelled them with an LSTM classifier model to create a dataset. We then trained this dataset with simple RNN, LSTM, and GRU models and compared their performance. The results show that the optimized LSTM model with the attention layer added to the dropout layer and the bidirectional recursive layer achieves an accuracy of about 92% or more. When the model is applied to e-commerce services, any error in the transaction status of the system can be automatically detected by the model.

Human Life Course as Constructive Migration.

In this paper, I discuss the systemic features of the life-span development approach which was initially elaborated by Baltes (1989) and more recently considered by Greve (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 1-21, 2023). I argue that the life-span development approach should recognize the agentivity of people as they not only passively react to changes inside and around themselves but rather imaginatively co-construct their selves (and, their environment) through aging. The irreversibility of human development is highlighted in this paper simultaneously with the recognition of the significance of past phenomenological experiences for self-construction. People are considered as historical agents who evolve through gradual qualitative transformations instead of jumping from one discrete (age) category to another. I consider "migration" as a metaphor for "development" (aging) as both imply movement from one temporal position to another as well as moving from one social position to another. The changes related to aging put an adult in a position similar to immigrants who occur abroad and need to make sense of their new positions in relation to their personal and cultural background and the immediate reality/context they live in. Migration and aging both lead to the innovative mixture of the meaning of old and new experiences/knowledge and the creation of new forms of selfhood and personal understanding at different temporal positions.

Understanding the neural bases of bodily self-consciousness: recent achievements and main challenges.

The last two decades have seen a surge of interest in the mechanisms underpinning bodily self-consciousness (BSC). Studies showed that BSC relies on several bodily experiences (i.e., self-location, body ownership, agency, first-person perspective) and multisensory integration. The aim of this literature review is to summarize new insights and novel developments into the understanding of the neural bases of BSC, such as the contribution of the interoceptive signals to the neural mechanisms of BSC, and the overlap with the neural bases of conscious experience in general and of higher-level forms of self (i.e., the cognitive self). We also identify the main challenges and propose future perspectives that need to be conducted to progress into the understanding of the neural mechanisms of BSC. In particular, we point the lack of crosstalk and cross-fertilization between subdisciplines of integrative neuroscience to better understand BSC, especially the lack of research in animal models to decipher the neural networks and systems of neurotransmitters underpinning BSC. We highlight the need for more causal evidence that specific brain areas are instrumental in generating BSC and the need for studies tapping into interindividual differences in the phenomenal experience of BSC and their underlying mechanisms.

Interpretable fake news detection with topic and deep variational models

The growing societal dependence on social media and user generated content for news and information has increased the influence of unreliable sources and fake content, which muddles public discourse and lessens trust in the media. Validating the credibility of such information is a difficult task that is susceptible to confirmation bias, leading to the development of algorithmic techniques to distinguish between fake and real news. However, most existing methods are challenging to interpret, making it difficult to establish trust in predictions, and make assumptions that are unrealistic in many real-world scenarios, e.g., the availability of audiovisual features or provenance. In this work, we focus on fake news detection of textual content using interpretable features and methods. In particular, we have developed a deep probabilistic model that integrates a dense representation of textual news using a variational autoencoder and bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with semantic topic-related features inferred from a Bayesian admixture model. Extensive experimental studies with 3 real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art competing models while facilitating model interpretability from the learned topics. Finally, we have conducted model ablation studies to justify the effectiveness and accuracy of integrating neural embeddings and topic features both quantitatively by evaluating performance and qualitatively through separability in lower dimensional embeddings.

КОМУНІКАЦІЙНІ ІНСТРУМЕНТИ БРЕНДИНГУ МЕДИЧНИХ УСТАНОВ У СОЦІАЛЬНИХ МЕРЕЖАХ

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The purpose of the study&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; is to represent communication tools for the &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;development of a branding strategy for a medical institution in social networks.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Research methodology.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; To understand the phenomenon of branding, methods of analysis and synthesis, and descriptive method were used; ascertainment of the specifics of medical institutions branding required the use of monitoring, content analysis, comparison and survey methods.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Results.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; The trends and specifics of branding &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;in the medical field («medical marketing»/«medical services marketing») were represented. Modern ways of updating content for information and communication interaction with the audience of a medical institution, in particular a maternity hospital, were described. The dominant communication tools for establishing contact with clients through social networks were characterized, in particular: video stories about the institution and its employees; materials with expert comments of specialists (doctors); live broadcasts with medical workers of the institution. The designed and implemented concept of content strategy in social networks for the maternity hospital number 9 of Zaporizhzhia was presented. The main components of corporate style and their implementation on the pages of the «Ninth» in social networks were revealed. As a result of the conducted online survey, a high assessment of the quality of the page information content on the Instagram platform was observed. It was found that the basic share of the target audience of the maternity hospital pages in social networks is pregnant women and women who have given birth, and therefore, in order to expand the circle of interested people, it is necessary to increase the percentage of content for those who are at the stage of pregnancy planning.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Novelty of the research&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; consists in studying the specifics of &lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt;branding such a type of medical institution as a maternity hospital; formation and implementation of the content strategy concept for organizing its pages in social networks, as well as studying the effectiveness of their content for information and communication interaction with the target audience.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Practical significance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; The conducted research contributed to the generalization of the main areas of information support for clients of medical institutions, in particular the regional maternity hospital, as well as to the identification of dominant trends in the development and implementation of the concept and content strategy of pages in social networks of such institutions.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Key words:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; brand, branding, medical branding,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; medical marketing, marketing of medical services, content strategy, social networks, information and communication interaction.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Media Digital Sebagai Upaya Optimalisasi Keterampilan Menyimak Anak Berkebutuhan Khusus

Adequate education services are the right of all citizens of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia, including children with special needs. One of the basic human capitals to be able to become a respectable human being is seen from listening skills. Because listening skill is a self of value that must radiate as a form of self as a social being. Listening skills in children with special needs are a fundamental area that is rarely touched upon in any research context. The Indonesian Education University's laboratory elementary school in this context has attempted to provide inclusive school services for children with special needs, however these efforts have only been made in this study. The solution taken to solve this problem is to apply digital media which is seen as having high value and attractiveness for children with special needs who want to improve their listening skills. The results of this preliminary research show that Android digital media can be applied to simulate and optimize the listening skills of children with special needs.