Negative Items Research Articles

Negative Concord and locality in Russian

AbstractThis article addresses locality conditions on Negative Concord (NC) in Russian. We examine long-distance licensing of “negative”ni-pronouns in subject- and object-control infinitives. Existing theories of negative concord rely in one way or another on the movement of negative concord items (NCI): either as a direct licensing condition, or as a prerequisite for entering a local configuration with the licensor. Consequently, theories predict thatni-pronoun movement to the matrix clause (i.e., the local domain of the matrix licensor) would increase acceptability ofni-licensing. Using experimental data, we explore various linear positions available forni-pronouns in the matrix clause and in embedded infinitival clauses. We show that movement is not required for long-distance licensing, and that derived positions ofni-pronouns are independent ofni-licensing. We argue that althoughni-licensing and movement both obey locality constraints, they differ as to the type of locality required. This article presents evidence for recent proposals that movement and agreement have different properties with respect to locality constraints.

DTGCF: Diversified Tag-Aware Recommendation with Graph Collaborative Filtering

In tag-aware recommender systems, users are strongly encouraged to utilize arbitrary tags to mark items of interest. These user-defined tags can be viewed as a bridge linking users and items. Most tag-aware recommendation models focus on improving the accuracy by introducing ingenious design or complicated structures to handle the tagging information appropriately. Beyond accuracy, diversity is considered to be another important indicator affecting the user satisfaction. Recommending more diverse items will provide more interesting items and commercial sales. Therefore, we propose a diversified tag-aware recommendation model based on graph collaborative filtering. The proposed model establishes a generic graph collaborative filtering framework tailored for tag-aware recommendations. To promote diversity, we adopt two modules: personalized category-boosted negative sampling to select a certain proportion of similar but negative items as negative samples for training, and adversarial learning to make the learned item representation category-free. To improve accuracy, we conduct a two-way TransTag regularization to model the relationship among users, items, and tags. Blending these modules into the proposed framework, we can optimize both the accuracy and diversity concurrently in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on Movielens datasets show that the proposed model can provide diverse recommendations while maintaining a high level of accuracy.

Investigating a neural language model's replicability of psycholinguistic experiments: A case study of NPI licensing.

The recent success of deep learning neural language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has brought innovations to computational language research. The present study explores the possibility of using a language model in investigating human language processes, based on the case study of negative polarity items (NPIs). We first conducted an experiment with BERT to examine whether the model successfully captures the hierarchical structural relationship between an NPI and its licensor and whether it may lead to an error analogous to the grammatical illusion shown in the psycholinguistic experiment (Experiment 1). We also investigated whether the language model can capture the fine-grained semantic properties of NPI licensors and discriminate their subtle differences on the scale of licensing strengths (Experiment 2). The results of the two experiments suggest that overall, the neural language model is highly sensitive to both syntactic and semantic constraints in NPI processing. The model's processing patterns and sensitivities are shown to be very close to humans, suggesting their role as a research tool or object in the study of language.

Carry‐over effect of single media exposure and mass‐mediated contact with remote outgroups: From asylum seekers in Europe to an Israeli local outgroup

AbstractThis research investigated the effects of a single exposure to media content of a distinct valence and mass‐mediated contact with a distant minority outgroup on feelings/attitudes toward a local outgroup. Experimental Study 1 was conducted among 314 Israeli Jews. The findings of Study 1 showed the effects of a single exposure to positive and negative media items about asylum seekers in Europe on perceived threats posed by them. In this study we did not find a carry‐over effect of single‐exposure to a media item about asylum seekers in Europe on feelings toward the local outgroup—asylum seekers in Israel. Study 2 was conducted through an online survey among 1039 Israeli Jews. It showed the effect of recurring mass‐mediated contact with asylum seekers in Europe on perceived threats posed by them. Both Study 1 and Study 2 found carry‐over effects of realistic and symbolic threats from asylum seekers in Europe on feelings/attitudes toward asylum seekers in Israel. The findings of Study 2 also showed a carry‐over effect of positive mass‐mediated contact with a distant outgroup on attitudes toward a local outgroup. Based on the findings, we conclude that the positive media framing of distant outgroups may promote tolerance and acceptance of local outgroups.

Shifting qualities of negative affective experience through adolescence: Age-related change and associations with functional outcomes.

Research shows negative affect increases in healthy adolescents, and this normative change is paralleled by increasing risk for the onset of psychopathology. However, research is limited in characterizing qualitative differences in the type of negative affect experienced beyond the positive-negative valence dimension. In the current study, we establish the relationship between different forms of negative affect and functioning outcomes (i.e., different facets of social functioning and life satisfaction), and examine whether these forms of negative affect are differentially prevalent across late childhood and adolescence. Seven-hundred and 70 participants aged 8-17 years completed self-report measures that assessed a wide range of negative affective experiences. A factor analysis on the negative affect items revealed a four-factor solution that characterized the dimensions of affective experience, with factors reflecting general anxiety, anger, evaluative anxiety, and sadness. Generalized additive model approaches revealed general anxiety increased nonlinearly with age and was associated with decreased reports of emotional support, a facet of social functioning. Anger was associated with increased perceived hostility, perceived rejection, and decreased life satisfaction, and remained stable across the age range. Evaluative anxiety was associated with greater loneliness and increased linearly with increasing age. Sadness was associated with all outcome measures and showed nonlinear changes with age, with notable increases in midadolescence. These results show that subsuming these subtypes of negative affect under a singular concept may obscure meaningful relationships between affect, age, and functioning. Exploring diverse forms of negative affect may help refine theories of emotional development and ultimately inform windows of risk for psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

KATIYEN as a common ground modifier in Turkish

KATIYEN is classified as a negative polarity item that necessarily takes scopeunder clause-mate negation (Kelepir 2001) and subcategorized as a (super)strong-NPIthat is licensed in antimorphic contexts (Görgülü 2017, following Zwarts 1995). I arguethat KATIYEN has a dual use as a negative sensitive item and a degree modifier on thecommon ground. The novel data I present indicate that KATIYEN can be used instructurally (and semantically) nonnegative sentences to express an attitude holder’sultimate degree of certainty. I aim to capture its dual status by suggesting that KATIYENis a universal modal adverb that behaves similarly to the Greek emphatic NPIs bytaking scope over negation (Giannakidou 2000), in addition has a common groundmanaging function of marking the interlocutor’s strong stance towards the positive ornegative proposition.

Changes in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Mediate Effects of Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback on Positive Emotional Memory Biases

Previous research suggests that implicit automatic emotion regulation relies on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). However, most of the human studies supporting this hypothesis have been correlational in nature. In the current study, we examine how changes in mPFC-left amygdala functional connectivity relate to emotional memory biases. In a randomized clinical trial examining the effects of heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback on brain mechanisms of emotion regulation, we randomly assigned participants to increase or decrease heart rate oscillations while receiving biofeedback. After several weeks of daily biofeedback sessions, younger and older participants completed an emotional picture memory task involving encoding, recall, and recognition phases as an additional measure in this clinical trial. Participants assigned to increase HRV (Osc+) (n = 84) showed a relatively higher rate of false alarms for positive than negative images than participants assigned to decrease HRV (Osc−) (n = 81). Osc+ participants also recalled relatively more positive compared with negative items than Osc− participants, but this difference was not significant. However, a summary bias score reflecting positive emotional memory bias across recall and recognition was significantly higher in the Osc+ than Osc− condition. As previously reported, the Osc+ manipulation increased left amygdala-mPFC resting-state functional connectivity significantly more than the Osc− manipulation. This increased functional connectivity significantly mediated the effects of the Osc+ condition on emotional bias. These findings suggest that, by increasing mPFC coordination of emotion-related circuits, daily practice increasing heart rate oscillations can increase implicit emotion regulation.

Lexical variation in NPI illusions – A case study of German jemals 'ever' and so recht 'really'

The illusory licensing of negative polarity items has been an insightful phenomenon for accounts of human sentence processing, as its extreme selectivity has proven problematic to explain in terms of parsing principles that underlie the establishment of other item-to-item dependencies. Using speeded acceptability judgments, I provide novel experimental evidence that the NPI illusion may be restricted to a particular type of NPI—illusory licensing was replicated for German jemals 'ever', but was not confirmed for the attenuating NPI so recht 'really'. I argue that this finding challenges all current accounts of the NPI illusion, and propose an explanation that purports an interaction between a scalar NPI licensing mechanism and scalar properties of the illusory licensing context as the source of the NPI illusion.

Measuring health-related stigma: Exploring challenges and research priorities to improve assessment

ABSTRACT Despite the advances in stigma research, measuring health-related stigma continues to be challenging and knowledge gaps remain. This study gained insight into challenges and research priorities related to the assessment of health-related stigma. Interviews were conducted with 14 stigma researchers, followed by a survey that was completed by 36 respondents. The findings showed a diverse range of research priorities. Among the top ranked priorities were the need for robust measurement properties of existing scales (content validity, responsiveness, validation across settings), exploration and assessment of subtle changes in stigma, and investigation on ways to assess actual behaviour and discrimination. Various challenges with the cross-cultural use of measures were identified, along with a research opportunity to shorten the cross-cultural validation process. Other identified research priorities related to: studying multi-level intersectional stigma; focusing on positive features that counter stigma; rephrasing negative and offending scale items; developing generic measures; and, the further development of practical tools to support researchers with scale implementation. The defined research priorities can guide future studies to advance stigma measurements and, as our ability to measure is critical for our understanding, enhance our knowledge about the complex stigma processes.

Changes in patient perceptions regarding ChatGPT-written explanations on lifestyle modifications for preventing urolithiasis recurrence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) imitating human-like language, such as ChatGPT, has impacted lives throughout various multidisciplinary fields. However, despite these innovations, it is unclear how well its implementation will assist patients in clinical situations. We evaluated changes in patient perceptions regarding AI before and after reading a ChatGPT-written explanation. In total, 24 South Korean patients receiving urolithiasis treatment were surveyed through questionnaires. The ChatGPT explanatory note was provided between the first and second questionnaires, detailing lifestyle modifications for preventing urolithiasis recurrence. The study questionnaire was the Korean version of the General Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence Scale, including positive and negative attitude items. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were accomplished to compare questionnaire scores before and after receiving the explanatory note. A linear regression analysis with stepwise elimination was used to assess variable (demographic data) accuracy in predicting outcomes. There were significant differences between total negative questionnaire scores pre- and post-surveys of ChatGPT, but not in the positive scores. Among variables, only education level significantly influenced mean score differences in the negative questionnaires. The negative perception change among urolithiasis patients after receiving the explanatory note provided by the AI chatbot program was observed, evidencing that patients with lower education levels expressed a more negative response. The explanatory note provided by the AI chatbot program could provoke an adverse change in AI perception. Negative human responses must be considered to improve and adapt new technology in health care. Only through changing patient perspectives will upgraded AI technology integrate into medical healthcare.

Response Coefficients on Earnings, Special Items, and Negative Special Items Components

Response Coefficients on Earnings, Special Items, and Negative Special Items Components

НЕГАТИВНОСТЬ В РЕЧИ И ЖЕСТАХ СИНХРОННЫХ ПЕРЕВОДЧИКОВ

The article elaborates on the role of negative language triggers for the highly demanding cognitive activity of simultaneous interpreting. Presumably, maintenance, omission or neutralization of negative information expresses a conscious decision of an interpreter. This process is often accompanied by certain co-speech gestures whose kinetic features we also subjected to analysis in this study. The data were collected during an experiment with 16 interpreters (8 from German and 8 from English). The information was annotated in ELAN program with further tests run in the Jamovi software. The results suggest that negative triggers tend to break monotony of interpretation and make interpreters process information more accurately, which is more typical of experienced interpreters. Both categories of interpreters though get emotionally involved, which can be seen by the gestural kinetic features traditionally associated with negativity (away movement, downward movement, palm down orientation, rubbing movement, usage of both hands and gesture space increase). At the same time the predominant part of negative items in the source text was preserved by the interpreters, who also created a “negativity balance”, adding negativity and neutralizing it to equalize the general negativity rate. Important differences associated with the language of the source text were not observed. Thus, a conclusion can be made that negativity disrupts the mechanical character of interpretation making interpreters more aware of the text contents.

PRESIDENT JOKO WIDODO'S SPEECH TEXT THROUGH APPRAISAL ANALYSIS

This study is a mixed method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to complement each other. The purpose of the study is to analyze and explain how appraisal system can be described in terms of attitude in the text of Jokowi’s presidential speech. The data of the research is a transcription of President JW’s speech text in 2015. The text document was collected in 2015. In this research, the Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005) is carried out and focus on the analysis of the Attitude element. Further, this prioritizes the discussion of the choice of attitudes that are utilized in the speech. Results showed that the appraisal system in terms of attitude in the text of Jokowi’s presidential speech in 2015 shows that there are 138 attitudes in the speech text. There are 92 positive items and 46 negative items. All kinds of attitudes are spread almost evenly; Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. This means President JW dares to express his evaluation not only through judgments and appreciations which were disseminated in the text but also expresses his own feelings proved by the affect. The most dominant attitude system portrayed in JW’s speech text in 2015 is propriety [+] and valuation [+].

Psychological distress among parents of children with obstetric brachial plexus injury visiting pediatric departments

Obstetrical brachial plexus injury (OBPI) is a severe nerve injury that is destructive with expected lifelong repercussions among affected children. A child with morbidity can affect a family in several ways, encompassing social, relational, financial, and emotional states. However, such effects on households remain mostly unrecognized, where the focus remains solely on the child’s health or his/her treatment endeavors, with little attention given to the parent's emotional state. Therefore, this study aimed to measure psychological distress among parents of children with OBPI. This descriptive cross-sectional study recruited 100 parents with children aged between 18 months and 16 years under treatment for OBPI who visited different healthcare facilities using a purposive sampling technique. Data were collected by conducting face-to-face interviews. The study used the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) to assess parents’ psychological distress. The positive items were assigned scores from 0 to 3 (i.e., always to never), and the negative items were assigned scores from 3 to 0 (i.e., always to never). The outcome score ranged between 0 and 36, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of general psychological distress. Descriptive statistics were calculated to achieve the study objectives. Most children suffering from OBPI were male (64%) rather than female (36%). All positive items of the GHQ-12 questionnaire had an average low score, indicating parents were not feeling reasonably happy, less able to concentrate on their routine work, somewhat incapable of making decisions, and unable to enjoy day-to-day activities. In contrast, negative items had an average high score, indicating that parents constantly felt under strain, could not overcome difficulties, felt unhappy and depressed, and lost confidence. The average GHQ-12 score was 23.47 ± 2.54, depicting a high level of psychological distress among parents of children with OBPI. Our study concluded that parents of children with OBPI are at potential risk of various psychological problems. Therefore, health personnel should be aware of these parents’ psychological adjustment and refer them for psychological support when necessary.

As strong as an NPI in LSF, NGT and LIS

Negative polarity items emerge from the interaction between some propertiesof the semantic module of human language and its lexicon. This leads tothe expectation that they should be equally common in spoken and sign language,contrary to what has been documented. We describe the sign UNTIL in French SignLanguage, Italian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands. We showthat under its punctual reading, UNTIL behaves as a strong negative polarity item,just like English until. We also discuss why more prototypical cases of polarityitems like any or ever are much harder to find in sign language

Measuring post-traumatic stress disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder using the International Trauma Questionnaire: results from a Hungarian clinical and non-clinical sample

ABSTRACT Background: The 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) simplified the description of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and also introduced a new trauma-related diagnosis called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). CPTSD is linked to earlier, prolonged interpersonal trauma, and is characterized by a broader range of symptoms, in addition to the core PTSD symptoms. The International Trauma Questionnaire (ITQ) has been developed to assess the new diagnostic criteria. Objectives: The primary aim of our study was to test the factor structure of the ITQ in a clinical and a non-clinical Hungarian sample. We also examined whether the degree of traumatization or the type of trauma experienced was associated with meeting the criteria for PTSD or CPTSD, or with the severity of PTSD or disturbances in self-organization (DSO) symptoms, in both samples. Method: A trauma-exposed heterogeneous clinical sample (N = 176) and a non-clinical sample (N = 229) filled out the ITQ and a modified version of the Life Events Checklist (LEC-5). The factor structure of the ITQ was tested by examining the model fit of seven competing confirmatory factor analysis models. Results: A two-factor second-order model with a second-order PTSD factor (measured by three first-order factors) and a DSO factor (measured directly by six symptoms) had the best fit to the data in both samples if an error correlation was allowed between negative self-concept items. Those in the clinical group who reported more interpersonal and childhood trauma experienced more PTSD and DSO symptoms. Also, there were significant, positive, and weak associations between the total number of different traumas and PTSD and DSO factor scores in both samples. Conclusion: ITQ was found to be a reliable tool to differentiate between PTSD and CPTSD, two related but distinct constructs in a clinical and a non-clinical trauma-exposed sample in Hungary.

Metacognitive training for negative symptoms: Support for the cognitive model.

Developing effective treatment options for negative symptoms of psychotic disorders remains a major unmet treatment need and area for further research. In a recent uncontrolled study by the main author, Metacognition Training (MCT) for negative symptoms was found to lead to fewer negative symptoms, less stigma and increased self-rated reflective ability. As the analysis examined negative symptoms as a whole, we here performed an additional analysis on individual negative symptom items as recent research has suggested that negative symptoms are best conceptualized through a five-factor model. It was found that the intervention led to changes specifically on sociality and blunted affect (with large effect sizes), which might reflect changes in both intrapersonal and interpersonal (meta)cognitive processes.

Dental Infection Control in Hafar AL-Batin Dental Center

A small percentage of germs can lead to an infection. In a dental setting, the patient's saliva mixed with blood, pus, plaque, and reticular fluid is frequently aerosolized and spattered, potentially infecting the dental practitioner. descriptive analytical method utilized 127 employees working in Hafar Al Batin dental center participant most of them 87% were female, 13% were male, and 20% The results showed the attitude toward infection control was high; the most negative attitude item was (Is the doctor obligated to wash hands and wear gloves in the dental clinic?" the most attitude item was (Is the doctor obligated to wash hands and wear gloves in the dental clinic) with high attitude and mean 2.88, followed by (Do you think that sterilizing the dental chair reduces infection) with high attitude and mean 2.74, followed by (Can wearing gloves be a substitute for hand washing) with low attitude and mean 1.47 the results showed there is no significant difference in attitude toward infection control due to gender, age, educational level, or infection as a result of the dental visit. Research and study in the case of transmission and how to reduce it through disinfection and some other methods will reach to reduce the potential risks of infection. The cross-infection control strategy every patient must undergo screening. Dental team members must maintain good health.Think about immunization Prophylaxis before and after exposure. Hepatitis B, influenza, mumps, measles, tetanus, rubella, tuberculosis, and whooping cough vaccinations are required for all members. Hand care and washing: provide personal protection barriers use cautionary aseptic techniques.

Grammaticalization from Minimizer to Focus Marker as Upward Reanalysis along the Nominal Spine*

AbstractThis article demonstrates that Japanese minimizers, which are originally used as Negative Polarity Items in a negative context, can sometimes behave as focus markers when used postnominally. I will review a previous syntactic analysis of English minimizers, and propose a revised syntactic analysis of Japanese minimizers, based on newly discovered synchronic and diachronic facts. I argue that the usage of Japanese minimizers as focus markers was developed through grammaticalization as Upward Reanalysis along the nominal spine.

Ranking-based contrastive loss for recommendation systems

The recommendation system is fundamental technology of the internet industry intended to solve the information overload problem in the big data era. Top-k recommendation is an important task in this field. It generally functions through the comparison of positive pairs and negative pairs based on Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR) loss. We find that the contrastive loss (CL) function used in contrastive learning is well-suited for top-k recommendation. However, there are two problems in the existing loss functions. First, all samples are treated the same, and hard samples are not considered. Second, all nonpositive samples are considered negative samples, which ignores the fact that they are unlabelled data containing items that users may like. Moreover, in our experiments, we find that when items are sorted by their similarities to the user, many negative items (or samples) appear before the positive items. We regard these negative items as hard samples and those at the top as potentially positive samples due to their high level of similarities with users. Therefore, we propose a ranking-based contrastive loss (RCL) function to exploit both hard samples and potentially positive samples. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, broad applicability, and high training efficiency of the proposed RCL function. The code and data are available at https://github.com/haotangxjtu/RCL.