Relative Salience Research Articles

Shocks to issue salience and electoral competition

We propose a two party electoral competition model to analyze the effects of an exogenous shock over the relative issue salience on the strategic policy choices of the parties. We find that both parties strategically shift their policy choices from their ideal points towards the ideal point of the median voter of the newly salient issue. The polarization of the distribution of the voters preferences produces a disadvantage for one of the parties, which is forced to implement a large policy shift. We argue that a large policy shift may break a party internal balance among its different factions, which in turn may produce important disruptions in the party system. We illustrate our arguments with an analysis of recent events in Catalonia and the UK.

Economy or culture? How the relative salience of policy dimensions shapes partisan effects on welfare state generosity

Abstract Whether parties matter for welfare policy is debated in comparative research. This article argues that one reason for dwindling partisan effects is that with the rising salience of cultural issues, political conflict has become increasingly two-dimensional. The argument expects parties to be more prone to shape welfare policy in ways expected by partisan theory if the salience of the economic policy dimension vis-à-vis the cultural dimension increases. To assess the relative salience of the dimensions, the article relies on parties’ emphases on economic issues compared to cultural issues from election manifestos. In a quantitative analysis of welfare benefits in 16 European countries between 1970 and 2011, partisan effects are shown to depend on the relative salience of the economic dimension in party competition: with increasing dominance of economic issues, the positive effect of left parties on welfare state generosity increases while partisan effects dissipate after elections dominated by cultural issues.

Choose your target wisely: how the EU shapes nationalism in contemporary Europe

Nationalism has experienced a resurgence across Europe since 1980, and one common explanation for this resurgence is that the backlash to European integration aids radical right parties, which prioritise cultural protectionism in the form of anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. In contrast, this article argues that, through the policy-making avenues available to certain parties, but not others, European integration encourages a different form of nationalism in highly regionalised countries: ethnoregionalism, which seeks either greater autonomy or independence for a sub-national unit. By examining how nationalist parties combine both cultural protectionism and ethnoregionalism, and the relative saliency that they attach to each, this article provides a novel way to disentangle the EU’s different potential effects on nationalism. Through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries for 1980–2019, this article finds that European integration has a significantly stronger effect on the saliency of ethnoregionalism than cultural protectionism. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: [DOI].

Effects of Social Network Characteristics on Mental Health Outcomes Among United States Army Reserve and National Guard Soldiers.

We sought to examine the relative salience of multiple social network structural characteristics (e.g., size, composition, quality, substance use) for understanding soldiers' mental health symptoms (anger, anxiety, depression, PTSD). Data are drawn from soldiers (N = 421) participating in the Operation: SAFETY study. Negative binomial regression models examined the relationship between ten social network characteristics and mental health outcomes, controlling for age, sex, years of military service, and deployment history. Greater number of close network ties was associated with fewer symptoms of anger, anxiety, and depression (ps < 0.05), but not PTSD. Having more illicit drug-using network ties was associated with greater severity of anxiety symptoms (p < 0.05). Finally, more days spent drinking with network members was related to higher levels of anger (p < 0.05). Interpersonal relationships that entail substance use are associated with greater anxiety and anger while a greater number of close ties is associated with fewer anger, anxiety, and depression symptoms.

Reaching the Uninterested by Referring to Valence Traits during Electoral Campaigns

Successful communication requires the sender of the message to adjust its content to the cognitive abilities of the receiver. Messages that are too complex or not interesting can be easily ignored. Failing to reach the voters with a message during a campaign is troubling for the parties competing in the election. In this study, I explore whether parties in countries in which the voters are less politically sophisticated are more inclined to emphasize their valence traits during campaigns – as these are deemed to be more cognitively accessible – at the expense of discussions of their policy propositions. The results obtained using data collected in ten European democracies show that parties in countries where the general public is less interested in politics tend to devote more attention to exhibiting their valence traits, especially honesty. The level of education of the electorate is not relevant to the relative salience of valence.

Testing Salience Model on Work Family Interface: A Regression Analysis

The simultaneous arrangement of home and work life is important for all. Many who work at home, however, face difficulties in maintaining their work and domestic relations balance, since both fields are mixed together on a single roof. As telecoms technology progresses, the possibilities of working from home have been improved. Discussed the effects of working at-home solutions on the quality of work life of the individual. The current research examined in a sample of service workers from Pakistan an extended version of the differential salience model and a related salience model. The findings of this study help in part the model in a number of cultural and domestic contexts, but they also establish variations in domain resources and limit requirements. Strong job demands and the present situation of COVID-19 represent primarily technically the work-to-home interference (WtHI). Traveling tools have been identical in terms of reducing the WtHI and work-to-home enhancement (WtHE). WtHE was expected to be more likely because of the activation of personnel services. However, testing one's work had no big influence on WtHE. Moreover, unlike the theoretical model, restriction requirements at the interfaces between work and family have been found to be differential, not comparatively significant.

Speech-related auditory salience detection in the posterior superior temporal region

Processing auditory human speech requires both detection (early and transient) and analysis (sustained). We analyzed high gamma (70–110 Hz) activity of intracranial electroencephalography waveforms acquired during an auditory task that paired forward speech, reverse speech, and signal correlated noise. We identified widespread superior temporal sites with sustained activity responding only to forward and reverse speech regardless of paired order. More localized superior temporal auditory onset sites responded to all stimulus types when presented first in a pair and responded in recurrent fashion to the second paired stimulus in select conditions even in the absence of interstimulus silence; a novel finding. Auditory onset activity to a second paired sound recurred according to relative salience, with evidence of partial suppression during linguistic processing. We propose that temporal lobe auditory onset sites facilitate a salience detector function with hysteresis of 200 ms and are influenced by cortico-cortical feedback loops involving linguistic processing and articulation.

Multimodal Affect Models: An Investigation of Relative Salience of Audio and Visual Cues for Emotion Prediction

People perceive emotions via multiple cues, predominantly speech and visual cues, and a number of emotion recognition systems utilize both audio and visual cues. Moreover, the perception of static aspects of emotion (speaker's arousal level is high/low) and the dynamic aspects of emotion (speaker is becoming more aroused) might be perceived via different expressive cues and these two aspects are integrated to provide a unified sense of emotion state. However, existing multimodal systems only focus on single aspect of emotion perception and the contributions of different modalities toward modeling static and dynamic emotion aspects are not well explored. In this paper, we investigate the relative salience of audio and video modalities to emotion state prediction and emotion change prediction using a Multimodal Markovian affect model. Experiments conducted in the RECOLA database showed that audio modality is better at modeling the emotion state of arousal and video for emotion state of valence, whereas audio shows superior advantages over video in modeling emotion changes for both arousal and valence.

Propaganda and Radicalization: The Case of Daesh in Iran

The process of becoming radicalized and joining extremist groups like Daesh, in countries with a Shi’a majority, such as Iran, is a controversial topic that has not received sufficient attention in the literature. This study examines Daesh’s media content in Farsi and seeks to provide an analysis of Daesh’s main messages, which have the primary objective of profoundly impacting their target audiences in Iran. This study collected data from 16 Iranian members of Daesh to discover how they were radicalized and why they decided to join Daesh. This study seeks to understand whether the media and Daesh’s propaganda are indeed the key reasons behind the radicalization of Daesh’s Iranian members and the creation of others’ perception of their mindsets against Iran and its Shi’a population, and to discover other possible factors that play a role in the radicalization process. While Daesh media and messages hold salience in relation to the Daeshization of some, studying such complex socio-political issues is rooted in an amalgamation of different personal, social, political, economic, and cultural push and pull factors. Such phenomena cannot, therefore, be reduced to only one of the mentioned elements.

Relative salience of chord-type and chord-voicing changes: A two-oddball paradigm

Our research project investigated the effect of background and stimuli factors on the relative salience of chord-type and chord-voicing changes. Earlier studies have shown that surface features tend to be easier to perceive than deeper features and that musical training attenuates this general tendency. For further studying how deeper-level and surface-level musical features are perceived, we used a two-oddball paradigm. Each item consisted of a succession of five same-root chords: one chord-type oddball (deeper feature), one voicing oddball (surface feature), and three standards. Participants chose the chord that sounded most different to them. All chord-type pairings formed of major, minor, dominant seventh, major seventh, and minor seventh chords were tested. Chord-type oddball and voicing oddball were chosen equally often, together forming the majority of the responses. Musical training and conceptual knowledge of chords affected the chord-type oddball responses, but not the voicing-oddball responses. However, chord-type oddballs were chosen regardless of the musical training. Chord-type responses were easiest for pairs consisting of a major-based and a minor-based chord and for pairs involving two pitch-class changes. Our results suggest that musical training and conceptual knowledge about chords is not the only factor influencing the relative salience of chord-type changes over voicing changes.

Multistakeholder Agency: Stakeholder Benefit Alignment and National Institutional Contexts

The alignment among multiple stakeholder benefits is a valuable performance indicator for the benefits generated by a firm for various stakeholders. Our research seeks to augment stakeholder-agency theory with an institutional perspective to analyze how national institutions affect stakeholder benefit alignment. We suggest that the current development of stakeholder-agency theory has overlooked the alignment of different stakeholders’ benefits and the external institutional contexts as critical determinants in ensuring such alignment. We conceptualize stakeholder benefit alignment as a positive relationship between different stakeholder groups’ benefits, and propose an institutional framework grounded in relative stakeholder salience. Using this framework, we argue that stakeholder benefits are better aligned when national institutions enhance the ease of withdrawal, legal protection, and private enforcement for intrinsically less salient stakeholders, and when a long-term oriented culture characterizes a society. We found supportive evidence by employing a meta-analytic approach based on 530 correlations from 94 primary studies representing 23 economies. Our study adds new insights to the stakeholder-agency literature by conceptualizing and quantitatively examining the degree of alignment across different stakeholder benefit dimensions, focusing on national formal and informal institutions as boundary conditions.

Relative salience signaling within a thalamo-orbitofrontal circuit governs learning rate

Learning to predict rewards is essential for the sustained fitness of animals. Contemporary views suggest that such learning is driven by a reward prediction error (RPE)-the difference between received and predicted rewards. The magnitude of learning induced by an RPE is proportional to the product of the RPE and a learning rate. Here we demonstrate using two-photon calcium imaging and optogenetics in mice that certain functionally distinct subpopulations of ventral/medial orbitofrontal cortex (vmOFC) neurons signal learning rate control. Consistent with learning rate control, trial-by-trial fluctuations in vmOFC activity positively correlate with behavioral updating when the RPE is positive, and negatively correlates with behavioral updating when the RPE is negative. Learning rate is affected by many variables including the salience of a reward. We found that the average reward response of these neurons signals the relative salience of a reward, because it decreases after reward prediction learning or the introduction of another highly salient aversive stimulus. The relative salience signaling in vmOFC is sculpted by medial thalamic inputs. These results support emerging theoretical views that prefrontal cortex encodes and controls learning parameters.

Dimension-selective attention and dimensional salience modulate cortical tracking of acoustic dimensions

Some theories of auditory categorization suggest that auditory dimensions that are strongly diagnostic for particular categories - for instance voice onset time or fundamental frequency in the case of some spoken consonants - attract attention. However, prior cognitive neuroscience research on auditory selective attention has largely focused on attention to simple auditory objects or streams, and so little is known about the neural mechanisms that underpin dimension-selective attention, or how the relative salience of variations along these dimensions might modulate neural signatures of attention. Here we investigate whether dimensional salience and dimension-selective attention modulate the cortical tracking of acoustic dimensions. In two experiments, participants listened to tone sequences varying in pitch and spectral peak frequency; these two dimensions changed at different rates. Inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) and amplitude of the EEG signal at the frequencies tagged to pitch and spectral changes provided a measure of cortical tracking of these dimensions. In Experiment 1, tone sequences varied in the size of the pitch intervals, while the size of spectral peak intervals remained constant. Cortical tracking of pitch changes was greater for sequences with larger compared to smaller pitch intervals, with no difference in cortical tracking of spectral peak changes. In Experiment 2, participants selectively attended to either pitch or spectral peak. Cortical tracking was stronger in response to the attended compared to unattended dimension for both pitch and spectral peak. These findings suggest that attention can enhance the cortical tracking of specific acoustic dimensions rather than simply enhancing tracking of the auditory object as a whole.

Agenda Diversity in Social Media Discourse: A Study of the 2012 Korean General Election

The diversity of agendas in the media plays a critical role in shaping the scope of public discourse. Due to the increasing impact of social media, it is important and necessary to examine if it is circulating a wide range of issue and extending the realm of public discussion. In this paper, we put forward agenda diversity as a core value for evaluation of social media discourse and examine the current diversity status. Our study provides a firm basis for understanding the topics, quantity, diversity, and relative salience of the agendas offered by the social media. We further look into the information diffusion process from the diversity viewpoint, and explore the potential to increase diversity.

Does online chatter matter for consumer behaviour? A priming experiment on organic food

AbstractConsumers are increasingly sharing their opinions on societal issues and products online. We studied the implications of such online word‐of‐mouth for consumer judgement and decision‐making. The case used is organic food, which is the most successful among the currently emerging, sustainability‐differentiated food product categories. We first analysed the online discussion on organic food by conducting a text‐mining study of reader comments (N = 63,379) from the comments section of a major German online news outlet. Topics therein are discussed with differing frequency, thereby indicating the salience of the various issues to online readers and consumers. One organic food topic of high salience (animal welfare) and one of low salience (biodiversity) were selected to investigate the behavioural relevance of salient online topics in a subsequent priming experiment (online survey of German consumers; N = 1,118). In particular, we tested whether the relative online salience of the two topics used as primes influenced the likelihood of choosing organic instead of conventional eggs and milk in a choice experiment and the acceptance of policies supporting organic farming. Although ineffective for the choice of milk, the priming worked as hypothesized regarding the choice of eggs and policy acceptance. Priming the topic with high online salience is more effective at promoting pro‐organic behaviour than priming the topic with low online salience. Priming effects also depended on prime strength, attitude strength and experience with buying organic food. We discuss how insights from text mining of online word‐of‐mouth can be employed to promote sustainable consumption behaviour.

Lessons From the UK's Lockdown: Discourse on Behavioural Science in Times of COVID-19.

In recent years behavioural science has quickly become embedded in national level governance. As the contributions of behavioural science to the UK's COVID-19 response policies in early 2020 became apparent, a debate emerged in the British media about its involvement. This served as a unique opportunity to capture public discourse and representation of behavioural science in a fast-track, high-stake context. We aimed at identifying elements which foster and detract from trust and credibility in emergent scientific contributions to policy making. With this in mind, in Study 1 we use corpus linguistics and network analysis to map the narrative around the key behavioural science actors and concepts which were discussed in the 647 news articles extracted from the 15 most read British newspapers over the 12-week period surrounding the first hard UK lockdown of 2020. We report and discuss (1) the salience of key concepts and actors as the debate unfolded, (2) quantified changes in the polarity of the sentiment expressed toward them and their policy application contexts, and (3) patterns of co-occurrence via network analyses. To establish public discourse surrounding identified themes, in Study 2 we investigate how salience and sentiment of key themes and relations to policy were discussed in original Twitter chatter (N = 2,187). In Study 3, we complement these findings with a qualitative analysis of the subset of news articles which contained the most extreme sentiments (N = 111), providing an in-depth perspective of sentiments and discourse developed around keywords, as either promoting or undermining their credibility in, and trust toward behaviourally informed policy. We discuss our findings in light of the integration of behavioural science in national policy making under emergency constraints.

Labour and left-wing parties’ programmatic orientations: salience, valence and the impact of the Great Recession

ABSTRACT The steady weakening of the relationship between parties and civil society, in particular trade unions, has been the subject of considerable research. The same cannot be said, however, of the programmatic salience assigned by political parties to labour issues. This paper aims to explore how different party families relate to labour through a quantitative and qualitative approach. First, data from the MARPOR/Comparative Manifestos Project is used to compare the relative salience of labour in distinct party families, thus allowing us to analyse trends over time and across countries. Second, we focus on Southern Europe, before and after the crisis, to conduct a qualitative analysis of left-of-centre party positions toward labour. The findings suggest that labour issues are less salient in contemporary party platforms and that the mainstream left depoliticised this dimension of competition over the last decades. The historical links between parties and trade unions, the ideological legacies of left-of-centre parties and electoral pressures are the main factors that explain variations of party positions toward labour.

Attentional capture: An ameliorable side-effect of searching for salient targets

ABSTRACT This commentary highlights that some of the remaining discrepancies in the attentional-capture debate can be resolved by a simple assumption: observers do not use the priority map when this map is useless to solve the task. Rather, whenever search targets are known to be non-salient, observers resort to a previously postulated alternative search strategy for which (distractor) saliency signals are irrelevant. Equipped with this assumption, we trace thus-far unaccounted-for discrepancies between empirical studies on attentional capture back to specific design choices that affect relative target saliency (display density and non-target heterogeneity).

Race, Family Conflict and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors among 9-10-Year-Old American Children.

Family conflict is known to operate as a major risk factor for children’s suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). However, it is unknown whether this effect is similar or different in Black and White children. Objectives: We compared Black and White children for the association between family conflict and STBs in a national sample of 9–10-year-old American children. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. This study included 9918 White or Black children between the ages of 9 and 10 living in married households. The predictor variable was family conflict. Race was the moderator. The outcome variable was STBs, treated as a count variable, reflecting positive STB items that were endorsed. Covariates included ethnicity, sex, age, immigration status, family structure, parental education, and parental employment, and household income. Poisson regression was used for data analysis. Results: Of all participants, 7751 were Whites, and 2167 were Blacks. In the pooled sample and in the absence of interaction terms, high family conflict was associated with higher STBs. A statistically significant association was found between Black race and family conflict, suggesting that the association between family conflict and STBs is stronger in Black than White children. Conclusion: The association between family conflict and STBs is stronger in Black than White children. Black children with family conflict may be at a higher risk of STBs than White children with the same family conflict level. These findings align with the literature on the more significant salience of social relations as determinants of mental health of Black than White people. Reducing family conflict should be regarded a significant element of suicide prevention for Black children in the US.

Representing agents, patients, goals and instruments in causative events: A cross-linguistic investigation of early language and cognition.

Although it is widely assumed that the linguistic description of events is based on a structured representation of event components at the perceptual/conceptual level, little empirical work has tested this assumption directly. Here, we test the connection between language and perception/cognition cross-linguistically, focusing on the relative salience of causative event components in language and cognition. We draw on evidence from preschoolers speaking English or Turkish. In a picture description task, Turkish-speaking 3-5-year-olds mentioned Agents less than their English-speaking peers (Turkish allows subject drop); furthermore, both language groups mentioned Patients more frequently than Goals, and Instruments less frequently than either Patients or Goals. In a change blindness task, both language groups were equally accurate at detecting changes to Agents (despite surface differences in Agent mentions). The remaining components also behaved similarly: both language groups were less accurate in detecting changes to Instruments than either Patients or Goals (even though Turkish-speaking preschoolers were less accurate overall than their English-speaking peers). To our knowledge, this is the first study offering evidence for a strong-even though not strict-homology between linguistic and conceptual event roles in young learners cross-linguistically.