Unitary Phenomenon Research Articles

It’s alignment all the way down, but not all the way up: Speakers align on some features but not others within a dialogue

During conversation, speakers modulate characteristics of their production to match their interlocutors’ characteristics. This behavior is known as alignment. Speakers align at many linguistic levels, including the syntactic, lexical, and phonetic levels. As a result, alignment is often treated as a unitary phenomenon, in which evidence of alignment on one feature is cast as alignment of the entire linguistic level. This experiment investigates whether alignment can occur at some levels but not others, and on some features but not others, within a given dialogue. Participants interacted with two experimenters with highly contrasting acoustic-phonetic and syntactic profiles. The experimenters each described sets of pictures using a consistent acoustic-phonetic and syntactic profile; the participants then described new pictures to each experimenter individually. Alignment was measured as the degree to which subjects matched their current listener’s speech (vs. their non-listener’s) on each of several individual acoustic-phonetic and syntactic features. Additionally, a holistic measure of phonetic alignment was assessed using 323 acoustic-phonetic features analyzed jointly in a machine learning classifier. Although participants did not align on several individual spectral-phonetic or syntactic features, they did align on individual temporal-phonetic features and as measured by the holistic acoustic-phonetic profile. Thus, alignment can simultaneously occur at some levels but not others within a given dialogue, and is not a single phenomenon but rather a constellation of loosely-related effects. These findings suggest that the mechanism underlying alignment is not a primitive, automatic priming mechanism but rather guided by communicative or social factors.

Danish cannabis policy revisited: Multiple framings of cannabis use in policy discourse.

Aim:This article traces recent developments in Danish cannabis policy, by exploring how “cannabis use” is problematised and governed within different co-existing policy areas.Background:Recently, many countries have changed their cannabis policy by introducing medical cannabis and/or by moving toward legalisation or decriminalisation. Researchers have thus argued that traditional notions of cannabis as a singular and coherent object, are being replaced by perspectives that highlight the multiple ontological character of cannabis. At the same time, there is growing recognition that drug policy is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather composed by multiple “policy areas”, each defined by particular notions of what constitutes the relevant policy “problem”.Design:We draw on existing research, government reports, policy papers and media accounts of policy and policing developments.Results:We demonstrate how Danish cannabis policy is composed of different co-existing framings of cannabis use; as respectively a social problem, a problem of deviance, an organised crime problem, a health- and risk problem and as a medical problem.Conclusion:While the international trend seems to be that law-and-order approaches are increasingly being replaced by more liberal approaches, Denmark, on an overall level, seems to be moving in the opposite direction: Away from a lenient decriminalisation policy and towards more repressive approaches. We conclude that the prominence of discursive framings of cannabis use as a “problem of deviance” and as “a driver of organised crime”, has been key to this process.

Recollection and familiarity in schizophrenia:An ERP investigation using face recognition exclusion tasks

Recent studies suggest that the recollection deficit observed in schizophrenia may not be a unitary phenomenon but could depend on the information to retrieve.Here we investigated whether the nature of the perceptual information affects recollection and familiarity in schizophrenia. ERP old/new effects were explored in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls during unfamiliar face exclusion tasks, with either intrinsic (expression) or extrinsic (background) information either changing or remaining the same between study and test. Schizophrenia patients rejected old faces as distractors in a greater extent than healthy controls. The FN400 old/new effect (300-500ms) was found in both groups. It was sensitive to facial expression change for healthy controls but not schizophrenia patients. In addition, the parietal old/new effect was lower for correctly excluded faces for patients, but not for controls. This points to the conclusion that schizophrenia patients discriminate between target and non-target faces on the basis of the memory strength signal corresponding to the study-test mismatch rather than the recollection of the critical information, as observed in healthy controls. This functioning can be useful when study-test perceptual mismatch must be detected but, in return, can lead to the over-exclusion of old stimuli.

Characteristics of auditory hallucinations in Indian patients with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder.

Background:Auditory verbal hallucinations are not a unitary phenomenon and can be further differentiated into certain clinical characteristics, viz., frequency, intensity, control, tone, distractibility, distress, and clarity. These clinical characteristics manifest in varying degrees in different psychiatric disorders.Aim:To study the characteristics of auditory hallucinations in Indian patients with schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder.Materials and Methods:By purposive sampling, 140 patients of schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder each were included in the study. Subjects were assessed cross-sectionally using sociodemographic proforma and characteristics of auditory hallucination scale.Results:Characteristics of auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia patients were significantly different from those of bipolar affective disorder patients in the domains of frequency, intensity, tone, self-control, clarity, distractibility, and distress.Conclusion:Characteristics of auditory hallucinations differ in all domains between schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder.

The functional significance of the P600: Some linguistic P600's do localize to language areas.

A recent paper in the journal Neuroreport suggested that, upon source localization, the semantic P600 localizes to executive function areas, that is, outside language. But is this true for all types of linguistic P600? We report a cross-sectional source localization study of a classical (agreement) syntactic paradigm.The results show a clear localization to the temporal lobe, in classical language areas.The P600 is probably not a unitary phenomenon in term of source localization, and the question whether it localizes within or outside the language system depends on the type of P600.

White matter damage and altered connectivity between primary motor cortices in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

White matter damage and altered connectivity between primary motor cortices in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Depression and prostate cancer: implications for urologists and oncologists.

Many patients with prostate cancer experience severe levels of depression, which can negatively affect their treatment and disease course. Some prostate cancer treatments can increase the severity of a patient's depression, for example, by increasing anhedonia and erectile dysfunction. Depression is often thought of as a unitary phenomenon, but multiple subtypes can be distinguished. This variety of manifestations challenges the successful application of universal antidepressant treatment options and argues for a multi-symptom assessment process that considers a patient's disease burden and their particular form of depression. Inclusion of screening and detailed diagnosis of depression can be argued to be part of good practice, and clinicians are urged to consider when and how this might be accomplished within their urological practice.

Executive Dysfunction and Reduced Self-Awareness in Patients With Neurological Disorders. A Mini-Review.

Awareness of deficits in patients with neurological disorders may be described as a theoretical unitary phenomenon, which has been analysed reaching interesting results in the last decades. Awareness of deficits manifests itself in a continuum ranging from full awareness to total absence. In line with a neurocognitive approach, a reduction in self-awareness could be explained considering executive dysfunction associated with prefrontal cortex anatomo-functional changes. Our mini-review will focus on reduced self-awareness in neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, behavioural Frontotemporal Dementia and Acquired Brain Injuries. Results achieved thanks to an explanatory investigative approach combined with a theoretical reference model will be presented. Data suggest the key role of executive functions in supporting adequate self-awareness towards patients’ cognitive-behavioural profile and instrumental activity autonomy. The Cognitive Awareness Model seems to be one of the best theoretical model to better approach this phenomenon.

Parents’ encounters with ‘the sexualisation of childhood’: paying attention differently?

ABSTRACT This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But we use the concept of duration to analyse various, differing ways images childhood endure in parents’ experience. This leads us to argue parents’ relations to images of childhood complicate, rather than solely reproduce, discursive understandings of sexualisation as a unitary phenomenon threatening ‘normal’ child development. We contend that further mapping of the ways images of childhood endure in parents’ experience may help refuse their impossible positioning as guardians of child innocence, and generate more complex forms of attention to sexualisation, which challenge gendered and heteronormative societal assumptions about children’s development.

Measuring impulsivity in Parkinson’s disease: a correlational and structural neuroimaging study using different tests

Impulsivity is an aspect of personality and a major component of multiple neuropsychiatric conditions. In Parkinson's disease, it has been associated with the expression of impulse control disorders, a highly prevalent non-motor complication. Even though multiple tests of impulsivity have been used in this context, the impact of test choice has not been addressed. The aim was to evaluate whether different impulsivity measures in Parkinson's disease share substantial inter-scale and anatomical correlations or rather mirror different underlying phenomena. In a consecutive sample of 89 Parkinson's disease patients without impulse control disorders, four common tests were evaluated assessing different aspects of impulsivity: impulsiveness trait, decisions under implicit risk with and without losses, and delay discounting. Correlations among test scores were analysed and each score was used as a regressor in a set of grey matter volume (GMV) voxel-based morphometry analyses to explore their brain structural correlates. No significant correlations were found between the different impulsivity tests. Furthermore, their structural brain correlates were divergent. Impulsiveness trait appeared to be associated with lower GMV in dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortices, implicit risk (with losses) with higher GMV in the left nucleus accumbens and lower left insular GMV, implicit risk (without losses) with higher GMV in the left lingual gyrus and lower GMV in the gyri recti and delay discounting with higher GMV in the left nucleus accumbens. In Parkinson's disease, different impulsivity measures reflect very dissimilar behavioural and brain structural correlates. Our results suggest that parkinsonian impulsivity is not a unitary phenomenon but rather a heterogeneous entity.

Female Multiple Orgasm: An Exploratory Internet-Based Survey

ABSTRACT Women’s multiorgasmic capacity has long been mentioned in the human sexuality literature. However, due in part to the conceptual vagueness surrounding this phenomenon, few empirical studies have focused on this topic, and our scientific knowledge is currently limited. This exploratory research is mainly aimed at providing a much-needed assessment of the profiles of women reporting multiorgasmic experiences. For this study, 419 sexually diverse women ages 18 through 69 who identified as multiorgasmic completed an online survey assessing variables pertaining to sociodemographic background, context and characteristics of a recent/typical multiorgasmic experience, relationships between multiple orgasm and sexual/nonsexual aspects of life, and sexual and orgasmic history. Data reduction analyses using principal component analysis pointed out that 15 variables of interest were distributed across six components, accounting for a large proportion of the sample’s variance. A k-means cluster analysis further revealed that four distinct groups of women could be parsed out. These four groups could be differentiated by three sets of variables—sexual motivation, sexual history, and multiple orgasm characteristics—suggesting that female multiple orgasm is not a unitary phenomenon. This research provides to date the most comprehensive picture of female multiple orgasm and helps refine our conceptual understanding.

Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity ed. by Nancy K. Stalker

Reviewed by: Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity ed. by Nancy K. Stalker Samuel Hideo Yamashita (bio) Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity. Edited by Nancy K. Stalker. Oxford University Press, New York, 2018. xviii, 349 pages. $105.00, cloth; $31.95, paper. Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity is an important contribution to the English-language scholarship on Japanese food. As editor Nancy Stalker explains in her acknowledgments, she and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin organized a conference in 2014 to commemorate UNESCO's addition of the term washoku to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, with funding from the Japan Foundation, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, and the Mitsubishi Caterpillar Heavy Industries Endowment. Devouring Japan consists of some of the essays presented at the conference. Because UNESCO's decision inspired this volume, I will start with the six chapters that treat this topic. Theodore Bestor's "Washoku Far and Near" is a good introduction to washoku that highlights both its domestic and its international dimensions. After rehearsing the history of the word washoku, he points out that the UNESCO application reflects the Japanese government's concern about the growing popularity of Japanese cuisine internationally and its position in the contemporary Japanese diet. The application was produced by a team of officials, chefs, representatives of food manufacturing companies, food critics, and historians, and its success was evidence, Bestor argues, of a new Japanese soft power and an example of "gastrodiplomacy." Nancy Stalker's contribution presents Kitano Rosanjin as a pioneering advocate of a Japanese "culinary nationalism." She gives us a biographical sketch of Rosanjin as a potter, connoisseur of Japanese objets d'art, restaurateur, and chef, but given the paucity of biographies of Japanese chefs in English, I wish her contribution had been longer. [End Page 271] Greg de St. Maurice's "Savoring the Kyoto Brand" is a revealing account of what the Kyoto prefectural and municipal authorities have done over the years to promote their brand. Although the "Kyoto brand" has premodern roots and was enabled by the local soil, water, and culture, de St. Maurice contends that it also was the result of the purposeful decisions of local officials, the food industry, and farmers. He catalogs some of what sustains the Kyoto culinary brand: the attention given to bamboo fields, the craftsmanship of kaiseki cuisine, "communities of practice," local government support, discerning consumers, and tourism. For de St. Maurice, washoku is clearly not a given. Yoshimi Osawa would agree. In "We Can Taste but Others Cannot," Osawa observes that "umami in the context of washoku as UNESCO world heritage . . . has been used as a gustatory instrument to embody the image of Japanese food for promotional purposes . . . [and] is thus a key element of Japan's culinary brand that is becoming increasingly prominent in Japanese representations of its cuisine abroad" (p. 119). He relates the history of umami as a scientific phenomenon (discovered in 1908) and now as a metaphor for Japanese food overseas. Osawa adds that many Japanese nonetheless claim that umami is evidence of their reputed "exquisite taste" and a phenomenon that only they can understand. Osawa is hinting at the mythical nature of washoku. Ayumi Takenaka, in "Nikkei Cuisine," examines washoku in an immigrant community in Peru. Her fieldwork revealed that after being called first "Okinawan" and then "Japanese," Japanese cuisine there became "Nikkei cuisine." She cites the reasons for these changes, including the Peruvian government's promotion of a fish-based diet, Japan's emergence as a global power, the Peruvian Japanese community's rising fortunes, both a "gastronomic boom" and a "sushi boom" in Peru, and recognition of Nikkei cuisine's contributions to the Peruvian national cuisine. To Takenaka, Nikkei cuisine is not a unitary phenomenon because it is defined differently by chefs, elite diners, and Peruvian Japanese consumers and is influenced by both indigenous and external developments, which challenge the idea of a single, unchanging, Japanese cuisine. Eric Rath's afterword offers a carefully historicized view of washoku. First, he notes that the word was initially used in the late 1800s to distinguish Japanese from Chinese and...

How to distinguish memory representations? A historical and critical journey

A memória não é um fenômeno unitário. Mesmo entre o grupo de representações de memória individuais de longo prazo (conhecidas na literatura como memória declarativa), parece haver uma distinção entre dois tipos de memória: memória de eventos experimentados pessoalmente (memória episódica) e memória de fatos ou conhecimentos sobre o mundo (memória semântica). Embora essa distinção pareça muito intuitiva, não é tão claro em qual característica ou conjunto de características inter-relacionadas reside a diferença. Neste artigo, apresento os diferentes critérios propostos na literatura filosófica e científica para dar conta dessa distinção: (1) o veículo de representação; (2) a gramática do verbo “lembrar”; (3) a causa da memória; (4) o conteúdo da memória; e (5) a fenomenologia das representações da memória. Embora alguns critérios pareçam mais plausíveis que outros, mostro que todos são problemáticos e nenhum deles realmente cumpre seu objetivo. Em seguida, descrevo brevemente um critério diferente, o critério afetivo, que parece uma linha de pesquisa promissora para tentar entender os fundamentos dessa distinção.

Exceptionality and derived environment effects: a comparison of Korean and Turkish

Morphologically derived environment effects (MDEEs) are well-known examples where phonotactic patterns in the lexicon mismatch with what is allowed at morphological boundaries – alternations. Analyses of MDEEs usually assume that the alternation is morphologically general, and that the sequences ‘repaired’ across morpheme boundaries are phonotactically well-formed in the lexicon. This paper examines the phonotactic patterns in the lexicon of two languages with MDEEs: Korean palatalisation and Turkish velar deletion. I show that Korean heteromorphemic sequences that undergo palatalisation are underattested in the lexicon. A computational learner learns a markedness constraint that drives palatalisation, suggesting a pattern of exceptional non-undergoing. This contrasts with Turkish, where the relevant constraint motivating velar deletion at the morpheme boundary is unavailable from phonotactic learning, and where the alternation is an example of exceptional triggering. These results indicate that MDEEs are not a unitary phenomenon, highlighting the need to examine these patterns in closer quantitative detail.

A micro-perspective on Verb-second in Romance and Germanic

AbstractThe Verb-second (V2) phenomenon is one of the central issues of modern linguistic theory. This volume examines V2 from a micro-perspective, comparing various languages and periods. At the heart of the work presented here lies the clear assumption that Verb-second is by no means a unitary phenomenon, but rather a heterogenous and rich system that affects languages in various ways.

Lineal kinship organization in cross-specific perspective

I draw on insights from anthropology to outline a framework for the study of kinship systems that applies across animal species with biparental sexual reproduction. In particular, I define lineal kinship organization as a social system that emphasizes interactions among lineally related kin-that is, individuals related through females only, if the emphasis is towards matrilineal kin, and individuals related through males only, if the emphasis is towards patrilineal kin. In a given population, the emphasis may be expressed in one or more social domains, corresponding to pathways for the transmission of different resources across generations (e.g. the allocation of food, the transfer of access to the natal territory or household). A lineal bias in any domain can be viewed as a bias in investment towards a particular set of kin-specifically, towards the offspring of daughters if the bias is matrilineal, and towards the offspring of sons if the bias is patrilineal. Effectively, investment is restricted to the offspring of the females in the population in one case, and to the offspring of the males in the other. This is distinct from a bias in investment towards daughters and towards sons, respectively. Overall, I propose a shift in focus-from viewing matrilineal and patrilineal kinship as unitary phenomena, to consideration of the different aspects of the social system featuring a bias towards lineally related kin. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'.

Sensory and decisional components of endogenous attention are dissociable.

Endogenous cueing of attention enhances sensory processing of the attended stimulus (perceptual sensitivity) and prioritizes information from the attended location for guiding behavioral decisions (spatial choice bias). Here, we test whether sensitivity and bias effects of endogenous spatial attention are under the control of common or distinct mechanisms. Human observers performed a multialternative visuospatial attention task with probabilistic spatial cues. Observers’ behavioral choices were analyzed with a recently developed multidimensional signal detection model (the m-ADC model). The model effectively decoupled the effects of spatial cueing on sensitivity from those on spatial bias and revealed striking dissociations between them. Sensitivity was highest at the cued location and not significantly different among uncued locations, suggesting a spotlight-like allocation of sensory resources at the cued location. On the other hand, bias varied systematically with cue validity, suggesting a graded allocation of decisional priority across locations. Cueing-induced modulations of sensitivity and bias were uncorrelated within and across subjects. Bias, but not sensitivity, correlated with key metrics of prioritized decision-making, including reaction times and decision optimality indices. In addition, we developed a novel metric, differential risk curvature, for distinguishing bias effects of attention from those of signal expectation. Differential risk curvature correlated selectively with m-ADC model estimates of bias but not with estimates of sensitivity. Our results reveal dissociable effects of endogenous attention on perceptual sensitivity and choice bias in a multialternative choice task and motivate the search for the distinct neural correlates of each.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Attention is often studied as a unitary phenomenon. Yet, attention can both enhance the perception of important stimuli (sensitivity) and prioritize such stimuli for decision-making (bias). Employing a multialternative spatial attention task with probabilistic cueing, we show that attention affects sensitivity and bias through dissociable mechanisms. Specifically, the effects on sensitivity alone match the notion of an attentional “spotlight.” Our behavioral model enables quantifying component processes of attention, and identifying their respective neural correlates.

Tra metafisica e fisiologia. Il corpo quale fenomeno unitario in Schopenhauer, Cabanis e Bichat

The following essay aims to analyse one aspect of schopenhauerean interpretation of body: the idea of Leib such as unitary phenomenon, and not as term of a dualism that counterposes body to soul. According to Schopenhauer, human body, although its polysemy, is ascribable to an underlying unity, the objectivation of the will. The will is thought as passion too, interconnected with Leib , that reflects its movements. Besides, the body considered as organism and as composition of affections and thoughts is conceived as a unity of parts which relate and influence mutually. According to Schopenhauer, this interpretation is proved and shared, from a physiological point of view, by Cabanis and Bichat, in terms of belonging between physique and moral on the one hand, and in terms of interconnection between vie organique and vie animale on the other hand. The essay aims to describe this unitary interpretation and intends to illustrate to what extent the different perspectives agree.

Self‐referenced interpersonal similarity phenomena: Theoretical specification and assessment at the individual, dyadic and group levels

AbstractA basic interpersonal task is assessing if another is similar to oneself, and is even observed among prelinguistic infants. In 450 highly acquainted dyads (150 from family, friend, co‐worker groups), participants judged others' similarity to themselves, and predicted others' similarity ratings of them. Assumed reciprocity and reciprocity of similarity judgments were observed; the former was much stronger than the latter. Specific others were judged as uniquely similar; in families these judgments were reciprocated. People inaccurately predicted others', and specific others', similarity judgments. Common members of these groups (key person) judged others as similar to themselves, and predicted others' reciprocated similarity judgments, although they did not. Social relations modeling showed that interpersonal similarity assessments in different groups are multiple phenomena at multiple levels of analysis and should not be treated as a single, unitary phenomenon.

Dropouts from a university counselling service: a quantitative and qualitative study

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to examine the characteristics of students who withdrew from a university counselling service in northern Italy. Differences found in the socio-demographic characteristics of counselling completers and dropouts and in the scores obtained in questionnaires administered at the outset were analysed. Furthermore, in order to identify reasons for dropping out, a qualitative approach was also used. The results suggest that premature termination is not a unitary phenomenon and that dropouts are a heterogeneous group. It is important not to always consider dropouts as a negative outcome of university counselling services. Additional research on dropouts is needed to help university counselling services to serve students more effectively.