Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.     

Discriminating emotions from appraisal-relevant situational information: Baseline data for structural models of cognitive appraisals

Abstract

Cognitive emotion theorists assume that the quality of emotions is determined by the appraisal of the eliciting states of affairs. Accordingly, a central criterion for the evaluation of structural models of cognitive appraisal is their capacity to discriminate between emotions on the basis of the proposed appraisal dimensions. It is suggested that a good model should approximate subjects' “natural” ability to distinguish emotions on the basis of appraisal-relevant situational information. Corresponding data for 23 common emotions, which can serve as a baseline for the evaluation of cognitive appraisal theories, are reported, and various factors that may have deflated the discrimination rates obtained so far in empirical studies are discussed.     

Cognitive-behavioral treatment for social phobia in Parkinson's disease: A single-case study

Individuals with Parkinson's disease often exhibit symptoms of social anxiety. However, they rarely meet criteria for social phobia due to the medical exclusion criteria of DSM-IV. The present study reports the case of a 60-year-old male with Parkinson's disease who also met criteria for social phobia. After receiving 12 weekly cognitive-behavioral group sessions for social phobia, clinician ratings and self-report measures at post-treatment and 6-month follow-up showed a significant short-term and long-term reduction of his social anxiety. These findings suggest that cognitive-behavior therapy may be an effective treatment for social anxiety, even if these symptoms are related to Parkinson's disease.