Anonymity and Diversity: A Phenomenology of Self-Formation in Urban Culture

Topoi - In this paper, I show how phenomenological analysis of unreflective dimensions of our experience has implications for our participation in an increasingly urban and multicultural world. I...     

Relationship satisfaction determines the association between Epstein–Barr virus latency and somatic symptoms after the loss of a spouse

The loss of a spouse is associated with a host of negative health outcomes. While bereaved individuals commonly report somatic symptoms, no investigations exist of the association between reactivation of latent Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) and somatic symptoms among this population. Further, how an individual perceives the quality of their lost relationship in retrospect may impact loss outcomes. Among 99 bereaved spouses, elevated EBV antibody titers were associated with somatic symptoms for those who retrospectively reported high or mean levels of relationship satisfaction (RS), but not among those less satisfied. Further, higher RS was associated with greater grief symptoms. This study identifies higher retrospective RS as a possible risk factor for negative physical and mental health outcomes during bereavement.     

IQ and scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE): controlling for effort and education among geriatric inpatients

The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III) were administered to 76 Extended Care Center inpatients of a Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 56 of whom did not carry a diagnosis associated with brain impairment, and 20 of whom had a diagnosis associated with degenerative or cerebrovascular conditions. MMSE and PPVT-III scores, the latter of which estimates verbal IQ, were significantly correlated in both groups, even when controlling for the effects of education. This correlation was attenuated, but remained significant, in the face of varying levels of patient effort. The findings of this study support earlier findings, which also suggest that interpretation of "impaired" performance on the MMSE for those with IQ scores below 90 should be interpreted with caution. Average MMSE scores for Wechsler IQ classifications are provided.     

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

The goal of this study was to explore the ability to discriminate languages using the visual correlates of speech (i.e., speech-reading). Participants were presented with silent video clips of an actor pronouncing two sentences (in Catalan and/or Spanish) and were asked to judge whether the sentences were in the same language or in different languages. Our results established that Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers could discriminate running speech from their two languages on the basis of visual cues alone (Experiment 1). However, we found that this ability was critically restricted by linguistic experience, since Italian and English speakers who were unfamiliar with the test languages could not successfully discriminate the stimuli (Experiment 2). A test of Spanish monolingual speakers revealed that knowledge of only one of the two test languages was sufficient to achieve the discrimination, although at a lower level of accuracy than that seen in bilingual speakers (Experiment 3). Finally, we evaluated the ability to identify the language by speech-reading particularly distinctive words (Experiment 4). The results obtained are in accord with recent proposals arguing that the visual speech signal is rich in informational content, above and beyond what traditional accounts based solely on visemic confusion matrices would predict.     

Dynamical Models of Sentence Processing

We suggest that the theory of dynamical systems provides a revealing general framework for modeling the representations and mechanism underlying syntactic processing. We show how a particular dynamical model, the Visitation Set Gravitation model of Tabor, Juliano, and Tanenhaus (1997), develops syntactic representations and models a set of contingent frequency effects in parsing that are problematic for other models. We also present new simulations showing how the model accounts for semantic effects in parsing, and propose a new account of the distinction between syntactic and semantic incongruity. The results show how symbolic structures useful in parsing arise as emergent properties of connectionist dynamical systems.     

Borderline Personality Disorder in 3-D: Dimensions,Symptoms, and Measurement Challenges

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a pervasive pattern of psychopathology characterized by unstable affect, suicidal behaviors, and identity problems (Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Washington, DC: Author; 2000). BPD is heterogeneous in nature, highly prevalent in clinical settings, and increasingly studied by clinical and social psychologists. This review highlights affective instability, impulsivity, and interpersonal hypersensitivity, the interaction of which we believe accounts for the symptoms of BPD, the BPD criteria most associated with these features, and the interrelationships among these underlying dimensions. We also discuss difficulties in measurement of these dimensions. Real-world assessment methods will assist in the measurement of time-dependent processes and identify causes, covariates, or consequences of these processes to determine how these features manifest themselves in real life.