Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information. Using automated and semi‐automated techniques, we extracted and analyzed, from the videos of 30 speakers, measures capturing the dynamics of their body movement, their slide change rate, and various aspects of their speech (speech rate, articulation rate, fundamental frequency, and intensity). There were consistent but statistically subtle patterns in the use of speech rate, articulation rate, intensity, and body motion across the presentation. Principal component analysis also revealed patterns of system‐like covariation among modalities. These findings, although tentative, do suggest that the cognitive system is integrating body, slides, and speech in a coordinated manner during natural language use. Further research is needed to clarify the specific coordination patterns that occur between the different modalities.     

Long-term memory for traumatic events: experiences and emotional reactions during the 2000 flood in Italy

The authors investigated how people remember real-life traumatic events. Adult residents (N = 145) of an Italian community that was flooded in fall of 2000 completed a questionnaire 3 years after the flood. Respondents briefly recounted their personal experiences with the flood and answered questions about emotional reactions to the flood, appraisal processes, and disaster exposure. Results showed that participants tended to recall experiences that occurred during the most critical phases of the disaster. The emotions most strongly experienced by respondents-sadness, fear, and surprise-were associated with specific appraisals. Content and amount of memories about flood experiences did not significantly vary as a function of flood exposure. Moreover, there was no significant relationship between memory quantity and emotional intensity. The authors discuss findings in the context of literature on traumatic memory and emotion.     

Happiness Components and their Attainment in Old Age: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Between Italy and Cuba

This study investigates the subjective representation of the components of happiness and their attainment in older adults from two countries with different economic well-being and cultural orientations: Italy and Cuba. Two hundred and nine Italians and 186 Cubans completed a questionnaire. Respondents were asked to write down at least five components that made them feel happy. A measure of overall happiness was also obtained by asking the subjects to rate to what extent they had attained each component in their life and calculating their mean. The results showed that there was agreement amongst the participants over their choice of components used to represent happiness; however, there were cross-cultural differences regarding the frequency of citation and importance of these components. The fact of living in Italy or Cuba was not a predictor of overall happiness, despite the difference in national income. This is in line with previous research highlighting how subjective well-being does not depend wholly on economic well-being.     

A Coalgebraic View of Heyting Duality

We give a coalgebraic view of the restricted Priestley duality between Heyting algebras and Heyting spaces. More precisely, we show that the category of Heyting spaces is isomorphic to a full subcategory of the category of all -coalgebras, based on Boolean spaces, where is the functor which maps a Boolean space to its hyperspace of nonempty closed subsets. As an appendix, we include a proof of the characterization of Heyting spaces and the morphisms between them.     

Parental attitudes, attachment styles, social networks, and psychological processes in autism spectrum disorders: a cross-cultural perspective

In this study the authors used a cross-cultural approach to examine parental attitudes, attachment styles, social networks, and some of the psychological processes involved in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Fifty-two children (aged 4-11 years) took part in the study: 30 Italians (15 with ASD and 15 controls) and 22 Cubans (11 with ASD and 11 controls). Findings indicated significant differences between the two cultural groups in terms of the structure of the children's social network and parental attitudes toward their children. However, the mother-child attachment relationship and cognitive and emotional functioning of the study participants were independent of culture.     

Egocentric updating of remote locations

The study examined whether people update remote spatial locations in unfamiliar environments during physical movement. Participants learned a layout of objects from one perspective and carried out perspective-taking trials after physically rotating to a new perspective in either the same room as learning or in an adjacent room. Prior to rotation in the adjacent room participants were instructed to visualize the objects as being around them. Responses to perspective-taking trials involved either pointing or verbal labeling. In both testing environments, participants pointed more efficiently from imagined perspectives aligned with either the initial learning perspective or their current facing orientation than from a novel imagined perspective; this indicates that they had updated the encoded spatial relations during the physical rotation and treated remote objects as immediate. Differences in performance among perspectives were less pronounced for verbal labeling in both environments, suggesting that this response mode is more flexibly used from imagined perspectives.