7,066 research outputs found

    Alʔilbīrī’s Book of the rational conclusions. Introduction, Critical Edition of the Arabic Text and Materials for the History of the Ḫawāṣṣic Genre in Early Andalus

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    [eng] The Book of the rational conclusions, written perhaps somewhen in the 10th c. by a physician from Ilbīrah (Andalus), is a multi-section medical pandect. The author brings together, from a diversity of sources, materials dealing with matters related to drug-handling, natural philosophy, therapeutics, medical applications of the specific properties of things, a regimen, and a dispensatory. This dissertation includes three different parts. First the transmission of the text, its contents, and its possible context are discussed. Then a critical edition of the Arabic text is offered. Last, but certainly not least, the subject of the specific properties is approached from several points of view. The analysis of Section III of the original book leads to an exploration of the early Andalusī assimilation of this epistemic tradition and to the establishment of a well-defined textual family in which our text must be inscribed. On the other hand, the concept itself of ‘specific property’ is often misconstrued and it is usually made synonymous to magic and superstition. Upon closer inspection, however, the alleged irrationality of the knowledge of these properties appears to be largely the result of anachronistic interpretation. As a complement of this particular research and as an illustration of the genre, a sample from an ongoing integral commentary on this section of the book is presented.[cat] El Llibre de les conclusions racionals d’un desconegut metge d’Ilbīrah (l’Àndalus) va ser compilat probablement durant la segona meitat del s. X. Es tracta d’un rudimentari però notablement complet kunnaix (un gènere epistèmic que és definit sovint com a ‘enciclopèdia mèdica’) en què l’autor aplega materials manllevats (sovint de manera literal i no-explícita) de diversos gèneres. El llibre obre amb una secció sobre apoteconomia (una mena de manual d’apotecaris) però se centra després en les diferents branques de la medicina. A continuació d’uns prolegòmens filosòfics l’autor copia, amb mínima adaptació lingüística, un tractat sencer de terapèutica, després un altre sobre les aplicacions mèdiques de les propietats específiques de les coses, una sèrie de fragments relacionats amb la dietètica (un règim en termes tradicionals) i, finalment, una col·lecció de receptes mèdiques. Cadascuna d’aquestes seccions mostren evidents lligams d’intertextualitat que apunten cap a una intensa activitat sintetitzadora de diverses tradicions aliades a la medicina a l’Àndalus califal. El text és, de fet, un magnífic objecte sobre el qual aplicar la metodologia de la crítica textual i de fonts. L’edició crítica del text incorpora la dimensió cronològica dins l’aparat, que esdevé així un element contextualitzador. Quant l’estudi de les fonts, si tot al llarg de la primera part d’aquesta tesi és només secundari, aquesta disciplina pren un protagonisme gairebé absolut en la tercera part, especialment en el capítol dedicat a l’anàlisi individual de cada passatge recollit en la secció sobre les propietats específiques de les coses

    A Spark Of Emotion: The Impact of Electrical Facial Muscle Activation on Emotional State and Affective Processing

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    Facial feedback, which involves the brain receiving information about the activation of facial muscles, has the potential to influence our emotional states and judgments. The extent to which this applies is still a matter of debate, particularly considering a failed replication of a seminal study. One factor contributing to the lack of replication in facial feedback effects may be the imprecise manipulation of facial muscle activity in terms of both degree and timing. To overcome these limitations, this thesis proposes a non-invasive method for inducing precise facial muscle contractions, called facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES). I begin by presenting a systematic literature review that lays the groundwork for standardising the use of fNMES in psychological research, by evaluating its application in existing studies. This review highlights two issues, the lack of use of fNMES in psychology research and the lack of parameter reporting. I provide practical recommendations for researchers interested in implementing fNMES. Subsequently, I conducted an online experiment to investigate participants' willingness to participate in fNMES research. This experiment revealed that concerns over potential burns and involuntary muscle movements are significant deterrents to participation. Understanding these anxieties is critical for participant management and expectation setting. Subsequently, two laboratory studies are presented that investigated the facial FFH using fNMES. The first study showed that feelings of happiness and sadness, and changes in peripheral physiology, can be induced by stimulating corresponding facial muscles with 5–seconds of fNMES. The second experiment showed that fNMES-induced smiling alters the perception of ambiguous facial emotions, creating a bias towards happiness, and alters neural correlates of face processing, as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs). In summary, the thesis presents promising results for testing the facial feedback hypothesis with fNMES and provides practical guidelines and recommendations for researchers interested in using fNMES for psychological research

    Speech-based automatic depression detection via biomarkers identification and artificial intelligence approaches

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    Depression has become one of the most prevalent mental health issues, affecting more than 300 million people all over the world. However, due to factors such as limited medical resources and accessibility to health care, there are still a large number of patients undiagnosed. In addition, the traditional approaches to depression diagnosis have limitations because they are usually time-consuming, and depend on clinical experience that varies across different clinicians. From this perspective, the use of automatic depression detection can make the diagnosis process much faster and more accessible. In this thesis, we present the possibility of using speech for automatic depression detection. This is based on the findings in neuroscience that depressed patients have abnormal cognition mechanisms thus leading to the speech differs from that of healthy people. Therefore, in this thesis, we show two ways of benefiting from automatic depression detection, i.e., identifying speech markers of depression and constructing novel deep learning models to improve detection accuracy. The identification of speech markers tries to capture measurable depression traces left in speech. From this perspective, speech markers such as speech duration, pauses and correlation matrices are proposed. Speech duration and pauses take speech fluency into account, while correlation matrices represent the relationship between acoustic features and aim at capturing psychomotor retardation in depressed patients. Experimental results demonstrate that these proposed markers are effective at improving the performance in recognizing depressed speakers. In addition, such markers show statistically significant differences between depressed patients and non-depressed individuals, which explains the possibility of using these markers for depression detection and further confirms that depression leaves detectable traces in speech. In addition to the above, we propose an attention mechanism, Multi-local Attention (MLA), to emphasize depression-relevant information locally. Then we analyse the effectiveness of MLA on performance and efficiency. According to the experimental results, such a model can significantly improve performance and confidence in the detection while reducing the time required for recognition. Furthermore, we propose Cross-Data Multilevel Attention (CDMA) to emphasize different types of depression-relevant information, i.e., specific to each type of speech and common to both, by using multiple attention mechanisms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective to integrate different types of depression-relevant information in speech, improving the performance significantly for depression detection

    Linking language and emotion: how emotion is understood in language comprehension, production and prediction using psycholinguistic methods

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    Emotions are an integral part of why and how we use language in everyday life. We communicate our concerns, express our woes, and share our joy through the use of non-verbal and verbal language. Yet there is a limited understanding of when and how emotional language is processed differently to neutral language, or of how emotional information facilitates or inhibits language processing. Indeed, various efforts have been made to bring back emotions into the discipline of psycholinguistics in the last decade. This can be seen in many interdisciplinary models focusing on the role played by emotion in each aspect of linguistic experience. In this thesis, I answer this call and pursue questions that remain unanswered in psycholinguistics regarding its interaction with emotion. The general trend that I am using to bring emotion into psycholinguistic research is straightforward. Where applicable and relevant, I use well-established tasks or paradigms to investigate the effects of emotional content in language processing. Hence, I focused on three main areas of language processing: comprehension, production and prediction. The first experimental chapter includes a series of experiments utilising the Modality Switching Paradigm to investigate whether sentences describing emotional states are processed differently from sentences describing cognitive states. No switching effects were found consistently in my 3 experiments. My results suggest that these distinct classes of interoceptive concepts, such as ‘thinking’ or ‘being happy’, are not processed differently from each other, suggesting that people do not switch attention between different interoceptive systems when comprehending emotional or cognitive sentences. I discuss the implications for grounded cognition theory in the embodiment literature. In my second experimental chapter, I used the Cumulative Semantic Interference Paradigm to investigate these two questions: (1) whether emotion concepts interfere with one another when repeatedly retrieved (emotion label objects), and (2) whether similar interference occurs for concrete objects that share similar valence association (emotion-laden objects). This could indicate that people use information such as valence and arousal to group objects in semantic memory. I found that interference occurs when people retrieve direct emotion labels repeatedly (e.g., “happy” and “sad”) but not when they retrieve the names of concrete objects that have similar emotion connotations (e.g., “puppy” and “rainbow”). I discuss my findings in terms of the different types of information that support representation of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In my final experimental chapter, I used the Visual World Paradigm to investigate whether the emotional state of an agent is used to inform predictions during sentence processing. I found that people do use the description of emotional state of an agent (e.g., “The boy is happy”) to predict the cause of that affective state during sentence processing (e.g., “because he was given an ice-cream”). A key result here is that people were more likely to fixate on the emotionally congruent objects (e.g., ice-cream) compared to incongruent objects (e.g., broccoli). This suggests that people rapidly and automatically inform predictions about upcoming sentence information based on the emotional state of the agent. I discuss our findings as a novel contribution to the Visual World literature. I conducted a diverse set of experiments using a range of established psycholinguistic methods to investigate the roles of emotional information in language processing. I found clear results in the eye-tracking study but inconsistent effects in both switching and interference studies. I interpret these mixed findings in the following way: emotional content does not always have effects in language processing and that effect are most likely in tasks that explicitly require participants to simulate emotion states in some way. Regardless, not only was I successful in finding some novel results by extending previous tasks, but I was also able to show that this is an avenue that can be explored more to advance the affective psycholinguistic field

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement

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    Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    Relatedly: Scaffolding Literature Reviews with Existing Related Work Sections

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    Scholars who want to research a scientific topic must take time to read, extract meaning, and identify connections across many papers. As scientific literature grows, this becomes increasingly challenging. Meanwhile, authors summarize prior research in papers' related work sections, though this is scoped to support a single paper. A formative study found that while reading multiple related work paragraphs helps overview a topic, it is hard to navigate overlapping and diverging references and research foci. In this work, we design a system, Relatedly, that scaffolds exploring and reading multiple related work paragraphs on a topic, with features including dynamic re-ranking and highlighting to spotlight unexplored dissimilar information, auto-generated descriptive paragraph headings, and low-lighting of redundant information. From a within-subjects user study (n=15), we found that scholars generate more coherent, insightful, and comprehensive topic outlines using Relatedly compared to a baseline paper list

    Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea

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    ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (β2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; β3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (β2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; β3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (β2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; β3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK
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