L1 listeners' evaluations of LX speech: The role of listener expectations and personality traits

LX speech tends to receive less favorable judgments, which can be attributed to its non-standard linguistic properties (e.g., foreign accents, grammatical errors). However, the evaluations of LX speech could be affected by listeners’ expectations and their individual differences. This study extends research on the role of listeners’ expectations (cued by speech accent) and personality traits (Big Five), by examining the degree to which and how accent, grammaticality and listener personality interact to determine L1 listeners’ evaluations of LX speech. Sixty L1 English speakers (30 female) rated the acceptability of 40 English speech stimuli in a British or Polish accent; half of the stimuli were filled with English article errors. The listeners’ personality traits were self-reported via a short questionnaire of the Big Five factors. The significant interaction of accent, grammaticality and listener personality suggests that the occurrence of grammatical errors is less penalized in foreign-accented speech (vs. native-accented speech), unless the L1 listeners are highly conscientious or highly extraverted. The theoretical (expectation mismatch effect, Interpersonal Circumplex model), methodological (considering non-linear models and the moderation of contextual factors for personality effects) and potential practical implications (awareness training of personality effects) of the results are discussed

Kernel structure of the combined English, Dutch, and Polish personality type-nouns, with a critical test against a type-noun based structure in Swahili

We compared three trait-structures based on type-nouns, to find their common kernel structure. We used ratings from 607 participants on 372 English type-nouns, 800 participants on 571 Dutch type-nouns, and 1,325 participants on 454 Polish typenouns. PCA based factor structures were compared using congruence coefficients. SCA was applied on a joint matrix of type-nouns with ratings from a total of 2,737 participants on 331 type-nouns shared by all three languages. The resulting structure reflected versions of the Big Five, yet narrowed to their oratory role. Finally, the results were compared with a type-nouns based structure in Swahili.</p

Kirurško liječenje recidivirajućeg metastatskog karcinoma doštitne žlijezde

We present the case of a 48-year-old male patient who underwent surgery for a recurrent metastatic parathyroid gland carcinoma in the patient’s right paratracheal space of the neck. The patient had undergone surgery for lower right parathyroid gland carcinoma 28 months earlier. Results: The metastases were resected en bloc with an ipsilateral central neck dissection and with the removal of the enlarged lower left parathyroid gland. After exploration of the remnant parathyroid glands we noticed that lower left parathyroid gland was macroscopically enlarged so we decided to remove it to prevent possible hypercalcemia in future and to also prevent possible recurrence of cancer or development of a new primary, considering the identical embryological origin of the lower parathyroid glands and possibility of synchronous, multiple tumors, which generally follow the same embryological origin if they occur. The patient was also treated with radiation therapy after the surgery. Conclusion: With the present surgical approach to recurrent metastatic parathyroid gland carcinoma, we aimed to prevent the recurrence of cancer or development of new primary and prevent or delay hypercalcemia in the future with all severe adverse metabolic states associated with high serum calcium levels.Prikaz slučaja 48 godišnjeg muškog bolesnika koji je operiran zbog recidvirajućeg metastatskog karcinoma doštitne žlijezde u paratrahealnom prostoru vrata desno. 28 mjeseci prije bolesnik je operiran poradi karcinoma donje desne doštitne žlijezde. Rezultati: Metastaze su odstranjene zajedno s ipsilateralnom centralnom disekcijom desne strane vrata kao i povećana donja lijeva doštitna žlijezda. Naime, nakon eksploracije preostalih doštitnih žlijezda, primjetili smo da je donja lijeva doštitna žlijezda makroskopski povećana, pa smo je odlučili odstraniti zbog te činjenice te da preveniramo razvoj moguće hiperkalcemije u budućnosti, a također i da preveniramo mogući recidiv karcinoma ili razvoj novog primarnog karcinoma uzimajući u obzir istu embriološku osnovu nastanka donjih doštitnih žlijezda i mogućnost razvoja istodobnih, sinhronih karcinoma doštitnih žlijezda koji, ukoliko se pojave, uglavnom prate istu embriološku osnovu. Bolesnik je liječen i radioterapijom nakon operacije. Zaključak: Prikazanim kirurškim pristupom liječenju recidivirajućeg metastatskog karcinoma doštitne žlijezde cilj nam je bio da spriječimo ponovni recidiv karcinoma ili nastanak novog primarnog karcinoma i da spriječimo ili odgodimo razvoj moguće hiperkalcemije u budućnosti sa svim teškim štetnim metaboličkim stanjima povezanima s visokim razinama kalcija u serumu

Pristup liječenju tumorskog tromba folikularnog karcinoma štitnjače u unutarnjoj jugularnoj i brahiocefaličnoj veni

Thyroid gland carcinoma causing tumor thrombus in the great veins of the neck and mediastinum is a rare condition with poor prognosis. Invasion of the internal jugular vein by thyroid gland carcinoma has been occasionally reported, but tumor thrombi extending to the great veins of the mediastinum are reported extremely rarely. We present a treatment approach in a case of follicular thyroid carcinoma intravascular tumor thrombus in the left internal jugular and left brachiocephalic vein.Karcinom štitnjače koji uzrokuje tumorske trombe u velikim venama vrata i medijastinuma je rijedak i ima lošu prognozu. Invazija unutarnje jugularne vene karcinomom štitnjače se povremeno opisuje u člancima, ali tumorski trombi koji zahvaćaju velike vene medijastinuma su iznimno rijetko opisani. Prikazujemo pristup liječenjuintravaskularnog tumorskog tromba folikularnog karcinoma štitnjače u lijevoj unutranjoj jugularnoj i lijevoj brahiocefaličnoj veni

Personality adjectives in Serbian Tweets: An opening

There has been a great interest in investigating relations between personality and language use on the web or social media. Most of the recent studies are based on mining the users’ information available online and then using machine learning algorithms to predict their personality characteristics. On the other hand, a few studies have relied on the traditional lexical hypothesis when exploring personality under the assumption that personality-related attributes could be obtained from dictionaries. However, little is known about personality structure from Twitter - do data strictly reflect personality structure as represented by personality models, or as unique personality semantic patterns. The aim of the study was to assess and interpret the personality adjective-based structure contained in tweets. The data were collected from an open-access „Tweet-sr“ Serbian Twitter linguistic corpus (Ljubešić & Klubička, 2014). Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a topic modeling technique, was conducted to extract topics and cosine similarity was used as a measure to determine topic similarities, as well as topic-personality dimensions’s similarities. The results showed that the optimal solution comprised four non-overlapping topics reflecting specific semantic structures. Topics did not replicate trait constructs but were modestly related to them. The largest similarities were found with Extraversion and Agreeableness, pointing out the conceptual importance of these traits when describing interpersonal behavior. Also, no inter-topic differences in category distributions were found, with the evaluation terms being the second most frequent in three topics. Although tweets are short-form text messages, they have the potential to communicate socially relevant information through personality descriptors

ANAPLASTIC THYROID CARCINOMA IN A 17-YEAR-OLD FEMALE PATIENT

Anaplastični karcinom štitnjače je jedan od četiri najmalignija tumora u čovjeka. Pojavljuje se u jednog do dva bolesnika na milijun ljudi u godini dana. U djece je iznimno rijedak. 17-godišnja bolesnica primljena je u Kliniku za bolesti uha, nosa i grla i kirurgiju glave i vrata u KBC-u Split zbog operacije štitnjače. Ranije joj je nađen nagli porast čvora lijevog režnja štitnjače. Preoperacijska obrada je upućivala na benigan karakter promjena. Napravljena je operacija thyreoidectomia totalis cum dissectione colli regionis VI et VII. Intraoperacijski preparat lijevog režnja štitnjače je bio maligan. Potom se napravio i PET/CT. Nalaz je bio uredan. Bolesnica je upućena otorinolaringološko-onkološkom timu gdje se određuje adjuvantna radioterapija. Stadij bolesti prema TNM klasifi kaciji bio je IVa. Godinu dana nakon operacije bolesnica je dobro, nema znakova bolesti. Ovaj prikaz slučaja je prilog dosadašnjim rijetkim spoznajama o anaplastičnom karcinomu štitnjače u osoba mlađe životne dobi u svijetu.Anaplastic carcinoma of thyroid gland is one of the four most malignant tumors in humans. It appears in one or two patients per million per year. It is very rare in children. A 17-year-old female patient was admitted to the Clinical Department of ENT and Head and Neck Surgery, Split University Hospital Center, for thyroid gland surgery due to rapid growth of a node in the thyroid gland left lobe. Preoperative examination indicated benign nature of changes. Total thyroidectomy with levels VI and VII neck dissection was done. Intraoperative slide of the left lobe was malignant. Positron emission tomography and computed tomography were also done. The finding was negative. The patient was examined by an ENT-oncology team and juvenile radiotherapy was administered. It was found to be carcinoma stage IVa according to TNM classification. One year after the operation, the patient was well and had no signs of illness. This case report is a contribution to the existing but scarce knowledge of anaplastic carcinoma of thyroid gland in young patients in the world

Editorial: The Interconnectedness of Personality and Language

Our principal idea behind this special issue was to highlight the importance of connecting the classic psycho-lexical approaches in personality psychology with emerging tendencies in natural language processing. Hence our "target contributing field" was initially planned as multidisciplinary, hoping that psychologists, linguists, and researchers from bordering fields would help us picture a map of the area more clearly, and to understand the potential and obstacles for field development. To provide a more compelling rationale and hopefully a clearer view of the topics in this Frontiers issue, we opted for a bibliometric approach, more specifically thematic mapping. For additional information on the procedure, we point the readers to the materials available on our OSF project page (https://osf.io/zvkag/). Nine papers are published in this issue, with contributions from 41 co-authors. The articles are authored by three to nine co-authors per paper, with one single-authored article. Authors' affiliations comprise sixteen research institutions from Australia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, and the United States of America. The proportion of international authorship is 33%, suggesting that one-third of the papers are produced in international collaborations. Six articles are original research papers, one an opinion article, one a method paper, and one a brief report. This overview suggests that this Frontiers issue may be considered as an international effort, offering diverse perspectives on the issues connecting personality and language. Our editorial team is especially honored by attracting the attention of esteemed authors in linguistics, psychology, and information science, making this effort even more valuable.While it is a subtle and delicate task to summarize the current contributions conceptually, we take the liberty to make a brief comment on the concepts covered in this issue, as we see it presently. Two papers are firmly rooted in the long-standing tradition of lexical research in personality, though both seem to cross, challenge, or redefine the current research practices in the field. A paper by Volungevičiene et al. (2022) explores the social effects (a seldomly investigated descriptor category) in a specific language and cultural context. An opinion piece (Saucier, 2022) by one of the leading experts in the field is an overview of the results and methodological practices in the psycho-lexical tradition, and simultaneously an outlook into its future. The psycho-lexical tradition is, through its methods and concepts, present in the paper by Fischer et al., (2022) however, this paper extends the values-related research to autobiographical narratives.Similarly, Brauer et al. ( 2022) explore the concept of playfulness in natural language, using a reliable but perhaps so far sparsely used automated language analysis paradigm; this is a prime example of using NLP procedures to gain advanced knowledge of a concept. Spitzley et al. ( 2022) use the same procedure (LIWC) along with a SPLICE measurement technique to explore the diversity of language styles and their relations to the Big Five personality traits. The use of state-of-the-art analytic procedures is revisited in a paper by Dai et al., (2022) relating natural language use in a specific setting with the HEXACO model of personality. Genkova et al. (2022) focus on language and culture as landmarks of a multi-cultural and multi-language area such as Eastern Europe, validating the constructs developed in Western culture, in a current and valuable etic-study. Calić et al. (2022) venture further into language-related communication, and beyond it, by exploring the paralinguistic cues in a sample of adults with moderate intellectual disabilities. Jang et al. (2022) propose a study protocol on the relations of the Five-Factor Model of personality traits (assessed through NLP) and psychological distress.Consistent with the authorship, the topical structure of our thematic issue is diverse. Opting to describe it using bibliometrics again, we chose the bibliographic coupling technique (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017;Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020;Van Eck & Waltman, 2014, whereby the documents' similarity was estimated using the degree of their references overlap Three thematic clusters, defined by authors' keywords, emerged in our collection. The first one is marked broadly as "language and personality"; the other two are "natural language processing" and "personality prediction". While we believe that they conveniently account for the wide range of our topics, what particularly interested us is how these topical patterns correspond with the conceptual structure of the field, as the field and its structure were before our first call for contributions was dispatched.The thematic mapping procedure enables the (tentative) topic allocation into one of four quadrants based on the combined scores on cluster density (standing for topic development) and cluster centrality (standing for topic relevance.) The quadrants are labeled as "niche themes" (high density, low relevance), "motor themes" (both scores high), "emerging or declining themes" (both scores low), and "basic themes" (low density, high relevance).The 2021 map of the personality-language field suggests well-populated "niche" and "basic" categories, with a multi-topic (but mostly NLP and machine learning-oriented) cluster almost at the center. Although the motor themes quadrant is scarcely populated, two clusters are bordering on it: a predominantly NLP-themed one and a second, containing terms typical of individual differences and foreign language learning.The projection of our 2023 themes to the 2021 conceptual map, shows that the broad "languagepersonality" cluster is located between the "niche" and "motor" quadrants. We believe that such a result may be in favor of the emerging relevance of this stream of research; we believe that the studies that are underway will be able to help increase it. Natural language processing is embedded within the "basic" topics, somewhat unexpectedly surrounded by "core" personality psychology concepts. This may suggest that a methodological shift towards advanced NLP techniques has to be reckoned with in personality studies. Personality prediction is located between the niche and emerging themes, suggesting that the topic "density", a.k.a. the number of studies within the research line, would be welcome, in order to define the personality prediction conceptual status better.Personality and language, as meta-concepts, have complex and nuanced meanings that complement and inform one another. These papers comprise a diversity of topics, concepts, and research methods, all related to personality constructs but striving to push forward the boundaries of understanding personality through language and vice versa. Such a diversity points to the interest and enthusiasm of the authors in multidisciplinary settings to continue exploring these and related concepts. We hope that this Frontiers issue has encouraged the researchers to delve.Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY

In Vivo Investigation of ALBO-OS Scaffold Based on Hydroxyapatite and PLGA

A synthetic bone substitute based on calcium hydroxyapatite (CHA) and poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA), described in this paper, was synthesized to fulfill specific requirements like biodegradability, satisfying mechanical properties, optimal porosity and nanotopology, osteoinductive and osteoconductive properties, and so forth. Structural and morphological properties of the new scaffold were analyzed by micro computed tomography and scanning electron microscopy, while its physicochemical properties were investigated by X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy. In vivo biological investigations of the synthesized scaffold were conducted over the cutaneous irritation and biofunctionality assays on rabbits and the test of acute systemic toxicity on mice. The results showed that the scaffold is not irritant and that it does not exhibit any symptoms of acute toxicity. Biofunctionality assays which include evaluation of the presence of various cells of immune response, the presence of neoangiogenesis, percentage of mineralization of newly formed bone, and fibroplasia in the tissue indicated that the new scaffold is suitable for the application in maxillofacial and dental surgery as a bone substitute. Also, it showed significant advantages over commercial product Geistlich Bio-Oss(R) from the aspect of some parameters of immunological response

Happiness around the world: A combined etic-emic approach across 63 countries.

What does it mean to be happy? The vast majority of cross-cultural studies on happiness have employed a Western-origin, or "WEIRD" measure of happiness that conceptualizes it as a self-centered (or "independent"), high-arousal emotion. However, research from Eastern cultures, particularly Japan, conceptualizes happiness as including an interpersonal aspect emphasizing harmony and connectedness to others. Following a combined emic-etic approach (Cheung, van de Vijver & Leong, 2011), we assessed the cross-cultural applicability of a measure of independent happiness developed in the US (Subjective Happiness Scale; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and a measure of interdependent happiness developed in Japan (Interdependent Happiness Scale; Hitokoto & Uchida, 2015), with data from 63 countries representing 7 sociocultural regions. Results indicate that the schema of independent happiness was more coherent in more WEIRD countries. In contrast, the coherence of interdependent happiness was unrelated to a country's "WEIRD-ness." Reliabilities of both happiness measures were lowest in African and Middle Eastern countries, suggesting these two conceptualizations of happiness may not be globally comprehensive. Overall, while the two measures had many similar correlates and properties, the self-focused concept of independent happiness is "WEIRD-er" than interdependent happiness, suggesting cross-cultural researchers should attend to both conceptualizations