An Emotional Agent for Moral Impairment Rehabilitation in TBI Patients

The ability to identify the emotions of others is a key component of what is known as social cognition. Narratives exploit this mechanism to create an emotional bond with the characters and to maintain the engagement of the audience throughout the story. In this paper, we illustrate a case study in emotion understanding in stories that exploits a computational agent to explore emotion impairment in a group of traumatic brain injured people. The study focuses on moral emotions, aiming to investigate the differences in moral functioning that characterize traumatic brain injured patients. After comparing the understanding of the moral and emotional facets of the agent's behavior in traumatic brain injured patients and in neurologically intact controls, slight–yet meaningful–differences were observed between the two groups. We describe the test methodology and results, highlighting their implications for the design of rehabilitation applications based on virtual agents

The collective bargaining of flexicurity: A case for sector-level analysis? The Italian chemical and metalworking sectors compared

While employment relations in Europe have long been seen as a factor of rigidity, limiting managerial discretion and adaptability, in the last thirty years they have witnessed a trend towards decentralisation of collective bargaining and negotiations increasingly centred on flexibility-security trade-offs between employers and employees. Research on the contribution of collective bargaining to the so-called flexicurity has mostly focused on national-level institutional arrangements. In this article, we contend that meso-level differences need to feature more prominently in the debate. Our comparison of two sectors in the same country (chemicals and metalworking in Italy) shows that decentralisation has divergent effects on flexicurity issues depending in particular on differences in market structures and on depth of bargaining. The interplay between these two factors affects what we refer to as procedural security, which we view as important in ensuring sustainable trade-offs between flexibility and security.Update issue date during checkdate report - RO

Patterns of impairment of narrative language in mild traumatic brain injury

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) represents a condition whose cognitive and behavioral sequelae are often underestimated, even when it exerts a profound impact on the patients’ every-day life. The present study aimed to analyze the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with mTBI. 10 mTBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS > 13) and 13 neurologically intact participants were recruited for the experiment. Their cognitive, linguistic and narrative skills were thoroughly assessed. The group of mTBIs exhibited normal phonological, lexical and grammatical skills. However, their narratives were characterized by the pres- ence of frequent interruptions of ongoing utterances, derailments and extraneous utterances that at times made their discourse vague and ambiguous. They produced more errors of global coherence [F (121)1⁄424.242p1⁄4.000h2p1⁄40. 536] and fewer Lexical Information Units [F (121) 1⁄4 7.068p 1⁄4 .015h2p 1⁄4 .252]. The errors of global coherence correlated negatively with non- perseverative errors on the WCST (r 1⁄4 1⁄4.755p < .012). The mac- rolinguistic problems made their narrative samples less informa- tive than those produced by the group of control participants. These disturbances may reflect a deficit at the interface between cognitive and linguistic processing rather than a specific linguistic disturbance. These findings suggest that also persons with mild forms of TBI may experience linguistic disturbances that may hamper the quality of their every-day life

Emotion Recognition in Low-Spatial Frequencies Is Partly Preserved following Traumatic Brain Injury

After a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), emotion recognition is typically impaired. This is commonly attributed to widespread multifocal damage in cortical areas involved in emotion processing as well as to Diffuse Axonal Injury (DAI). However, current models suggest that emotional recognition is subserved by a distributed network cantered on the amygdala, which involves both cortical and subcortical structures. While the cortical system is preferentially tuned to process high spatial frequencies, the subcortical networks are more sensitive to low-spatial frequencies. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether emotion perception from low-spatial frequencies underpinning the subcortical system is relatively preserved in TBI patients. We tested a group of 14 subjects with severe TBI and 20 matched healthy controls. Each participant was asked to recognize the emotion expressed by each stimulus that consisted of happy and fearful faces, filtered for their low and high spatial frequencies components. Results in TBI patients’ performances showed that low-spatial frequency expressions were recognized with higher accuracy and faster reaction times when compared to high spatial frequency stimuli. On the contrary, healthy controls did not show any effect in the two conditions, neither for response accuracy nor for reaction times. The outcomes of this study indicate that emotion perception from low-spatial frequencies is relatively preserved in TBI, thereby suggesting spare of functioning in the subcortical system in mediating emotion recognition

Combined use of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and psycho-sensory stimulation in a patient with severe disorder of consciousness

The main aim of this work was to evaluate the effectiveness of the transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) on alertness improvement in a patient in a Minimally Conscious State (MCS) by means of DOCS scale combined with a structured psycho-sensory protocol and specific individualized checklists. A further purpose was to estimate the effects of tDCS on muscle hypertonus through the Ashworth scale. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) (1.5 mA, 10-second ramp, 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for 3 months) was performed through a two-channel intra-cephalic stimulator. Two stimulating electrodes (anodes) were applied on the left Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) and the cerebellar cortex, respectively. The cathode was positioned on the right primary motor cortex (M1). This protocol aims at activating the fronto-parietal mesocircuit. After stimulation, the patient followed a cognitive behavioural psycho-sensory stimulation training associated with physiotherapy and speech therapy sessions. The results, obtained through the systematic observation of the patient during the treatment, showed an improvement in the level of alertness, as well as an increase in the quality of the rehabilitation intervention, highlighted both by a higher DOCS score and by ad hocscales set up specifically for the patient. Although these data refer to a single subject, they seem to demonstrate the usefulness of the non-invasive brain stimulation techniques combined with rehabilitation treatment. The importance of this combination was already proposed by other authors, who reported an improvement in the sensory abilities and in the level of onsciousness in a group of individuals with a diagnosis of Vegetative State (VS) or Wakefulness Unresponsive State (UWS) by stimulating the left primary sensorimotor cortex and inhibiting the right orbito-frontal one. Furthermore, this study highlights some fundamental aspects which could be useful for the implementation of an intervention protocol addressed to patients suffering from a disorder of consciousness, by building a personalized treatment, based on patient’ s specific clinical features and not only on standardized measures. In conclusion, the outcomes of this research highlight the key role of transcranial electrical stimulation in producing improvements in patients with disorders of consciousness, especially when applied in combination with individualized and ad hoc protocols built on patient’ s clinical features

Severity effects on discourse production after TBI

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often experience macrolinguistic (i.e., pragmatic and discourse) difficulties. However, it is still not clear whether these difficulties are related to their cognitive impairments and little research has investigated communication abilities across the severity spectrum of TBI. This study compared the cognitive profile and narrative performance of persons with mild-to-moderate TBI, individuals with severe TBI and healthy control participants by adopting a multilevel procedure for discourse analysis. The results showed both severity-dependent and severity-independent effects on the participants\u2019 cognitive and narrative skills. A series of correlational analyses and two Principal Component Analyses confirmed the articulated nature of their narrative impairments and the complex interplay between cognitive and discourse difficulties in both groups of patients. The results from this study suggest that trauma severity influences the gravity of some of the symptoms observed in persons with TBI. At the same time, however, they highlight the cognitive nature of their narrative difficulties

Paradoxically striving for food security in the leading food-producing tropical country, Brazil

Zero hunger is one of the most challenging Sustainable Development Goals, one to which Latin America has demonstrated commitment through socioeconomic policies that target the most vulnerable people. However, political instability in Brazil, a major Latin American economy, has been responsible for retrogressive changes in social and environmental policies, condemning the country to a rise in food insecurity