UK closed-end fund discount

A closed-end fund, referred to as an investment trust in the UK, is a collective investment company that typically holds other publicly traded securities. These funds are characterized by one of the most puzzling anomalies in finance - the existence and behaviour of the discount to net asset value (NAy). This study attempts to describe and characterise the discount on UK closed-end funds. First we describe the industry and extensively review the literature on closed-end fund discounts. Second, we revisit one of the traditional theories of the discount - managerial performance - which claims that discounts reflect the perception of management ability to outperform relative to a passive portfolio. We define the value added by active management using two methodologies - Gruber's (1996) unconstrained multi-index regression and Sharpe's (1992) returns-based style analysis regression'. We show that discounts weakly reflect past performance, but do not seem to predict future managerial performance. Analysis of the time-series behaviour of closed-end fund discounts shows that discounts are highly autocorrelated in their levels but not in their first differences. Nevertheless, we find weak evidence of price reversal. We also show that discounts have a tendency to revert to their mean and fluctuate around it within a certain range. Furthermore, there is strong evidence of discounts moving together. An attempt is made to explain at least part of the largely idiosyncratic movements in the discount. Our model of the discount generating process measures the sensitivity of the changes in the discount to factors that measure the influence of the market, size, sentiment, mean-reversion, manager, past performance and reversal. We find that these seven factors explain, on average, 35 percent of monthly changes in the discount. Finally, we investigate the behaviour of UK closed-end funds at the time of the IPO, of seasoned equity offerings (rights and "C" share issues) and of open-ending. We find that (i) share prices tend to decline after the IPO, (ii) funds tend to disappear after periods of poor NAV performance and (iii) funds with good past share price and NAV performance tend to have rights and "C" share issues. References M.J. Gruber (1996), Another Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds. Journal of Finance W.F. Sharpe (1992), Asset Allocation: Management Style and Performance Measurement. Journal of Portfolio Management

Autistic traits affect interpersonal motor coordination by modulating strategic use of role-based behavior

Background: Despite the fact that deficits in social communication and interaction are at the core of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC), no study has yet tested individuals on a continuum from neurotypical development to autism in an on-line, cooperative, joint action task. In our study, we aimed to assess whether the degree of autistic traits affects participants' ability to modulate their motor behavior while interacting in a Joint Grasping task and according to their given role. Methods: Sixteen pairs of adult participants played a cooperative social interactive game in which they had to synchronize their reach-to-grasp movements. Pairs were comprised of one ASC and one neurotypical with no cognitive disability. In alternate experimental blocks, one participant knew what action to perform (instructed role) while the other had to infer it from his/her partner’s action (adaptive role). When in the adaptive condition, participants were told to respond with an action that was either opposite or similar to their partner. Participants also played a non-social control game in which they had to synchronize with a non-biological stimulus. Results: In the social interactive task, higher degree of autistic trait s predicted less ability to mod ulate joint action according to one’s interactive role. In the non-social task, autistic traits did not predict differences in movement preparation and planning, thus ruling out the possibility that social interact ive task results were due to basic motor or executive function difficulties. Furthermore, when participants played the non-social game, the higher their autistic traits, the more they were interfered by the non-biological stimulus. Conclusions: Our study shows for the first time that high autistic traits predict a stereotypical interaction style when individuals are required to modulate their movements in order to coordinate with their partner according to their role in a joint action task. Specifically, the infrequent emergence of role-based motor behavior modulation during on-line motor cooperation in participants with high autistic traits sheds light on the numerous difficulties ASC have in nonverbal social interaction

Self-identification with another person's face. The time relevant role of multimodal brain areas in the enfacement illusion

Illusory subjective experience of looking at one's own face while in fact looking at another person's face can surprisingly be induced by simple synchronized visuo-tactile stimulation of the two faces. Recently, Apps and colleagues (Cerebral Cortex, 2014) investigated for the first time the role of visual unimodal and temporo-parietal multimodal brain areas in the enfacement illusion, and suggested a model in which multisensory mechanisms are crucial to construct and update self-face representation

Face individual identity recognition: a potential endophenotype in autism

Funder: Autism Research TrustFunder: NIHR Biomedical Research CentreFunder: National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care East of England at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation TrustFunder: Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Foundation; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100001479Funder: National Science Foundation; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008982Funder: The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science CenterFunder: US-IT Fulbright CommissionAbstract: Background: Face individual identity recognition skill is heritable and independent of intellectual ability. Difficulties in face individual identity recognition are present in autistic individuals and their family members and are possibly linked to oxytocin polymorphisms in families with an autistic child. While it is reported that developmental prosopagnosia (i.e., impaired face identity recognition) occurs in 2–3% of the general population, no prosopagnosia prevalence estimate is available for autism. Furthermore, an autism within-group approach has not been reported towards characterizing impaired face memory and to investigate its possible links to social and communication difficulties. Methods: The present study estimated the prevalence of prosopagnosia in 80 autistic adults with no intellectual disability, investigated its cognitive characteristics and links to autism symptoms’ severity, personality traits, and mental state understanding from the eye region by using standardized tests and questionnaires. Results: More than one third of autistic participants showed prosopagnosia. Their face memory skill was not associated with their symptom’s severity, empathy, alexithymia, or general intelligence. Face identity recognition was instead linked to mental state recognition from the eye region only in autistic individuals who had prosopagnosia, and this relationship did not depend on participants’ basic face perception skills. Importantly, we found that autistic participants were not aware of their face memory skills. Limitations: We did not test an epidemiological sample, and additional work is necessary to establish whether these results generalize to the entire autism spectrum. Conclusions: Impaired face individual identity recognition meets the criteria to be a potential endophenotype in autism. In the future, testing for face memory could be used to stratify autistic individuals into genetically meaningful subgroups and be translatable to autism animal models

Autistic traits modulate mimicry of social but not nonsocial rewards

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are associated with diminished responsiveness to social stimuli, and especially to social rewards such as smiles. Atypical responsiveness to social rewards, which reinforce socially appropriate behavior in children, can potentially lead to a cascade of deficits in social behavior. Individuals with ASC often show diminished spontaneous mimicry of social stimuli in a natural setting. In the general population, mimicry is modulated both by the reward value and the sociality of the stimulus (i.e., whether the stimulus is perceived to belong to a conspecific or an inanimate object). Since empathy and autistic traits are distributed continuously in the general population, this study aimed to test if and how these traits modulated automatic mimicry of rewarded social and nonsocial stimuli. High and low rewards were associated with human and robot hands using a conditioned learning paradigm. Thirty-six participants from the general population then completed a mimicry task involving performing a prespecified hand movement which was either compatible or incompatible with a hand movement presented to the participant. High autistic traits (measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient, AQ) predicted lesser mimicry of high-reward than low-reward conditioned human hands, whereas trait empathy showed an opposite pattern of correlations. No such relations were observed for high-reward vs. low-reward conditioned robot hands. These results demonstrate how autistic traits and empathy modulate the effects of reward on mimicry of social compared to nonsocial stimuli. This evidence suggests a potential role for the reward system in underlying the atypical social behavior in individuals with ASC, who constitute the extreme end of the spectrum of autistic traits

Their pain is not our pain: brain and autonomic correlates of empathic resonance with the pain of same and different race individuals.

Recent advances in social neuroscience research have unveiled the neurophysiological correlates of race and intergroup processing. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying intergroup empathy. Combining event-related fMRI with measurements of pupil dilation as an index of autonomic reactivity, we explored how race and group membership affect empathy-related responses. White and Black subjects were presented with video clips depicting white, black, and unfamiliar violet-skinned hands being either painfully penetrated by a syringe or being touched by a Q-tip. Both hemodynamic activity within areas known to be involved in the processing of first and third-person emotional experiences of pain, i.e., bilateral anterior insula, and autonomic reactivity were greater for the pain experienced by own-race compared to that of other-race and violet models. Interestingly, greater implicit racial bias predicted increased activity within the left anterior insula during the observation of own-race pain relative to other-race pain. Our findings highlight the close link between group-based segregation and empathic processing. Moreover, they demonstrate the relative influence of culturally acquired implicit attitudes and perceived similarity/familiarity with the target in shaping emotional responses to others' physical pain

A Politico-Communal Reading of the Rose

Lettura del Fiore in rapporto alle fonti retoriche e politiche di ambiente comunal

A systematic review of how emotional self-awareness is defined and measured when comparing autistic and non-autistic groups

We would like to sincerely thank all the authors who shared their data with us. We would also like to thank Ira Lesser, Taylor Graeme, and Arvid Heiberg for kindly sharing their articles for the historical review. Review was conduced as part of CFH's PhD studies. We would like to thank the Northwood Trust, UK for their financial support for this research. Research data available upon request from first author.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Mixed emotions: The contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism

It is widely accepted that autism is associated with disordered emotion processing, and in particular, with deficits of emotional reciprocity such as impaired emotion recognition and reduced empathy. However, a close examination of the literature reveals wide heterogeneity within the autistic population with respect to emotional competence. Here we argue that, where observed, emotional impairments are due to alexithymia - a condition that frequently co-occurs with autism - rather than a feature of autism per se. Alexithymia is a condition characterized by a reduced ability to identify and describe one’s own emotion, but which results in reduced empathy and an impaired ability to recognize the emotions of others. We briefly review studies of emotion processing in alexithymia, and in autism, before describing a recent series of studies directly testing this ‘alexithymia hypothesis’. If found to be correct, the alexithymia hypothesis has wide-reaching implications for the study of autism, and how we might best support sub-groups of autistic individuals with, and without, accompanying alexithymia. Finally, we note the presence of elevated rates of alexithymia, and inconsistent reports of emotional impairments, in eating disorders, schizophrenia, substance abuse, Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and anxiety disorders. We speculate that examining the contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of these disorders may bear fruit in the same way that it is starting to do in autism