Verso una "cultura" del disinvestimento: Efficienza, Superiorit\ue0 e Conformit\ue0

Strategic management research has always been committed to portray divestitures just as a reaction to strategic mistakes or a change to earlier decisions. Yet, scholars have recently gauged that divestiture operations represent a keystone in firm value creation (e.g. Moschieri and Mair, 2011) propelling change process. This article reviews existing research on divestiture classifying it into three schools of thought - firm efficiency, firm superiority and firm conformity \u2013 based on different assumptions and conceptualizations of firms and firm objectives. Moreover, it introduces a taxonomy of divestiture operations that accounts for their heterogeneous determinants, thus proposing to read divestiture no longer and not only as a sign of failure, but rather as a tool to create and preserve shareholders\u2019 wealth

Complexity index from a personalized wearable monitoring system for assessing remission in mental health

This study discusses a personalized wearable monitoring system, which provides information and communication technologies to patients with mental disorders and physicians managing such diseases. The system, hereinafter called the PSYCHE system, is mainly comprised of a comfortable t-shirt with embedded sensors, such as textile electrodes, to monitor electrocardiogram-heart rate variability (HRV) series, piezoresistive sensors for respiration activity, and triaxial accelerometers for activity recognition. Moreover, on the patient-side, the PSYCHE system uses a smartphone-based interactive platform for electronic mood agenda and clinical scale administration, whereas on the physician-side provides data visualization and support to clinical decision. The smartphone collects the physiological and behavioral data and sends the information out to a centralized server for further processing. In this study, we present experimental results gathered from ten bipolar patients, wearing the PSYCHE system, with severe symptoms who exhibited mood states among depression (DP), hypomania(HM), mixed state (MX), and euthymia (EU), i.e., the good affective balance. In analyzing more than 400 h of cardiovascular dynamics, we found that patients experiencing mood transitions from a pathological mood state (HM, DP, or MX - where depressive and hypomanic symptoms are simultaneously present) to EU can be characterized through a commonly used measure of entropy. In particular, the SampEn estimated on long-term HRV series increases according to the patients' clinical improvement. These results are in agreement with the current literature reporting on the complexity dynamics of physiological systems and provides a promising and viable support to clinical decision in order to improve the diagnosis and management of psychiatric disorders

Automatic analysis of speech F0 contour for the characterization of mood changes in bipolar patients

da inserireBipolar disorders are characterized by a mood swing, ranging from mania to depression. A system that could monitor and eventually predict these changes would be useful to improve therapy and avoid dangerous events. Speech might convey relevant information about subjects' mood and there is a growing interest to study its changes in presence of mood disorders. In this work we present an automatic method to characterize fundamental frequency (F0) dynamics in voiced part of syllables. The method performs a segmentation of voiced sounds from running speech samples and estimates two categories of features. The first category is borrowed from Taylor's Tilt intonational model. However, the meaning of the proposed features is different from the meaning of Taylor's ones since the former are estimated from all voiced segments without performing any analysis of intonation. A second category of features takes into account the speed of change of F0. In this work, the proposed features are first estimated from an emotional speech database. Then, an analysis on speech samples acquired from eleven psychiatric patients experiencing different mood states, and eighteen healthy control subjects is introduced. Subjects had to perform a text reading task and a picture commenting task. The results of the analysis on the emotional speech database indicate that the proposed features can discriminate between high and low arousal emotions. This was verified both at single subject and group level. An intra-subject analysis was performed on bipolar patients and it highlighted significant changes of the features with different mood states, although this was not observed for all the subjects. The directions of the changes estimated for different patients experiencing the same mood swing, were not coherent and were task-dependent. Interestingly, a single-subject analysis performed on healthy controls and on bipolar patients recorded twice with the same mood label, resulted in a very small number of significant differences. In particular a very good specificity was highlighted for the Taylor-inspired features and for a subset of the second category of features, thus strengthening the significance of the results obtained with patients. Even if the number of enrolled patients is small, this work suggests that the proposed features might give a relevant contribution to the demanding research field of speech-based mood classifiers. Moreover, the results here presented indicate that a model of speech changes in bipolar patients might be subject-specific and that a richer characterization of subject status could be necessary to explain the observed variability

Assessment of linear and nonlinear/complex heartbeat dynamics in subclinical depression (dysphoria)

Objective: Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Most previous studies have focused on major depression, and studies on subclinical depression, such as those on so-called dysphoria, have been overlooked. Indeed, dysphoria is associated with a high prevalence of somatic disorders, and a reduction of quality of life and life expectancy. In current clinical practice, dysphoria is assessed using psychometric questionnaires and structured interviews only, without taking into account objective pathophysiological indices. To address this problem, in this study we investigated heartbeat linear and nonlinear dynamics to derive objective autonomic nervous system biomarkers of dysphoria. Approach: Sixty undergraduate students participated in the study: according to clinical evaluation, 24 of them were dysphoric. Extensive group-wise statistics was performed to characterize the pathological and control groups. Moreover, a recursive feature elimination algorithm based on a K-NN classifier was carried out for the automatic recognition of dysphoria at a single-subject level. Main results: The results showed that the most significant group-wise differences referred to increased heartbeat complexity (particularly for fractal dimension, sample entropy and recurrence plot analysis) with regards to the healthy controls, confirming dysfunctional nonlinear sympatho-vagal dynamics in mood disorders. Furthermore, a balanced accuracy of 79.17% was achieved in automatically distinguishing dysphoric patients from controls, with the most informative power attributed to nonlinear, spectral and polyspectral quantifiers of cardiovascular variability. Significance: This study experimentally supports the assessment of dysphoria as a defined clinical condition with specific characteristics which are different both from healthy, fully euthymic controls and from full-blown major depression

Characterizing psychological dimensions in non-pathological subjects through autonomic nervous system dynamics

The objective assessment of psychological traits of healthy subjects and psychiatric patients has been growing interest in clinical and bioengineering research fields during the last decade. Several experimental evidences strongly suggest that a link between Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) dynamics and specific dimensions such as anxiety, social phobia, stress, and emotional regulation might exist. Nevertheless, an extensive investigation on a wide range of psycho-cognitive scales and ANS non-invasive markers gathered from standard and non-linear analysis still needs to be addressed. In this study, we analyzed the discerning and correlation capabilities of a comprehensive set of ANS features and psycho-cognitive scales in 29 non-pathological subjects monitored during resting conditions. In particular, the state of the art of standard and non-linear analysis was performed on Heart Rate Variability, InterBreath Interval series, and InterBeat Respiration series, which were considered as monovariate and multivariate measurements. Experimental results show that each ANS feature is linked to specific psychological traits. Moreover, non-linear analysis outperforms the psychological assessment with respect to standard analysis. Considering that the current clinical practice relies only on subjective scores from interviews and questionnaires, this study provides objective tools for the assessment of psychological dimensions

Human body odors of happiness and fear modulate the late positive potential component during neutral face processing: a preliminary ERP study on healthy subjects

Human body odors (HBOs) are powerful stimuli that can affect emotional, cognitive and behavioral processes. However, the characterization of the physiological response to HBOs is still to be fully investigated. Here, we analyzed the self-assessed emotion perception and the EEG event-related potentials (ERP) on 17 healthy young women during a simultaneous visual-olfactory stimulation. Particularly, we evaluated the effect of happiness and fear HBO on the amplitude of ERP waveforms elicited by neutral face processing. In addition, we evaluated the subjective valence and arousal perception of the presented neutral faces by means of the self-assessment-manikin test. We observed a significant increase in the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) for central left sites (i.e., C3) during the administration of HBOs with respect to clean air. On the other hand, we did not observe any significant change in the subjective valence and arousal scores as well as for the early components of the ERP (i.e., P100, N170, Vertex-Positive-Potential). Our preliminary results suggest that fear and happiness HBO can induce a protracted increase in the LPP, and possibly reflect an automatic and sustained engagement with emotionally significant content

The Effect of Visual Experience on the Development of Functional Architecture in hMT+

We investigated whether the visual hMT+ cortex plays a role in supramodal representation of sensory flow, not mediated by visual mental imagery. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in sighted and congenitally blind individuals during passive perception of optic and tactile flows. Visual motion–responsive cortex, including hMT+, was identified in the lateral occipital and inferior temporal cortices of the sighted subjects by response to optic flow. Tactile flow perception in sighted subjects activated the more anterior part of these cortical regions but deactivated the more posterior part. By contrast, perception of tactile flow in blind subjects activated the full extent, including the more posterior part. These results demonstrate that activation of hMT+ and surrounding cortex by tactile flow is not mediated by visual mental imagery and that the functional organization of hMT+ can develop to subserve tactile flow perception in the absence of any visual experience. Moreover, visual experience leads to a segregation of the motion-responsive occipitotemporal cortex into an anterior subregion involved in the representation of both optic and tactile flows and a posterior subregion that processes optic flow only

Real vs. immersive-virtual emotional experience: Analysis of psycho-physiological patterns in a free exploration of an art museum

[EN] Virtual reality is a powerful tool in human behaviour research. However, few studies compare its capacity to evoke the same emotional responses as in real scenarios. This study investigates psycho-physiological patterns evoked during the free exploration of an art museum and the museum virtualized through a 3D immersive virtual environment (IVE). An exploratory study involving 60 participants was performed, recording electroencephalographic and electrocardiographic signals using wearable devices. The real vs. virtual psychological comparison was performed using self-assessment emotional response tests, whereas the physiological comparison was performed through Support Vector Machine algorithms, endowed with an effective feature selection procedure for a set of state-of-the-art metrics quantifying cardiovascular and brain linear and nonlinear dynamics. We included an initial calibration phase, using standardized 2D and 360 degrees emotional stimuli, to increase the accuracy of the model. The self-assessments of the physical and virtual museum support the use of IVEs in emotion research. The 2-class (high/low) system accuracy was 71.52% and 77.08% along the arousal and valence dimension, respectively, in the physical museum, and 75.00% and 71.08% in the virtual museum. The previously presented 360 degrees stimuli contributed to increasing the accuracy in the virtual museum. Also, the real vs. virtual classifier accuracy was 95.27%, using only EEG mean phase coherency features, which demonstrates the high involvement of brain synchronization in emotional virtual reality processes. These findings provide an important contribution at a methodological level and to scientific knowledge, which will effectively guide future emotion elicitation and recognition systems using virtual reality.This work was supported by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad de Espana (URL: http://www.mineco.gob.es/; Project TIN201345736-R and DPI2016-77396-R); Direccion General de Trafico, Ministerio Del Interior de Espana (URL: http://www.dgt.es/es/; Project SPIP2017-02220); and the Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (URL: https://www.ivam.es/).The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Marín-Morales, J.; Higuera-Trujillo, JL.; Greco, A.; Guixeres, J.; Llinares Millán, MDC.; Gentili, C.; Scilingo, EP.... (2019). Real vs. immersive-virtual emotional experience: Analysis of psycho-physiological patterns in a free exploration of an art museum. 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A protocol for a multicentre, parallel-group, pragmatic randomised controlled trial to evaluate the NEVERMIND system in preventing and treating depression in patients with severe somatic conditions

Background Depressive symptoms are common in individuals suffering from severe somatic conditions. There is a lack of interventions and evidence-based interventions aiming to reduce depressive symptoms in patients with severe somatic conditions. The aim of the NEVERMIND project is to address these issues and provide evidence by testing the NEVERMIND system, designed to reduce and prevent depressive symptoms in comparison to treatment as usual. Methods The NEVERMIND study is a parallel-groups, pragmatic randomised controlled trial to assess the effectiveness of the NEVERMIND system in reducing depressive symptoms among individuals with severe somatic conditions. The NEVERMIND system comprises a smart shirt and a user interface, in the form of a mobile application. The system is a real-time decision support system, aiming to predict the severity and onset of depressive symptoms by modelling the well-being condition of patients based on physiological data, body movement, and the recurrence of social interactions. The study includes 330 patients who have a diagnosis of myocardial infarction, breast cancer, prostate cancer, kidney failure, or lower limb amputation. Participants are randomised in blocks of ten to either the NEVERMIND intervention or treatment as usual as the control group. Clinical interviews and structured questionnaires are administered at baseline, at 12 weeks, and 24 weeks to assess whether the NEVERMIND system is superior to treatment as usual. The endpoint of primary interest is Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) at 12 weeks defined as (i) the severity of depressive symptoms as measured by the BDI-II. Secondary outcomes include prevention of the onset of depressive symptoms, changes in quality of life, perceived stigma, and self-efficacy. Discussion There is a lack of evidence-based interventions aiming to reduce and prevent depressive symptoms in patients with severe somatic conditions. If the NEVERMIND system is effective, it will provide healthcare systems with a novel and innovative method to attend to depressive symptoms in patients with severe somatic conditions. Trial registration DRKS00013391. Registered 23 November 2017

Foscolo critico

Il volume, primo della collana open access dei "Quaderni di Gargnano", ospita i contributi presentati al XV Convegno internazionale di Letteratura italiana "Gennaro Barbarisi", tenutosi a Gargnano del Garda dal 24 al 26 settembre 2012. Il "Quaderno", dedicato al Foscolo critico, accoglie contributi di Giovanni Biancardi, Arnaldo Bruni, Andrea Campana, Massimo Castellozzi, Gustavo Costa, Alfredo Cottignoli, Christian Del Vento, Sandro Gentili, Franco Longoni, Ilaria Mangiavacchi, Donatella Martinelli, Giuseppe Natale, Enzo Neppi, Matteo Palumbo, Elena Parrini Cantini, Chiara Piola Caselli. \uc8 aperto da una Prefazione di Claudia Berra, Paolo Borsa e Giulia Ravera.This volume on "Foscolo critico" is the first volume of the "Quaderni di Gargnano", an open access book series which publishes the Proceedings of the "Gennaro Barbarisi" International Conferences on Italian Literature, held in Gargnano del Garda. It contains contributions by Giovanni Biancardi, Arnaldo Bruni, Andrea Campana, Massimo Castellozzi, Gustavo Costa, Alfredo Cottignoli, Christian Del Vento, Sandro Gentili, Franco Longoni, Ilaria Mangiavacchi, Donatella Martinelli, Giuseppe Natale, Enzo Neppi, Matteo Palumbo, Elena Parrini Cantini, Chiara Piola Caselli, preceded by a Preface by the Editor: Claudia Berra, Paolo Borsa, Giulia Ravera