34 research outputs found
Everyday conceptions of modesty: a prototype analysis
Get PDFGood theoretical definitions of psychological phenomena not only are rigorously formulated but also provide ample conceptual coverage. To assess the latter, we empirically surveyed everyday conceptions of modesty in a combined U.S./U.K. sample. In Study 1, participants freely generated multiple exemplars of modesty that judges subsequently sorted into superordinate categories. Exemplar frequency and priority served, respectively, as primary and secondary indices of category prototypicality that enabled central, peripheral, and marginal clusters to be identified. Follow-up studies then confirmed the ordinal prototypicality of these clusters with the aid of both explicit (Studies 2 and 3) and implicit (Study 3) methodologies. Modest people emerged centrally as humble, shy, solicitous, and not boastful and peripherally as honest, likeable, not arrogant, attention-avoiding, plain, and gracious. Everyday conceptions of modesty also spanned both mind and behavior, emphasized agreeableness and introversion, and predictably incorporated an element of humility
The why's the limit: curtailing self-enhancement with explanatory introspection
No full textSelf-enhancement is linked to psychological gains (e.g., subjective well-being, persistence in adversity) but also to intrapersonal and interpersonal costs (e.g., excessive risk taking, antisocial behavior). Thus, constraints on self-enhancement may sometimes afford intrapersonal and interpersonal advantages. We tested whether explanatory introspection (i.e., generating reasons for why one might or might not possess personality traits) constitutes one such constraint. Experiment 1 demonstrated that explanatory introspection curtails self-enhancement. Experiment 2 clarified that the underlying mechanism must (a) involve explanatory questioning rather than descriptive imagining, (b) invoke the self rather than another person, and (c) feature written expression rather than unaided contemplation. Finally, Experiment 3 obtained evidence that an increase in uncertainty about oneself mediates the effect
Tilting Generator for the Coulomb Branch
Get PDFRemarkable work of Kaledin, based on earlier joint work with Bezrukavnikov, has constructed a tilting generator of the category of coherent sheaves on a very general class of symplectic resolutions of singularities.
In this paper, we give a concrete construction of this tilting generator on the cotangent bundle of , the Grassmannian of 2-planes in . This construction builds on work of the second author describing these tilting bundles in terms of KLRW algebras, but in this low-dimensional case, we are able to describe our tilting generator as a sum of geometrically natural bundles on : line bundles and their extensions, as well as the tautological bundle and its perpendicular
Big Data, Big Libraries, Big Problems?: the 2014 LibTech Anti-talk?
Get PDFThe desire to create automatons is a familiar theme in human history, and during the age of the Enlightenment mechanical automatons became not only an “emblem of the cosmos”, but a symbol of man’s confidence that he would unlock nature’s greatest mysteries and fully harness her power. And yet only a century later, automatons had begun to represent human repression and servitude, a theme later picked up by writers of science fiction. Man’s confidence undeterred, the endgame of the modern scientific and technological mindset, or MSTM, seems to be increasingly coming into view with the rise of “information technology” in general and “Big data” in particular. Along with those who wield them, these can be seen as functioning together as a “mechanical muse” of sorts – surprisingly alluring – and, like a physical automaton can serve as a symbol – a microcosm – of what the MSTM sees (at the very least in practice) as the cosmic machine, our “final frontier”. And yet, individuals who unreflectively participate in these things – giving themselves over to them and seeking the powers afforded by the technology apart from technology’s rightful purposes – in fact yield to the same pragmatism and reductionism those wielding them are captive to. Thus, they ultimately nullify themselves philosophically, politically, and economically – their value increasingly being only the data concerning their persons, and its perceived usefulness. Likewise libraries, the time-honored place of, and symbol for, the intellectual flowering of the individual, will, insofar as they spurn the classical liberal arts (with the idea that things are intrinsically good, and in the case of humans, special as well) in favor of the alluring embrace of MSTM-driven “information technology” and Big data - unwittingly contribute to their irrelevance and demise as they find themselves increasingly less needed, valued, wanted. Likewise for the liberal arts as a whole, and in fact history itself, if the acid of a “science” untethered from what is, in fact, good (intrinsically), continues to gain strengt
Occipitocervical fusion – An epidemiological drift experienced in an Irish tertiary spinal referral center: Twenty-year follow-up study
No full textBackground: Occipitocervical disease is common in the elderly population, and is on the rise due to an increasingly aging population.
Methods: We retrospectively reviewed all patients who underwent occipitocervical fusion in our institution over a 20 year period (1996-2016) at a tertiary spinal referral centre. Patients were divided in 2 groups. Group A included all patient who underwent OCF in the first decade between 1996 and 2005. Group B was all patients who underwent OCF in the second decade between 2006 and 2016.
Results: A total of 23 patients underwent occipitocervical fusion between 1996 until 2016 at our institution. Instability secondary to Rheumatoid arthritis was the leading factor in group A, responsible for 43 percent of cases. In group B, trauma was the leading burden accounting for 44 percent of the cases. In contrast to Group A however, only 19 % of OCFs occurred secondary to RA in group B. Our fusion rate was 96 percent with a survival rate of 67 percent.
Conclusion: We noticed a clear epidemiological drift in the cervical spine pathologies requiring OCF during the first and second decade of study period with an increase in prevalence of pathological fractures secondary to metastatic disease. In addition, a drop in rheumatoid cervical disease requiring OCF has been noted
Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis
Get PDFMultiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis
What it takes to attain status in face-to-face groups: the importance of distinguishing between dominance and prestige hierarchies
No full textHierarchy is a defining feature of groups (Berger et al., 1972; Fiske, 2010; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). In this thesis I examined what it takes to climb up this hierarchy in face-to-face groups. I did so from three angles: what people need to do in order to attain status, what kind of person people need to be in order to attain status, and what people may need to sacrifice in order to attain status. Moreover, I assessed the moderating effect on these relations of two fundamental processes underlying group hierarchies: dominance (i.e., assertively claiming status) and prestige (i.e., willingly being granted status). Before addressing the main questions of this thesis, I examined the impact of dominance and prestige processes on perceptions of group hierarchy types (Chapter 2). A vignette study found that assertively claiming status for oneself and willingly being granted status both emerged as viable ways of enhancing perceived status, above and beyond formal status. It also found that, at the group level, each type of process worked against the other: perceptions of each were undermined by mixing it with the other. This finding implies that groups can be classed along a hierarchy type continuum, ranging from highly dominance-based to highly prestige-based.Having empirically established how dominance and prestige processes jointly shape the types of hierarchies that exist in groups, I addressed the main questions of this thesis in a series of experimental and naturalistic studies. In Chapter 3, I examined the interpersonal behaviours that promote status in different types of group hierarchies. I found that agentic behaviour promoted status both in dominance-based and in prestige-based hierarchies. In contrast, communal behaviour augmented status in prestige-based hierarchies, but diminished status in dominance-based hierarchies. Thus, I found that status attainment is associated with diametrically different interpersonal behaviours in different hierarchy types. In Chapter 4, I assessed how the self-appraisals of people who engage in different status-promoting behaviours differ. I found that self-esteem was associated with behaviour that was high in agency and high in communion, whereas narcissism was associated with behaviour that was high in agency and low in communion. Thus, self-esteem related to behaviours that promote status in prestige-based groups, whereas narcissism related to behaviours that promote status in dominance-based groups.In Chapter 5, an experimental study found that the interpersonal warmth towards individuals increased with status in relatively prestige-based hierarchies and decreased with status in relatively dominance-based hierarchies. In other words, in prestige-based groups, being liked and being included were liable to go hand-in-hand, whereas in dominance-based groups, there was a trade-off between them: to attain status one might need to sacrifice inclusion. However, this finding needs to be interpreted with caution as I failed to replicate it in a subsequent naturalistic study.Together, these findings presented in this thesis convincingly demonstrate that hierarchy type is a diversifying feature of groups. As such, they powerfully illustrate the importance of distinguishing between dominance-based and prestige-based groups
Genome-wide association study identifies a variant in HDAC9 associated with large vessel ischemic stroke
Get PDFGenetic factors have been implicated in stroke risk, but few replicated associations have been reported. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for ischemic stroke and its subtypes in 3,548 affected individuals and 5,972 controls, all of European ancestry. Replication of potential signals was performed in 5,859 affected individuals and 6,281 controls. We replicated previous associations for cardioembolic stroke near PITX2 and ZFHX3 and for large vessel stroke at a 9p21 locus. We identified a new association for large vessel stroke within HDAC9 (encoding histone deacetylase 9) on chromosome 7p21.1 (including further replication in an additional 735 affected individuals and 28,583 controls) (rs11984041; combined P = 1.87 × 10<sup>−11</sup>; odds ratio (OR) = 1.42, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.28–1.57). All four loci exhibited evidence for heterogeneity of effect across the stroke subtypes, with some and possibly all affecting risk for only one subtype. This suggests distinct genetic architectures for different stroke subtypes
