1,720,974 research outputs found
The Dark Side of Language
No full textIn our chapter, we’ll examine the impact that language has in schizophrenia. We claim that this mental disorder is, in a strong sense, a linguistic experience. Language plays a crucial role in this psychosis. It is directly involved, in that disorganized language is one of the most important features of schizophrenia, but it also indirectly contributes to fuelling delusions, and to the making of another important symptom of schizophrenia: hallucinations. More precisely, schizophrenic patients can become obsessed by language, and, with their fascination for its infinite possibilities of signification, they reveal a different, dangerous nature of language, that usually passes unnoticed, and that we’ll discuss in this chapter. Besides, in schizophrenia, language also changes from the inside. Even the inner speech, the internal dialogue we usually experience in our heads, becomes something different, and it is altered in a specific way; it becomes a voice. What we will try to show is that, in schizophrenia, language can short circuit, and, in doing so, contribute to maintaining the mental disorder itself. In some sense, thus, schizophrenia can be viewed as a language’s virus, that shows the dark side of this remarkable feature of mankind
The Potential Use of Sex Robots in Adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders: A Theoretical Framework
No full textAlthough the importance of the sexual sphere for the health of all human beings has been recognized at an international level, often this is underestimated when it comes to disabilities and even more to intellectual disabilities. In fact, the idea that subjects with intellectual disabilities are not aware of their bodies and of their wishes in the sexual and emotional field is still widespread in our society, in such a way that they are considered as children in need of constant supervision. Moreover, further hints of criticism that can be raised are about the poor level of sexual education that is dedicated to these subjects, both by family members and by therapists. The last decades have been characterized by a considerable growth in the technological sector and many new instruments have been successfully used in the field of healthcare of weak or disabled subjects. A particularly fruitful branch has been robotics which, in subjects with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), has revealed itself as an excellent support to stimulate communication and develop social skills. As in recent years the field of robotics has also been characterized by a strong interest in the sphere of sexuality, building and implementing what we now define as sex robots or sexbots, it could be interesting to start a debate on the potential that these new generation artificial agents could have in the field of care of subjects with ASD. These robots, possessing a technology based on stimulating verbal and nonverbal interaction, could be useful for an education that is not only sexual but also psycho-emotional in subjects with ASD
A Radical Enactivist Account of Social Cognition
No full textIn this paper, a radical enactivist account of social cognition is given, showing how we move from neurons to mindreading skills without the need of introducing any idea of mental content or internal representation. In order to accomplish this task, a two-levels model that keeps together radical enactivism, interactive specialization and semiotics narrativity is introduced. Starting from the subpersonal action/perception/imagination matching mechanism implemented in mirror neurons and from the reward network – encouraging us to prefer the stimuli and the experiences that lead to a positive sanction – it is action with its narrative logic that turns a very general embodied matching system into a mindreading module tuned to the meaning of the actions of the others during interaction. An overview of the ontogenetic processes that lead to mindreading through joint attention, semiotic competence, deception skills, pretend play and language acquisition is also given. Our everyday practice of making sense of intentional actions in terms of reasons (beliefs, desires etc.) is a skill that comes from social narrative practices in which we manipulate others, we try to make others do things inside a shared system of values, we gain the competences needed to do those kinds of things, we act and we get judged on our actions. This kind of activity grounds the relationship between caregivers and baby before verbal language shows up and is a pattern of action that can be found not only in primates, but probably in a variety of other social animals
It Doesn’t Seem_it, But It Is. A Neurofilmological Approach to the Subjective Experience of Moving-Image Time
No full textThis article illustrates the first steps of a research project concerning the “Subjective Experience and Estimation of Moving-Image Time” (SEEM_IT). After introducing the theoretical background of the research, that links time perception to the embodied experience of movement, the article presents the main empirical results of an experiment aimed at assessing how spectators’ time perception is affected by the style of editing and the type of represented action in short video clips. Though the style of editing played a major role in influencing SEEM_IT, it also significantly interacted with the type of represented action. The article reassesses these findings by discussing them within the theoretical framework of the research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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