1,720,965 research outputs found
Uncover the Offensive Side of Disparagement Humor: An fMRI Study
Disparagement humor is a kind of humor that denigrates, belittles an individual or a social group. In the aim to unveil the offensive side of these kinds of jokes, we have run an event-related fMRI study asking 30 healthy volunteers to judge the level of fun of a series of verbal stimuli that ended with a sentence that was socially inappropriate but funny (disparagement joke -DJ), socially inappropriate but not funny (SI) or neutral (N). Behavioral results showed disparagement jokes are perceived as funny and at the same time offensive. However, the level of offense in DJ is lower than that registered in SI stimuli. Functional data showed that DJ activated the insula, the SMA, the precuneus, the ACC, the dorsal striatum (the caudate nucleus), and the thalamus. These activations suggest that in DJ a feeling of mirth (and/or a desire to laugh) derived from the joke (e.g., SMA and precuneus) and the perception of the jokes’ social inappropriateness (e.g., ACC and insula) coexist. Furthermore, DJ and SI share a common network related to mentalizing and to the processing of negative feelings, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, the putamen and the right thalamus
Factors affecting outcome in ocular myasthenia gravis
Aim of the study: 50%–60% of patients with ocular myasthenia gravis (OMG) progress to generalized myasthenia gravis (GMG) within two years. The aim of our study was to explore factors affecting prognosis of OMG and to test the predictive role of several independent clinical variables. Materials and methods: We reviewed a cohort of 168 Caucasian patients followed from September 2000 to January 2016. Several independent variables were considered as prognostic factors: gender, age of onset, results on electrophysiological tests, presence and level of antibodies against acetylcholine receptors (AChR Abs), treatments, thymic abnormalities. The primary outcome was the progression to GMG and/or the presence of bulbar symptoms. Secondary outcomes were either achievement of sustained minimal manifestation status or worsening in ocular quantitative MG subscore (O-QMGS) or worsening in total QMG score (T-QMGS), assessed by Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America (MGFA) quantitative scores. Changes in mental and physical subscores of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) were assessed with SF-36 questionnaire. Variance analysis was used to interpret the differences between AChR Ab titers at different times of follow up among the generalized and non-generalized patients. Results: Conversion to GMG occurred in 18.4% of patients; it was significantly associated with sex, later onset of disease and anti-AChR Ab positivity. Antibody titer above the mean value of 25.8 pmol/mL showed no significant effect on generalization. Sex and late onset of disease significantly affected T-QMGS worsening. None of the other independent variables significantly affected O-QMGS and HRQoL. Conclusions: Sex, later onset and anti-AChR Ab positivity were significantly associated with clinical worsening
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
“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
We 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
We 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Neural correlates of anosognosia in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment: A multi-method assessment
Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) may present anosognosia for their cognitive deficits. Three different methods have been usually used to measure anosognosia in patients with AD and MCI, but no studies have established if they share similar neuroanatomical correlates. The purpose of this study was to investigate if anosognosia scores obtained with the three most commonly used methods to assess anosognosia relate to focal atrophy in AD and MCI patients, in order to improve understanding of the neural basis of anosognosia in dementia. Anosognosia was evaluated in 27 patients (15 MCI and 12 AD) through clinical rating (Clinical Insight Rating Scale, CIRS), patient-informant discrepancy (Anosognosia Questionnaire Dementia, AQ-D), and performance discrepancy on different cognitive domains (self-appraisal discrepancies, SADs). Voxel-based morphometry correlational analyses were performed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data with each anosognosia score. Increasing anosognosia on any anosognosia measurement (CIRS, AQ-D, SADs) was associated with increasing gray matter atrophy in the medial temporal lobe including the right hippocampus. Our results support a unitary mechanism of anosognosia in AD and MCI, in which medial temporal lobes play a key role, irrespectively of the assessment method used. This is in accordance with models suggesting that anosognosia in AD is primarily caused by a decline in mnemonic processes
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