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Background Recommendations for promoting mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic include maintaining social contact, through virtual rather than physical contact, moderating substance/alcohol use, and limiting news and media exposure. We seek to understand if these pandemic-related behaviors impact subsequent mental health. Methods Daily online survey data were collected on adults during May/June 2020. Measures were of daily physical and virtual (online) contact with others; substance and media use; and indices of psychological striving, struggling and COVID-related worry. Using random-intercept cross-lagged panel analysis, dynamic within-person cross-lagged effects were separated from more static individual differences. Results In total, 1148 participants completed daily surveys [657 (57.2%) females, 484 (42.1%) males; mean age 40.6 (s.d. 12.4) years]. Daily increases in news consumed increased COVID-related worrying the next day [cross-lagged estimate = 0.034 (95% CI 0.018–0.049), FDR-adjusted p = 0.00005] and vice versa [0.03 (0.012–0.048), FDR-adjusted p = 0.0017]. Increased media consumption also exacerbated subsequent psychological struggling [0.064 (0.03–0.098), FDR-adjusted p = 0.0005]. There were no significant cross-lagged effects of daily changes in social distancing or virtual contact on later mental health. Conclusions We delineate a cycle wherein a daily increase in media consumption results in a subsequent increase in COVID-related worries, which in turn increases daily media consumption. Moreover, the adverse impact of news extended to broader measures of psychological struggling. A similar dynamic did not unfold between the daily amount of physical or virtual contact and subsequent mental health. Findings are consistent with current recommendations to moderate news and media consumption in order to promote mental health.

BackgroundFrustration, the response to blocked goal attainment, is a universal affective experience, but how the brain embodies frustration is not known. Understanding brain network dynamics during frustration may provide insight into pediatric irritability, one of the most frequent reasons for psychiatric consultation in youth and a risk factor for affective disorders and suicidality.MethodsUsing fMRI, we investigated changes in neural network architecture from a baseline resting-state, through a task that included frustrative nonreward (FNR) and anticipation of new feedback following FNR (FNR+1), to a post-task resting-state in a transdiagnostic sample of 66 youth (33 female, mean age 14 years). Using a train/test/held-out procedure, we aimed to predict past-week irritability from the global efficiency (i.e., Eglob, capacity for parallel information processing) of brain networks before, during, and after frustration.ResultsCompared to pre-task resting state, FNR+1 and the post-state resting state were uniquely associated with a more segregated brain network organization. Nodes that were originally affiliated with the default-mode-temporal-limbic and fronto-parietal networks contributed most to this reconfiguration. Solely Eglob of brain networks that emerged after the frustrating task predicted self- and observer-rated irritability in previously unseen data. Self-reported irritability was predicted by Eglob of a fronto-temporal-limbic module, while observer-rated irritability was predicted by Eglob of motor-parietal and ventral-prefrontal-subcortical modules.DiscussionWe characterize frustration as an evolving brain network process and demonstrate the importance of the post-frustration recovery period for the pathophysiology of irritability; an insight that, if replicated, suggests specific intervention targets for irritability.

Objective Some studies have suggested alterations of structural brain asymmetry in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but findings have been contradictory and based on small samples. Here, we performed the largest ever analysis of brain left-right asymmetry in ADHD, using 39 datasets of the ENIGMA consortium. Methods We analyzed asymmetry of subcortical and cerebral cortical structures in up to 1,933 people with ADHD and 1,829 unaffected controls. Asymmetry Indexes (AIs) were calculated per participant for each bilaterally paired measure, and linear mixed effects modeling was applied separately in children, adolescents, adults, and the total sample, to test exhaustively for potential associations of ADHD with structural brain asymmetries. Results There was no evidence for altered caudate nucleus asymmetry in ADHD, in contrast to prior literature. In children, there was less rightward asymmetry of the total hemispheric surface area compared to controls (t = 2.1, p = .04). Lower rightward asymmetry of medial orbitofrontal cortex surface area in ADHD (t = 2.7, p = .01) was similar to a recent finding for autism spectrum disorder. There were also some differences in cortical thickness asymmetry across age groups. In adults with ADHD, globus pallidus asymmetry was altered compared to those without ADHD. However, all effects were small (Cohen’s d from −0.18 to 0.18) and would not survive study-wide correction for multiple testing. Conclusion Prior studies of altered structural brain asymmetry in ADHD were likely underpowered to detect the small effects reported here. Altered structural asymmetry is unlikely to provide a useful biomarker for ADHD, but may provide neurobiological insights into the trait., Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 62 (10), ISSN:0021-9630, ISSN:1469-7610

Despite the central role of vocabulary in language learning, and the increasing interest in academic vocabulary, materials for testing academic vocabulary are not common. This paper reports on the development of a new test of academic vocabulary. Test items were based on a relatively recently developed list of academic vocabulary. They were then piloted, refined, and two comparable forms of the test were produced. The paper describes the approaches used to assess the validity and equivalence of the two forms of the test. Research and pedagogical implications and uses of the test are discussed. Full text available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1475158518303126

With the objective of determining what academic vocabulary students use productively, and exploring the relationship between receptive and productive academic vocabulary, this paper continues the dialog on what constitutes academic vocabulary. By adopting a set of principled criteria (ratio, dispersion, discipline specificity and range) and by approximating the procedures from a recent study of academic vocabulary, the academic vocabulary found in students' writing is identified and subsequently compared to the academic vocabulary found in published academic writing (indexical of receptive purposes). Nearly 600 words emerge as being represented significantly more frequently in students' academic writing than in their non-academic writing, demonstrating that students distinguish in their writing between academic and non-academic vocabulary. Furthermore, the investigation finds significant differences between students' productive academic vocabulary and academic vocabulary serving receptive purposes, suggesting that students' productive and receptive academic vocabulary needs are far from identical. The findings reported here are intended to serve as a tool for EAP educators working to help students develop academic vocabulary fit for purpose, as well as an incentive for EAP researchers to continue to explore the nature of academic vocabulary.

In a parallel language environment it is important that teaching takes account of both the languages students are expected to work in. Lectures in the mother tongue need to offer access to textbooks in English and encouragement to read. This paper describes a preliminary study for an investigation of the extent to which they actually do so. A corpus of lectures in English for mainly L1 English students (from BASE and MICASE) was examined for the types of reference to reading which occur, classified by their potential usefulness for access and encouragement. Such references were called ‘intertextual episodes’. Seven preliminary categories of intertextual episode were identified. In some disciplines the text is the topic of the lecture rather than a medium for information on the topic, and this category was not pursued further. In the remaining six the text was a medium for information about the topic. Three of them involved management, of texts by the lecturer her/himself, of student writing, or of student reading. The remaining three involved reference to the content of the text either introducing it to students, reporting its content, or, really the most interesting category, relativizing it and thus potentially encouraging critical reading. Straightforward reporting that certain content was in the text at a certain point was the most common type, followed by management of student reading. Relativization was relatively infrequent. The exercise has provided us with categories which can be used for an experimental phase where the effect of different types of reference can be tested, and for observation of the references actually used in L1 lectures in a parallel-language environment.

In this chapter, the author pays particular attention to Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode and to the accompanying sonnet ‘Intrepid sons of Albion!’, revealing the ways in which these poems address ideas of personal and collective sacrifice. With reference to sermons published in the wake of the Battle of Waterloo, Shaw looks at how religious and political rhetoric conspired to convert the shocking toll of victory—an estimated 50,000 dead and wounded—into the compostable soil of national unanimity, and how Wordsworth responded to this communal trauma. For Wordsworth, engagement with national questions of slaughter, sacrifice, and divine providence was inseparable from modes of autobiographical revision.

We consider developmental and cognitive models to explain why some children 'grow out' of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by adulthood. The first model views remission as a convergence towards more typical brain function and structure. In support, some studies find that adult remitters are indistinguishable from those who were never affected in the neural substrates of 'top-down' mechanisms of cognitive control, some 'bottom-up' processes of vigilance/response preparation, prefrontal cortical morphology and intrinsic functional connectivity. A second model postulates that remission is driven by the recruitment of new brain systems that compensate for ADHD symptoms. It draws support from demonstrations of atypical, but possibly beneficial, patterns of connectivity within the cognitive control network in adult remitters. The final model holds that some childhood ADHD anomalies show lifelong persistence, regardless of adult outcome, supported by shared reports of anomalies in remitters and persisters in posterior cerebral and striato-thalamic regions. The models are compatible: different processes driving remission might occur in different brain regions. These models provide a framework for future studies which might inform novel treatments to 'accelerate' remission.

This article utilizes a unique data set to examine the relationship between a group of potential explanatory variables and educational corruption in Ukraine. Our corruption controls include bribing on exams, on term papers, for credit, and for university admission. We use a robust nonparametric approach in order to estimate the probability of bribing across the four different categories. This approach is shown to be robust to a variety of different types of endogeneity often encountered under commonly assumed parametric specifications. Our main findings indicate that corruption perceptions, past bribing behavior, and the perceived criminality of bribery are significant factors for all four categories of bribery. From a policy perspective, we argue that when bribe control enforcement is difficult, anti-corruption education programs targeting social perceptions of corruption could be appropriate. (JEL K42, J16, C14)

Motion-related artifacts are one of the major challenges associated with pediatric neuroimaging. Recent studies have shown a relationship between visual quality ratings of T1 images and cortical reconstruction measures. Automated algorithms offer more precision in quantifying movement-related artifacts compared to visual inspection. Thus, the goal of this study was to test three different automated quality assessment algorithms for structural MRI scans. The three algorithms included a Fourier-, integral-, and a gradient-based approach which were run on raw T1-weighted imaging data collected from four different scanners. The four cohorts included a total of 6,662 MRI scans from two waves of the Generation R Study, the NIH NHGRI Study, and the GUSTO Study. Using receiver operating characteristics with visually inspected quality ratings of the T1 images, the area under the curve (AUC) for the gradient algorithm, which performed better than either the integral or Fourier approaches, was 0.95, 0.88, and 0.82 for the Generation R, NHGRI, and GUSTO studies, respectively. For scans of poor initial quality, repeating the scan often resulted in a better quality second image. Finally, we found that even minor differences in automated quality measurements were associated with FreeSurfer derived measures of cortical thickness and surface area, even in scans that were rated as good quality. Our findings suggest that the inclusion of automated quality assessment measures can augment visual inspection and may find use as a covariate in analyses or to identify thresholds to exclude poor quality data.

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e., how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.

We investigate the relationship between intelligence and bribing behavior in a simple one-shot game of corruption. We find a robust relationship between intelligence and the probability of bribing in which a higher intelligence quotient (IQ) leads to a lower probability of bribing in the game. This result holds after controlling for other determinants such as gender, attitude toward corruption, and perceptions of corruption. By revealing the gender of the matched player, we also show that gender perceptions of corruption are strong determinants of bribery.

The resilience of many children in the face of adversity has long been a research focus. The study by Burt et al. delineates the neuroanatomy of resilience, using in vivo magnetic resonance images acquired on 1,800 youth. They find that resilient youth had a larger right lateral prefrontal cortex compared to youth who either lacked resilience or did not experience adversity. The size of the right lateral prefrontal cortex was further associated with a likelihood of a maladaptive problem of alcohol use. These findings implicate high-order regulatory processes supported by the right lateral prefrontal cortex as pivotal in resilience. The study also sets the stage for exploring how neuroimaging data, combined with behavioral and genomic information might be used to assess treatment efficacy and identify children who need therapeutic interventions to boost their resilience.

Shaw discusses British artistic representations of the Battle of Valenciennes, fought on 25 July 1793, with a particular focus on Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s large-scale battle painting The Grand Attack on Valenciennes (1793) and on associated works by the graphic satirist James Gillray. In drawing attention to the collaborative relations between members of the British royal family, painters and print-makers and the establishment press, Shaw demonstrates how British military art in the 1790s sought to regulate the emotional responses of civilians to visual representations of the Allied war against revolutionary France. The essay includes discussion of large-scale paintings by William Hodges painted in the same period intended to arouse anti-war sentiment.

This paper reports the findings of a study of undergraduate student use of, and attitudes toward, textbooks and other assigned reading. More than 1200 students of various subjects at three Swedish universities were surveyed. Most students said reading played an important role in learning generally and attributed positive characteristics to their textbooks. However, students’ self-reported reading behaviour was at odds with these attitudes, with many students reporting some degree of non-compliance with reading assignments and a small group of students expressing active resistance to completing reading assignments. Although textbooks were perceived as valuable, students reported a preference for learning course content from other resources, such as lectures and lecture notes. Textbooks were perceived as alternatives, rather than complements, to attending class. Differences were found across academic disciplines. Implications of these findings for educational administration and classroom practice are discussed.

If differences among the rhetorics of academic articles from different cultures are due to essential cultural differences, analogous differences should be found in older articles. This paper aims to find out whether this is the case. It examines 91 articles from economics journals in Bulgarian, Danish, English, and German published between 1900 and 2000, looking at article type and length, title length, first-person pronoun usage, first-sentence orientation to research or policy, moves in the introduction, and orientation of the conclusion. Most aspects of the development are similar across languages: many early articles are accounts rather than problem-oriented analyses, but by 1973 all are cast in the latter form. Mere accounts died out between 1933 and 1953 in the British and Danish samples, possibly later in Germany and Bulgaria. Joint authorship predominates in 1993, but is hardly known before 1973. Division into sections was sporadic initially, but by 1993 titled sections are obligatory. Explicit statements of aim and of the occasion for writing have become common; thesis statements seem to have appeared at different times. There are, however, some differences in the date of developments and differences across languages/cultures/communities. Articles in most languages tend increasingly to avoid first-person pronouns, whereas the trend is the opposite in the British sample. The focus of introductions and conclusions has shifted more towards research in the British sample than it has in the others. These developments seem explicable in terms of professionalisation of the whole discipline, alongside internationalisation focused on English-language publication. There seems little evidence of essential differences at this level.

The abundance and composition of groups of Bare-cheeked Babblers Turdoides gymnogenys in Namibia were examined to determine whether differences in abundance within riverine and non-riverine habitats were matched by differences in breeding success. Abundance levels were eight times higher, and the percentage of offspring twice as high in well-wooded, riverine habitat as in open or non-riverine habitat. Although the former accounted for only 8% of sample points, it supported 27.5% of adults, who reared 38.3% of all offspring. Thus, most non-riverine habitat was sparsely occupied, suggesting that any benefits arising through dispersal to marginal habitats were outweighed by those associated with philopatry. One potential benefit of philopatry is an increase in inclusive fitness, through helping breeding relatives. However, as in several other Turdoides species, no significant relationship existed between breeding success and the number of adults in each group.

In the globalised university environment, many university students are expected to learn subject-specific terminology in both the local language and the L2 (English) by learning from two media in two different languages: lectures in the local language and reading in L2 English. These students' bilingual learning is greatly affected by the learning strategies they employ. An experiment was designed to investigate the effects of student choice of learning media and the order of media on their learning and perception of learning of terminology in English. The results confirm that added exposure to terminology in different media, even in different languages, contributes to learning and show that, in some circumstances, learning terminology from reading may be more effective than learning it from a lecture. The results also show that students do not correctly judge their knowledge of terms learnt from different media in different languages and that they underestimate knowledge gained from reading in L2. Implications for teaching are discussed.

In the late 1790s and early 1800s J. M. W. Turner was engaged in the production of a series of paintings focusing on biblical themes. Five of these paintings, The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), The Tenth Plague of Egypt (1802), The Holy Family (1803), The Deluge (1805), and The Destruction of Sodom (1805) are extant; a sixth, The Army of the Medes (1801), is untraced. In this chapter I will consider how this lost painting bears on questions of war, representation and the transmission of affect in visual culture of the late Georgian period. I am interested in particular in how The Army of the Medes, a work focused ostensibly on the destruction of a military force in ancient Persia, responds to the culmination of the British campaign against the French in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century. As I will go on to argue, the painting raises complex questions about the relations between biblical and historical notions of truth, the connections between war, visualisation, and the concept of the sublime, and the political connotations of the discourse of sympathy.

This essay’s concern with the representation of suffering in military art of the 1780s is hampered from the outset by a fundamental problem; the lack, certainly in ‘high art’ of the period, of any significant interest in the effects of war on ordinary soldiers and civilians. We can offer a number of explanations for the absence of common suffering in such works. The first explanation is political. In war, as the social philosopher Adam Ferguson proclaimed in 1767, ‘he who has not learned to resign his personal freedom in the field [with] the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil society, and is only fit to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state’. We do not see the sufferings of individuals in military art because individuals, as such, no longer matter. The second explanation is socio-cultural. As the art historian Peter Harrington observes

Today the title the Disasters of War refers to at least three works. The first a set of engravings etched by Francisco Goya, c. 1810–20, published posthumously in 1863 as Los Desastres de la guerra, the second and third are a set of miniature dioramas and a suite of engravings produced by Dinos and Jake Chapman in the 1990s. All three works take as their subject the horrors of war. Goya's is based on his first-hand experience of the sufferings of the Spanish people during and immediately after the Napoleonic occupation. The Chapmans' are born out of a desire ‘to virally infect or be contagious to’ the artist's ‘association with humanism’. These latter Disasters attempt, in other words, to reanimate the founding trauma of Goya's work, to reveal the indivisible remainder, the abject object, that art criticism, wedded as it is to the ideology of humanism, seeks to repress. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay takes a critical look at the nature and significance of this desire, asking whether or not the Chapmans' fascination with the founding trauma of Goya's Disasters of War marks a reinvention of, rather than a retreat from, the ethics of humanism.

Many academics write both in their mother tongue and in English. Their rhetoric is influenced by the general national culture, the culture of their national scientific community, their perception of their audience, and, in English, by their language proficiency. This study examines rhetoric, and specifically evaluation, in three sets of published economics articles: one set in Danish, the second by the same authors in English, and a third by international authors from the same journals as the second. Despite the many similarities among all three, there are Danish norms in terms of use of the Gap move, use of personal pronouns, and other features, some of which the Danes carry over into their writing in English. However, the features carried over are within the norms of writing in English and are probably not perceptible to international readers: Danish writers in international journals merely tend to cluster at the less promotional end of the spectrum.

The present quantitative study focuses on witnesses’ speech in Swedish criminal trials, more specifically on potential differences between men’s and women’s language styles. Since the 1970s, research on language and gender has been divided into three main approaches towards the relationship between men’s and women’s language use: the deficit approach, the dominance approach and the cultural approach. The present study uses the more recent dynamic approach to show how gender is acted out in each situation taking into account a number of factors, e.g. context. The aim of our work is first and foremost to study the possible correlation between the witnesses’ gender and language in the courtroom context and then to investigate if income and/or level of education provide better explanations for possible variation by looking at a broad range of linguistic variables. The results show no statistically significant gender or social status differences in the witnesses’ speech. However, when comparing the results of the testifying police officers accidentally included in the study with the rest of the witnesses, the differences turned out to be significant. This shows that, in this case, factors such as previous courtroom experience and familiarity with the context were probably more influential on the speech of the informants than gender, income and education, in conformity with the assumptions of the dynamic approach.

Intertextuality is essential in academic writing but it is governed by quite complex conventions. Different intertextuality practices can be judged evidence of academic com-petence or incompetence, or condemned as plagiarism. Learners can break the conventions with criminal intent, or from ignorance, or because their language proficiency prevents them from doing anything else. This paper reports the results of interviews with academic staff in a British university and their postgraduate students about intertextuality practices. The interviewees ahowed a wide range of – sometimes contradictory – attitudes to quotation, referencing, and copying. Several pointed out the developmental advantages of various types of copying.

Handbooks and consultants offer guidelines for customer-complaint reception which seem quite uniform across cultures. But one would expect different behavior patterns in different cultures. This paper describes a pilot investigation of this paradox. Four complaint-handling dialogues exhibiting different levels and types of politeness were written and shown to business students of various European nationalities, predominantly Danish and Spanish. The results showed that the Danes were much less tolerant of polite phrases and promotional language than the Spaniards, but that there was a ’concise, brief, sincere’ style acceptable to all cultural-national groups.

Counts of register features have produced useful data on varieties of written English and on differences between writers of differing writing and language proficiency. This article reports an attempt to extend this procedure to an evaluation of the same foreign-language writers at two different stages. It shows that the procedure can differentiate the products of developing writers at two relatively close points in time, and that a more detailed examination of significant changes can be revealing about patterns of learning. The major changes were from features of spoken English to those more typical of formal writing, both in surface detail and in more fundamental characteristics. There was less change in complexity of construction or variety of vocabulary. Improved correctness in the structures used was balanced by errors in new structures being attempted. The subjects had been discriminating in their acceptance of academic style and actively sensitive to genre and other requirements.

Academic discourse (the language, organization, and rhetoric of academic texts) is a member of a set of discourses called “language for specific purposes” (LSP), which include business, legal, and technical discourse. These discourses occur in spoken and written texts of many sorts. Their vocabulary and grammar can be called their registers, so that one could speak of a general academic written register characterized, for example, by formality and precision, and, within that, of the register of chemistry, characterized above all by a particular terminology. But all these LSP discourses are also characterized by having a particular set of genres (i.e., types of texts with a particular purpose and audience, for example textbooks, research articles, student essays). They use the grammar of the general language but the frequency and functions of some features are different, depending partly on the genre. Keywords: pragmatics; syntax; grammar; language for academic purposes; language for specific purposes; writing

Evaluative genres can be interested or disinterested. The difference, for example, between blurbs (Cacchiani, 2007; Gesuato, 2007a, b) and reviews (Motta-Roth, 1998;Gea-Valor, 2000;Hyland, 2000;Salager-Meyer et al., 2004, 2007; Romer, 2005, 2008) is that, although both evaluate a book, blurbs adopt an interested stance, clearly intending to promote the book, while reviews adopt a disinterested stance, intending to give the reader an honest, if personal, evaluation. Blurbs are written to maximize sales, whereas the recipients of reviews may justifiably expect them to give impartial advice. Of course an individual review text may have any sort of private purpose (Bhatia, 2004), but in the English-speaking academic world (Moreno and Suarez, 2008) the genre is read as disinterested, and a writer who is somehow involved with the book reviewed is expected to declare an interest.

Empathy has two key components: affective and cognitive. It relies on "embodied" processes such as the generation, representation and perception of feeling states. People diagnosed with Depersonalization Disorder (DPD) report disturbances in affective experience, such as emotional numbing, alongside aberrations in "body image" such as increased self-focus and feelings of "disembodiment". DPD therefore provides a test bed for the role of such self-related processes in empathy. We tested 16 participants diagnosed with DPD and 48 control volunteers on measures of cognitive and affective empathy. We used self-report measures (EQ; Baron-CohenWheelwright, 2004), an objective measure of cognitive empathy-the "Eyes" task (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste,Plumb, 2001), and a novel task tapping affective empathy, utilizing speech rate as an implicit measure of physiological arousal. We also measured participants' tendency to use mental representations that relate to the self during the affective empathy task. The DPD group showed intact performance on the cognitive empathy task. However, there was a disruption in the physiological component of affective empathy alongside a more pronounced reliance on mental representations of the self. These findings suggest affective empathy to be reliant on intact emotional experience in the observer. In addition, excessive self-focus may be detrimental to an empathic response.

Freud’s immediate response to the declaration of war was an unexpected one. One would have supposed that a pacific savant of fifty-eight would have greeted it with simple horror, as so many did. On the contrary, his first response was rather one of youthful enthusiasm, apparently a reawakening of the military ardours of boyhood … He was quite carried away, could not think of any work, and spent his time discussing the events of the day with his brother Alexander … He was excitable, irritable, and made slips of the tongue all day long.1

Evidence suggests that we use the same mechanisms for both producing and perceiving actions. Such 'shared representations' may also underlie social perception and empathy. However, this idea raises some important and as yet unresolved questions: (i) how do we distinguish other-orientated empathic responses from a self-orientated reactions such as personal distress and (ii) what are the neural substrates underpinning these processes? We employed event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore whether 'shared representations' were recruited to decode dynamic social stimuli in 12 healthy volunteers. We used an adapted version of the Profile of Non-Verbal Sensitivity (Rosenthal, H., Hall, J.A., DiMatteo, M.R., Rogers, P.L., Archer, D., (1979). Sensitivity to nonverbal communication: the PONS test. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore) which taps social perception using brief silent video clips. Participants chose one of two words that best described the state conveyed by the actor, or in the control condition using the same clips, the word describing which parts of the body were visible (non-social labelling). Off-line self-report measures of empathy and personal distress engendered by thoughts about others, were also given along with an experimentally-derived index of the degree of self-other overlap during social perception. Brain activation specific to the main experimental condition was found in the inferior frontal gyrus (BA44) and premotor areas (BA6) consistent with the use of 'shared representations'. Somatosensory areas such as the insula and supramarginal gyrus (BA40) were also activated suggesting that participants constructed a qualitative representation of the target state. Activity in the rostral anterior cingulate was associated with self-reports of personal distress and increased blood flow to the anterior cingulate (BA24) and inferior parietal cortex (BA40) was related to self-other overlap.

Background. Empathy plays a key role in social understanding, but its empirical measurement has proved difficult. The Empathy Quotient (EQ) is a self-report scale designed to do just that. This series of four studies examined the reliability and validity of the EQ and determined its factor structure.Method. In Study 1, 53 people completed the EQ, Social Desirability Scale (SDS) and a non-verbal mental state inference test, the Eyes Task. In Study 2, a principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted on data from 110 healthy individuals and 62 people reporting depersonalisation (DPD). Approximately 1 year later, Study 3, involved the re-administration of the EQ (n=24) along with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; n=28). In the last study, the EQ scores of those with DPD, a condition that includes a subjective lack of empathy, were examined in depth.Results. An association was found between the Eyes task and EQ, and only three EQ items correlated with the SDS. PCA revealed three factors: (1) ‘cognitive empathy’; (2) ‘emotional reactivity’, and (3) ‘social skills’. Test–retest reliability was good and moderate associations were found between the EQ and IRI subscales, suggesting concurrent validity. People with DPD did not show a global empathy deficit, but reported less social competence.Conclusions. The EQ is a valid, reliable scale and the different subscales may have clinical applications.

Scott was not alone in his desire to see something of the real face of battle. Although his party set off from Brussels shortly after dawn, they found several other parties already on their journey to Waterloo. Typical of these sightseers were a group who called themselves ‘the Brentford lads’ - members of the lower professional or shopkeeping class who formed the greater mass of society to which the Duke of Wellington would eventually return. On arrival at Mont St Jean they contracted a guide and bought three pints of brandy and a quantity of snuff to block out the ’stench’. Their journey took them to La Belle Alliance where they fraternized with some women harvesters, close to where a man’s leg lay in the stubble looking ‘very fresh’. As Elizabeth Longford adds, the peasants ‘looked even fresher, having made great sums from plunder. But dinner at the inn was dreadful: fat yellow bacon and almost raw meat. They could not help suspecting it had been cut off the dead bodies.’ Two of the lads picked a finger each from a Frenchman’s half-buried hand, to be taken home pickled in spirits: grisly souvenirs of a day at Waterloo.2