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Blunted affect is associated with severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. Mechanisms of blunted affect are poorly understood, potentially due to a lack of phenomenological clarity. Here, we examine clinician rated blunted affect and computerized facial metrics derived from ambulatory video assessment using machine learning. With high predictive accuracy (80–82%), we found that head orientation, eye movement, and facets of mouth movement were associated with clinical ratings of blunted affect. Features denoting larger muscle movements were associated with social cognition (R2 = 0.37) and cognition (R2 = 0.40). Findings provide potential insights on psychological and pathophysiological contributors to blunted affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive description of the ideophones of Teko, a Tupi language spoken in French Guiana. This word class, previously only briefly described, is defined in this paper through a systematic comparison to nouns and verbs, at various levels: phonology, word structure, prosody, semantic, morphology, syntax and discourse use. When relevant, it offers quantitative analyses with statistical tests to support the comparison. The analysis is based on a lexical database of 177 ideophones, 420 occurrences in texts and a subset of 101 tokens with audio-recording. It particularly investigates in detail various aspects of prosody, including syllabic structure, pitch, intensity and duration, and pauses. Contrary to the common view on ideophones that postulates a rather marginal status of the latter, this paper shows that ideophones are in fact rather well integrated in the linguistic system of Teko. They yet show regularities that require to consider them a distinct word category. This paper aims at contributing to the growing literature on the cross-linguistic definition and description of ideophones.

Abstract Background Thoracic aortic aneurysm/dissection (TAAD) and patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) are serious autosomal-dominant diseases affecting the cardiovascular system. They are mainly caused by variants in the MYH11 gene, which encodes the heavy chain of myosin 11. The aim of this study was to evaluate the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11 from a distinctive perspective based on a pair of monozygotic twins. Methods The detailed phenotypic characteristics of the monozygotic twins from the early fetal stage to the infancy stage were traced and compared with each other and with those of previously documented cases. Whole-exome and Sanger sequencing techniques were used to identify and validate the candidate variants, facilitating the analysis of the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11. Results The monozygotic twins were premature and presented with PDA, pulmonary hypoplasia, and pulmonary hypertension. The proband developed heart and brain abnormalities during the fetal stage and died at 18 days after birth, whereas his sibling was discharged after being cured and developed normally post follow-up. A novel variant c.766 A > G p. (Ile256Val) in MYH11 (NM_002474.2) was identified in the monozygotic twins and classified as a likely pathogenic variant according to the American College of Medical Genetics/Association for Molecular Pathology guidelines. Reviewing the reported cases (n = 102) showed that the penetrance of MYH11 was 82.35%, and the most common feature was TAAD (41.18%), followed by PDA (22.55%), compound TAAD and PDA (9.80%), and other vascular abnormalities (8.82%). The constituent ratios of null variants among the cases with TAAD (8.60%), PDA (43.8%), or compound TAAD and PDA (28.6%) were significantly different (P = 0.01). Further pairwise comparison of the ratios among these groups showed that there were significant differences between the TAAD and PDA groups (P = 0.006). Conclusion This study expands the mutational spectrum of MYH11 and provides new insights into the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11 based on the monozygotic twins with variable clinical features and outcomes, indicating that cryptic modifiers and complex mechanisms beside the genetic variants may be involved in the condition.

We study many-valued coalgebraic logics with semi-primal algebras of truthdegrees. We provide a systematic way to lift endofunctors defined on the variety of Boolean algebras to endofunctors on the variety generated by a semi-primal algebra. We show that this can be extended to a technique to lift classical coalgebraic logics to many-valued ones, and that (one-step) completeness and expressivity are preserved under this lifting. For specific classes of endofunctors, we also describe how to obtain an axiomatization of the lifted many-valued logic directly from an axiomatization of the original classical one. In particular, we apply all of these techniques to classical modal logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focusses on non-adverbial uses of lá in European Portuguese, whose exact meaning contribution still remains an open research question. Applying a multidimensional semantics framework, the central claim is that non-adverbial uses of lá represent use-conditional items. Passing the standard tests suggested in the literature, they thus do not contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance but specify particular use conditions. It is argued that they are felicitously used if a speaker wants to convey illocutionary modification, which pragmatically leads to mitigation or reinforcement effects. Diachronically, substantiated by historical data from the Corpus do Português, use-conditional lá is argued to be a product of a pragmaticalization process that led to so-called pragmatic fission at some point, i.e., to the polysemy of two synchronically available configurations of a truth-conditional and a use-conditional lá. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study an extension of first-degree entailment (FDE) by Dunn and Belnap with a non-contingency operator |$\blacktriangle \phi $| which is construed as ' |$\phi $| has the same value in all accessible states' or 'all sources give the same information on the truth value of |$\phi $| '. We equip this logic dubbed |$\textbf {K}^\blacktriangle _{\textbf {FDE}}$| with frame semantics and show how the bi-valued models can be interpreted as interconnected networks of Belnapian databases with the |$\blacktriangle $| operator modelling search for inconsistencies in the provided information. We construct an analytic cut system for the logic and show its soundness and completeness. We prove that |$\blacktriangle $| is not definable via the necessity modality |$\Box $| of |$\textbf {K}_{\textbf{FDE}}$|⁠. Furthermore, we prove that in contrast to the classical non-contingency logic, reflexive, |$\textbf {S4}$| and |$\textbf {S5}$| (among others) frames are definable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Thoracic aortic aneurysm/dissection (TAAD) and patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) are serious autosomal-dominant diseases affecting the cardiovascular system. They are mainly caused by variants in the MYH11 gene, which encodes the heavy chain of myosin 11. The aim of this study was to evaluate the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11 from a distinctive perspective based on a pair of monozygotic twins. Methods: The detailed phenotypic characteristics of the monozygotic twins from the early fetal stage to the infancy stage were traced and compared with each other and with those of previously documented cases. Whole-exome and Sanger sequencing techniques were used to identify and validate the candidate variants, facilitating the analysis of the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11. Results: The monozygotic twins were premature and presented with PDA, pulmonary hypoplasia, and pulmonary hypertension. The proband developed heart and brain abnormalities during the fetal stage and died at 18 days after birth, whereas his sibling was discharged after being cured and developed normally post follow-up. A novel variant c.766 A > G p. (Ile256Val) in MYH11 (NM_002474.2) was identified in the monozygotic twins and classified as a likely pathogenic variant according to the American College of Medical Genetics/Association for Molecular Pathology guidelines. Reviewing the reported cases (n = 102) showed that the penetrance of MYH11 was 82.35%, and the most common feature was TAAD (41.18%), followed by PDA (22.55%), compound TAAD and PDA (9.80%), and other vascular abnormalities (8.82%). The constituent ratios of null variants among the cases with TAAD (8.60%), PDA (43.8%), or compound TAAD and PDA (28.6%) were significantly different (P = 0.01). Further pairwise comparison of the ratios among these groups showed that there were significant differences between the TAAD and PDA groups (P = 0.006). Conclusion: This study expands the mutational spectrum of MYH11 and provides new insights into the genotype–phenotype correlation of MYH11 based on the monozygotic twins with variable clinical features and outcomes, indicating that cryptic modifiers and complex mechanisms beside the genetic variants may be involved in the condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In topological modal logic, it is well known that the Cantor derivative is more expressive than the topological closure, and the 'elsewhere', or 'difference', operator is more expressive than the 'somewhere' operator. In 2014, Kudinov and Shehtman asked whether the combination of closure and elsewhere becomes strictly more expressive when adding the Cantor derivative. In this paper we give an affirmative answer: in fact, the Cantor derivative alone can define properties of topological spaces not expressible with closure and elsewhere. To prove this, we develop a novel theory of morphisms which preserve formulas with the elsewhere operator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have witnessed a fast and widespread acceptance of speech synthesis technology in, leading to the transition toward a society characterized by a strong desire to incorporate these applications in their daily lives. We provide a comprehensive survey on the recent advancements in the field of expressive Text-To- Speech systems. Among different methods to represent expressivity, this paper focuses the development of expressive TTS systems, emphasizing the methodologies employed to enhance the quality and expressiveness of synthetic speech, such as style transfer and improving speaker variability. After that, we point out some of the subjective and objective metrics that are used to evaluate the quality of synthesized speech. Finally, we point out the realm of child speech synthesis, a domain that has been neglected for some time. This underscores that the field of research in children's speech synthesis is still wide open for exploration and development. Overall, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of historical and contemporary trends and future directions in speech synthesis research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scoring the penetrance of heterozygotes in complex phenotypes, like colour pattern, is difficult and complicates the analysis of systems in which dominance is incomplete or evolving. The African Monarch (Danaus chrysippus) represents an example where colour pattern heterozygotes, formed in the contact zone between the different subspecies, show such intermediate dominance. Colour pattern in this aposematic butterfly is controlled by three loci A, B and C. The B and C loci are closely linked in a B/C supergene and significant interaction of B and C phenotypes is therefore expected via linkage alone. The A locus, however, is not linked to B/C and is found on a different chromosome. To study interactions between these loci we generated colour pattern heterozygotes by crossing males and females bearing different A and B/C genotypes, collected from different parts of Africa. We derived a novel scoring system for the expressivity of the heterozygotes and, as predicted, we found significant interactions between the genotypes of the closely linked B and C loci. Surprisingly, however, we also found highly significant interactions between C and the unlinked A locus, modifications that generally increased the resemblance of heterozygotes to homozygous ancestors. In contrast, we found no difference in the penetrance of any of the corresponding heterozygotes from crosses conducted either in allopatry or sympatry, in reciprocal crosses of males and females, or in the presence or absence of endosymbiont mediated male‐killing or its associated neoW mediated sex‐linkage of colour pattern. Together, this data supports the idea that the different colour morphs of the African Monarch meet transiently in the East African contact zone and that genetic modifiers act to mask inappropriate expression of colour patterns in the incorrect environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers. It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker's expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modal logic enjoys topological semantics that may be traced back to McKinsey and Tarski, and the classification of topological spaces via modal axioms is a lively area of research. In the past two decades, there has been interest in extending topological modal logic to the language of the mu-calculus, but previously no class of topological spaces was known to be mu-calculus definable that was not already modally definable. In this paper, we show that the full mu-calculus is indeed more expressive than standard modal logic, in the sense that there are classes of topological spaces (and weakly transitive Kripke frames), which are mu-definable but not modally definable. The classes we exhibit satisfy a modally definable property outside of their perfect core, and thus we dub them imperfect spaces. We show that the mu-calculus is sound and complete for these classes. Our examples are minimal in the sense that they use a single instance of a greatest fixed point, and we show that least fixed points alone do not suffice to define any class of spaces that is not already modally definable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the relationship between leadership and expressivity as exemplified by the Polish President's address to the Ukrainian Parliament delivered on 22 May 2022. The study draws on existing understandings of expressivity and discursive leadership as well as previous studies on gesture in political rhetoric. Co-speech gestures are discussed as an interactional resource linked to emotion and evaluation, and as an inseparable part of the speaker’s public persona and identity. Following Bednarek (2011), the analysis considers the president’s expressivity at the micro-, meso- and macro-level, and it identifies a range of linguistic and gestural resources with which Andrzej Duda constructs a positive involved style while “communicating emotion” and “doing intensity.” The analysis also links the president’s linguistic expression of ardour and gestural behaviour to leadership capabilities, explaining how “relating to the audience” and “visioning” can stir and mobilise the audience in times of war and uncertainty.

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) highlight that empathy involves perceiving the other's expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other's lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other's texts, as speech, can form part of the other's lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir 'to go', the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the functioning of two discourse operators, one, c'est le cas de le dire 'it is worth saying', formed on the French verb dire 'to say' and the other, j'avoue, on the performative verb avouer 'to confess'. We provide a syntactic/semantic description and examine the possible reasons for blocking the appearance of one in place of the other, based on the following constraints: weakening of the act of confession, requirement of a negative polarity, a high degree and/or an exemplary situation. Taking these elements into account, we highlight the specific features of the two operators under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a popular choice for analyzing graph data in the last few years, and characterizing their expressiveness has become an active area of research. One popular measure of expressiveness is the number of linear regions in neural networks with piecewise linear activations. In this paper, we present estimates for the number of linear regions in classic graph convolutional networks (GCNs) with one layer and multiple-layer scenarios and ReLU activation function. We derive an optimal upper bound for the maximum number of linear regions for one-layer GCNs and upper and lower bounds for multi-layer GCNs. Our simulated results suggest that the true maximum number of linear regions is likely closer to our estimated lower bound. These findings indicate that multi-layer GCNs have exponentially greater expressivity than one-layer GCNs per parameter, implying that deeper GCNs are more expressive than their shallow counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study holds that negation phenomena in a natural language involve much more than mere logical entailments in some individual's epistemic model. The unique characteristics of negation, i.e., the persistent diachronic renewal of negative particles cross-linguistically, as well as the prevalent synchronic reinforcement of these particles through emphatic mechanisms, demand an analysis that casts the expressive speaker, not her epistemic model, in the leading role. Opting for a comprehensive account of negation in Modern Greek, the present analysis highlights this subjective involvement of the individual and suggests that it is the thinking and – more important – the feeling speaker that directs the distribution of Modern Greek negators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Scoring the penetrance of heterozygotes in complex phenotypes, like colour pattern, is difficult and complicates the analysis of systems in which dominance is incomplete or evolving. The African Monarch (Danaus chrysippus) represents an example where colour pattern heterozygotes, formed in the contact zone between the different subspecies, show such intermediate dominance. Colour pattern in this aposematic butterfly is controlled by three loci A, B and C. The B and C loci are closely linked in a B/C supergene and significant interaction of B and C phenotypes is therefore expected via linkage alone. The A locus, however, is not linked to B/C and is found on a different chromosome. To study interactions between these loci we generated colour pattern heterozygotes by crossing males and females bearing different A and B/C genotypes, collected from different parts of Africa. We derived a novel scoring system for the expressivity of the heterozygotes and, as predicted, we found significant interactions between the genotypes of the closely linked B and C loci. Surprisingly, however, we also found highly significant interactions between C and the unlinked A locus, modifications that generally increased the resemblance of heterozygotes to homozygous ancestors. In contrast, we found no difference in the penetrance of any of the corresponding heterozygotes from crosses conducted either in allopatry or sympatry, in reciprocal crosses of males and females, or in the presence or absence of endosymbiont mediated male‐killing or its associated neoW mediated sex‐linkage of colour pattern. Together, this data supports the idea that the different colour morphs of the African Monarch meet transiently in the East African contact zone and that genetic modifiers act to mask inappropriate expression of colour patterns in the incorrect environments.

This study focusses on non-adverbial uses of lá in European Portuguese, whose exact meaning contribution still remains an open research question. Applying a multidimensional semantics framework, the central claim is that non-adverbial uses of lá represent use-conditional items. Passing the standard tests suggested in the literature, they thus do not contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance but specify particular use conditions. It is argued that they are felicitously used if a speaker wants to convey illocutionary modification, which pragmatically leads to mitigation or reinforcement effects. Diachronically, substantiated by historical data from the Corpus do Português, use-conditional lá is argued to be a product of a pragmaticalization process that led to so-called pragmatic fission at some point, i.e., to the polysemy of two synchronically available configurations of a truth-conditional and a use-conditional lá.

Abstract Phenotypic heterogeneity is very common in genetic systems and in human diseases and has important consequences for disease diagnosis and treatment. In addition to the many genetic and non-genetic (e.g., epigenetic, environmental) factors reported to account for part of the heterogeneity, we stress the importance of stochastic fluctuation and regulatory network topology in contributing to phenotypic heterogeneity. We argue that a threshold effect is a unifying principle to explain the phenomenon; that ultrasensitivity is the molecular mechanism for this threshold effect; and discuss the three conditions for phenotypic heterogeneity to occur. We suggest that threshold effects occur not only at the cellular level, but also at the organ level. We stress the importance of context-dependence and its relationship to pleiotropy and edgetic mutations. Based on this model, we provide practical strategies to study human genetic diseases. By understanding the network mechanism for ultrasensitivity and identifying the critical factor, we may manipulate the weak spot to gently nudge the system from an ultrasensitive state to a stable non-disease state. Our analysis provides a new insight into the prevention and treatment of genetic diseases.

The aim of this article is to show that a specific type of non-canonical question, namely surprise questions, needs to be defined in its own right and differentiated from rhetorical questions. The communicative function of surprise questions is explained on the basis of three constructions – what the hell questions in English, qu’est-ce que questions, and c’est quoi ce N (i.e. an in situ interrogative followed by a right dislocation) in French. Surprise questions are reported to be expressive and to request an explanation for or a change in an activity judged to be incongruous. However, only the intensification conveyed by the hell systematically guarantees the expressive reading. In French, the surprise reading is argued to rely on a combination of syntactic structure, prosodic features, and lexical items. While qu’est-ce que questions are syntactically more complex and diverse, the in situ construction followed by a right dislocation allows for the surprise reading to be more readily identified as such.

This paper examines the effects of emotional language and telecinematic direct address in the BBC television series Fleabag (2016–2019) on viewers' empathetic engagement, showing how multimodal narratives can invite empathy. In this series, direct address, often used to create intimacy with the audience, is the vehicle through which the eponymous protagonist shares or does not share her emotional states with those within or outside the diegesis. This way of communicating her feelings, I argue, shapes and intensifies viewers' potential empathetic engagement in different ways throughout the series. In particular, I explain that the way in which Fleabag recurrently uses expressive language, most prominently swear words, while addressing the audience, initially invites viewer's empathy in Season 1, before a stylistic shift in Season 2 eventually redefines this kind of emotional address: at the end of the series, viewers' empathy is disinvited, positioning them as unwanted voyeurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of inferring what happened to a person in a social task from momentary facial reactions. To approach this, we introduce several innovations. First, rather than predicting what (observers think) someone feels, we predict objective features of the event that immediately preceded the facial reactions. Second, we draw on appraisal theory, a key psychological theory of emotion, to characterize features of this immediately-preceded event. Specifically, we explore if facial expressions reveal if the event is expected, goal-congruent, and norm-compatible. Finally, we argue that emotional expressivity serves as a better feature for characterizing momentary expressions than traditional facial features. Specifically, we use supervised machine learning to predict third-party judgments of emotional expressivity with high accuracy, and show this model improves inferences about the nature of the event that preceded an emotional reaction. Contrary to common sense, “genuine smiles” failed to predict if an event advanced a person’s goals. Rather, expressions best revealed if an event violated expectations. We discussed the implications of these findings for the interpretation of facial displays and potential limitations that could impact the generality of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arbitrary public announcement logic (APAL) is a logic of change of knowledge with modalities representing quantification over announcements. We present two rather different versions of APAL wherein this quantification is restricted to formulas only containing a subset of all propositional variables: SAPAL and SCAPAL. Such restrictions are relevant in principle for the specification of multi-agent system dynamics. We also present another version of APAL, quantifying over all announcements implied by or implying a given formula: IPAL. We then determine the relative expressivity of all these logics and APAL. We also present complete axiomatizations of SAPAL and SCAPAL and show undecidability of satisfiability for all logics involved, by arguments nearly identical to those for APAL. We show that the IPAL quantifier, motivated by the satisfaction clause for substructural implication, yields a new substructural dynamic consequence relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Expressive flexibility refers to the ability to assess situational demands and adjust one's emotion expressions via enhancement or suppression. It has been associated with lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and greater social acceptance. These relationships, however, have not yet been examined across cultures--where prior research has found cultural differences in norms on emotion displays and their associations with mental health. This study examined expressive flexibility across three cultural groups and their associations with life satisfaction and depressive symptoms over time. Methods: 276 first-year college students (146 Asian American, 71 European Americans, and 62 Latinx Americans) completed two online surveys during the first (T1) and thirteenth week (T2) of the Fall 2020 academic semester. Results: Results revealed no significant cultural group differences in the ability to enhance or suppress emotions. However, we found a significant ethnicity x enhancement ability interaction in predicting T2 life satisfaction, controlling for T1 life satisfaction, age, gender, and emotion regulation frequency. Specifically, greater ability to enhance one's emotions was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction over time among Asian Americans, but not for European Americans and Latinx Americans. Discussion: Our findings illustrate the importance of not looking just at cultural group differences in the levels of expressive flexibility, but also at the associations between expressive flexibility and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundExpressive flexibility refers to the ability to assess situational demands and adjust one’s emotion expressions via enhancement or suppression. It has been associated with lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and greater social acceptance. These relationships, however, have not yet been examined across cultures—where prior research has found cultural differences in norms on emotion displays and their associations with mental health. This study examined expressive flexibility across three cultural groups and their associations with life satisfaction and depressive symptoms over time.Methods276 first-year college students (146 Asian American, 71 European Americans, and 62 Latinx Americans) completed two online surveys during the first (T1) and thirteenth week (T2) of the Fall 2020 academic semester.ResultsResults revealed no significant cultural group differences in the ability to enhance or suppress emotions. However, we found a significant ethnicity x enhancement ability interaction in predicting T2 life satisfaction, controlling for T1 life satisfaction, age, gender, and emotion regulation frequency. Specifically, greater ability to enhance one’s emotions was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction over time among Asian Americans, but not for European Americans and Latinx Americans.DiscussionOur findings illustrate the importance of not looking just at cultural group differences in the levels of expressive flexibility, but also at the associations between expressive flexibility and mental health.

A quantum neural network (QNN) is a method to find patterns in quantum data and has a wide range of applications including quantum chemistry, quantum computation, quantum metrology, and quantum simulation. Efficiency and universality are two desirable properties of a QNN but are unfortunately contradictory. In this work, a deep Ising Born machine (DIBoM) is examined, and shown that it has a good balance between efficiency and universality. More precisely, the DIBoM has a flexible number of parameters to be efficient, and achieves provable universality with sufficient parameters. The architecture of the DIBoM is based on generalized controlled‐Z gates, conditional gates, and some other ingredients. To compare the universality of the DIBoM with other QNNs, a fidelity‐based expressivity measure is proposed, which may be of independent interest. Extensive empirical evaluations corroborate that the DIBoM is both efficient and expressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sibling relationships have unique implications for youth well-being and adjustment, leading researchers to examine factors, such as sibling sex, that explain variation in sibling dynamics. This study was designed to unpack biological sex to examine girls' and boys' gender-typed personality qualities to determine whether they accounted for differences in sibling intimacy and conflict, beyond the effects of sex. Specifically, we applied the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model via multilevel modeling to 5 years of longitudinal data, collected in home interviews from two adolescent-aged siblings from 194 families, to assess links between older (Mage = 16.47 SD =.80) and younger (Mage = 13.88, SD = 1.15) siblings' stereotypically feminine, expressive (e.g., kindness, sensitivity) characteristics and their ratings of sibling intimacy and conflict. Results indicated that youth's expressivity was related positively to their reports of sibling intimacy and negatively to their reports of sibling conflict. Controlling for biological sex, sibling intimacy reached its highest levels and sibling conflict was at its lowest, when both siblings reported high expressivity. On a practical level, these findings illuminate malleable behaviors and characteristics that may promote harmonious sibling relationships, a significant goal given that siblings can serve as sources of support and care in adolescence and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we wish to clarify the way of being and appearing of ambiences. First of all, by distinguishing them on the one hand from lived experiences and on the other hand from external things; then by making the hypothesis of a third mode of being which comes from what stands between the subjects and the objects and which belongs neither to the one nor to the other. Finally, our proposal aims at showing that if the atmospheres are properties of the situations even before the subjects feel them, they feel them anyway only as these intrinsic and presubjective properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have argued that human-controlled avatar interactions fail to facilitate the kinds of expressivity and social understanding afforded by our physical bodies. We identify three claims meant to justify the supposed expressive limits of avatar interactions compared to our physical interactions. First, “The Limited Expressivity Claim”: avatars have a more limited expressive range than our physical bodies. Second, “The Inputted Expressivity Claim”: any expressive avatarial behaviour must be deliberately inputted by the user. Third, “The Decoding Claim”: users must infer or figure out the expressive meaning of human-controlled avatars’ behaviour through cognitively onerous processes. With the aim of critically assessing all three claims, we analyze data collected through observations of and interviews with expert players of the avatar-based video game League of Legends. Focusing on Daniel Stern’s (2010) notion of vitality, we analyze the participants’ descriptions of seeing and interacting with other avatars during performance. Our analysis shows that the informants experience human-based avatarial interactions as qualitatively different than interactions with bots, that the informants see the movements of other players’ avatars as having different expressive styles, and that the informants actively use and manipulate this avatarial expressivity during performance. The results of our analysis, we argue, provide reasons for loosening or resisting the three claims concerning the limits of avatarial expressivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the critical comments on the central ideas of the book Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction. First, we clarify some aspects of the proposal: the relationship between second-person interactions and bodily expressions of attributed psychological states, and the role that they have in the acquisition of the most basic psychological concepts. Next, we specify the sense in which second-person attributions are practical and transparent. Finally, we highlight the ubiquitous role of normativity in second-person interactions, emphasizing the asymmetries that occur in these interactions, and we show why we hold that there are no interactions devoid of normativity to which normativity is later added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of departure for this essay, which reflects on the religious, anthropological and ethical meaning of the act of blessing, is the multifaceted tradition of all kinds of blessings in the Catholic faith community, both in a sacramental and non-sacramental context. To properly understand the act of blessing, it is necessary to outline the existential and religious background of the blessing as an experience and condition. Starting from the general biblical background of blessing as an earthly reality, attention is paid to the transition from the implicit to the explicit religious meaning of blessing as a gift. Subsequently, the act of blessing in its bi-dimensional modality, namely as word and gesture, receives the necessary attention. This is accomplished by a shift from a theological to a philosophical understanding; this is anthropological and existential understanding of blessing. First, the specificity of the blessing as a language event is examined. Then, the bodily and possibly material form of the act of blessing is explored phenomenologically. Thus, it will appear that what is specifically Christian also has universal significance, is literally "catholic", that is, "kat' holon", meaningful "for everyone". Last but not least, consideration is given to the "power" of the act of blessing, both its "founding" power and the risk of magical derailment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study, whose theoretical framework is based on Bandura's social cognitive theory, was to investigate the effectiveness of including a metacognitive approach in teaching expressivity at the piano. Questions addressed the perceived effect of metacognition by investigating the processes allowing young pianists to elicit an expressive musical idiom through the use of aural modeling and esthetic and stylistic mental representations, by exploring the mechanisms triggering the translation from felt emotions to expressive performance, and by assessing the resulting overall pianistic performance. A case study design was employed. Five intermediate piano students were recruited. Data were collected through teachers' questionnaires, adjudicators' assessments, students' interviews, students' diaries, and students' performance recordings. Findings highlighted the central role played by aural modeling. The esthetic and stylistic mental representations in the metacognitive process allowed young pianists to elicit an expressive musical idiom through a mental conversion process. The constructs of aural modeling and of esthetic and stylistic mental representations, along with that of musical phraseology, appeared to function both independently and in conjunction with each other. Results also indicated a positive influence of the above constructs on the overall performance of young pianists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine what effect performer's bodily movement may have on listeners' (N = 103) perceptions of a choral ensemble performance. A 34-voice choir was audio/video recorded performing two different musical excerpts. Each excerpt was recorded twice, once with movement and once without movement, for a total of four audio/video recordings. Additionally, the audio from each of these recordings was isolated and used as a separate stimuli. Participants were presented each stimuli (movement/non-movement, audio only/audio + video), and asked to rate each for expressivity and style. The factor of audio/video was not found to have consistently significant differences in rating. However, there was a consistent interaction effect between these two stimuli, suggesting that both the visual and auditory differences when using movement conversely effected the listeners' perception. College major did not prove to be a consistent indicator, but membership in a choral ensemble significantly impacted ratings. Implications may include a greater effect of movement when viewed by the listener than simply what can be perceived in the aural stimuli alone. Suggestions for further research include additional study between choral and instrumental music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorical data play an important part in machine learning research and appears in a variety of applications. Models that can express large classes of real-valued functions on the Boolean cube are useful for problems involving discrete-valued data types, including those which are not Boolean. To this date, the commonly used schemes for embedding classical data into variational quantum machine learning models encode continuous values. Here, we investigate quantum embeddings for encoding Boolean-valued data into parameterized quantum circuits used for machine learning tasks. We narrow down representability conditions for functions on the $n$-dimensional Boolean cube with respect to previously known results, using two quantum embeddings: a phase embedding and an embedding based on quantum random access codes. We show that for any real-valued function on the $n$-dimensional Boolean cube, there exists a variational linear quantum model based on a phase embedding using $n$ qubits that can represent it and an ensemble of such models using $d < n$ qubits that can express any function with degree at most $d$. Additionally, we prove that variational linear quantum models that use the quantum random access code embedding can express functions on the Boolean cube with degree $d\leq \lceil {n}/{3}\rceil$ using $\lceil {n}/{3}\rceil$ qubits, and that an ensemble of such models can represent any function on the Boolean cube with degree $d\leq \lceil {n}/{3}\rceil$. Furthermore, we discuss the potential benefits of each embedding and the impact of serial repetitions. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the embeddings presented by performing numerical simulations and experiments on IBM quantum processors using the Qiskit machine learning framework.