Words that make a difference

BACKGROUND: Pregnancy-related death is on the rise in the United States, and there are significant disparities in outcomes for Black patients. Most solutions that address pregnancy-related death are hospital based, which rely on patients recognizing symptoms and seeking care from a health system, an area where many Black patients have reported experiencing bias. There is a need for patient-centered solutions that support and encourage postpartum people to seek care for severe symptoms...

Ctenophores are the descendants of the earliest surviving lineage of ancestral metazoans, predating the branch leading to sponges (Ctenophore-first phylogeny). Emerging genomic, ultrastructural, cellular, and systemic data indicate that virtually every aspect of ctenophore biology as well as ctenophore development are remarkably different from what is described in representatives of other 32 animal phyla. The outcome of this reconstruction is that most system-level components associated with the ctenophore organization result from convergent evolution...

This comprehensive meta-analysis investigates the significant factors influencing consumer decision-making in e-commerce. Predominantly focusing on the parameters of trust, perceived risk, perceived security, and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), this study provides insightful revelations on their integral roles in shaping e-commerce purchasing decisions. The findings demonstrate that trust, perceived risk, perceived security, and e-WOM significantly influence consumers' e-commerce purchasing decisions. Perceived Risk plays a substantial moderating role in the relationship between Trust and e-commerce purchasing decisions, amplifying the importance of managing and minimizing risk in online transactions to cultivate consumer trust...

I analyzed all the theories and models of the origin of the genetic code, and over the years, I have considered the main suggestions that could explain this origin. The conclusion of this analysis is that the coevolution theory of the origin of the genetic code is the theory that best captures the majority of observations concerning the organization of the genetic code. In other words, the biosynthetic relationships between amino acids would have heavily influenced the origin of the organization of the genetic code, as supported by the coevolution theory...

Human judgments of similarity and difference are sometimes asymmetrical, with the former being more sensitive than the latter to relational overlap, but the theoretical basis for this asymmetry remains unclear. We test an explanation based on the type of information used to make these judgments (relations versus features) and the comparison process itself (similarity versus difference). We propose that asymmetries arise from two aspects of cognitive complexity that impact judgments of similarity and difference: processing relations between entities is more cognitively demanding than processing features of individual entities, and comparisons assessing difference are more cognitively complex than those assessing similarity...

Language models (LMs) continue to reveal non-trivial relations to human language performance and the underlying neurophysiology. Recent research has characterized how word embeddings from an LM can be used to generate integrated discourse representations in order to perform inference on events. The current research investigates how such event knowledge may be coded in distinct manners in different classes of LMs and how this maps onto different forms of human inference processing. To do so, we investigate inference on events using two well-documented human experimental protocols from Metusalem et al...

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a devastating disease that destroys memory and other cognitive functions. There has been an increasing research effort to prevent and treat AD. In the US, two major data sharing resources for AD research are the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC) and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI); Additionally, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Data Elements (CDE) Repository has been developed to facilitate data sharing and improve the interoperability among data sets in various disease research areas...

Reading difficulties are amongst the most commonly reported problems in individuals with homonymous visual field defects (HVFDs). To be able to provide guidance for healthcare professionals considering offering reading training, researchers in this field and interested individuals with HVFDs, this systematic review aims to (1) provide an overview of the contextual and intervention characteristics of all published HVFD interventions and (2) generate insights into the different reading outcome measures that these studies adopted...

The quest for the origins of language is a diverse enterprise, where research from a variety of disciplines brings area-specific ideas and area-specific terminology to bear. This variety often results in misunderstandings and misconceptions about communication in various species. In the present paper, we argue for focus on emotional systems as the primary motivators for social signals in animals in general. This focus can help resolve discrepancies of interpretation among different areas of inquiry and can illuminate distinctions among different social signals as well as their phylogenetic origins in animals and especially in humans...

This study used ratings and event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare the mechanisms through which verbal irony and cognitive reappraisal mitigate negative emotion. Verbal irony is when the literal meaning of words contrasts with their intended meaning. Cognitive reappraisal is when we reconsider emotional stimuli to make them less intense. Our hypothesis was that cognitive reappraisal is a potential mechanism through which irony reduces negative emotion. Participants viewed mildly negative pictures first, then read an ironic or literal statement about it in one block, and used cognitive reappraisal of or attending to the picture in the other block...

Efficient recycling of resources forms the cornerstone of sustainable development. Among multiple options in stock for waste recycling, vermicomposting technology is regarded as a futuristic strategy, being tested in every part of the globe due to easy accessibility. Hence, a bibliometric study was planned to set a sight on global scientific trends encompassing vermicomposting research in last three decades. The data were retrieved from Google Scholar, Scopus and PubMed. Publications from different search engines were filtered out and 2064 unique documents were collected and illustrated in MS Excel and Vos-viewer...

In principle, the fundamental concepts person, woman, and man should apply equally to people of different genders and races/ethnicities. In reality, these concepts might prioritize certain groups over others. Based on interdisciplinary theories of androcentrism , we hypothesized that (a) person is more associated with men than women (person = man) and (b) woman is more associated with women than man is with men (i.e., women are more gendered: gender = woman). We applied natural language processing tools (specifically, word embeddings) to the linguistic output of millions of individuals (specifically, the Common Crawl corpus)...

BACKGROUND: The choice of inhaler device type can play a crucial role in managing asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). With various devices available, differences in choice and application may lead to confusion for both prescribers and patients. Furthermore, improper use of a device may lead to suboptimal or inadequate treatment. OBJECTIVES: The primary objective was to identify factors that prescribers consider when selecting an inhaler device for a patient...

BACKGROUND: Online physician reviews increase transparency in health care, helping patients make informed decisions about their provider. Language processing techniques can quantify this data and allow providers to better understand patients' experiences, perspectives, and priorities. The objective of this study was to assess patient satisfaction and understand the aspects of care that are valued by patients seeking refractive care using sentiment and word frequency analysis. METHODS: Written reviews and Star ratings for members of the Refractive Surgery Alliance Society practicing in the United States were collected from Healthgrades, a popular physician rating website...

The issues of depth vocabulary knowledge and Willingness to Communicate (henceforth, WTC) are among the most important issues in second language learning. The present study set out to empirically look into the contribution of WTC to depth of vocabulary knowledge in L2 learning. To this end, 88 English L2 learners, divided into two groups in terms of their WTC, were given two depth vocabulary tests. The Word Association Test (WAT) was first administered to make a comparison between the depth vocabulary knowledge of the two WTC groups...

Wernicke (Der aphasische Symptomencomplex: Eine psychologische Studie auf anatomischer Basis. Cohn und Weigert, Breslau.  https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dwv5w9rw , 1874) proposed a model of the functional neuroanatomy of spoken word repetition, production, and comprehension. At the heart of this epoch-making model are psychological reflex arcs underpinned by fiber tracts connecting sensory to motor areas. Here, I evaluate the central assumption of psychological reflex arcs in light of what we have learned about language in the brain during the past 150 years...

The aim of this study is to compare ecologically-valid measure (the Cambridge Prospective Memory Test, CAMPROMPT) and laboratory measure (eye-tracking paradigm) in assessing prospective memory (PM) in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs). In addition, eye-tracking indices are used to examine the relationship between PM and other cognitive domains in SSDs patients. Initially, the study sample was formed by 32 SSDs patients and 32 healthy control subjects (HCs) who were matched in sociodemographic profile and the performance on CAMPROMPT...

BACKGROUND: At present, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder（PTSD） mainly relies on clinical symptoms and psychological scales, and finding objective indicators that are helpful for diagnosis has always been a challenge in clinical practice and academic research. Neuroimaging is a useful and powerful tool for discovering the biomarkers of PTSD,especially functional MRI (fMRI), structural MRI (sMRI) and Diffusion Weighted Imaging（DTI）are the most commonly used technologies, which can provide multiple perspectives on brain function, structure and its connectivity...

Creating and evaluating predictions are considered important features in sensory perception. Little is known about processing differences between the senses and their cortical substrates. Here, we tested the hypothesis that olfaction, the sense of smell, would be highly dependent on (non-olfactory) object-predictive cues and involve distinct cortical processing features. We developed a novel paradigm to compare prediction error processing across senses. Participants listened to spoken word cues (e.g. "lilac") and determined whether target stimuli (odors or pictures) matched the word cue or not...

Recent studies have revealed the instability of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE). The current study was designed to demonstrate the hypothesis that the instability of the ACE may be attributed to the instability of focused information in a sentence. A pilot study indicated that the focused information of sentences was relatively stable in the sentence-picture verification task but exhibited significant interindividual variability in the action-sentence compatibility paradigm in previous studies...