Wilson Disease and the COVID-19 pandemic: exploring patients' mental health and vaccination attitudes in a longitudinal study.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the mental health of individuals with chronic conditions such as Wilson's Disease (WD). This study investigates stress, anxiety, depression, quality of life, cognitive function, vaccination rates, infection rates, and perceptions related to the pandemic and vaccines among WD patients. Methods: The study analyzed COVID-19 perceptions and vaccine attitudes of 62 adult WD patients enrolled in the international multisite WD Registry. A subgroup of 33 participants completed a series of mental health scales. The effect of working essentially, income loss, wellness activity initiation, and infection of COVID-19 during the pandemic was observed. Results: Results indicate that, overall, the pandemic did not exacerbate anxiety or cognitive function in WD patients but did lead to increased depression among essential workers. Patients experiencing income loss exhibited higher levels of stress and anxiety. Despite these challenges, WD patients showed high vaccination rates and positive attitudes towards vaccines. Discussion: The findings underscore the significant impact of the pandemic on the mental health of WD patients.

Machine translation: Turkish-English bilingual speakers' accuracy detection of evidentiality and preference of MT.

Machine translation (MT) is the automated process of translating text between different languages, encompassing a wide range of language pairs. This study focuses on non-professional bilingual speakers of Turkish and English, aiming to assess their ability to discern accuracy in machine translations and their preferences regarding MT. A particular emphasis is placed on the linguistically subtle yet semantically meaningful concept of evidentiality. In this experimental investigation, 36 Turkish-English bilinguals, comprising both early and late bilinguals, were presented with simple declarative sentences. These sentences varied in their evidential meaning, distinguishing between firsthand and non-firsthand evidence. The participants were then provided with MT of these sentences in both translation directions (Turkish to English and English to Turkish) and asked to identify the accuracy of these translations. Additionally, participants were queried about their preference for MT in four crucial domains: medical, legal, academic, and daily contexts. The findings of this study indicated that late bilinguals exhibited a superior ability to detect translation accuracy, particularly in the case of firsthand evidence translations, compared to their early bilingual counterparts. Concerning the preference for MT, age of acquisition and the accuracy detection of non-firsthand sentence translations emerged as significant predictors.

Is an Ideal Sense of Humor Gendered? A Cross-National Study.

To explore lay conceptions of characteristics of an ideal sense of humor as embodied in a known individual, our study examined elicited written narratives by male and female participants from three different countries of origin: United States, Iran, and Turkey. As reported in an earlier previous study with United States-based participants (Crawford and Gressley, 1991), our study also found that the embodiment of an ideal sense of humor was predominantly a male figure. This effect was more pronounced for male than for female participants but did not differ by country. Relative mention of specific humor characteristics differed by participant gender and by country of origin. Whereas all groups mentioned creativity most often as a component of an ideal sense of humor, this attribute was mentioned significantly more often by Americans than by the other two groups; hostility/sarcasm was also mentioned significantly more often by Americans than Turkish participants who mentioned it more often than Iranian participants. Caring was mentioned significantly more often by Americans and Iranians than by Turkish participants. These findings show a shared pattern of humor characteristics by gender but group differences in the relative prominence given to specific humor characteristics. Further work is needed to corroborate the group differences observed and to pinpoint their source.

Bilinguals' Plausibility Judgments for Phrases with a Literal vs. Non-literal Meaning: The Influence of Language Brokering Experience.

Previous work has shown that prior experience in language brokering (informal translation) may facilitate the processing of meaning within and across language boundaries. The present investigation examined the influence of brokering on bilinguals' processing of two word collocations with either a literal or a figurative meaning in each language. Proficient Spanish-English bilinguals classified as brokers or non-brokers were asked to judge if adjective+noun phrases presented in each language made sense or not. Phrases with a literal meaning (e.g., stinging insect) were interspersed with phrases with a figurative meaning (e.g., stinging insult) and non-sensical phrases (e.g., stinging picnic). It was hypothesized that plausibility judgments would be facilitated for literal relative to figurative meanings in each language but that experience in language brokering would be associated with a more equivalent pattern of responding across languages. These predictions were confirmed. The findings add to the body of empirical work on individual differences in language processing in bilinguals associated with prior language brokering experience.

What's so funny? Modelling incongruity in humour production.

Finding something humorous is intrinsically rewarding and may facilitate emotion regulation, but what creates humour has been underexplored. The present experimental study examined humour generated under controlled conditions with varying social, affective, and cognitive factors. Participants listed five ways in which a set of concept pairs (e.g. MONEY and CHOCOLATE) were similar or different in either a funny way (intentional humour elicitation) or a "catchy" way (incidental humour elicitation). Results showed that more funny responses were produced under the incidental condition, and particularly more for affectively charged than neutral concepts, for semantically unrelated than related concepts, and for responses highlighting differences rather than similarities between concepts. Further analyses revealed that funny responses showed a relative divergence in output dominance of the properties typically associated with each concept in the pair (that is, funny responses frequently highlighted a property high in output dominance for one concept but simultaneously low in output dominance for the other concept); by contrast, responses judged not funny did not show this pattern. These findings reinforce the centrality of incongruity resolution as a key cognitive ingredient for some pleasurable emotional elements arising from humour and demonstrate how it may operate within the context of humour generation.

What affects facing direction in human facial profile drawing? A meta-analytic inquiry.

Two meta-analyses were conducted to examine two potential sources of spatial orientation biases in human profile drawings by brain-intact individuals. The first examined profile facing direction as function of hand used to draw. The second examined profile facing direction in relation to directional scanning biases related to reading/writing habits. Results of the first meta-analysis, based on 27 study samples with 4171 participants, showed that leftward facing of profiles (from the viewer's perspective) was significantly associated with using the right hand to draw. The reading/writing direction meta-analysis, based on 10 study samples with 1552 participants, suggested a modest relationship between leftward profile facing and primary use of a left-to-right reading/writing direction. These findings suggest that biomechanical and cultural factors jointly influence hand movement preferences and in turn the direction of facing of human profile drawings.