Methodological and Empirical Advances in the Quantitative Analysis of Spontaneous Responses in Psychophysiological Time Series

The aim of the present study was to advance the methodology and use of time series analysis to quantify dynamic structures in psychophysiological processes and thereby to produce information on spontaneously coupled physiological responses and their behavioral and experiential correlates. Series of analyses using both simulated and empirical cardiac (IBI), electrodermal (EDA), and facial electromyographic (EMG) data indicated that, despite potential autocorrelated structures, smoothing increased the reliability of detecting response coupling from an interindividual distribution of intraindividual measures and that especially the measures of covariance produced accurate information on the extent of coupled responses. This methodology was applied to analyze spontaneously coupled IBI, EDA, and facial EMG responses and vagal activity in their relation to emotional experience and personality characteristics in a group of middle-aged men (n = 37) during the administration of the Rorschach testing protocol. The results revealed new characteristics in the relationship between phasic end-organ synchronization and vagal activity, on the one hand, and individual differences in emotional adjustment to novel situations on the other. Specifically, it appeared that the vagal system is intimately related to emotional and social responsivity. It was also found that the lack of spontaneously synchronized responses is related to decreased energetic arousal (e.g., depression, mood). These findings indicate that the present process analysis approach has many advantages for use in both experimental and applied research, and that it is a useful new paradigm in psychophysiological research. Keywords: Autonomic Nervous System; Emotion; Facial Electromyography; Individual Differences; Spontaneous Responses; Time Series Analysis; Vagal System

Aivojen jännitevasteiden rekisteröinti useaan äänen piirteeseen yhdellä mittauskerralla terveillä musiikkileikkikoulua käyvillä kaksivuotiailla

The early detection of hearing deficits is important to a child's development. However, examining small children with behavioural methods is often difficult. Research with ERPs (event-related potentials), recorded with EEG (electroencephalography), does not require attention or action from the child. Especially in children's ERP research, it is essential that the duration of a recording session is not too long. A new, faster optimum paradigm has been developed to record MMN (mismatch negativity), where ERPs to several sound features can be recorded in one recording session. This substantially shortens the time required for the experiment. So far, the new paradigm has been used in adult and school-aged children research. This study examines if MMN, LDN (late discriminative negativity) and P3a components can be recorded in two-year-olds with the new paradigm. The standard stimulus (p=0.50) was an 80 dB harmonic tone consisting of three harmonic frequencies (500 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz) with a duration of 200 ms. The loudness deviants (p=0.067) were at a level of +6 dB or -6 dB compared to the standards. The frequency deviants (p=0.112) had a fundamental frequency of 550 or 454.4 Hz (small deviation), 625 or 400 Hz (medium deviation) or 750 or 333.3 Hz (large deviation). The duration deviants (p=0.112) had a duration of 175 ms (small deviation), 150 ms (medium deviation) or 100 ms (large deviation). The direction deviants (p=0.067) were presented from the left or right loudspeaker only. The gap deviant (p=0.067) included a 5-ms silent gap in the middle of the sound. Altogether 17 children participated in the experiment, of whom the data of 12 children was used in the analysis. ERP components were observed for all deviant types. The MMN was significant for duration and gap deviants. The LDN was significant for the large duration deviant and all other deviant types. No significant P3a was observed. These results indicate that the optimum paradigm can be used with two-year-olds. With this paradigm, data on several sound features can be recorded in a shorter time than with the previous paradigms used in ERP research.

The Development of the Concept of Music Education in Estonian Kindergartens, 1905-2008 : a Historical–Critical Overview

The dissertation focuses on the development of music education in Estonian kindergartens and the factors influencing it, analysed in the historical perspective relying on post-positivist paradigm. The study is based on the factors and subjects’ views on kindergarten music education from 1905 to 2008, recorded in written sources or ascertained by means of questionnaire and interview. The dissertation deals with music’s functions, music education in retrospective, factors influencing child’s musical aptitude and development and teacher’s role in it through the prism of history. The formation of Estonian kindergarten music education and the phenomenon of its development have been researched by stages: the first manifestations of music in kindergarten in 1905 - 1940; the formation of the concept of music education in 1941 - 1967 and the application of a unified system in 1968 - 1990. The work also outlines innovative trends in music education at the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this century, in 1991 - 2008. The study relies on a combined design and an analysis of historical archival material and empirical data. The empirical part of the study is based on the questionnaire (n=183) and interviews (n=18) carried out with kindergarten music teachers. The data has been analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The subject of the research is the content and activity types of kindergarten music education and the role of music teacher in their implementation. The study confirmed that fundamental changes took place in Estonian kindergarten music education due to the change in political power in the 1940s. Following the example of the Soviet system of education, music in kindergarten became an independent music educational orientation and the position of a professionally trained music teacher was established (1947). It was also confirmed that in the newly independent Estonian Republic under the influence of innovative trends a new paradigm of music education arose from the traditional singing-centred education towards the more balanced use of music activity types (attaching importance to the child-centred approach, an increase in the number and variety of activity types). The most important conclusions made in the dissertation are that there has been improvement and development deriving from contemporary trends in the clear concept that has evolved in Estonian kindergarten music education over a century; professionally trained music teachers have had a crucial role in shaping it; and kindergarten music education is firmly positioned as a part of preschool education in Estonian system of education. Key words: early childhood music education, history of music education, kindergarten music education, early childhood music teachers

Paradigmatic considerations for creative practice in Creative Industries research: The case of Australia's Indie 100

This paper begins with the assertion that research grounded in creative practice constitutes a new paradigm. We argue both for and against the idea. We argue against the idea in terms of applying it to the idealised ‘lone artist’ engaged in the production of their art, whose focus of research is a self-reflection upon the art they produce, and whose art is also the findings of the research. Our position is that such an approach cannot be considered as anything other than a form of auto-phenomenography, that such efforts are part of qualitative research, and they are thus trivial in paradigmatic terms. However, we argue in the positive for understanding the artistic event – by which we mean any mass ecology of artistic practice – as being paradigmatically new in terms of research potentials and demands. Our exemplar for that argument is a practice-led, large-scale annual event called Indie 100 which has run for five years and has demonstrated a distinct paradigmatic ‘settling in’ over its duration while clearly pushing paradigmatic boundaries for research into creative practice.

Alternative News Sources as 'Collaboratory' Journalism. A case study of Helsingin Sanomat and its relation with the Youth Voice Editorial Board

The new paradigm of connectedness and empowerment brought by the interactivity feature of the Web 2.0 has been challenging the traditional centralized performance of mainstream media. The corporation has been able to survive the strong winds by transforming itself into a global multimedia business network embedded in the network society. By establishing networks, e.g. networks of production and distribution, the global multimedia business network has been able to sight potential solutions by opening the doors to innovation in a decentralized and flexible manner. Under this emerging context of re-organization, traditional practices like sourcing need to be re- explained and that is precisely what this thesis attempts to tackle. Based on ICT and on the network society, the study seeks to explain within the Finnish context the particular case of Helsingin Sanomat (HS) and its relations with the youth news agency, Youth Voice Editorial Board (NÄT). In that sense, the study can be regarded as an explanatory embedded single case study, where HS is the principal unit of analysis and NÄT its embedded unit of analysis. The thesis was able to reach explanations through interrelated steps. First, it determined the role of ICT in HS’s sourcing practices. Then it mapped an overview of the HS’s sourcing relations and provided a context in which NÄT was located. And finally, it established conceptualized institutional relational data between HS and NÄT for their posterior measurement through social network analysis. The data set was collected via qualitative interviews addressed to online and offline editors of HS as well as interviews addressed to NÄT’s personnel. The study concluded that ICT’s interactivity and User Generated Content (UGC) are not sourcing tools as such but mechanism used by HS for getting ideas that could turn into potential news stories. However, when it comes to visual communication, some exemptions were found. The lack of official sources amidst the immediacy leads HS to rely on ICT’s interaction and UGC. More than meets the eye, ICT’s input into the sourcing practice may be more noticeable if the interaction and UGC is well organized and coordinated into proper and innovative networks of alternative content collaboration. Currently, HS performs this sourcing practice via two projects that differ, precisely, by the mode they are coordinated. The first project found, Omakaupunki, is coordinated internally by Sanoma Group’s owned media houses HS, Vartti and Metro. The second project found is coordinated externally. The external alternative sourcing network, as it was labeled, consists of three actors, namely HS, NÄT (professionals in charge) and the youth. This network is a balanced and complete triad in which the actors connect themselves in relations of feedback, recognition, creativity and filtering. However, as innovation is approached very reluctantly, this content collaboration is a laboratory of experiments; a ‘COLLABORATORY’.

Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives

Hypertexts are digital texts characterized by interactive hyperlinking and a fragmented textual organization. Increasingly prominent since the early 1990s, hypertexts have become a common text type both on the Internet and in a variety of other digital contexts. Although studied widely in disciplines like hypertext theory and media studies, formal linguistic approaches to hypertext continue to be relatively rare. This study examines coherence negotiation in hypertext with particularly reference to hypertext fiction. Coherence, or the quality of making sense, is a fundamental property of textness. Proceeding from the premise that coherence is a subjectively evaluated property rather than an objective quality arising directly from textual cues, the study focuses on the processes through which readers interact with hyperlinks and negotiate continuity between hypertextual fragments. The study begins with a typological discussion of textuality and an overview of the historical and technological precedents of modern hypertexts. Then, making use of text linguistic, discourse analytical, pragmatic, and narratological approaches to textual coherence, the study takes established models developed for analyzing and describing conventional texts, and examines their applicability to hypertext. Primary data derived from a collection of hyperfictions is used throughout to illustrate the mechanisms in practice. Hypertextual coherence negotiation is shown to require the ability to cognitively operate between local and global coherence by means of processing lexical cohesion, discourse topical continuities, inferences and implications, and shifting cognitive frames. The main conclusion of the study is that the style of reading required by hypertextuality fosters a new paradigm of coherence. Defined as fuzzy coherence, this new approach to textual sensemaking is predicated on an acceptance of the coherence challenges readers experience when the act of reading comes to involve repeated encounters with referentially imprecise hyperlinks and discourse topical shifts. A practical application of fuzzy coherence is shown to be in effect in the way coherence is actively manipulated in hypertext narratives.

ReadAlong: reading articles and comments together

We propose a new paradigm for displaying comments: showing comments alongside parts of the article they correspond to. We evaluate the effectiveness of various approaches for this task and show that a combination of bag of words and topic models performs the best.

Clusters, asters, and collective oscillations in chemotactic colloids

The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signaling, and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active components that transform chemical energy into directed motion. These artificial realizations of motility point in the direction of a new paradigm in engineering, through the design of emergent behavior by manipulating properties at the scale of the individual components. Catalytic colloidal swimmers are a particularly promising example of such systems. Here we present a comprehensive theoretical description of gradient-sensing of an individual swimmer, leading controllably to chemotactic or anti-chemotactic behavior, and use it to construct a framework for studying their collective behavior. We find that both the positional and the orientational degrees of freedom of the active colloids can exhibit condensation, signaling formation of clusters and asters. The kinetics of catalysis introduces a natural control parameter for the range of the interaction mediated by the diffusing chemical species. For various regimes in parameter space in the long-ranged limit our system displays precise analogs to gravitational collapse, plasma oscillations, and electrostatic screening. We present prescriptions for how to tune the surface properties of the colloids during fabrication to achieve each type of behavior.

Enhancing parametric sensitivity using mode localization in electrically coupled mems resonators

We use vibration localization as a sensitive means of detecting small perturbations in stiffness in a pair of weakly coupled micromechanical resonators. For the first time, the variation in the eigenstates is studied by electrostatically coupling nearly identical resonators to allow for stronger localization of vibrational energy due to perturbations in stiffness. Eigenstate variations that are orders of magnitude greater than corresponding shifts in resonant frequency for an induced stiffness perturbation are experimentally demonstrated. Such high, voltagetunable parametric sensitivities together with the added advantage of intrinsic common mode rejection pave the way to a new paradigm of mechanical sensing. ©2009 IEEE.

Teología y contexto epocal : una mirada recíproca

En el comienzo del Ciclo Lectivo 2010, el autor ofreció esta conferencia acerca de la teología en el contexto del cambio epocal, que la desafía en su particular función de interpretación y discernimiento, en su idoneidad para procesar el sentido y para introducir lo simbólico como nuevo paradigma. En este contexto, propuso la interdisciplinariedad en la Facultad de Teología y la Universidad como una oportunidad para reflexionar la propia fe pensando en el otro.

La ciudad y el paradigma de comunión : un elogio de lo urbano

Este artículo trata de ofrecer una mirada positiva de la ciudad, soslayando su aspecto sombrío, bastante difundido por distintos medios. Está fundado en la conjetura de que si hay un nuevo paradigma de comunión emergente, entonces no se puede soslayar en su constitución a la ciudad de hoy configurada en vastas regiones metropolitanas, en ciudades globales y en un planeta Tierra que es todo él ciudad, aunque haya, por supuesto, regiones que funcionan como campo y naturaleza, pero administradas y gestionadas desde las ciudades. Además, indaga en el carácter propio de la ciudad como un nudo dinámico de vínculos. Estos vínculos son una síntesis constante de materia, energía, información, comunicación y comunión de manera tal que, en el metabolismo urbano, hay un mundo natural que está siempre transformándose. Luego de apreciar la relación sociedad-naturaleza, considero la dimensión más filosófica del habitar para concluir en la apreciación de la ciudad como sacramento.

Aportes teóricos de la psicología cognitiva para la construcción de una nueva economía científica

Resumen: El presente ensayo teórico se orienta a revisar las concepciones de sujeto de uno de los sistemas teóricos de economía-política que han tenido mayor influencia hasta el presente. El padre del liberalismo (Adam Smith) sustentó una teoría de sujeto cartesiano (moderno), es decir, un verdadero sapiens sapiens racional y autoconsciente. A través de la psicología cognitiva, los Premios Nobel en economía Kanheman y Tversky presentan una nueva variante de homoeconomicus, enriquecida con aportes de la ciencia experimental, modificando sustancialmente aquella vieja concepción de hombre como ser racional que signó casi todo el pensamiento moderno. Dadas estas “recientes revisiones” teórico-metodológicas, gestadas a la luz de la denominada ciencia de la mente, es que se hace indispensable re-pensar las viejas nociones de sujeto que sirvieron de cimiento al sistema económico y político, antes citadas. Para tal fin, se propone efectuar una sinergia teórico-metodológica entre dos disciplinas científicas: la economía y la psicología. Dicho sincretismo podría proporcionar las bases para una nueva disciplina científica integradora, que muchos teóricos ya han denominado neuro-economía. Es por esto que en el presente trabajo se propone realizar una crítica fundamentada de una de las teorías económicas vigentes, haciendo principal hincapié en los supuestos psicológicos y antropológicos. Finalmente, se intenta re-pensar un nuevo modelo de homoeconomicus, articulando los principales supuestos de la economía actual con algunos de los aportes de la psicología cognitiva, la biología y las neurociencias cognitivas, que redunde en un nuevo paradigma integrador denominado psiconeuro- economía.

Métodos cuantitativos versus métodos cualitativos en la economía de los Negocios. ¿Es una metodología reconciliable?

Changes in the organizational environment over the last three decades have increasingly led to traditional theories being called into question, by stimulating the search for new models suited to the new realities of business economics, generating a crisis or scientific revolution that may result in the appearance of a new paradigm. The positivism-phenomenology duality provokes an “epistemological crisis” in research in management sciences. But the existence of both approaches does not imply the election of one scientific orientation in frontal opposition to the other. From these two conceptions of research procedure, the methods applied can be classed into groups, quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative methodologies places great confidence in the ability of data and measurement to represent opinions or concepts, while qualitative methodologies focus on words and relations to describe a reality or situation. While the diversity of methods contribute to its development and indicates the maturity of an area, the methods must be suitably implemented to obtain significant, valid results. The methodology to be used is not going to depend solely on the type of study or the reality under examination, but also on the stage the research process has reached.

From transistor to trapped-ion computers for quantum chemistry

Over the last few decades, quantum chemistry has progressed through the development of computational methods based on modern digital computers. However, these methods can hardly fulfill the exponentially-growing resource requirements when applied to large quantum systems. As pointed out by Feynman, this restriction is intrinsic to all computational models based on classical physics. Recently, the rapid advancement of trapped-ion technologies has opened new possibilities for quantum control and quantum simulations. Here, we present an efficient toolkit that exploits both the internal and motional degrees of freedom of trapped ions for solving problems in quantum chemistry, including molecular electronic structure, molecular dynamics, and vibronic coupling. We focus on applications that go beyond the capacity of classical computers, but may be realizable on state-of-the-art trapped-ion systems. These results allow us to envision a new paradigm of quantum chemistry that shifts from the current transistor to a near-future trapped-ion-based technology.

Identidad, imagen y reputación de la empresa: integración de propuestas teóricas para una gestión exitosa

[ES] El nuevo paradigma propuesto por el marketing corporativo identifica la gestión de la identidad, imagen y reputación de la empresa como elementos esenciales para la supervivencia y el éxito empresarial. Consecuentemente, la comprensión clara de estos tres conceptos es el primer requisito básico para las empresas interesadas en gestionar sus negocios en línea con las tendencias de marketing más actuales. No obstante, la proliferación de enfoques académicos en el estudio de la identidad, imagen y reputación dificulta la creación de un conocimiento integral en este particular. En el presente trabajo se propone una revisión teórica, integrando diversas perspectivas académicas, para comprender mejor los conceptos y las dimensiones de la identidad, imagen y reputación de la empresa. Dicha revisión de literatura facilita la mejor comprensión y gestión de estas tres vertientes del marketing corporativo tanto en el ámbito académico como profesional.