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We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers’ choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rati...

National Innovation Systems are found to be impacted by different cultural facets of the referent ecosystem; yet the findings are conflicting. This study undertakes a cross-country comparison to de...

Jerome Kern's “All the Things You Are” has enjoyed a lengthy and varied history as a jazz standard. Like many other standards, hundreds of recordings of the tune exist, each rendition different fro...

Objective: Consistently strong negative associations have been found between self-compassion and depressive symptoms, but less is known about mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This study ...

This paper explores the functions of the prepositional phrase consisting of the preposition u ‘at’ and the genitive with human referent (henceforth indicated as u + GEN) in the history of Russian. ...

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a characteristic hallmark of cognition and therefore not surprisingly a central topic in cognitive science. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour commonly observed in strictly controlled lab environments generalizes to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (i.e. anticipatory eye movements as observed in the visual world paradigm) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of i) immersing participants in naturalistic everyday scenes, ii) increasing the number of distractor objects present, iii) manipulating the location of referents in central versus peripheral vision, and iv) modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents in the experiment. Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed, even in the presence of 10 objects (hereby testing working memory) and when only 25% of all sentences contained a visually present referent (hereby testing error-based learning). The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, when referents were placed in peripheral vision. Together, our findings suggest that working memory may play an important role in predictive processing in everyday communication, but only in contexts where upcoming referents have been explicitly attended to prior to encountering the spoken referential act. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand in hand in future studies of human predictive behaviour.

On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent....

An important research objective in modelling instruction is defining what students should learn about the model-referent relationship, as when unguided, they tend to errantly think of models as literal interpretations of their referents. Restating this problem we say students should learn about structure-preserving transformations between models and referents; including: what gets transformed, how it is transformed, and directions of information flow in transformation. To define what students should learn of this triumvirate, we introduce two explanatory statements: models are abstractions and models have transferability. We then investigated how readily students could learn about abstraction and transferability, and how this learning related to literal interpretation, by comparing pre- and posttest scores of modelling knowledge for students (n = 175) who participated in a modelling activity that provided experiences with abstraction and transferability. A control group (n=49) took identical tests but received no relevant instruction. Results showed that modelling students: (1) improved their capability to generate abstract models; (2) gained in their understanding that models represented their referents under transformation; and (3) consequently, did not think of models as literal interpretations. Lack of gains in the control ruled out a testing effect. We concluded that knowledge of structure-preserving transformations is a viable and valuable object of instruction.

Several studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) tend to use more pronouns than healthy aged adults when referring to entities during discourse. This referential behavior has been associated with the decrease of cognitive abilities, such as lexical retrieval difficulties or reduced abilities in working memory. However, the influence of certain important discourse factors on the referential choices made by people with AD has yet to be established. This study examines referential choices made at three discourse stages during narrative discourse (the introduction of a referent, the maintaining of the referent in focus, and the shift from one referent in focus to another). These referential choices are examined in increasingly complex referential contexts. In addition, this study investigates the relationships between referential choices and various cognitive abilities. To do so, the narrative discourses of 21 people with AD and 21 healthy adults were elicited using a newly developed storytelling in sequence task. The analyses focused on the production of three major referential expressions (indefinite expressions, definite expressions and pronouns) which are expected to vary according to discourse stage and the referential complexity of the stories. The results show that AD participants produce significantly fewer of the referential expressions expected at the introduction and shift stages than healthy aged adults produce. Nevertheless, the variation in the categories of referential expressions produced by the AD participants between the discourse stages is similar to that produced by the healthy aged adults, suggesting a preserved sensitivity to the factors manipulated in the task (i.e., discourse stages and referential complexity). This study also highlights the fact that different cognitive competences, especially executive abilities, are greatly involved in referential choices. The results add further evidence that referential choices rely on a variety of cognitive skills, depending on the discourse context in which they are made.

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing c...

For tourism to be entirely sustainable, one cannot travel. This is impossible. This paradox is particularly evident within last chance tourism (LCT), where tourists, seeking experiences with vanishing animals and land/seascapes, can accelerate the decline of those very attractions. Though recent studies hint that those with the highest intentions to visit LCT destinations are also some of the most concerned with climate change, no study has assessed the psychological drivers that may help explain why individuals are increasingly engaging in this paradox. Drawing on the VBN model, this research examines a theoretical framework to assess the psychological drivers behind individuals’ intention to engage in environmentally responsible behavior while traveling and, ultimately, their desire to participate in LCT. Results reveal that a set of environmentally referent cognitions (i.e., values, environmental worldview, awareness of consequences, and ascription of responsibility) lead to personal norms activation, which then influence tourists’ intent to behave in pro-sustainable ways and, ultimately, individuals’ intentions to engage in LCT. Findings are important as they further confirm the benefits of using VBN theory within an LCT context. For practitioners, this research strengthens the appeal of sustainable tourism operations to secure business and receive positive word-of-mouth from potential LCT tourists.

This article focuses on a common rhetorical referent in Egyptian public imagery and parlance–that of wasat (center) and its derivatives wasati/wasatiyya (centrist/centrism)–and discusses how it has been appropriated and molded in the sphere of party politics. Inductive in approach, it examines the rhetorical appropriations of the center ground by party officials, revealing not only its popularity as a marker of (ideological) self-positioning but its malleability and contextuality. The article concludes that in Egyptian party politics the center positioning of parties cannot be gauged exclusively from the study of party manifestos and/or expert surveys, but ought to include contextual analysis of how this and other ideological markers are appropriated and given meaning in elite rhetoric.

Climate change issue has evolved as a central policy of the Government of India. The crux of the policy is centered on the economic development. Internationally, India has been consistently...

Referring to things in the world - that woman, her idea, she - is a central component of language. Understanding reference requires the listener to keep track of the unfolding discourse history while integrating multiple sources of information to interpret the speech stream as it unfolds in time. Pronouns are a common way to establish reference. But due to their impoverished form, to understand them listeners must relate features of the pronoun (e.g., gender, animacy) with existing representations of potential discourse referents. Successful referential processing seems to place demands on memory. In a previous study, patients with hippocampal amnesia and healthy participants listened to short stories as their eye movements were monitored. When interpreting ambiguous pronouns, healthy participants demonstrated order-of-mention effects, whereby ambiguous pronouns are interpreted as referring to the first-mentioned referent in the story. By contrast, memory-impaired patients exhibited significant disruptions in their ability to use information about which character had been mentioned first to interpret pronouns. Repetition of the most salient information is a common clinical recommendation for improving pronoun resolution and communication in individuals with memory disorders (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) but this recommendation lacks an evidentiary basis. The present study seeks to determine whether the pronoun resolution performance of hippocampal patients can be improved, by repetition of the target referent, increasing its salience. Results indicate that patients with hippocampal damage demonstrate improved processing of pronouns following repetition of the target referent, but benefit from this repetition to a significantly smaller degree compared to healthy participants. These results provide further evidence for the role of the hippocampal-dependent memory system in language processing and point to the need for empirically tested communication interventions.

Background Characterizing productive language deficits following lesions to the right (RH) or left hemispheres (LH) is valuable in identifying appropriate therapeutic goals. While damage to the LH classically is associated with deficits in language, RH lesions also result in changed communication beyond prosody due to cognitive-linguistic effects. Cohesion, reference to introduced content across sentences within discourse, relies on a listener's clear and unambiguous understanding that a reference has occurred. To date, we are not aware of any prior work that has compared patterns of cohesive strategy between RH and LH lesioned individuals with cohesion deficits. Aims The purpose of the present study is to determine whether individuals with communication deficits following RH and LH lesions differ in the inclusion and clarity of cohesive markers. Methods & procedures Seventy-six RH samples and 145 LH samples were used for comparison of cohesion performance in a Cookie Theft picture description task. Cohesive ties were assessed following the protocol outlined in Liles and Coelho (1998). It was hypothesized that individuals with LH lesions would present a different pattern of cohesion behaviour than RH lesioned individuals when considered both acutely and chronically. Outcomes & results Overall, samples from LH and RH groups did not differ in word counts or cohesive marker usage. However, the patterns of markers they chose to employ were different. LH samples used conjunctions and personal pronouns more frequently and used lexical cohesive markers less frequently than RH samples. Acutely, patterns of cohesive marker use between LH and RH samples were more similar. Chronically, LH samples contained more personal pronouns and the differences in lexical cohesive markers remained unchanged. When cohesion was unsuccessful, LH and RH damage were associated with different patterns of error. LH samples tended to omit information needed to clarify the intended referent, resulting in incomplete cohesion errors. RH samples tended to sustain breakdowns in cohesion from sentence to sentence, not resolving incorrectly chosen pronouns or ambiguities left in their samples. Conclusions LH and RH lesions resulted in differing patterns of chosen cohesive markers and errors when cohesion was unsuccessful. This was particularly true in lexical cohesion, which has been far less studied than closed-class cohesive markers like referential pronouns. It was also noted that cohesive behavior did not appear to "recover" for either group, suggesting spontaneous recovery is minimal and present strategies for language therapy may not effectively address this linguistic function.

This project focuses on what we call referent-specific judgments (i.e., judgments that require specific comparisons). They can have many forms—including comparative judgments, probability judgments, proportion estimates, and ranks—but the different forms seem vulnerable to similar biases. We present a Referent-Specific Judgment Framework (RSJF) aimed at providing a more organized understanding of these biases and the explanations that have been proposed for them across distinct literatures. Two studies tested predictions of RSJF as they apply to similarities and differences in bias among comparative and probability judgments that qualify as referent-specific judgments. The results revealed the expected similarities and differences, and they more generally supported the utility of theorizing about referent-specific judgments as a coherent class of judgments.

The concept of human security became popular in the 1990s as a new framework for conceptualising security, shifting its referent from states to human beings and expanding its scope. While acknowled...

Two experiments investigated whether listeners mandatorily apply the Gricean maxim of quantity. In conversation, it is infelicitous to use a label that does not distinguish the referent (“the car” when there are two cars) or to use an unnecessarily specific label (“the convertible” when only one car is present). Subjects verified labels that picked out one of two objects, which was visually cued. Labels were at the basic or subordinate level, and the objects were related (two cars) or not (car and boat). Presuppositions were manipulated by varying determiners (“the/a car”). Responses were slower and less accurate when the basic-level name was used in the context of two related objects, suggesting that listeners prefer more distinguishable names even when the referent is unambiguous. Overly specific names did not incur a cost. Manipulating determiners had little effect. These results argue against a general use of Gricean maxims or presuppositions when identifying referents.

There is a school of thought that holds the view that the concept of race has a biological referent. In other words, they are of the view that race is biologically real. However, there is a general...

Learning by observing the behaviors and choices of other (referent) firms is an important way for firms to augment their stock of knowledge. However, new ventures face unique challenges with vicarious learning. In particular, their referent firms may not be spatially close, which makes it difficult to collect and make sense of information. In a field study of 175 high-technology new ventures, we examine and find that distance and the maturity of the legal environments of the observed firms, along with the moderating effect of the size of referent firms, can influence new ventures’ observation and processing of information. Such learning is reflected by the perceived speed of new ventures fulfilling ISO 9000 certification.

Based on one specially created corpus of U.S. cybersecurity-related laws, this study employs the corpus approach to examine the referent objects and securitizing actors in U.S. cybersecurity legisl...

The visual world paradigm (VWP) studies of spoken word recognition rely on a linking hypothesis that connects lexical activation to the probability of looking at the referent of a word. The standard hypothesis is that fixation probabilities track activation levels transformed via the Luce Choice Rule. Under this assumption, given enough power, any difference between positive activations should be detectable using VWP. We argue that looking at a referent of a word is a decision, made when the word’s activation exceeds a context-specific threshold. Subthreshold activations do not drive saccades, and differences among such activations are undetectable in VWP. Evidence is provided by VWP experiments on Japanese. Bayesian analyses indicate a relatively high threshold: saccades to cohort competitors do not exceed those to unrelated distractors unless the cohort competitor shares the initial CVC with the target. We argue that threshold setting constitutes an understudied source of variability in VWP data.

Children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar object when asked to identify the referent of a novel label. Current accounts of this so-called disambiguation effect do not ad...

The article describes EU cross-sectoral policy work on online information threats, focusing on the intersection between values and 'referent objects'. Examining discussions on strategic communicati...

Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker’s intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker’s gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.

Events are a core concept of spatial information, but location-based social media (LBSM) provide information on reactions to events. Individuals have varied degrees of agency in initiating, reacting to or modifying the course of events, and reactions include observations of occurrence, expressions containing sentiment or emotions, or a call to action. Key characteristics of reactions include referent events and information about who reacted, when, where and how. Collective reactions are composed of multiple individual reactions sharing common referents. They can be characterized according to the following dimensions: spatial, temporal, social, thematic and interlinkage. We present a conceptual framework, which allows characterization and comparison of collective reactions. For a thematically well-defined class of event such as storms, we can explore differences and similarities in collective attribution of meaning across space and time. Other events may have very complex spatio-temporal signatures (e.g. political processes such as Brexit or elections), which can be decomposed into series of individual events (e.g. a temporal window around the result of a vote). The purpose of our framework is to explore ways in which collective reactions to events in LBSM can be described and underpin the development of methods for analysing and understanding collective reactions to events.

A critical challenge for human rights and human security alike turns on diminution of subject audibility and voice and the reduction of rights-bearing subjects to mere referent objects of security....

Despite the fact that the Korean nuclear crisis is one of the most protracted security issues in the world, the research analysing the crisis from the perspective of securitisation theory is curiously absent. This article attempts to pin down some distinguishing features of South Korea’s securitisation of the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, thereby investigating why one rarely sees the implications of securitisation theory in the way that the Copenhagen School theorists would suggest. Borrowing the key components of securitisation theory—existential threats, referent objects and extraordinary measures—this article suggests three elusive characteristics of the South Korean actors’ speech acts as sources highlighting the dilemma. To make the article’s arguments clearer, I hold Floyd’s classification of securitisation theory, which separated the securitisation process into two different stages: securitising move and security practice. While acknowledging the importance of the differences between...

We investigated how decision-making is affected by the visual presentation of flood hazard information. We exposed participants to different formats of flood hazard information while they simulated selecting a property to purchase. We compared three flood hazard formats: (i) maps currently used by the UK Environment Agency, (ii) tables that present flood level and frequency information and (iii) graphical representations depicting the level-frequency combination using a cartoon house image as a physical referent. In the experiment participants were presented, via computer screen, side-by-side information about two houses in a series of trials. Participants made a forced choice preference judgement between 108 different pairs of houses to indicate which they would purchase. Our findings indicate that when hazard information is presented in map format, individuals are less accurate in selecting lower-hazard houses, compared to when the same information is presented as a graphic representation of a house or as a table. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Human security as a concept contends that the appropriate referent for peace and security should be the individual instead of the state. This Essay explores whether a human security-centred approac...

Drawing on the choice and self-referent processing literatures, we hypothesized that the act of making consumer choices will augment narcissism, because it directs attention to the self (i.e., increases selfreferencing). Results of three experiments provided support for the proposed path from choice to narcissism via self-referencing (indirect effect), but not for the path from choice to narcissism (total effect). This pattern, first reported in Experiment 1, held only for agentic choices (e.g., products for personal use), which prompt thoughts about the self, and not for communal choices (e.g., charitable organizations), which prompt thoughts about others (Experiment 2). Also, this pattern generalized across agentic choices of public and private products (Experiment 3). We consider theoretical and practical implications.

This article explains the implications and benefits of founding transdisciplinary collaborations of knowledge production in critical realism. We call such equal partnerships of researchers and practitioners knowledge alliances. Drawing on the distinction between the referent to which we refer (the object that our research is about) and our references (our research about this object), we show that practitioners can contribute to the process of knowledge production by providing access to referents and producing references but also by achieving societal relevance. In order to accomplish excellence, knowledge production should be organized in ways that engage different types of knowledge in a constructive interplay and use the respective strong points of researchers and practitioners. Abduction and retroduction, two modes of inference vital to critical realism, are particularly inclined to benefit from involving practitioners in knowledge production. We call such an approach potential-oriented and put it in contrast to problem-orientation and the empiricism of evidence-based research and policy-making.

This study introduces the referent network, the set of relations defined by knowing others reward levels, and makes initial predictions about how the structure of that network shapes perceptions of...

Integral to employees’ working lives are the HR policies and more importantly, the practices that follow those and their implementation, which employees experience directly. To date, research on HR implementation considers how HRM is ‘done to’ employees by management and therefore ignores the agency of individuals to shape how HRM is ‘done to them’. Taking the perspective of employees, in a qualitative study of female lawyers, this paper examines employees’ roles in shaping HR implementation, addressing a lack of understanding about the role of ‘others’ in the process. Drawing on the concept of social power, the article focuses on the implementation of agile working practices within UK-based law firms. It finds that despite lacking legitimate position power to influence processes, employees draw on a variety of other power sources (e.g. referent, information, coercive) and tactics (e.g. leveraging membership of professional networks) in order to influence their working environment with respect to HR policy and practice, particularly in response to perceived implementation gaps. The current study underlines that employees may be integral to bridging the gap between policy and practice and therefore to ensuring the link between HRM and organisational performance. It also proposes that behavioural responses to HR practices should be considered in future theorising of the HRM-performance relationship.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problem of existential import in Abelard's modal logic, and to ask whether the system of logical relationships that he proposes for modal propositions maintains its validity when some of the terms included in these propositions are empty. In the following, I first argue that, just as in the case of non-modal propositions, Abelard interprets modal propositions as having existential import, so that it is a necessary condition for the truth of propositions like ‘It is possible for my son to be alive’ or ‘it is necessary that all men are animals’ that their subjects’ referents exist. Then, I present the schemata of inferences that Abelard proposes to describe the logical behaviour of de rebus modal propositions. I argue that these systems of relations are valid only as long as all the terms contained in the formulas have an existing referent. I also claim that Abelard was aware of this difficulty (at least in the Logica Ingredientibus), and, accordingly, he explicit...

Attempts at combining Uexkull’s ideas with those of Peirce within a single quasi-discipline called ‘biosemiotics’ are ill-founded. Peirce’s ‘interpretant’ sensu lato refers to two qualitatively different mental states, one relating to indexes and icons (INT 1) and the other to symbols (INT 2). Animal communication is dyadic – the referent is a directly induced mental state (INT 1). Glottocentric communication is triadic because the connection between symbol and INT 1 is mediated by INT 2. Whereas the gradualist view of glottogenesis is erroneous, Muller’s and Chomsky’s saltationist theories may imply that the idea of language Rubicon is anti-evolutionary. However, the views of Pavlov and Vygotsky and of their modern followers, Deacon and Tomasello, while being Darwinian, support the saltationist scenario. The emergence of the second signal system, of symbols, and of INT 2 was a psychological leap. In human communication, apart from the semiotic triangle (INT 1 – INT 2 – symbol), the dyadic relatio...

Previous design research has demonstrated how epistemic uncertainty engenders localized, creative reasoning, including analogizing and mental simulation. We analyzed not just the short-term, localized effects of epistemic uncertainty on creative processing and information selection, but also its long-term impact on downstream creative processes. Our hypothesis was that heightened levels of uncertainty associated with a particular cognitive referent would engender: (1) immediate creative elaboration of that referent aimed at resolving uncertainty and determining information selection; and (2) subsequent attentive returns to that cognitive referent at later points in time, aimed at resolving lingering uncertainty and determining information selection. Findings: First – contrary to expectations – we observed that increased epistemic certainty (rather than increased epistemic uncertainty) in relation to cognitive referents triggered immediate, creative reasoning and information elaboration. Second, epistemic uncertainty was, as predicted, found to engender subsequent attentive returns to cognitive referents. Third, although epistemic uncertainty did not predict the selection of information, both immediate creative elaboration and subsequent attentive returns did predict information selection, with subsequent attentive returns being the stronger predictor. Our findings hold promise for identifying more global impacts of epistemic uncertainty on creative design cognition possibly mediated through the establishment of lasting associations with cognitive referents.

This article draws on labor history and science and technology studies to propose a method, and to provide an example, of historical analysis that is responsive to the conceptual categories that arise out of ethnographic accounts of individuals’ lived experiences. Using an ‘ontological tool-box’, this article follows various enactments of consumer appliances and, along with them, ideas of what it is to be a productive worker in a small appliance repair shop and across the practices of certain institutions of disciplinary power. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this article reveals that, rather than being inevitable or essential, all the categories used to organize our world, whether referent to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities, which even historians are implicated in reproducing.

This article provides a critical exposition of the epistemological underpinnings of a recent redevelopment of Grounded Theory (GT) methodology, ‘Constructivist’ GT. Although proffered as freed from the ‘objectivist’ tenets of the original version, critical examination exposes the essentialism threaded through its integral analytic practices. Movement towards a position critical of an external referent, discernible within Wittgenstein’s later works, is the apparent target of Constructivist GT. However, despite its championing of indeterminate, multiple meanings, the notion of correspondence to the world, discernible within the Tractatus, persists. In order for Constructivist GT to achieve coherence, Socio-Linguistic Realism is suggested here as a stance which would help sharpen its distinction from the atomism of the original version of GT. However, in order for such repositioning to extend to all its analytic practices, particularly coding, further development would be required so that it can acco...

Much of the current conversation about social justice, economic responsibility and individual self-realization is informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between capitalist and socialist modernities. The Soviet Union’s variety of socialism understandably serves as a critical master referent in this conversation. In this regard, a dominant historical narrative that ties the history of Soviet socialism to the Bolshevik origins imposes serious limitation to available depictions of socialism and histories of the twentieth century. This article turns the Bolshevik fundamentals assigned to the Soviet project into a problem of historical analysis and argues that the Soviet experience has more than one normative vision of socialism to offer. The goal is to foreground the divergence of normative conceptions of the socialist society and individual by historicizing the two principal and presently closely identified ideological-educational undertakings: those of the New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’....

This article considers ways in which signing poets use space to produce visual images, creating aesthetic and metaphorical effects using the options available to sign languages and their bodies, whether in a solo performance or jointly constructed as duets or living tableaus. Close reading of sign language poetry shows poets use their bodies to demonstrate poetic images directly, by embodying the referent so they ‘become’ it, or by showing it through a transfer onto different parts of the body. Even richer images with additional metaphorical meaning arise when poets perform with others, especially to convey concepts of contrast or unity. The article draws primarily upon poetic performances in South African Sign Language (SASL) at Signing Hands Across the Water 2, an international sign poetry festival held in Johannesburg in 2014. It also considers works in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and British Sign Language (BSL) – two languages whose rich poetic activity has not yet received much research ...

Purpose: The sales literature shows that motivation is a key determinant of salesperson performance. The literature also suggests that how managers use social power will have an effect on important organizational outcomes, including salesperson performance. This study examines the five bases of social power that sales managers use (reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, and expert) as moderating influences in the salesperson motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic)—salesperson performance linkage.Methodology/approach: Data was collected from 128 salespeople using a cross industry survey. Eight hypotheses were developed and tested using SmartPLS (partial least squares).Findings: The authors found support for five of eight hypotheses. Results and significant findings suggest that sales managers can impact sales performance in extrinsically motivated salespeople by using coercive and legitimate power. For intrinsically motivated salespeople, sales managers can impact sales performance by using coercive,...

Many charity organizations face ongoing challenges to promote monetary donations and other helping behaviors. Integrating the literature on the role of emotion in persuasive communication and intercultural communication, two studies were conducted to explore the impact of moral emotions and self-construal in charity advertising. A survey investigated the extent to which moral emotions with different referent of focus operated differently among individuals with varying self-construal in affecting the intent to donate. An experiment examined the impact of ego- versus other-focused emotional appeals in the processing of charity advertising. Results indicated that moral emotions significantly influenced participants' purchase intention towards social-cause products. In addition, self-construal moderated the influence of positive moral emotions on purchase intention, as well as the influence of positive emotional appeals on the intent to donate. Specifically, the persuasive effectiveness was enhanced w...

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent’s existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent’s information status as inferred or brand-new) and a referent’s unique identifiability (as indicated by a referent’s uniqueness status) affect (1) ambiguous pronoun resolution in comprehension and (2) the bias to mention a referent again and make it topic in discourse planning. In Experiment 1, a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we found that ambiguous pronouns are more likely to be interpreted as linked to the direct object of the preceding sentence when the associated referent was inferred and unique than when it was inferred and non-unique. For brand-new referents, uniqueness status did not affect ambiguous pronoun resolution. In Experiment 2, a story continuation experiment, we fou...

Drawing on both anthropology and philosophy, this paper argues that the profiled form of the human hand is a universally recognizable image; one whose significance transcends temporally and geographically defined cultural divisions, and represents the earliest known artistic symbol of the human form. The unique co-occurrence of five properties in the image of the human hand and the way it is recognized support this argument, including that it is: (1) unmistakably a hand, (2) unmistakably human, (3) a universal point of interface, (4) a universal referent of scale, and (5) an easy way of making a complex shape. This underappreciated aspect of hand art makes these images among the most important forms of early artistic expression encountered in the prehistoric record.

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor it brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative this directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking reading experiment confirm that preferences for it and this differ as predicted. Moreover, a sentence-completion experiment revealed converging evidence for this difference, with clear differences in antecedent preferences for it and this. Overall, findings show that the processing and use of anaphoric expressions is affected by the interaction between the lexical characteristics of referential forms and different types of referent.

Effective communication requires adjusting one’s discourse to be understood by the addressee. While some suggest that choices of referring expressions are dependent on the addressee’s accessibility to the referent there is also evidence for an egocentric bias in speech production. This study relied on two new experimental tasks designed to assess whether speakers adapt their choices of referential expressions when introducing movie characters that are either likely known or likely unknown by their addressee and when maintaining or reintroducing these characters at a later point in the discourse. Results revealed an adjustment to the addressee in the use of character’s names (increased for likely known characters) and definite expressions (increased for likely unknown characters) observed at all the discourse stages. Use of indefinite expressions and names was affected by the participant’s own knowledge specifically when introducing the characters. These results indicate that speakers take their addressee’s likely knowledge into account at multiple discourse stages.

John Maynard Keynes’s phrase Low Animal Spirits describes a paradox found in human nature that locates a herd-like mentality, as well as unpredictability and uncertainty, at the core of international finance: a model of mass behavioural procedures. Low Animal Spirits was a work made in collaboration with Richard Cochrane that took its cue from the oft-mentioned loss of the referent in both language and the economy that was speculated about wildly after the economic collapse of 2007/08. It employs a high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithm written by Cochrane (a former Vice President of Goldman Sachs), and ‘deals’ in words sourced from global news feeds for virtual ‘profit’, whilst speculating on their usage. The analysis produces new phenomena in the form of speculative headlines tweeted from the twitterbot @LowAnimalSpirit. As various social productions, including news, are increasingly enmeshed within algorithmic procedures, through their production, distribution and reception, it seemed an apt mo...

The perspective-adjustment model of language interpretation assumes an initial egocentric stage in comprehension that is only later adjusted to the interlocutor's perspective. Moreover, substantial processing resources are involved in perspective-taking. However, many experiments in the perspective-adjustment framework do not control for visual salience and semantic typicality of referents. We conducted a referential task experiment focusing on salience and typicality as potential factors that may increase the cognitive costs of an interpretation. We additionally manipulated the interactive versus non-interactive nature of the task (with or without an interlocutor) to test the effects of perspective-taking on interpretation. Saliency and typicality of referents influenced the interpretation process when they were in conflict with the perspective-taking factor. Also, the interactive situations were more cognitively demanding than the non-interactive ones. These results are consistent with the constraint-ba...