This paper addresses the question "why and how is it that we say the same thing differently to different people, or even to the same person in different circumstances?" We vary the content and form of our text in order to convey more information than is contained in the literal meanings of our words. This information expresses the speaker's interpersonal goals toward the hearer and, in general,...

This paper explores the possibilities of using audio and haptics for interpersonal communication via mobile devices. Drawing on the literature on current messaging practises, a new concept for multimodal messaging has been designed and developed. The Shake2Talk system allows users to construct audio-tactile messages through simple gesture interactions, and send these messages to other people. S...

Using the 1957-2004 data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we explore the effect of job authority in 1993 (at age 54) on the change in depressive symptoms between 1993 and 2004 (age 65) among white men and women. Within-gender comparisons indicate that women with job authority (defined as control over others' work) exhibit more depressive symptoms than women without job authority, whereas ...

How can we understand each other during communicative interactions? An influential suggestion holds that communicators are primed by each other's behaviors, with associative mechanisms automatically coordinating the production of communicative signals and the comprehension of their meanings. An alternative suggestion posits that mutual understanding requires shared conceptualizations of a signa...

This study aimed to know lupus outpatients' life experiences, in terms of the meanings they attributed to several phenomena associated to the process of becoming ill. Systemic Lupus Erythematosus is a chronic inflammatory disease, probably caused by a combination of inborn/hereditary predispositions and environmental factors, which leads to an abnormal stimulation of the immune system. Lupus li...

Quality is an illusive concept with different meanings to different people. Providers often define quality in terms of patient outcomes, professional standards of practice, predetermined criteria used to measure quality, and even subjective opinion. Patients describe quality in terms of the interpersonal aspects of care, how well they were treated, and the responsiveness of the provider to thei...

Objective To reflect on violence against children and adolescents in psychic suffering, and nursing care based on social phenomenology. Method Theoretical study based on the conceptions of Alfred Schütz. Results The subject in psychic suffering shows conflicts in family relationships, and is often immersed in a biographical situation that removes their autonomy, contributing violence itself. Vi...

People everywhere select among multiple alternatives, but are they always making choices? In five studies, we found that people in U.S. American contexts, where the disjoint model of agency is prevalent, are more likely than those in Indian contexts to construe their own and other individuals' behaviors as choices, to construe ongoing behaviors and behaviors recalled from memory as choices, to ...

Research on Jamaican mother-child relationships has had a limited focus on authoritarian parenting styles and selected discipline practices such as corporal punishment. This study examined Jamaican mothers' experiences of closeness and connectedness with their children to provide a holistic perspective on Jamaican-parent-child relationships. Thirty mothers (17 middle class and 13 lower class) l...

We propose that textual ‘style’ should be best defined as ‘non-denotational meaning’, i.e., those aspects of a text’s meaning that are mostly independent of what the text refers to in the world. To make this more concrete, we describe a linguistically well-motivated framework for computational stylistic analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics. This theory views a text as a realisation...