Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metap...

BACKGROUND Major depressive disorder afflicts an estimated 17% of individuals during their lifetimes at tremendous suffering and costs. Interpersonal psychotherapy and other psychodynamic therapies may be effective interventions for major depressive disorder, but the effects have only had limited assessment in systematic reviews. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Cochrane systematic review methodolo...

Can we trust our beliefs about the first impressions we make? The current article addresses this question by assessing ‘‘idiographic’’ meta-accuracy, or people’s ability to detect how another person views their characteristic pattern of traits, and people’s awareness of their level of meta-accuracy. Results from two samples suggest that people do achieve idiographic metaaccuracy (i.e., they kno...

Meta-analytic evidence supports a gene-environment (G×E) interaction between life stress and the serotonin transporter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) on depression, but few studies have examined factors that influence detection of this effect, despite years of inconsistent results. We propose that the "candidate environment" (akin to a candidate gene) is key. Theory and evidence implicate major stress...

BACKGROUND Professional competence is important in delivering high quality patient care, and it can be enhanced by reflection and reflective discourse e.g. in mentoring groups. However, students are often reluctant though to engage in this discourse. A group mentoring program involving all preclinical students as well as faculty members and co-mentoring clinical students was initiated at Witten...

This paper advocates the development of general models of dialog dynamics: across observables such as prosody, gesture, facial expression, proxemics, posture and gaze; across functions such as turn-taking, meta-communication, interpersonal relation management, and affect expression; and largely independently of semantic content. The paper also suggests a way to frame dialog dynamics as a machin...