Search Results (225)

Background/Objectives: Gambling disorder (GD) is characterized by a high prevalence of co-occurring psychiatric disorders, including personality disorders (PDs), which may negatively influence clinical presentation, treatment outcomes, and relapse rates. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesize recent evidence regarding the association between GD and formally diagnosed PD and/or diagnostically anchored PD symptomatology, and to describe the main personality dimension most frequently reported in affected individuals. Methods: A systematic search was conducted in the PubMed and Dialnet databases for articles published between 30 November 2015 and 30 November 2025, according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA 2020) guidelines. PubMed was selected as the primary database because it is the most comprehensive source for peer-reviewed biomedical and psychiatric research, while Dialnet was included to complement PubMed by ensuring coverage of peer-reviewed psychiatric and psychological research published in other Romance-language journals, which are often underrepresented in international databases. The methodological quality and risk of bias of the included studies were evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Checklist for cross-sectional studies and the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale (NOS) for observational studies. Data extraction and synthesis were performed manually by two independent reviewers. Eight studies, predominantly cross-sectional in nature, assessing exclusively formally diagnosed personality disorders in adult individuals (≥18 years) diagnosed with GD were included. Results: Eight studies met the inclusion criteria, including a total of 4607 patients with GD. Across studies, personality pathology was highly prevalent among individuals with GD, with antisocial and borderline personality disorders most consistently reported. Elevated levels of impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and narcissistic traits were frequently observed and were additionally associated with greater gambling severity, earlier onset, and poorer clinical outcomes. Antisocial personality symptoms were strongly linked to high-risk gambling subtypes, while obsessive–compulsive personality traits showed a more heterogeneous relationship with gambling severity. Conclusions: These results underscore the importance of personality assessment in individuals with GD and highlight the need for longitudinal studies using standardized diagnostic frameworks to inform tailored prevention and treatment strategies. Full article

Despite the censorship imposed by the GHQ in postwar Japan, the period saw the launch of numerous fetish magazines featuring explicit sexual expression. These magazines sometimes complied with the censorship of sexual expression and sexual norms and resisted it at other times. This niche print culture enabled the emergence of Japanese gay magazines like Sabu (1974–2002), the primary focus of this paper. Although previous studies have described Sabu primarily as a hardcore SM magazine, this paper argues that it also functioned as a space for articulating gay identities and resisting social discrimination. Through a close analysis of the magazine’s reader correspondence sections, the study demonstrates how Sabu emphasized personal acts of coming out and expressions of solidarity in response to the AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, it shows that Sabu sought to diversify stereotypical representations of gay men by attempting a crossover with the male–male romances created by and for women. By examining Sabu as a case study, this paper re-evaluates the magazine’s place in the history of Japanese gay magazines and explores how such publication employed erotic representations as a medium for the articulation and strengthening of minority identities. Full article

This article contends that Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) uses digital filmmaking to re-animate the commodified image of Priscilla Presley, privileging surface and affect over historical realism. Though Coppola predominantly shoots on film, her decision to film Priscilla digitally—an adaptation of Presley’s memoir—marks a formal shift in her filmography aligned with her ongoing exploration of feminine interiority and aesthetic control. The film traces Priscilla’s life from her first encounter with Elvis Presley to their separation, presenting a visually stylized narrative that immerses viewers in what Walter Benjamin terms a phantasmagoria: a spectacle of commodification divorced from historical consciousness (The Arcades Project). Rather than striving for veracity, Coppola evokes a nostalgic atmosphere that re-members Priscilla through pre-circulated cultural images. This article examines Coppola’s often-criticized “flat” visual style in relation to the Freudian uncanny, i.e., the estrangement of the familiar through temporal and affective distortion. Coppola manipulates digital temporality—looping and flattening time—to produce an oneiric repetition that heightens the artifice of Presley’s image while emotionally distancing viewers. These formal strategies dissipate emotional depth but intensify aesthetic control. Finally, this article considers the political valences of Coppola’s digital aesthetics in a media landscape that both enables visibility and enacts erasure. Full article

Text-to-image generative models can be used to imitate historical artistic styles, but their effectiveness in doing so remains unclear. In this work, we propose an evaluation framework that leverages expert knowledge from art history and visual semiotics and combines it with quantitative analysis to assess stylistic fidelity. Three experts rated both historical artwork production and images generated with Midjourney v6 for five major movements (Abstract Art, Cubism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism) and ten associated painters (male and female pairs), using nine visual criteria grounded in Greimas’s plastic categories and Wölfflin’s stylistic oppositions. Ratings were expressed as 95% intervals on continuous 0–100 scales and compared using our Relative Ratings Map (RRMap), which summarizes relative shifts, relative dispersion, and distributional overlap (via the Bhattacharyya coefficient). They were also discretized in four quality ratings (bad, stereotype, fair, excellent). The results show strong inter-expert variability and more moderate intra-expert effects tied to movements, criteria, criterion groups and modalities. Experts tend to agree that the model sometimes aligns with historical trends but also sometimes produces stereotyped versions of a movement or painter, or even completely missed its target, although no unanimous consensus emerges. We conclude that evaluating generative models requires both expert-driven interpretation and quantitative tools, and that stylistic fidelity is hard to quantify even with a rigorous framework. Full article

Romanian popular music has had a storied history across the last century and a half. Incorporating different influences at different times, today it boasts a wide range of both autochthonous and imported genres, such as traditional folk music, rock, rap, pop, and manele, to name a few. We aim to trace the linguistic differences between the lyrics of these genres using natural language processing and a computational linguistics approach by studying the prosodic, stylistic, syntactic, and sentiment-based features of each genre. For this purpose, we have crawled a dataset of ~14,000 Romanian songs from publicly available websites along with the user-provided genre labels, and characterized each song and each genre, respectively, with regard to these features, discussing similarities and differences. We improve on existing tools for Romanian language natural language processing by building a lexical analysis library well suited to song lyrics or poetry which encodes a set of 17 linguistic features. In addition, we build lexical analysis tools for profanity-based features and improve the SentiLex sentiment analysis library by manually rebalancing its lexemes to overcome the limitations introduced by it having been machine translated into Romanian. We estimate the accuracy gain using a benchmark Romanian sentiment analysis dataset and register a 25% increase in accuracy over the SentiLex baseline. The contribution is meant to describe the characteristics of the Romanian expression of autochthonous as well as international genres and provide technical support to researchers in natural language processing, musicology or the digital humanities in studying the lyrical content of Romanian music. We have released our data and code for research use. Full article

This article explores the concept of makhloket (dispute, disagreement) as a foundational principle of rabbinic discourse, contrasting it with Western philosophical and political notions of conflict. Beginning with Mishnah Avot 5:17, which distinguishes between disputes “for the sake of heaven” (exemplified by Hillel and Shammai) and those that are not (exemplified by Korah), the essay argues that makhloket is not simply about contesting authority but about constituting a mode of discourse. To situate this, the article engages Heraclitus’s fragment on polemos as the “father of all things,” and traces its divergent readings in Heidegger and Schmitt, who grounded politics in existential struggle. Drawing on Gregory Fried’s analysis, the essay shows how Heidegger oscillated between interpreting polemos as Kampf (struggle for domination) and Auseinandersetzung (productive confrontation), thereby staging a conflict about conflict itself. The rabbinic model of makhloket is then read as an alternative to these traditions: not a war of logoi for supremacy, nor a negation of conflict in the name of unity, but a discourse generated through disagreement. By juxtaposing Talmudic and philosophical notions of conflict, the essay argues that rabbinic makhloket constitutes a polemical poetics that endures by refusing closure, offering a distinct vision of reason, tradition, and political thought. Full article

This paper examines the reportative evidential dizque in Andean Spanish as spoken in Ecuador and Peru. Taking, as a starting point, the synchronic and diachronic syntactic analyses of this type of markers in Romance that have been discussed in the literature, I propose an analysis that makes explicit how their syntax is mapped into semantics, and provide a semantics that captures the evidential and lack of certainty implications of dizque. I argue that expressions with dizque must be uttered when reportative evidence is available to the speaker, and, building on previous literature, that the lack of certainty flavor that these expressions have is a not-at-issue entailment. I show a number of consequences that follow from this kind of approach. I further point out how my proposal can capture the cross-Romance variation that is found in this domain, and discuss some key differences between dizque and other reportative evidentials cross-linguistically in connection to the expression of lack of certainty. Full article

The aim of the present paper is to further develop a theory on the flow of linguistic variables making a sentence, namely, the transformation of (a) characters into words; (b) words into word intervals; and (c) word intervals into sentences. The relationship between two linguistic variables is studied as a communication channel whose performance is determined by the slope of their regression line and by their correlation coefficient. The mathematical theory is applicable to any field/specialty in which a linear relationship holds between two variables. The signal-to-noise ratio $\Gamma$ is a figure of merit of a channel being “deterministic”, i.e., a channel in which the scattering of the data around the regression line is negligible. The larger $\Gamma$ is, the more the channel is “deterministic”. In conclusion, humans have invented codes whose sequences of symbols that make words cannot vary very much when indicating single physical or mental objects of their experience (larger $\Gamma )$. On the contrary, large variability (smaller $\Gamma )$ is achieved by introducing interpunctions to make word intervals, and word intervals make sentences that communicate concepts. This theory can inspire new research lines in cognitive science research. Full article

In an increasingly globalized world, learning foreign languages (FLs) is essential, particularly in education. Multilingualism is critical due to the multicultural and interconnected nature of societies, yet early third language acquisition (TLA) is not widely adopted in schools. This study investigates how the simultaneous learning of Spanish first language (L1), a second language (L2), and a third language (L3) impacts oral language (OL) development in L1 and whether prior L2 knowledge aids L3 acquisition. The study involved bilingual (L1 + L2) and trilingual (L1 + L2 + L3) learners. Data were collected using the Navarre Oral Language Test-Revised, which evaluates phonological, morphological–syntactic, lexical–semantic, and pragmatic competencies in oral communication. Findings revealed that trilingual learners showed better OL development in L1 compared to bilingual learners. Additionally, prior L2 knowledge facilitated L3 learning, highlighting the benefits of early trilingual education. The study demonstrates that early trilingual learning positively impacts OL development in L1. These results contribute significantly to research on TLA and the advancement of multilingual education. Full article

This study investigates how Mexican Spanish/U.S. English heritage bilinguals process scope ambiguities in sentences containing the existential quantifiers a/una and the universal quantifiers every/cada in English and Spanish. Sentences like ‘A person bought every book’ are syntactically ambiguous in both languages, allowing for multiple possible interpretations. Research suggests that one interpretation is often preferred due to lower cognitive demand, though degree of preference varies across languages. Notably, heritage bilinguals may have distinct interpretation preferences in each language, highlighting the complexity of bilingual processing. Sixty Spanish/English heritage bilinguals (Age M = 25.48, SD = 2.65) completed a timed and graded truth-value judgment task in both languages, along with language proficiency tests. We analyzed interpretation ratings, response times, and potential effects of proficiency. Results reveal nearly identical preferred interpretation ratings (Spanish: M = 4.19, SD = 0.56; English: M = 4.14, SD = 0.66) and response times (Spanish: M = 6.97 s, SD = 2.70; English: M = 6.67 s, SD = 1.80) across languages, with one interpretation consistently favored and associated with faster response times. Language proficiency had no significant impact. Our experimental findings offer new insights into heritage bilinguals’ processing of competing linguistic structures and inform models of bilingual syntax and cognitive flexibility. Full article

The spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic raised widespread concerns about public health communication and media reliability. In this study, we focus on these issues as they manifested in Romanian-language media and employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to classify misinformation, with a particular focus on super-narratives—broad thematic categories that capture recurring patterns and ideological framings commonly found in pandemic-related fake news, such as anti-vaccination discourse, conspiracy theories, or geopolitical blame. While some of the categories reflect global trends, others are shaped by the Romanian cultural and political context. We introduce a novel dataset of fake news centered on COVID-19 misinformation in the Romanian geopolitical context, comprising both annotated and unannotated articles. We experimented with multiple LLMs using zero-shot, few-shot, supervised, and semi-supervised learning strategies, achieving the best results with an LLaMA 3.1 8B model and semi-supervised learning, which yielded an F1-score of 78.81%. Experimental evaluations compared this approach to traditional Machine Learning classifiers augmented with morphosyntactic features. Results show that semi-supervised learning substantially improved classification results in both binary and multi-class settings. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of semi-supervised adaptation in low-resource, domain-specific contexts, as well as the necessity of enabling real-time misinformation tracking and enhancing transparency through claim-level explainability and fact-based counterarguments. Full article

This article examines two Caribbean texts which use 20th-century journeys on passenger ships as opportunities to investigate ways in which colonial anxieties of race and gender are worked out through nautical desires. Mayra Montero’s erotic novel La última noche que pasé contigo (1991) and Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille (2020) both wrestle with the imagined and material consequences of pervasive anti-blackness. They also raise crucial questions about embodied practices of struggle for survival. My analysis seeks to answer the following questions. What happens when anti-blackness masquerades as desire? How do we read and represent an anti-blackness that seeks to consume parts of the Caribbean and then dispense as refuse with what it sees as superfluous? What reading practices might we adopt in order to make sense of Caribbean bodies dehumanized on their own shores, and what narrative solutions might Caribbean fiction propose that might begin to restore humanity and value to these bodies? Full article

Despite extensive prevention strategies in Spain since the 1980s, gender-based violence, including among adolescents, remains prevalent, as observed in the Romance SUCC-ED Project (R&D&I Operating Programme ERDF Andalusia 2014–2020). This research study investigates the dimensions, meanings, relationships, and practices shaping the culture of romance in digital Andalusian adolescence (12–16 years) and its potential impact on school trajectories in Compulsory Secondary Education. Based on the premise that equality-focused relationship education is key to preventing gender violence, the study employs an ethnographic methodology with 12 Andalusian school case studies (4 out of them are located in rural areas) and 220 in-depth interviews (126 girls, 57.3%; 94 boys, 42.7%). This article aims to empirically explain gender violence in early adolescence by analysing the culture of romance as an explanatory factor. Findings reveal an interconnected model where dimensions (love, couple, sexuality, pornography, social networks, and cultural references), meanings (constructed by adolescents within each of them), relationships (partner), and practices (control and jealousy) reinforce romanticised femininity and dominant masculinity, thus explaining the high incidence of gender-based violence among students in the study. Full article

Fluid effects are important in films and advertisements, where their realism and aesthetic quality directly impact the visual experience. With the rapid advancement of digital technology and computer-aided design (CAD), modern visual effects are used to simulate various water-related phenomena, such as flowing water, ocean waves, and raindrops. However, creating these realistic effects is not solely dependent on advanced software and hardware; it also requires an understanding of the technical and artistic aspects of visual effects artists. In the creation process, the artist must possess a keen aesthetic sense and innovative thinking to craft stunning visual effects to overcome technological constraints. Whether depicting the grandeur of turbulent ocean scenes or the romance of gentle rain, the artist needs to transform fluid effects into expressive visual language to enhance emotional impact, aligning with the storyline and the director’s vision. The production process of fluid effects typically involves the following critical steps. First, the visual effects artist utilizes CAD-based tools, particle systems, or fluid simulation software to model the dynamic behavior of water. This process demands a solid foundation in physics and the ability to adjust parameters flexibly according to the specific needs of the scene, ensuring that the fluid motion appears natural and smooth. Next, in the rendering stage, the simulated fluid is transformed into realistic imagery, requiring significant computational power and precise handling of lighting effects. Finally, in the compositing stage, the fluid effects are seamlessly integrated with live-action footage, making the visual effects appear as though they are parts of the actual scene. In this study, the technical details of creating fluid effects using free software such as Blender were explored. How advanced CAD tools are utilized to achieve complex water effects was also elucidated. Additionally, case studies were conducted to illustrate the creative processes involved in visual effects production to understand how to seamlessly blend technology with artistry to create unforgettable visual spectacles. Full article