That Gut Feeling: The Role of Inflammatory Cytokines in Depression Among Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

There is mounting evidence of an associative link between inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and clinical depression. In the first major treatise on the eponymous disease, Burrill Crohn himself noted that: “The number of cases of ileitis that have been rescued from institutions for the treatment of mental diseases emphasises not the personality but the end results of the drain of the disease upon the psychic constitution of the sufferer.” In the 70 years since that prescient statement, a high incidence of neuropsychiatric symptoms (depression, anxiety, cognitive fatigue, and sleep disorders) in patients with IBD has been frequently observed. Since patients with depression have significantly increased rates of relapse, surgery, hospitalisation, and suicide, recognising and treating depression is of paramount importance. In this narrative review, the authors will trace some of the biochemical connections between intestinal inflammation and neuropsychiatric symptoms and focus on strategies to manage both. Additionally, the authors offer a cautionary reflection on the extant need for widespread screening for depression among patients with IBD.

Commissions

Commissions have a poor reputation in contemporary critical discourse. Too strong is the associative link with the grand seigneurs of times past, who relied on poets to praise their conquests. But precisely because they have such a proven track record of controlling historical and political narratives, commissions are an undeniably strong example of ‘worlding’ through authorship. And by no means can this force be deployed only for negative ends. In this chapter, Ra Page, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Manchester-based publishing house Comma Press, demonstrates how such a process might work. The author offers case studies of short-story anthologies that unapologetically try to alter our perception of the world. They do so not just through their subject matter, but also by how they conceptualize the process of authorship and of the ideological commitments that it entails.

Our Inherent Need for Associative Coherence.

The world around us consists of typical settings manifested as statistical regularities and stored as associations. These associations are beneficial for performance and serve as a source of stability in our perception of a coherent surroundings. What happens when such associativity is not apparent? We presented pairs of associated images and pairs of non-associated images and compared their corresponding effect on subsequent performance in three different visual perception paradigms: contrast-sensitivity, global vs. local perception, and critical-flicker-fusion. In all three experiments, performance was significantly inferior when preceded by images with no clear associative connection. We argue that these results reflect our inherent need to find coherence in our environment. When it is not easily detected, we continue to seek an associative link, which in our case persisted and posed a cognitive load on subsequent performance.

Metonymy

Metonymy (Greek μετωνυμία, Latin denominatio) has been known as a rhetorical trope since Greek antiquity. The online Oxford English Dictionary defines this trope as “[a] figure of speech characterized by the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it [ . . . ].” In modern linguistics, especially cognitive linguistics, metonymy (like metaphor) is considered as not just a rhetorical trope used for various stylistic purposes, but as a figure of thought (referred to as “conceptual metonymy”). Metonymies are usually notated as source for target (i.e., the conventional meaning of a word or expression functions as the source vehicle for accessing a target meaning) as in the newspaper headline Brussels Proposes EU Antideforestation Fund, where the city of Brussels stands for the target meaning “the EU commission (located in Brussels)”. The relationship between the source and the target meaning of a metonymy is usually characterized as one of association or contiguity. In contrast, metaphor is normally represented as target is source, a notation indicating that the target meaning of a metaphor is conceptually organized like the source (e.g., in Shakespeare’s famous metaphor the world is a stage—see separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Cognitive Linguistics” by Vyvyan Evans). There is no unified conception of metonymy, but most scholars agree that metonymy involves an associative link between two meaning components within one conceptual domain or frame, whereas metaphor is constituted by usually multiple mappings across two domains or frames. It has, however, to be noted that no completely satisfactory definition of what constitutes one domain or frame in contrast to distinct domains or frames has been provided thus far. Given these definitional problems, the categories “metonymy” and “metaphor” should not be regarded as “classical” Aristotelian categories in the sense of being definable by a set of necessary and jointly sufficient properties, but as prototypes with central and more peripheral members and fuzzy boundaries.

The Sound of an Endless Column

Zohar Eitan and Hila Tamir-Ostrover start their chapter with a survey of existing empirical studies of sound-space mappings—in particular, pitch/spatial height associations. Using Ligeti’s Endless Column as a case, they exemplify how music might challenge these mappings by pointing out contradictions in the associative link between the auditory dimension and spatial and motion features. These contradictions, the authors argue, on the one hand can illustrate novel opportunities for composers to use music-space correspondences to create paradoxical spaces while, on the other hand, could demonstrate how the music-space correspondence revealed by empirical research could be used in the analysis of music.

Perceptions Des Nuisances Environnementales Liées Aux Déchets Solides Ménagers Dans Les Centres Urbains Du Nord-Bénin : Cas Des Villes De Parakou, Djougou, Kandi Et Malanville

The cities of Parakou, Djougou, Kandi and Malanville in the north of Benin have difficulty in eliminating dispose of waste produced by households in ecological way. This research was initiated to analyze the attitudes and understanding of environmental problems related to poor management of DSM by people of north Benin. To achieve this objective, a survey was conducted on the perception of environmental damage related to waste with 585 heads of households from August 2014 to March 2015. The city of residence, gender, age, marital status, level education, income, socio professional category are characteristics that were selected for the statistical analysis Khi2. Results showed 100% a significant statistical link between environmental pollution and city of residence (χ2 = 153.135; DF = 12; Pvalue = 0.000 <0.05). No statistically significant association was found between perceived environmental nuisances and sex (χ2 = 2.035; DF = 4; PValue = 0.729> 0.05) ; age (χ2 = 19.189, DF = 16; P-Value = 0.259> 0.05) ; marital status (χ2 = 20.809, DF = 12; P-Value = 0.053> 0.05 and income of respondents (χ2 = 32.273, DF = 32; P-Value = 0.453> 0.05). However in Djougou, a highly significant associative link was observed between respondents with incomes ranging from 100,001 to 150,000 and the air pollution (χ2 = 11.96, DF = 32; P-value = 0.000 <0.05). It is the same for the pollution of rivers in this income bracket in Parakou (χ2 = 5.85; DF = 24; Pvalue = 0.004 <0.05) and Kandi (χ2 = 6 04; DF = 10; P-value = 0.000 <. 0.05). Moreover, the level of education (χ2 = 14.728, DF = 12; P-Value = 0.257> 0.05) and occupation of the individuals interviewed (χ2 = 59.060, DF = 40; P-Value = 0.026 <0.05) determine their perceptions of environmental damage related to DSM. In total, city of residence, education level and occupation of individuals are the most, significant determiners in the perception of environmental damage related to the solid household waste.

Alcune osservazioni sulle cause di tenuta del settore del franchising nelle fasi recessive

La ricerca esamina le imprese che operano in franchising attraverso microdati raccolti da Assofranchising, la principale associazione italiana nel campo del franchising. Mediante tecniche esplorative e multivariate si dimostra che, ceteris paribus, un aumento della scala delle reti, basata sulla crescita delle risorse umane e materiali, ha un effetto positivo sull'efficienza aziendale attraverso il miglioramento di indicatori strategici di produttivitŕ. Questo fatto indica che le reti in franchising italiane, costituite principalmente ma non esclusivamente da parte delle piccole e medie imprese, anche se sono forti del vincolo associativo, non possono e non devono distogliere lo sguardo dal cercare ogni possibile espansione della loro dimensionalitŕ. Inoltre, questa strategia aiuta ad affrontare meglio le fasi di recessione economica, come l'attuale. The research examines companies operating under franchise through microdata collected from Assofranchising, the main Italian association in the field of franchising. By means of explorative and multivariate techniques it is shown that, other things being equal, an increase in the size of the networks, based on growth of human and material resources, has a positive effect on business efficiencies by improving strategic indicators of productivity. This fact indicates that the Italian franchise networks, consisting primarily but not exclusively by small and medium enterprises, even though they are strong of the associative link, cannot and should not divert their gaze from seeking any possible expansion of their dimensionality. Furthermore, this strategy helps to better address the downturn the economic cycle, like the present one