Publications by authors named "Valeria A Pfeifer"

Past studies showed that metaphoric expressions (e.g., "she was cold to him") require more cognitive-neural effort than literal paraphrases (e.

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For the longest time, the gold standard in preparing spoken language corpora for text analysis in psychology was using human transcription. However, such standard comes at extensive cost, and creates barriers to quantitative spoken language analysis that recent advances in speech-to-text technology could address. The current study quantifies the accuracy of AI-generated transcripts compared to human-corrected transcripts across younger (n = 100) and older (n = 92) adults and two spoken language tasks.

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Article Synopsis
  • This study looked at how verbal irony (saying something that means the opposite) and cognitive reappraisal (changing the way we think about things to feel better) help people feel less sad.
  • Participants saw sad pictures and then read either ironic or regular statements about them, and they used either cognitive reappraisal or just looked at the pictures to manage their feelings.
  • The results showed that using irony and cognitive reappraisal both helped reduce negative feelings, but cognitive reappraisal was even more effective than irony.
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Introduction: Current cognitive assessments suffer from floor/ceiling and practice effects, poor psychometric performance in mild cases, and repeated assessment effects. This study explores the use of digital speech analysis as an alternative tool for determining cognitive impairment. The study specifically focuses on identifying the digital speech biomarkers associated with cognitive impairment and its severity.

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Metaphors are pervasive in cancer discourse. However, little is known about how metaphor use develops over time within the same patient, and how metaphor use and its content relate to the mental health of the patient. Here, we analyzed metaphor use in personal essays written by breast cancer patients shortly after the time of diagnosis and nine months later, in relation to their depressive symptoms at both time points.

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In this commentary we draw attention to a context involving mixed and ambiguous emotions: verbal irony. Irony is frequently used, evokes mixed emotional responses (e.g.

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Verbal irony is when words intend the opposite of their literal meaning. We investigated the emotional function of irony by asking whether irony intensifies or mitigates negative feelings. Experiment 1 used ratings to assess the mental state of a speaker using irony or literal language following a negative event in either a high- or a low-emotional context.

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