Better to be in agreement than in bad company : A critical analysis of many kappa-like tests

The effect of gesture expressivity on emotional resonance in storytelling interaction

The key function of storytelling is a meeting of hearts: a resonance in the recipient(s) of the story narrator's emotion toward the story events. This paper focuses on the role of gestures in engendering emotional resonance in conversational storytelling. The paper asks three questions: Does story narrators' gesture expressivity increase from story onset to climax offset (RQ #1)? Does gesture expressivity predict specific EDA responses in story participants (RQ #2)? How important is the contribution of gesture expressivity to emotional resonance compared to the contribution of other predictors of resonance (RQ #3)? 53 conversational stories were annotated for a large number of variables including Protagonist, Recency, Group composition, Group size, Sentiment, and co-occurrence with quotation. The gestures in the stories were coded for gesture phases and gesture kinematics including Size, Force, Character view-point, Silence during gesture, Presence of hold phase, Co-articulation with other bodily organs, and Nucleus duration. The Gesture Expressivity Index (GEI) provides an average of these parameters. Resonating gestures were identified, i.e., gestures exhibiting concurrent specific EDA responses by two or more participants. The first statistical model, which addresses RQ #1, suggested that story narrators' gestures become more expressive from story onset to climax offset. The model constructed to adress RQ #2 suggested that increased gesture expressivity increases the probability of specific EDA responses. To address RQ #3 a Random Forest for emotional resonance as outcome variable and the seven GEI parameters as well as six more variables as predictors was constructed. All predictors were found to impact Eemotional resonance. Analysis of variable importance showed Group composition to be the most impactful predictor. Inspection of ICE plots clearly indicated combined effects of individual GEI parameters and other factors, including Group size and Group composition. This study shows that more expressive gestures are more likely to elicit physiological resonance between individuals, suggesting an important role for gestures in connecting people during conversational storytelling. Methodologically, this study opens up new avenues of multimodal corpus linguistic research by examining the interplay of emotion-related measurements and gesture at micro-analytic kinematic levels and using advanced machine-learning methods to deal with the inherent collinearity of multimodal variables.

Unmasking Verbal Defensiveness: The Role of Psychological Threat in Sentence Completion Tests

Shedding light on the validity of sentence completion test (SCT) verbal defensiveness as an index of defensive behavior, the current two-part study examined the relationship between psychological threat and verbal defensiveness among military security and mission-critical team candidates using SCTs. Our study showed that as the threatening nature of SCT stems increased, defensive responses also increased, substantiating the link between psychological threat and defensive behavior. In addition, expert ratings of stem content revealed moderately strong relationships with defensive responses across two different SCTs, irrespective of their structural characteristics. In contrast to previous studies using total verbal defensiveness scores, we examined specific defensive response types and their associations with stem threat ratings, finding that omissions, denial, and comments about the test were linked to stem threat levels. Lastly, our study extends the application of the SCT verbal defensiveness index beyond specialized personnel selection, finding no significant differences in verbal defensiveness based on gender or military status. Overall, these findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of defensive behavior and its contextual variations.

Programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) clone 22C3 expression in resected colorectal cancer as companion diagnostics for immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy: A comparison study and inter-rater agreement evaluation across proposed cut-offs and predictive (TPS, CPS and IC) scores

BACKGROUND

Expression of programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) guides the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) in several cancers. In colorectal cancer (CRC), ICI are only approved for metastatic CRC, while several studies suggest high efficacy even in operable CRC. The aim of this study was to investigate the inter-rater agreement of PD-L1 as a companion diagnostic marker.

METHODS

Specimens from resected stage I-III CRC (n = 166 tumors) were stained with PD-L1 22C3 clone. PD-L1 expression was scored by two pathologists as tumor proportion score (TPS), combined positive score (CPS) and immune cell score (IC). Inter-rater agreement was tested using three different agreement coefficients.

RESULTS

Raw scores of the two pathologists had 'good' to 'excellent' correlation. Spearman's rho for TPS=0.917 (95 %CI 0.839-0.995), for CPS=0.776 (95 %CI 0.726-0.826) and IC=0.818 (95 %CI 0.761-0.875). For TPS, kappa (κ)-agreements for both the ≥1 % and ≥10 % cutoffs had excellent correlation. For CPS the ≥1 % and ≥10 % cutoffs demonstrated κ=0.32 (95 %CI 0.12-0.51) and κ=0.36 (95 %CI 0.25-0.48) respectively. Cutoffs for IC showed κ=0.53 (95 %CI 0.18-0.79) for the ≥1 % cutoff, and κ=0.61 (95 %CI 0.48-0.73) for the ≥10 % cutoff. Gwet's agreement coefficient (AC1) showed higher agreement coefficients than κ-values for most, but not all cut-offs.

CONCLUSION

Agreement for PD-L1 was good to excellent for raw scores. Agreement variation across several criteria and cut-offs suggests the need for more robust criteria for PD-L1 as a companion diagnostic marker.