The Christian doctor whom Nona Màlia married is described as "majestic, bearded, and taciturn"; Rita, a fellow-student, has "her shabby clothes, her firm gaze, her concrete sadness"; Cesare, one of those morally strong, physically vital men who sustain Levi in time of need, is "very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized".
Perhaps Sam and his concrete state of sadness are ontologically fundamental and the fact that Sam is sad is not ontologically fundamental.
"If you don't know anyone directly affected, you feel very bad, but there is no concrete outlet for your sadness, no way to process what has happened through funerals or memorials.
Consistent with predictions, the significant interaction indicates that the extent to which participants use more concrete identification with increasing sadness was moderated by depression status.
For some people, the cause of sadness is concrete and easily identifiable, like a breakup, death of a loved one, or loss of a job.
"Abstract" nouns like sadness and wisdom and "concrete" nouns like water and furniture all belong to the morphosyntactic class of mass nouns.
However, for currently depressed participants, there was no significant relationship between change in sadness and change in concrete identification, r(21) = −.22, p =.32 (see Figure 2).
These results are consistent with Watkins' (2008, 2010) level of identification dysregulation hypothesis, which proposes that depressed individuals are compromised in their ability to regulate their level of goal/action identification in response to situational demands such that they show a reduced shift towards more concrete representations in response to increasing sadness or reducing happiness.
In concrete terms, all depressive states are characterized by sadness, so affective mood tone cannot distinguish between different types of depression.
The system, built by USC Prof Behrokh Khoshnevis and his team, extrudes concrete in clever shapes which then harden to form an impregnable shell of sadness and woe.
For never-depressed participants, greater increases in sadness were associated with greater shifts towards the use of more concrete identifications, r(21) =.59, p <.001.
