Концептуализации политики в посткоммунистической Украине

The peculiarities of representation of political leaders in the minds of voters of Ukraine. It is shown that the categorization of the political leaders of the population is based on the inherent implicit theories of personality. It is proved that in the minds of voters there are some, not perceived them (implicit) typology of political leaders who define their relationship to the politicians and their political choicesПроаналізовано особливості репрезентації політичних лідерів у свідомості електорату України. Показано, що категоризація політичних лідерів населенням відбувається на основі притаманних йому імпліцитних теорій особистості. Доведено, що у свідомості виборців існують певні неусвідомлювані (імпліцитні) типології політичних лідерів, які визначають їхнє ставлення до політиків та їх політичний вибірПроанализированы особенности репрезентации политических лидеров в сознании электората Украины. Показано, что категоризация политических лидеров населением происходит на основе присущих ему имплицитных теорий личности. Доказано, что в сознании избирателей существуют некие, недостаточно осознаваемые ними (имплицитные) типологии политических лидеров, которые определяют их отношение к политикам и их политический выбо

A survey on perceived speaker traits: personality, likability, pathology, and the first challenge

The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge aimed at a unified test-bed for perceived speaker traits – the first challenge of this kind: personality in the five OCEAN personality dimensions, likability of speakers, and intelligibility of pathologic speakers. In the present article, we give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art in these three fields of research and describe the three sub-challenges in terms of the challenge conditions, the baseline results provided by the organisers, and a new openSMILE feature set, which has been used for computing the baselines and which has been provided to the participants. Furthermore, we summarise the approaches and the results presented by the participants to show the various techniques that are currently applied to solve these classification tasks

Effects of Job Stereotype, Applicant Gender, and Powerful and Powerless Speech Styles on Telephone Interview Outcomes

By examining the effects of powerful and powerless speech styles, gender stereotyped jobs, and gendered voices during the employment interviewing process, this study sought to further the research of Parton (1996); Parton, Siltanen, Hosman, and Langenderfer (2002); and Juodvalkis, Grefe, Hogue, Svyantek, and DeLamarter (2003). This study was designed to further explore the possibility of longitudinal changes within acceptable communicative expectations during telephone job interviewing. Participants (undergraduate and professional) listened to two audio taped interviews manipulated by speech style, stereotyped job title, and interviewee gender. Variables were evaluated on semantic differential scales following the previous work of Parton (1996). Similar to those of Parton (1996) and Parton et al. (2002), results indicated that powerful speech style suggested positive attributions of overall impression and employability; and gender significantly interacts with speech style and attribution of similarity and within several multiple variable interactions. Results further indicated that undergraduate and professional participants continue to evaluate speech styles differently. However, the current study found significance for control-of-self within multi-variated interactions that were previously not found. Therefore, theoretical outcomes and implications within the associated research were addressed

Towards Integration of Cognitive Models in Dialogue Management: Designing the Virtual Negotiation Coach Application

This paper presents an approach to flexible and adaptive dialogue management driven by cognitive modelling of human dialogue behaviour. Artificial intelligent agents, based on the ACT-R cognitive architecture, together with human actors are participating in a (meta)cognitive skills training within a negotiation scenario. The agent  employs instance-based learning to decide about its own actions and to reflect on the behaviour of the opponent. We show that task-related actions can be handled by a cognitive agent who is a plausible dialogue partner.  Separating task-related and dialogue control actions enables the application of sophisticated models along with a flexible architecture  in which  various alternative modelling methods can be combined. We evaluated the proposed approach with users assessing  the relative contribution of various factors to the overall usability of a dialogue system. Subjective perception of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction were correlated with various objective performance metrics, e.g. number of (in)appropriate system responses, recovery strategies, and interaction pace. It was observed that the dialogue system usability is determined most by the quality of agreements reached in terms of estimated Pareto optimality, by the user's negotiation strategies selected, and by the quality of system recognition, interpretation and responses. We compared human-human and human-agent performance with respect to the number and quality of agreements reached, estimated cooperativeness level, and frequency of accepted negative outcomes. Evaluation experiments showed promising, consistently positive results throughout the range of the relevant scales

Triggering and measuring neural response indicative of inhibition in humans during conversations with virtual humans

The aim of this PhD was to determine if a confrontational virtual human can evoke a response in the prefrontal cortex, indicative of inhibiting an antisocial response. It follows previous studies by Aleksandra Landowska (2018) and Schilbach (2016) demonstrating that a prefrontal cortex response indicative of inhibition can be evoked by a virtual environment. The test scenario was a conversation about Brexit, the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. This was used in three experiments which varied in level of immersivity of the interface and iteratively tweaked methods. A virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD) was adopted in the first experiment, a 50-inch display monitor was adopted in the second experiment, while the third experiment was carried out in an immersive suite. The independent variable in the experiments was the friendliness of the virtual human confederates. fNIRS was used to measure changes in haemoglobin in the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Video recordings were taken to capture possible behavioural evidence that may be associated with inhibition. The friendliness of the virtual human was measured using the likeability section of the Godspeed Questionnaire series. This may be the first study to use functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure response to virtual humans; previous studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which provides a less natural experience and is not conducive to non-verbal communication. The results from the first experiment suggest an effect emanating from prior experience with VR and gaming. Consequently, participants were grouped into two, with G1 representing the group with prior VR and gaming experience and G2 representing the group with no VR and gaming experience. Increased activation was found in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during conversation with the confrontational (unfriendly) virtual human confederate for G2, in line with similar studies of emotional regulation. G1, on the other hand, showed increased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) during the conversation with the friendly virtual human confederate. The second experiment which was aimed at validating the outcome of the first experiment also showed an effect emanating from prior experience with VR and gaming. The results suggest increased activation in the MPFC for G1 and increased activation in the MPFC and DLPFC for G2 during the conversation with the friendly virtual human confederate in both groups. The third experiment showed increased activation in the DLPFC during the conversation with the unfriendly virtual human confederate across participants. Furthermore, head-mounted displays complicated data capture with the fNIRS; a problem alleviated by screen or projection-based approaches. Although all the experiments in this research targeted healthy subjects, the outcome may be of interest to health professionals and technology providers interested in mental deficits relating to antisocial behaviours. It also finds potential application in mental health illness such as PTSD and autism where inhibitory responses are impaire

Putting the Ha! In Aha!: Humor as a Tool for Effective Communication

Speakers, trainers, and leaders are challenged with delivering important messages aimed at informing, persuading, and influencing audiences; audiences that are already overwhelmed with information, daunted by problems, or stuck in old patterns of attitudes and behaviors. Until recently, humor has been viewed as something that merely makes us feel good and distracts us from our daily drudgeries. Positive psychology offers empirical data that show that humor is a serious tool that creates connection between people, enhances charisma of communicators, engages attention, enhances memory, leverages people’s willingness to shift attitudes and behaviors, and increases the resilience of communicators and their audiences. Humor does all of this, not despite the fact that it is enjoyable, but in large part, because it is enjoyable. Most research has used pre-produced humor (cartoons, stories, and videos), showing that communicators need not be producers of humor themselves, but can leverage the power of pre-produced humor to engage and delight audiences. This capstone includes a business plan for the creation of humorous video vignettes that can be utilized by the author, as well as other communicators, to bring speeches and trainings to life and make a message shtick

New approaches to the emerging social neuroscience of human-robot interaction

Prehistoric art, like the Venus of Willendorf sculpture, shows that we have always looked for ways to distil fundamental human characteristics and capture them in physically embodied representations of the self. Recently, this undertaking has gained new momentum through the introduction of robots that resemble humans in their shape and their behaviour. These social robots are envisioned to take on important roles: alleviate loneliness, support vulnerable children and serve as helpful companions for the elderly. However, to date, few commercially available social robots are living up to these expectations. Given their importance for an ever older and more socially isolated society, rigorous research at the intersection of psychology, social neuroscience and human-robot interaction is needed to determine to which extent mechanisms active during human-human interaction can be co-opted when we encounter social robots. This thesis takes an anthropocentric approach to answering the question how socially motivated we are to interact with humanoid robots. Across three empirical and one theoretical chapter, I use self-report, behavioural and neural measures relevant to the study of interactions with robots to address this question. With the Social Motivation Theory of Autism as a point of departure, the first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) investigates the relevance of interpersonal synchrony for human-robot interaction. This chapter reports a null effect: participants did not find a robot that synchronised its movement with them on a drawing task more likeable, nor were they more motivated to ask it more questions in a semi-structured interaction scenario. As this chapter heavily relies on self-report as a main outcome measure, Chapter 4 addresses this limitation by adapting an established behavioural paradigm for the study of human-robot interaction. This chapter shows that a failure to conceptually extend an effect in the field of social attentional capture calls for a different approach when seeking to adapt paradigms for HRI. Chapter 5 serves as a moment of reflection on the current state-of-the-art research at the intersection of neuroscience and human-robot interaction. Here, I argue that the future of HRI research will rely on interaction studies with mobile brain imaging systems (like functional near-infrared spectroscopy) that allow data collection during embodied encounters with social robots. However, going forward, the field should slowly and carefully move outside of the lab and into real situations with robots. As the previous chapters have established, well-known effects have to be replicated before they are implemented for robots, and before they are taken out of the lab, into real life. The final empirical chapter (Chapter 6), takes the first step of this proposed slow approach: in addition to establishing the detection rate of a mobile fNIRS system in comparison to fMRI, this chapter contributes a novel way to digitising optode positions by means of photogrammetry. In the final chapter of this thesis, I highlight the main lessons learned conducting studies with social robots. I propose an updated roadmap which takes into account the problems raised in this thesis and emphasise the importance of incorporating more open science practices going forward. Various tools that emerged out of the open science movement will be invaluable for researchers working on this exciting, interdisciplinary endeavour