Accurately Detecting Flirting: Error Management Theory, the Traditional Sexual Script, and Flirting Base Rate

The present manuscript reports two studies on the accuracy of flirting detection. In Study 1, 52 pairs (N = 104) of opposite-sex heterosexual strangers interacted for 10-12 minutes, then self-reported flirting and perceived partner flirting. The results indicated that interactions where flirting did not occur were more accurately perceived than interactions where flirting occurred. In Study 2, 26 one minute video clips drawn from Study 1 were randomly assigned to one of eight experimental conditions that varied flirting base rate and the traditional sexual script. Participant observers (N = 261) attempted to determine if flirting occurred. Results indicated that base rate affected accuracy; flirting was more accurately detected in clips where flirting did not occur than in clips where flirting occurred. Study 2 also indicated that female targets’ flirting was more accurately judged than male targets’ flirting. Findings are discussed in relation to accuracy and courtship context

Affinity Through Instant Messaging: An Exploration Of Initial Interactions

This thesis sought to extend work on relationship initiation in an online setting by examining the initial interaction of cross-sex dyads. Sixty male-female dyads interacted for 20 minutes with instructions to find out enough information to determine if they would interact with their partner again. Results indicated that individuals who are more accurate at determining when their partner showed liking had partners that reported more liking towards those individuals and perceived more liking by those individuals. Liking is also increased when trust is established. Moreover, liking is increased when there is little disliking shown and partners share more intimate disclosures. Future interactions are desired when more flirting and greater appropriateness are perceived. Implications for seeking, testing, and signaling affinity are presented

Recognizing Uncertainty in Speech

We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around the phrases causing uncertainty, in addition to utterance-level prosodic features, improves our model's level of certainty classification. In addition, our models can be used to predict which phrase a person is uncertain about. These results rely on a novel method for eliciting utterances of varying levels of certainty that allows us to compare the utility of contextually-based feature sets. We elicit level of certainty ratings from both the speakers themselves and a panel of listeners, finding that there is often a mismatch between speakers' internal states and their perceived states, and highlighting the importance of this distinction.Comment: 11 page

An Examination of Reported Flirtation Behaviors

A great deal of sexual interest and communication occurs at the nonverbal level in the form of gestures and signs. Nonverbal behaviors like smiles, winks, body postures, physical space, eye contact, clothing, among other cues and gestures, add subtle communiqués of romantic attention because the verbal expression of sexual interest can lead to embarrassment, confusion, and ambiguity. These nonverbal courtship behaviors are important and have been used to examine the dynamics of sexual initiation and interaction both in and outside of marriage (Gecas & Libby, 1976). A primary aim of the present study is to create a flirtation questionnaire that accurately captures the flirting behaviors of both men and women to help individuals who are not adept at understanding flirtation behaviors or experience difficulties interpreting or enacting flirtatious behaviors. As the literature currently stands, there exists a gap between behavioral items measured out in the field and self-reported behavioral items recorded via surveys. The results of the study found a four-factor solution making up the Basic Behavioral Flirting Questionnaire (BBFQ), and those factors included: nervousness, togetherness, lovemaking, and prosocial. The confirmatory factor analysis did not reach significance. Clinical implications are addressed in the discussion section with the interpretation of nervousness and prosocial flirting behavioral items. Future research and study limitations are also addressed in the discussion section

Can third-party observers detect attraction in others based on subtle nonverbal cues?

Action Contro

Bullying at the Middle School Level: A Descriptive Study

Bullying within schools has been a topic of great interest in recent years. Due to various factors, bullying is a particularly large problem at middle schools. In order to obtain further research on this topic, a study was conducted at a small suburban middle school in Connecticut. Teachers were given surveys to complete to address their thoughts on bullying. Additionally, a smaller subsample of teachers and the school social worker were interviewed. The data gathered from the surveys and interviews revealed that bullying was in fact present at the school. Participants expressed that students tend to bully one another in more indirect rather than direct ways, making it difficult for staff to notice when bullying is taking place. Being aware of this theme can help teachers and social workers at others schools learn how to better identify bullying behaviors and address them in more effective ways. On a higher level, this study has implications for policy and social work practice; legislators can work to create more uniform policies regarding bullying and social workers can gain a better understanding of how to effectively work with adolescents who are involved with bullying

Analyzing the Language of Food on Social Media

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have most predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps, semantics-preserving wordclouds and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in IEEE Big Data 201

The Role of Emotion Projection, Sexual Desire, and Self-Rated Attractiveness in the Sexual Overperception Bias

A consistent finding in the literature is that men overperceive sexual interest in women (i.e., sexual overperception bias). Several potential mechanisms have been proposed for this bias, including projecting one’s own interest onto a given partner, sexual desire, and self-rated attractiveness. Here, we examined the influence of these factors in attraction detection accuracy during speed-dates. Sixty-seven participants (34 women) split in four groups went on a total of 10 speed-dates with all opposite-sex members of their group, resulting in 277 dates. The results showed that attraction detection accuracy was reliably predicted by projection of own interest in combination with participant sex. Specifically, men were more accurate than women in detecting attraction when they were not interested in their partner compared to when they were interested. These results are discussed in the wider context of arousal influencing detection of partner attraction

Living by the Code: Authority in Gerard Stembridge\u27s The Gay Detective

Irish drama has few representations of police officers as anything but a trope for authority, tending to avoid any substantive character development. Likewise, it has few representations of homosexual characters, and when such representations do exist they are often caricatures. Reductive portrayals of police often arise from the complex relationship the Irish have with authority and with the legal system. But one of the few exceptions to this trend, and the only play to tackle the representation of a police officer and a homosexual at once, is Gerard Stembridge’s play The Gay Detective (1996). The play offers up the character of Pat, a ‘gay detective’, a fascinating dramatic portrayal of the collision of two identities which, on the surface, contest each other. Alternately comic and tragic, poignant and gruesome, with an ambiguous ending, Stembridge’s work defies attempts at easy categorization. He explores the comic possibilities in the tension between the codified identifiers of Irish police officers and of gay men, two codes which don’t often ‘speak’ to each other, but he also demonstrates the tragedy in the misunderstanding between these two cultures. The collision provides a fascinating study of codified behaviour and the way different codes of identity recognition can clash in one individual. This paper will explore the implications of Pat’s seemingly incompatible persona, implications that force a consideration of his adoption of these codes in terms of Judith Butler’s concept of ‘masquerade’ allowing for a kind of interpellation