Facial first impressions are not mandatory : A priming investigation

Made Open Access under the Elsevier agreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Taste in appearance: self, cultivated dispositions, and cultural capital

The purpose of the study is to develop a theory about taste in appearance and to investigate if cultural capital, proposed by Bourdieu (1984), is a relevant concept in explaining appearance-related consumption. Taste has been studied in two disciplines. Philosophers defined taste as an aesthetic aptitude or capacity to discover beauty from works of art. Sociologists conceptualized taste as a cultivated disposition in the guise of an innate disposition in a broad range of cultural products. While philosophers endeavored to conceptualized taste in relation to beauty, sociologists associated taste with social acceptance or attractiveness.;Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 16 participants from upper-middle and middle class backgrounds who lived in three Midwestern cities. Information about participants\u27 demographic and family backgrounds was also collected. Participants were selected through a snowball sampling procedure to have varied background characteristics. A constant comparative approach to qualitative data analysis was conducted to find important themes and explore differences among participants related to their backgrounds (Strauss, 1987).;The content of the interviews indicated that taste in appearance is a cultivated disposition to direct consumption activities. Taste included preferences for putting together outfits as well as for particular aesthetic elements. Participants described taste in terms of how they related particular things to themselves (self-concept) and why they liked particular things (motives). Participants\u27 preferences indicated their struggle with ambivalence about how much they wanted to fit in but remain somewhat different from others and how much they wanted to keep their appearance up-to-date and in fashion. Taste was actualized through the exercise of appearance-specific motives and efficient appearance management strategies, including optimizing the use of given resources and negotiating conflicts among preferences and resources.;With respect to evaluation of taste, participants evaluated taste as a sum of the appearance and the consumption skills of a person, because taste was communicated through presentation of one\u27s appearance. Evaluation included judging how well appearance embodies an actor, how motives in clothing practice were successfully pursued and how an actor successfully managed constraints and balanced ambivalent factors.;Level of cultural capital possessed by the participants differentially shaped social actors\u27 experiences of appearance consumption. The resources of cultural capital, including upbringing, education, and occupation (Bourdieu, 1984), provided participants with an aptitude for involvement in appearance consumption, including sensitivity to dressing appropriately, capacity to construct and communicate meanings, and opportunities and refinement of dressing practices. Among the participants, about half had background characteristics indicating fairly high level of cultural capital, and the other half had a middle range of cultural capital. For those with higher level of cultural capital, manifested taste was constructed with a higher degree of complexity than among participants with a middle level of cultural capital. High cultural capital individuals showed greater evidence of aesthetic involvement through clothing practices.;The findings have practical implications for apparel marketers. Knowledge of levels of cultural capital of target customers will help define strategies for advertising, store layout and merchandise display. The findings have useful implications for marketing of products other than clothing

An empirical and theoretical investigation into the psychological effects of wearing a mask

A review of the literature shows that the wearing of a mask has been hypothesised to bring about four main psychological effects: disinhibition, transformation, facilitation of the expression of aspects of the wearer’s Self, and various psycho-somatic changes. Several different explanations have been proposed as to why each of these effects come about. Using theoretical and empirical research, the thesis explores in detail the hypothesis that a mask can disinhibit its wearer, and that this disinhibition comes about because the mask-wearer feels less identifiable. The findings show that a mask can significantly reduces its wearer’s feelings of identifiability, and that it can also significantly reduce its wearer’s public self-awareness as a consequence of changes in attentional focus. However, the empirical evidence suggests that the mask’s disinhibiting effect is limited to situations in which an individual wants to behave in a particular way, but inhibits that behaviour out of a concern with ‘mask-able’ facets of their public self. Concomitantly, the findings suggest that, if an individual wants to behave in a way for which they require ‘mask-able’ facets of the public self, then the wearing of a mask may be experienced as inhibiting. This thesis also examines the hypothesis that a mask can transform its wearer, and that this occurs through the self-attribution process outlined by Kellerman and Laird (1982). The thesis provides strong empirical support for both these hypotheses, showing that the wearing of a mask can make individuals feel less like their usual self and more like the character represented in the mask. However, the empirical evidence suggests that this latter effect only occurs under conditions in which an individual is specifically focused on their masked appearance. A final chapter discusses the theoretical and applied implications of these findings, with specific reference to the use of masks in therapeutic practice

Predicting judging-perceiving of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in online social forum

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a well-known personality test that assigns a personality type to a user by using four traits dichotomies. For many years, people have used MBTI as an instrument to develop self-awareness and to guide their personal decisions. Previous researches have good successes in predicting Extraversion-Introversion (E/I), Sensing-Intuition (S/N) and Thinking-Feeling (T/F) dichotomies from textual data but struggled to do so with Judging-Perceiving (J/P) dichotomy. J/P dichotomy in MBTI is a non-separable part of MBTI that have significant inference on human behavior, perception and decision towards their surroundings. It is an assessment on how someone interacts with the world when making decision. This research was set out to evaluate the performance of the individual features and classifiers for J/P dichotomy in personality computing. At the end, data leakage was found in dataset originating from the Personality Forum Café, which was used in recent researches. The results obtained from the previous research on this dataset were suggested to be overly optimistic. Using the same settings, this research managed to outperform previous researches. Five machine learning algorithms were compared, and LightGBM model was recommended for the task of predicting J/P dichotomy in MBTI personality computing

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

'The emotional wardrobe': a fashion perspective on the integration of technology and clothing

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology

‘Subtle’ Technology: Design for Facilitating Face-to-Face Interaction for Socially Anxious People

PhD thesisShy people have a desire for social interaction but fear being scrutinised and rejected. This conflict results in attention deficits during face-to-face situations. It can cause the social atmosphere to become ‘frozen’ and shy persons to appear reticent. Many of them avoid such challenges, taking up the ‘electronic extroversion’ route and experiencing real-world social isolation. This research is aimed at improving the social skills and experience of shy people. It establishes conceptual frameworks and guidelines for designing computer-mediated tools to amplify shy users’ social cognition while extending conversational resources. Drawing on the theories of Social Objects, ‘natural’ HCI and unobtrusive Ubiquitous Computing, it proposes the Icebreaker Cognitive-Behavioural Model for applying user psychology to the systems’ features and functioning behaviour. Two initial design approaches were developed in forms of Wearable Computer and evaluated in a separate user-centred study. One emphasised the users’ privacy concerns in the form of a direct but covert display of the Vibrosign Armband. Another focused on low-attention demand and low-key interaction preferences – rendered through a peripheral but overt visual display of the Icebreaker T-shirt, triggered by the users’ handshake and disguised in the system’s subtle operation. Quantitative feedback by vibrotactile experts indicated the armband effective in signalling various types of abstract information. However, it added to the mental load and needed a disproportionate of training time. In contrast, qualitative-based feedback from shy users revealed unexpected benefits of the information display made public on the shirt front. It encouraged immediate and fluid interaction by providing a mutual ‘ticket to talk’ and an interpretative gap in the users’ relationship, although the rapid prototype compromised the technology’s subtle characteristics and impeded the users’ social experience. An iterative design extended the Icebreaker approach through a systematic refinement and resulted in the Subtle Design Principle implemented in the Icebreaker Jacket. Its subtle interaction and display modalities were compared to those of a focal-demand social aid, using a mixed-method evaluation. Inferential analysis results indicated the subtle technology more engaging with users’ social aspirations and facilitating a higher degree of unobtrusive experience. Through the Icebreaker model and Subtle Design Principle, together with the exploratory research framework and study outcome, this thesis demonstrates the advantages of using subtle technology to help shy users cope with the challenges of face-to-face interaction and improve their social experience.RCUK under the Digital Economy Doctoral Training scheme, through MAT programme, EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre EP/G03723X/1

Fashioning the executive (look): Australian women, fashion and the rise of the new work order

Fashion is not essential to completing an effective and productive day's work. Suits, shoulder pads and power dressing are images and phrases that encircle working women and are too often relegated to the empty cubicles of 1980s and 1990s history. The proliferation of internet-mediated commerce meant - in fictional narratives at least - women swapped their Claiborne for geek chic and 'up all night' hair, the preferential wear for New Economy employees.1 In the 2000s, the Australian employment industry - fractured, non-standard and fluid - is promoting a new 'creative' work order. What are the consequences of this transformation of ideology and iconography for workplace dressing and the bodies of the women who wear it? This doctoral thesis examines the relationship between fashion, clothes, women and work. The goal and methodology of this thesis is the alignment of work theory, with discourses of clothing and fashion, oral history, policy documents and popular culture. Such a research project requires interdisciplinary scholarship that activates debates about women's bodies, the state of the contemporary working environment and the dissonance in literacies between body and workplace. Through the application of semiotic and cultural studies, as well as drawing on theories of media, gender, labour, leisure, literacy and fashion, I investigate the position of women and their bodies within the contemporary Australian workplace. This thesis deploys oral histories to illuminate how women function in the changing Australian workplace. I have compiled these oral sources in order to capture specific experiences and portray the successes and struggles that are faced by the women employed in these sectors. The function of these histories in this thesis is to provide a memory of, to and for working women, revealing many of the unspoken assumptions and characteristics of the contemporary Australian workforce, such as the New Economy, an increasing non-standard workforce, the myth of 'work/life balance', lifestyle, dissonant bodies in the workplace, and the compartmentalization of work from other social function including family life. Within the nine chapters of this thesis, the research objective is to explore how women's bodies are located within and negotiate the contemporary Australian workforce. It begins with an examination of the conflation between 'self-help' and feminist texts, to map the troubled relationship between gender, power and the female body. The disparate functions of dress and bodies are important focuses in this research. The use of oral history, popular memory theory and the textual analysis of magazines is a way to interrogate the role of women's bodies and fashion in history. The use of oral and popular cultural sources is intentional. The goal is to develop an alternative system for remembering bodies and clothing, with the aim of transforming their historical relevance. The focal point of this thesis is assessing women's bodies and fashion in the workplace. By evaluating contemporary trends in women's work attire, I expose the disparity in the work clothes market in relation to quality, accessibility, functionality and price. This doctoral thesis deploys work theory and the ideologies of the 'New' and 'Old' Economy. Throughout this project, I trace the differences in workplace customs and representations. The purpose of the thesis - and indeed the original contribution to knowledge - is to demonstrate that women and men must be literate in not only the workplace, but also in workplace clothing. Only when moving from everyday to reflexive literacies can relevant models of discrimination and oppression within the 'New Economy' be revealed and addressed. While presenting the voices and views of working women, this research proposes a strategy for a change in education and the requirement of mentoring in relation to careers and the 'new' work order. The latter chapters are focussed on tracing working life in the new knowledge economy within Australia. They explore the notion of 'supplementary' work in relation to 'lifestyle' change and investigates the creative industries, the creative class and ponders the dilemma of the creative industries in Australia. The objective of this thesis is to not only to critique, but also to gather and deploy the words of women in the contemporary workplace, as both inspiration and model for the strategies required to instigate change. The final chapters capture a proactive desire to not only discuss difference, but make a difference. The probing of dissonant literacies in the workplace opens the tight and troubling relationship between women and bodies