Communication in young people with intellectual impairments: the influence of partnership

Adults with intellectual impairments experience frequent communication breakdown in their everyday interactions. This can result from impairment of the linguistic skills required for effective communication and/or difficulties dealing with non-verbal information. Problems also exist, however, in the way that some non-impaired speakers, such as care providers, approach these communicative episodes. This thesis investigates communication in young adults with intellectual impairments with three different communication partners. These were a care provider, a student and a peer with intellectual impairments. Student partners were previously unknown to the main participants and not experienced in communicating with people with intellectual impairments. Communication structure and process are investigated according to the number of words and turns used to complete a co-operative problem-solving task and the types of conversational acts used by speakers and listeners. Non-verbal communication is investigated through the use of one non-verbal signal, gaze, during the task dialogues. An interactionist approach is taken to communication, where outcome or success is viewed as a product of the collaborative efforts of speakers and listeners. Communication is seen as multi-modal and involving the exchange of information via the verbal and non-verbal channels. The results show that when both parties were intellectually impaired performance was poorest. More surprisingly, dyads including a student partner communicated more effectively and efficiently than where the partner was a carer. One reason for this may be that carers used more complex, open questions to introduce new information into the task, and these were distracting rather than useful. Overusing open questions may be problematic for this population and less effective at establishing shared understanding than where listeners check their own interpretation of previous messages, a strategy preferred by student partners. Non-verbal signals can help to ease constraints on communication by providing interlocutors with feedback information on the levels of mutual understanding

An interactional sociolinguistic study of fictional characters' conversational exchanges /

Dissertação (Mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão

Sensing, interpreting, and anticipating human social behaviour in the real world

Low-level nonverbal social signals like glances, utterances, facial expressions and body language are central to human communicative situations and have been shown to be connected to important high-level constructs, such as emotions, turn-taking, rapport, or leadership. A prerequisite for the creation of social machines that are able to support humans in e.g. education, psychotherapy, or human resources is the ability to automatically sense, interpret, and anticipate human nonverbal behaviour. While promising results have been shown in controlled settings, automatically analysing unconstrained situations, e.g. in daily-life settings, remains challenging. Furthermore, anticipation of nonverbal behaviour in social situations is still largely unexplored. The goal of this thesis is to move closer to the vision of social machines in the real world. It makes fundamental contributions along the three dimensions of sensing, interpreting and anticipating nonverbal behaviour in social interactions. First, robust recognition of low-level nonverbal behaviour lays the groundwork for all further analysis steps. Advancing human visual behaviour sensing is especially relevant as the current state of the art is still not satisfactory in many daily-life situations. While many social interactions take place in groups, current methods for unsupervised eye contact detection can only handle dyadic interactions. We propose a novel unsupervised method for multi-person eye contact detection by exploiting the connection between gaze and speaking turns. Furthermore, we make use of mobile device engagement to address the problem of calibration drift that occurs in daily-life usage of mobile eye trackers. Second, we improve the interpretation of social signals in terms of higher level social behaviours. In particular, we propose the first dataset and method for emotion recognition from bodily expressions of freely moving, unaugmented dyads. Furthermore, we are the first to study low rapport detection in group interactions, as well as investigating a cross-dataset evaluation setting for the emergent leadership detection task. Third, human visual behaviour is special because it functions as a social signal and also determines what a person is seeing at a given moment in time. Being able to anticipate human gaze opens up the possibility for machines to more seamlessly share attention with humans, or to intervene in a timely manner if humans are about to overlook important aspects of the environment. We are the first to propose methods for the anticipation of eye contact in dyadic conversations, as well as in the context of mobile device interactions during daily life, thereby paving the way for interfaces that are able to proactively intervene and support interacting humans.Blick, Gesichtsausdrücke, Körpersprache, oder Prosodie spielen als nonverbale Signale eine zentrale Rolle in menschlicher Kommunikation. Sie wurden durch vielzählige Studien mit wichtigen Konzepten wie Emotionen, Sprecherwechsel, Führung, oder der Qualität des Verhältnisses zwischen zwei Personen in Verbindung gebracht. Damit Menschen effektiv während ihres täglichen sozialen Lebens von Maschinen unterstützt werden können, sind automatische Methoden zur Erkennung, Interpretation, und Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten notwendig. Obwohl die bisherige Forschung in kontrollierten Studien zu ermutigenden Ergebnissen gekommen ist, bleibt die automatische Analyse nonverbalen Verhaltens in weniger kontrollierten Situationen eine Herausforderung. Darüber hinaus existieren kaum Untersuchungen zur Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten in sozialen Situationen. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, die Vision vom automatischen Verstehen sozialer Situationen ein Stück weit mehr Realität werden zu lassen. Diese Arbeit liefert wichtige Beiträge zur autmatischen Erkennung menschlichen Blickverhaltens in alltäglichen Situationen. Obwohl viele soziale Interaktionen in Gruppen stattfinden, existieren unüberwachte Methoden zur Augenkontakterkennung bisher lediglich für dyadische Interaktionen. Wir stellen einen neuen Ansatz zur Augenkontakterkennung in Gruppen vor, welcher ohne manuelle Annotationen auskommt, indem er sich den statistischen Zusammenhang zwischen Blick- und Sprechverhalten zu Nutze macht. Tägliche Aktivitäten sind eine Herausforderung für Geräte zur mobile Augenbewegungsmessung, da Verschiebungen dieser Geräte zur Verschlechterung ihrer Kalibrierung führen können. In dieser Arbeit verwenden wir Nutzerverhalten an mobilen Endgeräten, um den Effekt solcher Verschiebungen zu korrigieren. Neben der Erkennung verbessert diese Arbeit auch die Interpretation sozialer Signale. Wir veröffentlichen den ersten Datensatz sowie die erste Methode zur Emotionserkennung in dyadischen Interaktionen ohne den Einsatz spezialisierter Ausrüstung. Außerdem stellen wir die erste Studie zur automatischen Erkennung mangelnder Verbundenheit in Gruppeninteraktionen vor, und führen die erste datensatzübergreifende Evaluierung zur Detektion von sich entwickelndem Führungsverhalten durch. Zum Abschluss der Arbeit präsentieren wir die ersten Ansätze zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten in sozialen Interaktionen. Blickverhalten hat die besondere Eigenschaft, dass es sowohl als soziales Signal als auch der Ausrichtung der visuellen Wahrnehmung dient. Somit eröffnet die Fähigkeit zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten Maschinen die Möglichkeit, sich sowohl nahtloser in soziale Interaktionen einzufügen, als auch Menschen zu warnen, wenn diese Gefahr laufen wichtige Aspekte der Umgebung zu übersehen. Wir präsentieren Methoden zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten im Kontext der Interaktion mit mobilen Endgeräten während täglicher Aktivitäten, als auch während dyadischer Interaktionen mittels Videotelefonie

Minds meeting through mindreading and mindspeaking: The role of social-cognitive abilities in interpersonal functioning in typically developing adults and adults with pathological fear of social evaluation

Thinking about thoughts, desires and feelings allows individuals to understand themselves (metacognition) and others (mindreading). The present dissertation investigates the ability to read other people's minds from the stance of a third-person observer of naturalistic social interaction. Furthermore, it examines mental state communication (mindspeaking), introduced as a concept reflecting communicative manifestations of first-person metacognition and second-person mindreading, i.e., individuals actively listening and talking to each other about their mental states. The general aim of this work is to advance an integrative research perspective on social-cognitive abilities and their role in interpersonal functioning, particularly social fear, avoidance, distress and conflict, across adults with (different) psychiatric disorders and typically developing adults. Study 1 (Wacker, Bölte, & Dziobek, 2017) considered social psychological, biological, and developmental perspectives to characterize gender- and age-related individual differences in mindreading performance using the ecologically valid Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (Dziobek et al., 2006) in a large sample. By demonstrating that women performed better (specifically in reading the mind of females), and that age had a non-linear negative effect on mindreading across the life span, the results of this study contribute to a better understanding of interindividual variation in typically developing adults. Study 2 (Buhlmann, Wacker, & Dziobek, 2015) investigated mindreading deficits with the same measure in adults with pathological social evaluation fear (social anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder) based on a transdiagnostic approach. Both groups showed a lower performance in understanding other people's mental states in social situations as compared to a clinical and a typically developing control group. The results confirm cognitive-behavioral models of social anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder emphasizing that biased interpretation of social information is a maintaining factor. Moreover, they show that mindreading difficulties generalize to situations in which individuals take a third-person observer perspective. Study 3 (Wacker & Dziobek, 2018) evaluated the effects of a 3-day training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC; Rosenberg, 2015) on mental state communication skills, perspective taking, empathic concern, empathic distress and social stressors at work in typically developing adults in health professions. A pre-post design including a newly developed NVC questionnaire and an established coding system for the observation of communication behavior was realized in the field setting of a public health organization. The training reduced empathic distress and prevented social stressors and conflict with colleagues and supervisors via increased verbalization of negative emotions in naturalistic social situations. This intervention study demonstrates that mental state communication can be effectively promoted in typically developing adults in professional roles demanding good socioemotional skills. The insights gained through the empirical studies emphasize that being able to understand other people's minds and (verbally) reflect upon thoughts, desires, and feelings is not only an issue for adults with social-cognitive difficulties, but also substantially relevant for typically developing adults, given that it plays a pivotal role in interpersonal functioning in particular professions such as healthcare. The dissertation closes with suggestions for interventions and future research with regard to social-cognitive bias modification in socially anxious individuals, conflict communication in heterosexual romantic couples, and empathic distress fatigue prevention in helping professionals

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

An investigation into the effects of social influence on moral behaviour using immersive virtual reality

Much of the research surrounding social influence investigates its effects in specifically non-moral situations while almost no research has looked at its effects during moral emergencies. At the same time, studies of moral psychology tend to focus on the intricacies of moral decision-making during the responses of individual participants. This thesis aims to bridge this gap between social influence and moral psychology by having participants respond to moral dilemmas while under the duress of social influence. In order to investigate the effects of social influence on moral behaviours, immersive virtual reality (IVR) was used, allowing participants to be placed in a life-like virtual simulation of events that they would normally only read about in a text-based vignette, probing their observed moral behaviours instead of just their abstract moral judgments. The benefits of using IVR include the ethical and controllable nature of questionnaires along with the verisimilitude of real-life. Another focus of this thesis is to compare moral judgments to moral behaviours. In two out of the three studies presented in this thesis, the virtual moral dilemma was replicated in a text-based questionnaire in order to compare the results from the two media. Moral judgments in response to text-based moral dilemma can miss out key contextual information such the motoric feedback of having to physically act out a movement. These factors can lead to a divergence between moral judgments and behaviours. The thesis starts with a literature review on IVR technology and moral decision-making and social influence research. After this, the three studies conducted as part of this thesis are described. The major findings from these studies include the demonstration of a preference to take action regardless of outcome only when in IVR and the inability for compliance attempts to influence specifically moral behaviour

Perceptions of Ingratiation From the Perspective of Retired Air Force Leaders

Ingratiation is a deceptive, psychological tactic subordinates use to convince their supervisors to treat them better than other subordinates. Subordinate ingratiation is relatively well-known, but the concept of a manager promoting and encouraging ingratiative behaviors to subordinates is less common and seen as uncommonly deceptive. Little is known about how managers feel about ingratiation why any manager would encourage it. The purpose of this study was to explore how people in management positions percieve manager-encouraged ingratiation. Research questions addressed how people in management positions might respond to a scenario wherein a manager encouraged a subordinate employee to act out ingratiation. The qualitative method was used to examine an environment in which experienced subjects could describe their perceptions about an uncommon behavioral issue in management practice. Fourteen Retired Air National Guard commanders listened to vignettes based on managers who encouraged subordinate ingratiation, and answered open-ended, vignette-based, interview questions. Matrix tables were used to analyze the data through content analyses with emotion and in vivo coding. Results inferred that managers question the ethics behind the specified behavior, but they believe that political and managerial skill can help ethically align ingratiation with organizational objectives. These results can prepare managers and scholars to recognize, discuss, and mitigate ingratiation, or, if appropriate, to accept it. Positive social change is promoted by building a sense of community and citizenship within the workplace, on to employees\u27 neighborhoods and communities, and progressing on a global scale through cooperation among affiliated organizations

Listening and Normative Entanglement: A Pragmatic Foundation for Conversational Ethics

People care very much about being listened to. In everyday talk, we make moral-sounding judgements of people as listeners: praising a doctor who listens well even if she does not have a ready solution, or blaming a boss who does not listen even if the employee manages to get her situation addressed. In this sense, listening is a normative behaviour: that is, we ought to be good listeners. Whilst several disciplines have addressed the normative importance of interpersonal listening—particularly in sociology, psychology, media and culture studies—analytic philosophy does not have a framework for dealing with listening as a normative interpersonal behaviour. Listening usually gets reduced mere speech-parsing (in philosophy of language), or into a matter of belief and trust in the testimony of credible knowers (in social epistemology). My preliminary task is to analyse why this reductive view is taken for granted in the discipline; to diagnose the problem behind the reduction and propose a more useful alternative approach. The central task of my work is to give an account of listening which captures its distinctively normative quality as an interpersonal way of relating to someone: one listens not because the speaker is an epistemic expert, but because the speaker is a person, worthy of recognition and care. I created a framework which accomplishes this by deploying the conceptual resources of conversation sociology and psycholinguistics, in counterpoint to the standing philosophical work on the ethics and politics of speech and silencing, to create a practical ethics of listening to people

Speech, Sex, and Social Norms

This thesis contains five essays about speech, sex, and social norms. In each of the first four essays, I analyse a different communicative phenomenon: discriminatory pejoratives (Chapter 1), cat-calling (Chapter 2), shaming (Chapter 3), and flirting (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5 I reflect on how our models of speech bear on issues of autonomy and power, manifested in differing roles assigned to ‘uptake’. Each essay is self-contained, but taken together they present a picture of how speech constructs identities and enforces norms, especially those governing gender and sexuality. The essays face in two directions. They face outwards from philosophy in so far as they use tools from philosophy of language to make sense of under-analysed communicative phenomena, drawing also on moral psychology, linguistics, and sociology. Discriminatory slurs (especially misogynistic ones), cat-calling, shaming, and flirting have all been neglected by philosophers, despite their social significance. Many of them play a key role in sustaining unjust social practices and structures. By illuminating the nature and function of these phenomena, the essays enhance our understanding and provide resources for political activism. The essays face inwards to philosophy in so far as they apply philosophical tools to social phenomena in order to reveal the shortcomings of those tools. None of the phenomena I consider are compatible with the standard, idealised model of communication. The essays demonstrate that communication is not as co-operative, transparent, or socially homogeneous as theorists have had us believe, and they make clear that linguistic theorising cannot be divorced from political considerations. Thus the essays show that just as philosophy of language can help further feminist ends, attention to issues of feminist concern can help refine philosophy of language.Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnershi

Human Computer Interaction and Emerging Technologies

The INTERACT Conferences are an important platform for researchers and practitioners in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) to showcase their work. They are organised biennially by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee on Human–Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13), an international committee of 30 member national societies and nine Working Groups. INTERACT is truly international in its spirit and has attracted researchers from several countries and cultures. With an emphasis on inclusiveness, it works to lower the barriers that prevent people in developing countries from participating in conferences. As a multidisciplinary field, HCI requires interaction and discussion among diverse people with different interests and backgrounds. The 17th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2019) took place during 2-6 September 2019 in Paphos, Cyprus. The conference was held at the Coral Beach Hotel Resort, and was co-sponsored by the Cyprus University of Technology and Tallinn University, in cooperation with ACM and ACM SIGCHI. This volume contains the Adjunct Proceedings to the 17th INTERACT Conference, comprising a series of selected papers from workshops, the Student Design Consortium and the Doctoral Consortium. The volume follows the INTERACT conference tradition of submitting adjunct papers after the main publication deadline, to be published by a University Press with a connection to the conference itself. In this case, both the Adjunct Proceedings Chair of the conference, Dr Usashi Chatterjee, and the lead Editor of this volume, Dr Fernando Loizides, work at Cardiff University which is the home of Cardiff University Press