Five Degrees of Happiness: Effective Smiley Face Likert Scales for Evaluating with Children

This paper focuses on achieving optimal responses through supporting children’s judgements, using Smiley Face Likert scales as a rating scale for quantitative questions in evaluations. It highlights the need to provide appropriate methods for children to communicate judgements, highlighting that the traditional Smiley Face Likert scale does not provide an appropriate method. The paper outlines a range of studies, identifying that to achieve differentiated data and full use of rating scales by children that faces with positive emotions should be used within Smiley Face Likert scales. The proposed rating method, the Five Degrees of Happiness Smiley Face Likert scale, was used in a large-scale summative evaluation of a Serious Game resulting in variance within and between children, with all points of the scale used

Exploiting Group Structures to Infer Social Interactions From Videos

In this thesis, we consider the task of inferring the social interactions between humans by analyzing multi-modal data. Specifically, we attempt to solve some of the problems in interaction analysis, such as long-term deception detection, political deception detection, and impression prediction. In this work, we emphasize the importance of using knowledge about the group structure of the analyzed interactions. Previous works on the matter mostly neglected this aspect and analyzed a single subject at a time. Using the new Resistance dataset, collected by our collaborators, we approach the problem of long-term deception detection by designing a class of histogram-based features and a novel class of meta-features we callLiarRank. We develop a LiarOrNot model to identify spies in Resistance videos. We achieve AUCs of over 0.70 outperforming our baselines by 3% and human judges by 12%. For the problem of political deception, we first collect a dataset of videos and transcripts of 76 politicians from 18 countries making truthful and deceptive statements. We call it the Global Political Deception Dataset. We then show how to analyze the statements in a broader context by building a Video-Article-Topic graph. From this graph, we create a novel class of features called Deception Score that captures how controversial each topic is and how it affects the truthfulness of each statement. We show that our approach achieves 0.775 AUC outperforming competing baselines. Finally, we use the Resistance data to solve the problem of dyadic impression prediction. Our proposed Dyadic Impression Prediction System (DIPS) contains four major innovations: a novel class of features called emotion ranks, sign imbalance features derived from signed graphs theory, a novel method to align the facial expressions of subjects, and finally, we propose the concept of a multilayered stochastic network we call Temporal Delayed Network. Our DIPS architecture beats eight baselines from the literature, yielding statistically significant improvements of 19.9-30.8% in AUC

Communication challenges in social board games

Background: Discussion-based communication scenarios are present in many aspects of life. These can range from conversations with friends in a social setting to formal consultation processes and focus groups used by industry and government. However, reliance on speech does not easily permit the fair and equitable involvement of people who face communication-based accessibility challenges. Aim: This work aimed to understand the communication challenges present within social board games, how these challenges arise, and participants’ perceptions of the difficulties these challenges may cause. Method: We conducted four social gameplay sessions to understand what parts of discussion may cause communication challenges and what techniques are commonplace in overcoming these. Results: Our results highlight how group facilitation and conversation pacing are essential in promoting accessibility within discussion-type situations. Our analysis identified four themes that focused on speech and delivery, access strategies, viewing and position, balance of power, and awareness of others. Conclusions: Communication within board game scenarios is a complex area that creates several intersectional accessibility challenges. These challenges can impact how group communication is facilitated, how pacing and delivery relate to overall group understanding, and how an awareness of accessibility is critical in developing inclusive environments

The visual analysis of heterogeneous sex role interactions: a content analysis of popular music videos

Hip Hop cultured music videos have raised concern among our nation’s leaders, parents and communities. Since the introduction of music videos in the early 1980s the medium has crossed cultural, regional and ethnic boundaries (Rose, 1994). This medium has been well researched since the 1980s. The focus of this study is Hip Hop cultured music videos from years 1989-2006. The uniqueness of this study is that it focuses on nonverbal sex role interactions in this genre of music videos. This study found many useful trends. For example, men were portrayed as more dominant and/or vertical than women in the sampled music videos

Story beats in videogames as value-driven choice-based unit operations

We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a ludonarrative unit, working simultaneously as a ‘unit operation’ in the study of games as systems, and as a microunit of character action in narrative analysis. The conclusion outlines prospective directions for using story beats in formal, experiential, and cultural game research.We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a ludonarrative unit, working simultaneously as a ‘unit operation’ in the study of games as systems, and as a microunit of character action in narrative analysis. The conclusion outlines prospective directions for using story beats in formal, experiential, and cultural game research

Teacher experiences of critical thinking using supernaturally themed novels: implications for contemporary middle school classrooms

Through the collation of teacher experiences, this qualitative research focuses on the implications of critical thinking involving supernatural themes presented in school-based literature. With the imbedded supernatural themes in the religious belief systems of some cultural groups, our Indigenous population, and the Christian majority, the implications of the critical thinking emphasis endorsed by the Australian Curriculum and its application to thematic content in the middle school English classroom is investigated in this study. A cache of purposefully selected novels approved for use in Australian secondary schools are examined to determine the type and frequency of commonly occurring supernatural themes. These are then investigated to determine what types of cultural conflict could occur, and the subsequent impact the treatment of such themes could have on the personal belief systems and sensitivities of some groups in our multicultural society. Teacher perspectives are examined using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology, and this research utilises hermeneutic principles to analyse the data gathered. This investigation reveals both positive and negative impacts on pedagogical practice, and highlights the ethical conflicts eliciting critical thinking responses using such thematic novels as a stimulus has on teachers in the 21st century classroom

The Psychology of Trust from Relational Messages

A fundamental underpinning of all social relationships is trust. Trust can be established through implicit forms of communication called relational messages. A multidisciplinary, multi-university, cross-cultural investigation addressed how these message themes are expressed and whether they are moderated by culture and veracity. A multi-round decision-making game with 695 international participants assessed the nonverbal and verbal behaviors that express such meanings as affection, dominance, and composure, from which people ultimately determine who can be trusted and who not. Analysis of subjective judgments showed that trust was most predicted by dominance, then affection, and lastly, composure. Behaviorally, several nonverbal and verbal behaviors associated with these message themes were combined to predict trust. Results were similar across cultures but moderated by veracity. Methodologically, automated software extracted facial features, vocal features, and linguistic metrics associated with these message themes. A new attentional computer vision method retrospectively identified specific meaningful segments where relational messages were expressed. The new software tools and attentional model hold promise for identifying nuanced, implicit meanings that together predict trust and that can, in combination, serve as proxies for trust

Enhancing Questionnaire Design Through Participant Engagement to Improve the Outputs of Evaluation.

Questionnaires are habitual choices for many user experience evaluators, providing a well-recognised and accepted, fast and cost effective method of collecting and analysing data. However, despite frequent and widespread use in evaluation, reliance on questionnaires can be problematic. Satisficing, acquiescence bias and straight lining are common response biases associated with questionnaires, typically resulting in suboptimal responses and provision of poor quality data. These problems can relate to a lack of engagement with evaluation tasks, yet there is a lack of previous research that has attempted to alleviate these limitations by making questionnaires more fun or enjoyable to enhance participant engagement. This research seeks to address whether ‘user evaluation questionnaires can be designed to be engaging to improve optimal responding. The aim of this research is to investigate if response quality can be improved through enhancing questionnaire design both to reduce common response biases and to maintain participant engagement. The evaluation context for this study was provided by MIXER, an interactive, narrative-based application for intercultural sensitivity learning, used and evaluated by 9-11 year old children in the classroom context. A series of Participatory Design studies with children investigated engagement and optimal responding with questionnaires. These initial studies informed the design of a series of questionnaires created in the form of three workbooks that were used to evaluate MIXER with over 400 children. 3 A mixed methods approach was used to evaluate the questionnaires. Results demonstrate that by making questionnaire completion more enjoyable data quality is improved. Response biases are reduced, quantitative data are more complete and qualitative responses are more verbose and meaningful compared to standard questionnaires. Further, children reported that completing the questionnaires was a fun and enjoyable activity that they would wish to repeat in the future. As a discipline in its own right, evaluation is under-investigated. Similarly user evaluation is not evaluated with a lack of papers considering this issue in this millennium. Thus, this research provides a significant contribution to the field of evaluation, highlighting that the outputs of user evaluation with questionnaires are improved when participant engagement informs questionnaire design. The result is a more positive evaluation experience for participants and in return a higher standard of data provision for evaluators and R&D teams