Talking about interaction*

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Recent research has exposed disagreements over the nature and usefulness of what may (or may not) be Human–Computer Interaction's fundamental phenomenon: ‘interaction’. For some, HCI's theorising about interaction has been deficient, impacting its capacity to inform decisions in design, suggesting the need either to perform first-principles definition work or broader administrative clarification and formalisation of the multitude of formulations of the concepts of interaction and their particular uses. For others, there remain open questions over the continued relevance of certain ‘versions’ of interaction as a useful concept in HCI at all. We pursue a different perspective in this paper, reviewing how HCI treats interaction through examining its ‘conceptual pragmatics’ within HCI's discourse. We argue that articulations of the concepts of interaction can be a site of productive conflict for HCI that for many reasons may resist attempts of formalisation as well as attempts to dispense with them. The main contribution of this paper is in specifying how we might go about talking of interaction and the value of interaction language as promiscuous concepts

Teacher-Student Verbal Interaction Patterns At The Tertiary Level Of Education

The main objective of the proposed study was to explore Teacher–Student verbal interaction patterns at tertiary level education in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan using Flanders’ Interaction Analysis system.  This study was significant because its findings and conclusions may stimulate teachers to improve their teaching behaviour in order to maximize student learning.  To achieve the above study objectives, three hypotheses were formulated in the light of Flanders “Two-thirds rule” of teacher-student classroom interaction at the tertiary level, namely, about two-thirds of the classroom time is devoted to talking, about two-thirds of this time the person talking is the teacher and two-thirds of the teachers’ talk is “direct” talk. Twenty-five classrooms at the tertiary level were randomly selected as samples for this study.  Twenty-five observations were carried out, one in each classroom, using Flanders Interaction Analysis system to secure the data.  To do this, time sampling was used and each classroom was observed for 810 seconds (13.50 minutes) in a 45-minutes class.  After obtaining and encoding the data, it was tabulated, analyzed, and interpreted by using percentages, means, and standard deviation.  All the hypotheses were supported and it was concluded that, at the tertiary level, more than two-thirds of classroom time was devoted to talking. Thus, talk method dominated in classes. More than two-thirds of the classroom talking time was devoted to teachers talking at the tertiary level with the teachers playing the dominant role.  More than two-thirds of the teachers’ talking time was devoted to direct talk, which showed the direct role of the teacher and indirect role of students at the tertiary level.&nbsp

Towards Multi-Modal Interactions in Virtual Environments: A Case Study

We present research on visualization and interaction in a realistic model of an existing theatre. This existing ‘Muziek¬centrum’ offers its visitors information about performances by means of a yearly brochure. In addition, it is possible to get information at an information desk in the theatre (during office hours), to get information by phone (by talking to a human or by using IVR). The database of the theater holds the information that is available at the beginning of the ‘theatre season’. Our aim is to make this information more accessible by using multi-modal accessible multi-media web pages. A more general aim is to do research in the area of web-based services, in particu¬lar interactions in virtual environments

Talking About Looking: Three Approaches to Interviewing Carers of People With Rheumatoid Arthritis About Information Seeking

© 2016 The Author(s). Given the profusion of illness-related information, in this article, we consider how talking about information seeking - and in particular Internet use - is difficult, not because it is necessarily a highly sensitive topic (though it may be), but rather due to the unusual and unfamiliar situation of talking about information seeking. Drawing on interviews conducted as part of a study on the educational needs of carers of people with rheumatoid arthritis, we compare three types of interview for understanding online information seeking: interviews (recall), researcher-led observation (joining participant at the computer), and diaries. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and discuss how changing interview questions and the form of interaction can help to produce different types of data, and potentially more meaningful insights. Of the three approaches, conducting interviews with participants while looking at a computer (talking while looking) offered the best opportunities to understand Internet-based information seeking

The Benefits and Risks of Telling and Listening to Stories of Difficulty Over Time: Experimentally Testing the Expressive Writing Paradigm in the Context of Interpersonal Communication Between Friends

The overarching goal of the current study was to determine the impact of talking interpersonally over time on emerging adults’ individual and relational health. Using an expressive writing study design (see Frattaroli, 2006), we assessed the degree to which psychological health improved over time for college students who told and listened to stories about friends’ current difficulties in comparison with tellers in control conditions. We also investigated the effects on tellers’ and listeners’ perceptions of each other’s communication competence, communicated perspective taking, and the degree to which each threatened the other’s face during the interaction over time to better understand the interpersonal communication complexities associated with talking about difficulty over time. After completing prestudy questionnaires, 49 friend pairs engaged in three interpersonal interactions over the course of 1 week wherein one talked about and one listened to a story of difficulty (treatment) or daily events (control). All participants completed a poststudy questionnaire 3 weeks later. Tellers’ negative affect decreased over time for participants exposed to the treatment group, although life satisfaction increased and positive affect decreased across time for participants regardless of condition. Perceptions of friends’ communication abilities decreased significantly over time for tellers. The current study contributes to the literature on expressive writing and social support by shedding light on the interpersonal implications of talking about difficulty, the often over looked effects of disclosure on listeners, and the health effects of talking about problems on college students’ health

The Benefits and Risks of Telling and Listening to Stories of Difficulty Over Time: Experimentally Testing the Expressive Writing Paradigm in the Context of Interpersonal Communication Between Friends

The overarching goal of the current study was to determine the impact of talking interpersonally over time on emerging adults’ individual and relational health. Using an expressive writing study design (see Frattaroli, 2006), we assessed the degree to which psychological health improved over time for college students who told and listened to stories about friends’ current difficulties in comparison with tellers in control conditions. We also investigated the effects on tellers’ and listeners’ perceptions of each other’s communication competence, communicated perspective taking, and the degree to which each threatened the other’s face during the interaction over time to better understand the interpersonal communication complexities associated with talking about difficulty over time. After completing prestudy questionnaires, 49 friend pairs engaged in three interpersonal interactions over the course of 1 week wherein one talked about and one listened to a story of difficulty (treatment) or daily events (control). All participants completed a poststudy questionnaire 3 weeks later. Tellers’ negative affect decreased over time for participants exposed to the treatment group, although life satisfaction increased and positive affect decreased across time for participants regardless of condition. Perceptions of friends’ communication abilities decreased significantly over time for tellers. The current study contributes to the literature on expressive writing and social support by shedding light on the interpersonal implications of talking about difficulty, the often over looked effects of disclosure on listeners, and the health effects of talking about problems on college students’ health

Family Therapy: New Intervention Programs and Researches: Systemic Family Approach in Health Care

Talking about family practice is talking about family systemic approach. There are many cues that are so important to understand how the family functions. This is the scope of systemic family approach, where the health is influenced by all the systems a person belongs. In this chapter, we will discuss how a family interacts and the roles of every person in the family—as individuals and as part of the context. And most of it is how this interaction influences the health of every member of the family. Based on the systemic theory, we will run over some tools that will allow to assess the family and discuss how to ease the communication and to help the family to face their difficulties

Parent-child interaction in Nigerian families: conversation analysis, context and culture

This paper uses a conversation analysis (CA) approach to explore parent child interaction (PCI) within Nigerian families. We illustrate how speech and language therapists (SLTs), by using CA, can tailor recommendations according to the interactional style of each individual family that are consonant with the family’s cultural beliefs. Three parent-child dyads were videoed playing and talking together in their home environments. The analysis uncovered a preference for instructional talk similar to that used in the classroom. Closer examination revealed that this was not inappropriate when considering the context of the activities and their perceived discourse role. Furthermore, this was not necessarily at the expense of responsivity or semantic contingency. The preference for instructional talk appeared to reflect deeply held cultural beliefs about the role of adults and children within the family and it is argued that the cultural paradigm is vitally important to consider when evaluating PCI. Given a potential risk that such young children may be vulnerable in terms of language difficulties, we offer an example of how PCI can be enhanced to encourage language development without disrupting the naturally occurring talk or the underlying purpose of the interaction

Challenging Social Cognition Models of Adherence:Cycles of Discourse, Historical Bodies, and Interactional Order

Attempts to model individual beliefs as a means of predicting how people follow clinical advice have dominated adherence research, but with limited success. In this article, we challenge assumptions underlying this individualistic philosophy and propose an alternative formulation of context and its relationship with individual actions related to illness. Borrowing from Scollon and Scollon’s three elements of social action – “historical body,” “interaction order,” and “discourses in place” – we construct an alternative set of research methods and demonstrate their application with an example of a person talking about asthma management. We argue that talk- or illness-related behavior, both viewed as forms of social action, manifest themselves as an intersection of cycles of discourse, shifting as individuals move through these cycles across time and space. We finish by discussing how these dynamics of social action can be studied and how clinicians might use this understanding when negotiating treatment with patients

The effects of parental interaction on infant learning.

It was previously thought that infants could not perceive causal events as causal (e.g., one ball rolls into another making the 2nd ball move) until the age of 6 months (Cohen & Amsel, 1998). However, more recent research has shown that infants are able to understand the concept of causality earlier than 6 months of age if given the opportunity to have “real-life” exposure to physical causality with sticky mittens (Rakison &Krogh, 2012). Sticky mittens” play sessions allow infants to manipulate Velcro balls while wearing mittens with Velcro sewn on the palms. This allows young infants, who are otherwise unable to grasp and manipulate objects, to do so. Data obtained from a recent study of infant causal perception in our lab indicated that “sticky mittens” play experience facilitated young infants\u27 causal perception but only when parental interaction was limited; when parental interaction was encouraged, infants’ learning about causal perception was not facilitated (Holt, 2016). The current thesis seeks to test the hypothesis that parental interaction caused infants to be distracted during the learning task. Videos from previously recorded “sticky mittens” play sessions were coded frame by frame to determine the percentage of time infants spent “on-task” (i.e., looking at the balls or the mittens), the percentage of time infants spent “off-task” (i.e., looking anywhere other than the balls or the mittens), and the percentage of time parents spent moving in the infants’ field of vision, which was taken as a measure of parental interference. These data were compared across Talking and No Talking conditions. No statistically significant differences were found in the time infants spent “on-task” or “off-task.” However, it was found that parents in the Talking condition interfered significantly more often with their infants compared to parents in the No Talking condition. Together, the results show that parental interaction can negatively affect infant learning