Everyday confrontation of discrimination: The well-being costs and benefits to women over time.

Taking action against discrimination has positive consequences for well-being (e.g., Cocking & Drury, 2004) but most of this research has focused on collective actions and has used methodologies assessing one point in time. This study therefore used a diary methodology to examine how women’s everyday confrontations of discrimination would affect measures of subjective and psychological well-being, and how these relationships would change over time. In a 28-day online diary study, women indicated their daily experience of discrimination, described their response, and completed measures of well-being. Results showed that at the beginning of the study, using indirect confrontation predicted greater well-being than using angered confrontation. However, continued use of indirect and educational confrontation decreased well-being whereas continued use of angered confrontation increased well-being over time. By the end of the study, using angered confrontation predicted greater well-being than using indirect confrontation. Analyses of linguistic markers were consistent with the explicit measures of well-being. Implications for distinguishing between types of confrontations and integrating time analyses are discussed

Diachronic and/or synchronic variation? The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in L2 French.

A majority of the early research in Second Language Acquisition focused on diachronic variation in the learners’ interlanguage (IL), that is, differences in the IL linked to a supposed increase in knowledge between two points in time (cf. Tarone 1988). The last decade has seen an increase in studies combining a diachronic perspective with a synchronic one, that is, where variation in production is seen as the consequence of individual differences among learners (gender, extraversion, learning strategies, attitudes, motivation, sociobiographical variables linked to the language learning experience and the use of the target language (TL)). In this perspective, non-native-like patterns are not automatically assumed to be the result of incomplete knowledge, but other possible causes are taken into consideration such as temporary inaccessibility of information in stressful situations or even a conscious decision by the L2 user to deviate from the TL norm

Streaming Channel Brand’s Rhetoric through @NetflixID Twitter Account

This research aims to analyze the rhetoric of @NetflixID, well-known as a brand's Twitter account using Selzer's rhetorical analysis approach. Data was collected in January 2020 through documentation using the text analysis technique. The objective of this research is to analyze @NetflixID's rhetoric and show that @NetflixID was found to be embodied the human character by using humor, emojis and emoticons, authorship and personal pronouns, non-formal language style, choice of words, anecdote, and non-standard vocabularies in giving information and showing emotions. Canon style and canon memory help find the pathos and logos of @NetflixID. Furthermore, this research found the potential uses of conversational tone, authorship, and personal pronouns as a marketing communication tool in initiating social interactions, generating affective responses from the audience, creating emotional bonds with the consumer, and attracting the consumers' attention similarly to humor. After all, this research discovers @NetflixID's rhetoric in promoting the products and engaging with audiences

Is it only about Partners and Servants? A qualitative study about positive Smart Speaker social roles

The smart speaker market is growing. Previous literature has shown that interacting with objects that are characterised by human-like characteristics lead users to assign specific social roles to smart speakers. However, this literature has only focused on two positive social roles: partner and servant. Taking a cue from consumerbrand relationship literature, we claim that new smart speaker roles might exist and need to be investigated. From a qualitative analysis of 85 customer reviews of Amazon Echo, three social roles emerged: Partner, Servant, and Affectionate caregiver. The features of these roles and the implications are discussed in the result section

An End-to-End Conversational Style Matching Agent

We present an end-to-end voice-based conversational agent that is able to engage in naturalistic multi-turn dialogue and align with the interlocutor's conversational style. The system uses a series of deep neural network components for speech recognition, dialogue generation, prosodic analysis and speech synthesis to generate language and prosodic expression with qualities that match those of the user. We conducted a user study (N=30) in which participants talked with the agent for 15 to 20 minutes, resulting in over 8 hours of natural interaction data. Users with high consideration conversational styles reported the agent to be more trustworthy when it matched their conversational style. Whereas, users with high involvement conversational styles were indifferent. Finally, we provide design guidelines for multi-turn dialogue interactions using conversational style adaptation

Show Me You Care: Trait Empathy, Linguistic Style and Mimicry on Facebook

Linguistic mimicry, the adoption of another’s language patterns, is a subconscious behavior with pro-social benefits. However, some professions advocate its conscious use in empathic communication. This involves mutual mimicry; effective communicators mimic their interlocutors, who also mimic them back. Since mimicry has often been studied in face-to-face contexts, we ask whether individuals with empathic dis- positions have unique communication styles and/or elicit mimicry in mediated communication on Facebook. Participants completed Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index and provided access to Facebook activity. We confirm that dispositional empathy is correlated to the use of particular stylistic features. In addition, we identify four empathy profiles and find correlations to writing style. When a linguistic feature is used, this often “triggers” use by friends. However, the presence of particular features, rather than participant dispo- sition, best predicts mimicry. This suggests that machine-human communications could be enhanced based on recently used features, without extensive user profiling