Talking the Talk: The Effect of Vocalics in an Interview

Our voices carry more than just content. People continuously make assumptions of one’s intelligence, credibility, personality, and other characteristics merely based on the way we talk. As the diversity of individuals in the workplace increases, so too do the differences in how those individuals talk. It is important that we understand how these different ways of speaking are being perceived in the workplace. More specifically, how are individuals being perceived prior to being hired via the interview process? This Honors Capstone project aims to understand the impact that vocal characteristics in an individual have on the interviewer’s perception of the interviewee, and how that impacts the hiring process. This project will offer professionals of all ages tangible advice on ways to increase one’s chances of receiving a job just by altering aspects of one’s voice

Relative persuasiveness of health infographics, The

2019 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.This study explores the persuasiveness of infographics, as a quantitative communication strategy to support medical decision making and health risk appraisal. compared to its equivalent text-based condition, within in the context of promoting STD and STI prevention and screening among young adults. This work uses the ELM as the guiding theoretical framework in a web-based experiment which utilizes a 2 x 1 posttest only experimental design investigates the influence manipulated visual content and message formats have on health-related persuasive message processing among young adults within in the context of promoting STD and STI prevention and screening among young adults. Predictions based on previous literature and empirical testing suggest that enhancing the vividness of the appearance of a health-related message in an infographic format will enhance elaborative processing, resulting in desired health behavior outcomes. To make these predictions, the study poses research questions that explore the cognitive processing and the number of positive thoughts generated by recipients randomly assigned to the infographic condition. In addition to these research questions, this study poses hypotheses that predict elaborative processing, knowledge, and attitude will be greater in the infographic condition, rather than its text-based equivalent, consistent with previous empirical findings. The results of this study can inform further investigations between these pathways and applications to future health communication strategies

DESIGNING PERSUASIVE SYSTEMS FOR USER ENGAGEMENT IN COLLABORATIVE INTERACTION

Social influnce concepts have great potential to positively affect the behaviors and attitudes of individuals. Drawing on socio-psychological theories, this study explores how social influnce design principles alter user engagement in collaborative interaction during public events. Based on a theory-driven research model, a persuasive information system comprising social influnce design principles of cooperation, social learning, and social facilitation was implemented and examined with a sample of 101 participants. The results reveal interactions between the design principles and their capacity to explain the persuasiveness of the system, which further substantially predicts the actual engagement of participants in collaborative interaction and their intention to use such systems in the future. Both cooperation and social learning are significantly correlated to perceived persuasiveness, and the cooperation also noticeably moderates the effect of social facilitation on social learning. These findings are potentially instrumental in achieving a richer understanding of how best to further harness social influnce for enhanced user engagement through novel socio-technical environments and for the future development of persuasive systems

Multimodal Human Group Behavior Analysis

Human behaviors in a group setting involve a complex mixture of multiple modalities: audio, visual, linguistic, and human interactions. With the rapid progress of AI, automatic prediction and understanding of these behaviors is no longer a dream. In a negotiation, discovering human relationships and identifying the dominant person can be useful for decision making. In security settings, detecting nervous behaviors can help law enforcement agents spot suspicious people. In adversarial settings such as national elections and court defense, identifying persuasive speakers is a critical task. It is beneficial to build accurate machine learning (ML) models to predict such human group behaviors. There are two elements for successful prediction of group behaviors. The first is to design domain-specific features for each modality. Social and Psychological studies have uncovered various factors including both individual cues and group interactions, which inspire us to extract relevant features computationally. In particular, the group interaction modality plays an important role, since human behaviors influence each other through interactions in a group. Second, effective multimodal ML models are needed to align and integrate the different modalities for accurate predictions. However, most previous work ignored the group interaction modality. Moreover, they only adopt early fusion or late fusion to combine different modalities, which is not optimal. This thesis presents methods to train models taking multimodal inputs in group interaction videos, and to predict human group behaviors. First, we develop an ML algorithm to automatically predict human interactions from videos, which is the basis to extract interaction features and model group behaviors. Second, we propose a multimodal method to identify dominant people in videos from multiple modalities. Third, we study the nervousness in human behavior by a developing hybrid method: group interaction feature engineering combined with individual facial embedding learning. Last, we introduce a multimodal fusion framework that enables us to predict how persuasive speakers are. Overall, we develop one algorithm to extract group interactions and build three multimodal models to identify three kinds of human behavior in videos: dominance, nervousness and persuasion. The experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the methods and analyze the modality-wise contributions

Multimedia Design, Learning Effectiveness, and Student Perceptions of Instructor Credibility and Immediacy

Online learning and the use of multimedia is a quickly growing element of higher education. This experimental research study examines five common audio and video presentation designs to inform evidence-based practices that can be applied by instructional designers as they develop content for online learners. Specifically, this experiment compares instructor-only, slides-only, dual-windows, video-switching, and superimposed-slides multimedia designs in terms of learning effectiveness, perceived instructor credibility, instructor immediacy, and cognitive load created by each design. This study included a diverse sample of adult learners who were randomly assigned to treatment groups. A total of 171 participants completed the study and responded to the NASA Task Load Index (TLX) used to gauge task and cognitive load, the credibility and immediacy survey, and the 20-item post-test. A series of 5x1 Analyses of Variance and Tukey post-hoc calculations were conducted to test for statistically significant differences between groups. The results suggest that a balance can be established between instructor credibility and immediacy by showing both the instructor and instructional content during online classes. The five multimedia designs can yield similar results in recall and comprehension as long as audio, video, and content quality is a design priority. The results also indicate that the design of instructional methods has a greater impact on learning than the device used to receive that instruction. Media and technology are a means to deliver pedagogy and foster communication; it is up to instructors and designers to use evidence-based best practices such as these to build optimal learning environments and instructional systems

Persua: A Visual Interactive System to Enhance the Persuasiveness of Arguments in Online Discussion

Persuading people to change their opinions is a common practice in online discussion forums on topics ranging from political campaigns to relationship consultation. Enhancing people's ability to write persuasive arguments could not only practice their critical thinking and reasoning but also contribute to the effectiveness and civility in online communication. It is, however, not an easy task in online discussion settings where written words are the primary communication channel. In this paper, we derived four design goals for a tool that helps users improve the persuasiveness of arguments in online discussions through a survey with 123 online forum users and interviews with five debating experts. To satisfy these design goals, we analyzed and built a labeled dataset of fine-grained persuasive strategies (i.e., logos, pathos, ethos, and evidence) in 164 arguments with high ratings on persuasiveness from ChangeMyView, a popular online discussion forum. We then designed an interactive visual system, Persua, which provides example-based guidance on persuasive strategies to enhance the persuasiveness of arguments. In particular, the system constructs portfolios of arguments based on different persuasive strategies applied to a given discussion topic. It then presents concrete examples based on the difference between the portfolios of user input and high-quality arguments in the dataset. A between-subjects study shows suggestive evidence that Persua encourages users to submit more times for feedback and helps users improve more on the persuasiveness of their arguments than a baseline system. Finally, a set of design considerations was summarized to guide future intelligent systems that improve the persuasiveness in text.Comment: This paper will appear in CSCW 202

Design Principles for Signal Detection in Modern Job Application Systems: Identifying Fabricated Qualifications

Hiring a new employee is traditionally thought to be an uncertain investment. This uncertainty is lessened by the presence of signals that indicate job fitness. Ideally, job applicants objectively signal their qualifications, and those signals are correctly assessed by the hiring team. In reality, signal manipulation is pervasive in the hiring process, mitigating the reliability of signals used to make hiring decisions. To combat these inefficiencies, we propose and evaluate SIGHT, a theoretical class of systems affording more robust signal evaluation during the job application process. A prototypical implementation of the SIGHT framework was evaluated using a mock-interview paradigm. Results provide initial evidence that SIGHT systems can elicit and capture qualification signals beyond what can be traditionally obtained from a typical application and that SIGHT systems can assess signals more effectively than unaided decision-making. SIGHT principles may extend to domains such as audit and security interviews

Assessing Preservice Teachers’ Presentation Capabilities: Contrasting the Modes of Communication with the Constructed Impression

A research-based understanding of how to develop and assess classroom presentation skills is vital for the effective development of pre-service teacher communication capabilities. This paper identifies and compares two different models of assessing pre-service teachers’ presentation performance – one based on the Modes of Communication (voice, body language, words, and alignment between those elements) and another based on features of the Constructed Impression of the communication acts (confidence, clarity, engagement and appropriateness). The Modes of Communication and the Constructed Impression of 164 pre-service teacher presentations were rated. The Constructed Impression model provided a better fit to data, while averaging of Modes of Communication elements offered more accurate prediction of overall score. All elements in both models made a significant contribution to the overall perception of communication performance. The study also reports on the relative contribution of voice, body language, words and alignment to the perceived confidence, clarity, engagement and appropriateness of the pre-service teacher presentations. Implications for developing pre-service teachers’ presentation capabilities are also discussed