Improving human interaction research through ecological grounding

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science

An appeal for a methodological fusion of conversation analysis and experimental psychology

©, Published with license by Taylor & Francis. © 2017 J. P. de Ruiter and Saul Albert. Human social interaction is studied by researchers in conversation analysis (CA) and psychology, but the dominant methodologies within these two disciplines are very different. Analyzing methodological differences in relation to major developments in the philosophy of science, we suggest that a central difference is that psychologists tend to follow Popper’s falsificationism in dissociating the context of discovery and the context of justification. In CA, following Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, these two contexts are much closer to one another, if not inextricable. While this dissociation allows the psychologist a much larger theoretical freedom, because psychologists “only” need to validate their theories by generating confirmed predictions from experiments, it also carries the risk of generating theories that are less robust and pertinent to everyday interaction than the body of knowledge accumulated by CA. However, as long as key philosophical differences are well understood, it is not an inherently bad idea to generate predictions from theories and use quantitative and experimental methods to test them. It is both desirable and achievable to find a synthesis between methodologies that combines their strengths and avoids their weaknesses. We discuss a number of challenges that would need to be met and some opportunities that may arise from creating such a synthesis

Repair: The interface between interaction and cognition

Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Topics in Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Cognitive Science Society. Conversational repair is the process people use to detect and resolve problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Through repair, participants in social interaction display how they establish and maintain communication and mutual understanding. We argue that repair provides a crucial theoretical interface for research between diverse approaches to studying human interaction. We provide an overview of conversation analytic findings about repair in order to encourage further cross-disciplinary research involving both detailed inductive inquiry and more theory-driven experimental approaches. We outline CA's main typologies of repair and its methodological rationale, and we provide transcripts and examples that readers can explore for themselves using open data from online corpora. Since participants in interaction use repair to deal with problems as they emerge at the surface level of talk, we conclude that repair can be a point of convergence for studying mis/communication from multiple methodological perspectives

Correlation Differences in Heartbeat Fluctuations During Rest and Exercise

We study the heartbeat activity of healthy individuals at rest and during exercise. We focus on correlation properties of the intervals formed by successive peaks in the pulse wave and find significant scaling differences between rest and exercise. For exercise the interval series is anticorrelated at short time scales and correlated at intermediate time scales, while for rest we observe the opposite crossover pattern -- from strong correlations in the short-time regime to weaker correlations at larger scales. We suggest a physiologically motivated stochastic scenario to explain the scaling differences between rest and exercise and the observed crossover patterns.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Instability of the rhodium magnetic moment as origin of the metamagnetic phase transition in alpha-FeRh

Based on ab initio total energy calculations we show that two magnetic states of rhodium atoms together with competing ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic exchange interactions are responsible for a temperature induced metamagnetic phase transition, which experimentally is observed for stoichiometric alpha-FeRh. A first-principle spin-based model allows to reproduce this first-order metamagnetic transition by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Further inclusion of spacial variation of exchange parameters leads to a realistic description of the experimental magneto-volume effects in alpha-FeRh.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Updated tests of scaling and universality for the spin-spin correlations in the 2D and 3D spin-S Ising models using high-temperature expansions

We have extended, from order 12 through order 25, the high-temperature series expansions (in zero magnetic field) for the spin-spin correlations of the spin-S Ising models on the square, simple-cubic and body-centered-cubic lattices. On the basis of this large set of data, we confirm accurately the validity of the scaling and universality hypotheses by resuming several tests which involve the correlation function, its moments and the exponential or the second-moment correlation-lengths.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure

Dynamic Assessment of Baroreflex Control of Heart Rate During Induction of Propofol Anesthesia Using a Point Process Method

In this article, we present a point process method to assess dynamic baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) by estimating the baroreflex gain as focal component of a simplified closed-loop model of the cardiovascular system. Specifically, an inverse Gaussian probability distribution is used to model the heartbeat interval, whereas the instantaneous mean is identified by linear and bilinear bivariate regressions on both the previous R−R intervals (RR) and blood pressure (BP) beat-to-beat measures. The instantaneous baroreflex gain is estimated as the feedback branch of the loop with a point-process filter, while the RRBP feedforward transfer function representing heart contractility and vasculature effects is simultaneously estimated by a recursive least-squares filter. These two closed-loop gains provide a direct assessment of baroreflex control of heart rate (HR). In addition, the dynamic coherence, cross bispectrum, and their power ratio can also be estimated. All statistical indices provide a valuable quantitative assessment of the interaction between heartbeat dynamics and hemodynamics. To illustrate the application, we have applied the proposed point process model to experimental recordings from 11 healthy subjects in order to monitor cardiovascular regulation under propofol anesthesia. We present quantitative results during transient periods, as well as statistical analyses on steady-state epochs before and after propofol administration. Our findings validate the ability of the algorithm to provide a reliable and fast-tracking assessment of BRS, and show a clear overall reduction in baroreflex gain from the baseline period to the start of propofol anesthesia, confirming that instantaneous evaluation of arterial baroreflex control of HR may yield important implications in clinical practice, particularly during anesthesia and in postoperative care.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-HL084502)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant K25-NS05758)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant DP2- OD006454)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-DA015644)Massachusetts General Hospital (Clinical Research Center, UL1 Grant RR025758