Quantifying social performance: A review with implications for further work

Human social performance has been a focus of theory and investigation for more than a century. Attempts to quantify social performance have focused on self-report and non-social performance measures grounded in intelligence-based theories. An expertise framework, when applied to individual differences in social interaction performance, offers novel insights and methods of quantification that could address limitations of prior approaches. The purposes of this review are 3-fold. First, to define the central concepts related to individual differences in social performance, with a particular focus on the intelligence-based framework that has dominated the field. Second, to make an argument for a revised conceptualization of individual differences in social–emotional performance as a social expertise. In support of this second aim, the putative components of a social–emotional expertise and the potential means for their assessment will be outlined. To end, the implications of an expertise-based conceptual framework for the application of computational modeling approaches in this area will be discussed. Taken together, expertise theory and computational modeling methods have the potential to advance quantitative assessment of social interaction performance

Laughter differs in children with autism: An acoustic analysis of laughs produced by children with and without the disorder

Few studies have examined vocal expressions of emotion in children with autism. We tested the hypothesis that during social interactions, children diagnosed with autism would exhibit less extreme laugh acoustics than their nonautistic peers. Laughter was recorded during a series of playful interactions with an examiner. Results showed that children with autism exhibited only one type of laughter, whereas comparison participants exhibited two types. No group differences were found for laugh duration, mean fundamental frequency (F ) values, change in F , or number of laughs per bout. Findings are interpreted to suggest that children with autism express laughter primarily in response to positive internal states, rather than using laughter to negotiate social interactions. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 0

Emotion expression among abusive mothers is associated with their children\u27s emotion processing and problem behaviours

The current study evaluated the quality of facial and vocal emotional expressions in abusive and nonabusivemothers, and assessed whether mothers’ emotional expression quality was related to theirchildren’s cognitive processing of emotion and behavioural problems. Relative to non-abusivemothers, abusive mothers produced less prototypical angry facial expressions, and less prototypicalangry, happy, and sad vocal expressions. The intensity of mothers’ facial and vocal expressions ofanger was related to their children’s externalising and internalising symptoms. Additionally,children’s cognitive processing of their mothers’ angry faces was related to the quality of mothers’facial expressions. Results are discussed with respect to the impact of early emotional learningenvironments on children’s socioemotional development and risk for psychopathology