Enhancing the Experience of International Doctoral Researchers - Key Messages

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Characterizing the Linguistic Chameleon: Personal and Social Correlates of Linguistic Style Accommodation

© 2016 International Communication Association Linguistic style accommodation between conversationalists is associated with positive social outcomes. We examine social power and personality as factors driving the occurrence of linguistic style accommodation, and the social outcomes of accommodation. Social power was manipulated to create 144 face-to-face dyadic interactions between individuals of high versus low power and 64 neutral power interactions. Particular configurations of personality traits (high self-monitoring, Machiavellianism and leadership, and low self-consciousness, impression management and agreeableness), combined with a low-power role, led to an increased likelihood of linguistic style accommodation. Further, greater accommodation by low-power individuals positively influenced perceptions of subjective rapport and attractiveness. We propose individual differences interact with social context to influence the conditions under which nonconscious communication accommodation occurs

Identifying linguistic correlates of power

Previous work on social power modelling from linguistic cues has been limited by the range of available data. We introduce a new corpus of dialogues, generated in a controlled experimental setting where participant roles were manipulated to generate a perceived difference in social power. Initial results demonstrate successful differentiation of upwards, downwards, and level communications, using a classifier built on a small set of stylistic features

Conversational Patterns and Listener Responses Associated with an Enhanced Fading Affect Bias after Social Disclosure

The fading affect bias (FAB) is a phenomenon of autobiographical memory whereby negative emotions associated with event memories fade in intensity over time more than positive emotions. Social disclosure enhances the FAB and listener responsiveness during social disclosure is an important facet, however, little is known about the nature of listener verbal responses that facilitate an enhanced FAB. In this study, we used discourse analysis to explore listener verbal responses and conversational patterns associated with an enhanced FAB after social disclosure: backchanneling, in which the listener shows they are paying attention to the story underway; displays of understanding whereby the listener shows awareness of the speaker’s emotional state; and positive facilitation, characterized by mutual development of positive interpretations of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. We suggest that such listener responses are similar to those described in the verbal person-centered framework, and the emotional benefits of social disclosure are in part collaboratively created by conversationalists

Concentrations of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB’s), Chlorinated Pesticides, and Heavy Metals and Other Elements in Tissues of Belugas, Delphinapterus leucas, from Cook Inlet

Tissues from Cook Inlet beluga whales, Delphinapterus leucas, that were collected as part of the Alaska Marine Mammal Tissue Archival Project were analyzed for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s), chlorinated pesticides, and heavy metals and other elements. Concentrations of total PCB’s (ΣPCB’s), total DDT (ΣDDT), chlordane compounds, hexachlorobenzene (HCB), dieldrin, mirex, toxaphene, and hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) measured in Cook Inlet beluga blubber were compared with those reported for belugas from two Arctic Alaska locations (Point Hope and Point Lay), Greenland, Arctic Canada, and the highly contaminated stock from the St. Lawrence estuary in eastern Canada. The Arctic and Cook Inlet belugas had much lower concentrations (ΣPCB’s and ΣDDT were an order of magnitude lower) than those found in animals from the St. Lawrence estuary. The Cook Inlet belugas had the lowest concentrations of all (ΣPCB’s aver-aged 1.49 ± 0.70 and 0.79 ± 0.56 mg/kg wet mass, and ΣDDT averaged 1.35 ± 0.73 and 0.59 ± 0.45 mg/kg in males and females, respectively). Concentrations in the blubber of the Cook Inlet males were significantly lower than those found in the males of the Arctic Alaska belugas (ΣPCB’s and ΣDDT were about half). The lower levels in the Cook Inlet animals might be due to differences in contaminant sources, food web differences, or different age distributions among the animals sampled. Cook Inlet males had higher mean and median concentrations than did females, a result attributable to the transfer of these compounds from mother to calf during pregnancy and during lactation. Liver concentrations of cadmium and mercury were lower in the Cook Inlet belugas (most cadmium values were <1 mg/kg and mercury values were 0.704–11.42 mg/kg wet mass), but copper levels were significantly higher in the Cook Inlet animals (3.97–123.8 mg/kg wet mass) than in Arctic Alaska animals and similar to those reported for belugas from Hudson Bay. Although total mercury levels were the lowest in the Cook Inlet population, methylmercury concentrations were similar among all three groups of the Alaska animals examined (0.34–2.11 mg/kg wet mass). As has been reported for the Point Hope and Point Lay belugas, hepatic concentrations of silver were r

What is 'Cyber Security'?: Differential Language of CyberSecurity Across the Lifespan

People experience and understand cyber security differently. Our ongoing work aims to address the fundamental challenge of how we can understand a diverse range of cyber security experiences, attitudes and behaviours in order to design better, more effective cyber security services and educational materials. In this paper, we take a lifespan approach to study the language of cyber security across three main life stages - young people, working age, and older people. By applying text feature extraction and analysis techniques to lists of cyber security features generated by each age group, we illustrate the differential language of cyber security across the lifespan and discuss the implications for design and research in HCI

Finding Zelig in Text:A Measure for Normalising Linguistic Accommodation

Linguistic accommodation is a recognised indicator of social power and social distance. However, different individuals will vary their language to different degrees, and only a portion of this variance will be due to accommodation. This paper presents the 'Zelig Quotient', a method of normalising linguistic variation towards a particular individual, using an author’s other communications as a baseline, thence to derive a method for identifying accommodation-induced variation with statistical significance. This work provides a platform for future efforts towards examining the importance of such phenomena in large communications datasets