Examining the Role of Facial Affect Recognition In The Relation Between Physiological Reactivity And Aggression During Marital Conflict

Understanding the affective mechanisms that underlie aggression and violence within interpersonal relationships is vital to the development of treatments that will reduce recidivism. Researchers examining physiological factors of emotion have identified differential patterns of physiological reactivity among different types of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators during interpersonal conflict. Although it is unclear what mechanisms are influencing these distinct physiological patterns, research suggests that perpetrators’ ability to decode emotions may be involved. The current study examined the effects of physiological reactivity on observed aggression of male IPV perpetrators during marital conflict across levels of facial affect recognition (FAR) accuracy. In particular, we examined the sympathetic nervous system, via Skin Conductance Level (SCL) Reactivity, and the parasympathetic nervous system, via Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity. Secondary data analyses were conducted on a previous study examining heterosexual couples with past male to female IPV perpetration. Couples completed self-report measures and participated in a conflict discussion regarding a topic of conflict with their partner while physiological and behavioral measures were recorded. Additionally, males were administered a facial affect recognition task. Results suggest that RSA and SCL reactivity had a significant effect on male observed aggression at high FAR accuracy. Specifically, co-deactivation of both parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity was associated with increased observed aggressive behavior. Our result suggests a dual physiological model of affect reactive aggression: parasympathetic withdrawal indicative of emotional dysregulation, and sympathetic attenuation associated with behavioral disinhibition.Psychology, Department o

The scope of language contact as a constraint factor in language change: The periphrasis haber de plus infinitive in a corpus of language immediacy in modern Spanish

In this work an empirical study grounded in the principles and methods of the comparative variationist framework is conducted to measure the scope of language contact as a factor constraining some potentially diverging uses of a Spanish verbal periphrasis that has undergone a sharp decline over the last century (haber de plus infinitive). The analysis is based on three independent samples of text that correspond to three dialectal areas of peninsular Spanish (monolingual zones, Catalan-speaking linguistic territories and the north-western linguistic area). These samples, extracted from a corpus made up of texts of communicative immediacy from the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, confirm the existence of a certain linguistic convergence in the expressive habits of the speakers in the bilingual communities. In each region, however, the outcomes are different, due to parallel differences in the structural position of the periphrasis in each language. However, a thorough analysis of the variable context that surrounds the periphrasis shows that the observed differences do not affect the essence of the underlying grammar of this variant, whose decline (which favours tener que plus infinitive and becomes faster as the 20th century advances) is constrained by identical linguistic and extralinguistic conditioning factors in all the dialectal areas

Pragmatic annotation for a multi-layered analysis of speech acts: a methodological proposal

Within the recently-coined sub-field of corpus pragmatics, one of the areas of interest is the study of speech acts and, specifically, how it can profit from the adoption of this methodological approach. However, the acknowledged lack of correspondence between speech acts and linguistic forms makes basic form-based corpus searches unreliable in retrieving speech acts from a corpus. In fact, function-to-form corpus research can prove much more fruitful in carrying out this kind of study, but it usually requires time-consuming manual annotation, which in turn means that there have been few attempts to employ this methodology. As a contribution in this new direction, this study will showcase a function-to-form approach to investigating speech acts of agreement and disagreement in spoken Catalan. Through this example, this paper aims to show the benefits of designing, compiling, transcribing and, especially, annotating one’s own corpus for the study of speech acts. In order to annotate data for the study of speech acts, a complex and multi-layered annotation system was designed and manually applied, so that all the different aspects that play a relevant role in the expression of agreement and disagreement could be covered. In addition to discussing the findings from this study, it is argued that the possibilities of exploitation provided by the resulting annotated corpus far outweigh the time cost and open the door to in-depth analyses of speech acts and politeness in naturally occurring spoken data.This work was supported by the Grant for universities and research centres for the recruitment of new research personnel (FI-DGR 2014) of the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (Generalitat de Catalunya)