Connecting in the Kitchen:An Empirical Study of Physical Interactions while Cooking Together at Home

Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance – it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and F-formations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people’s spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design. Author Keywords F-formations; proxemics; natural user interaction; cooking together; digital ethnography; digital kitchens; the home ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 Computer-supported cooperative wor

Recognition of facial emotions among maltreated children with high rates of post–traumatic stress disorder

Objective. The purpose of this study is to examine processing of facial emotions in a sample of maltreated children showing high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Maltreatment during childhood has been associated independently with both atypical processing of emotion and the development of PTSD. However, research has provided little evidence indicating how high rates of PTSD might relate to maltreated children’s processing of emotions. Method. Participants’ reaction time and labeling of emotions were measured using a morphed facial emotion identification task. Participants included a diverse sample of maltreated children with and without PTSD and controls ranging in age from 8 to 15 years. Maltreated children had been removed from their homes and placed in state custody following experiences of maltreatment. Diagnoses of PTSD and other disorders were determined through combination of parent, child, and teacher reports. Results. Maltreated children displayed faster reaction times than controls when labeling emotional facial expressions, and this result was most pronounced for fearful faces. Relative to children who were not maltreated, maltreated children both with and without PTSD showed enhanced response times when identifying fearful faces. There was no group difference in labeling of emotions when identifying different facial emotions. Conclusions. Maltreated children show heightened ability to identify fearful faces, evidenced by faster reaction times relative to controls. This association between maltreatment and atypical processing of emotion is independent of PTSD diagnosis

Building resilience to stress through leisure activities : a qualitative analysis

Stress is prevalent in modern society and coping strategies largely determine well-being. A qualitative investigation of leisure as a positive coping response to stress was undertaken using a resilience-based perspective. This approach enabled a focus on competencies and strengths in the stress-leisure-coping process, contributing to the sparse literature in this area. In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of eight participants. From a thematic analysis three overall themes emerged: leisure as a buffer of stress, the relationship between negative and positive emotions and leisure, and benefits of leisure for coping with stress. The findings demonstrate how leisure facilitates a sense of resilience and its preventative functions. The results are discussed in relation to relevant theoretical propositions concerning the role of positive emotion in coping. In particular, the broaden-and-build theory provided a meaningful framework for suggesting how leisure and positive emotions acted in tandem to develop psychosocial resources over time

Academic achievement : the role of praise in motivating students

The motivation of students is an important issue in higher education, particularly in the context of the increasing diversity of student populations. A social-cognitive perspective assumes motivation to be dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable, thereby rendering it to be a much more differentiated construct than previously understood. This complexity may be perplexing to tutors who are keen to develop applications to improve academic achievement. One application that is within the control of the tutor, at least to some extent, is the use of praise. Using psychological literature the article argues that in motivating students, the tutor is not well served by relying on simplistic and common sense understandings of the construct of praise and that effective applications of praise are mediated by students' goal orientations, which of themselves may be either additive or interactive composites of different objectives and different contexts

The role of pre-school quality in promoting resilience in the cognitive development of young children

The study reported here investigates the role of pre-school education as a protective factor in the development of children who are at risk due to environmental and individual factors. This investigation builds upon earlier research by examining different kinds of 'quality' in early education and tests the hypothesis that pre-schools of high quality can moderate the impacts of risks upon cognitive development. Cognitive development was measured in 2857 English pre-schoolers at 36 and 58 months of age, together with 22 individual risks to children's development, and assessments were made of the quality of their pre-school provision. Multilevel Structural Equation Modelling revealed that: the global quality of pre-school can moderate the effects of familial risk (such as poverty); the relationships between staff and children can moderate the effects of child level risk (such as low birth weight); and the specific quality of curricular provision can moderate the effects of both. Policy makers need to take quality into account in their efforts to promote resilience in young 'at risk' children through early childhood services

Resilience characteristics and prior life stress determine anticipatory response to acute social stress in children aged 7-11 years.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the interplay of prior life stress and characteristics of resilience in determining how children cope with potentially stressful situations, using a two-phase study that triangulates parent-child dyadic interview data with subsequent experience of an acute laboratory stressor in 7-11-year-olds. METHODS: Participants (n = 34) were designated as being in one of four groups based on high/low levels of prior stress experience and high/low resilience ratings assessed during at-home interviews and from questionnaires measuring recent life events, hassles, and trait coping. During a subsequent laboratory stress protocol, salivary cortisol and heart rate were monitored, and a verbal subjective report was provided. RESULTS: Salivary cortisol showed a significant increase in anticipation of the stress test, heart rate increased during the test, and children self-reported the task as stressful. Males displayed higher levels of cortisol than females in the anticipatory period. We observed no increase in salivary cortisol in response to the stress testing phase. Using the stress/resilience categorization, children with a higher level of resilience were differentiated by cortisol level in anticipation of the acute stress experiment based on their level of prior life stress. Highly resilient children with greater experience of prior life stress showed a lower anticipatory cortisol response than highly resilient children with less experience of prior life stress. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the relevance of contextual factors, such as prior stress experience and resilience, in physiological response to the anticipation of acute stress and has implications for understanding how children cope with stressful experiences. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? An adaptation to the stress testing paradigm, the Bath Experimental Stress Test for Children (BEST-C) was found to reliably induce a salivary cortisol response in young children, suggesting that peer matching the audience was an effective modification to laboratory social stress testing. Recent work focusing on early life adversity has seen the emergence of prior stress experience and resilience as key factors in the examination of acute stress responses. However, much of the research regarding the impact of childhood stress is ambiguous; some research suggests that if children have experienced prior stressful life events this will enact a positive effect on stress responses and lead to resilience, and other research suggested that it will have a compounding negative effect. What does the study add? Findings provide support for the capacity of the BEST-C to induce an anticipation stress response in children. Contextual factors e.g., prior stress experience and resilience are key for understanding stress responses. Resilient children with more experience of stress show lower cortisol than those with less stress experience