Body Language Cues Research Articles

Can perpetrators discern survivors from voice?

ABSTRACT Background: Research has shown that potential perpetrators and individuals high in psychopathic traits tend to body language cues to target a potential new victim. However, whether targeting occurs also by tending to vocal cues has not been examined. Thus, the role of voice in interpersonal violence merits investigation. Objective: In two studies, we examined whether perpetrators could differentiate female speakers with and without sexual and physical assault histories (presented as rating the degree of ‘vulnerability’ to victimization). Methods: Two samples of male listeners (sample one N = 105, sample two, N = 109) participated. Each sample rated 18 voices (9 survivors and 9 controls). Listener sample one heard spontaneous speech, and listener sample two heard the second sentence of a standardized passage. Listeners’ self-reported psychopathic traits and history of previous perpetration were measured. Results: Across both samples, history of perpetration (but not psychopathy) predicted accuracy in distinguishing survivors of assault. Conclusions: These findings highlight the potential role of voice in prevention and intervention. Gaining a further understanding of what voice cues are associated with accuracy in discerning survivors can also help us understand whether or not specialized voice training could have a role in self-defense practices.

Okeydoggy: A Mobile Application That Helps Understand Calming Signals of Dog Using MOBILENETV2 —Focusing on “Play Bowing” and “Licking Nose”

Domestic dogs display a range of postures, facial expressions, and other body language cues that can be used to evaluate their emotional and mental state; however, many do not understand the meaning of theses signals. In this study, we recognized calming signal of companion dogs using a mobile application powered by MobileNetV2. Specifically, we recognized calming signal such as “Play bowing”, which indicates to reinitiate play after a pause, and “Licking nose”, which indicates nervousness. We conducted a user survey with 44 dog owners to investigate if this mobile application provides positive user experiences, and received positive responses.

Blindness influences emotional authenticity perception in voices: Behavioral and ERP evidence

The ability to distinguish spontaneous from volitional emotional expressions is an important social skill. How do blind individuals perceive emotional authenticity? Unlike sighted individuals, they cannot rely on facial and body language cues, relying instead on vocal cues alone. Here, we combined behavioral and ERP measures to investigate authenticity perception in laughter and crying in individuals with early- or late-blindness onset. Early-blind, late-blind, and sighted control participants (n = 17 per group, N = 51) completed authenticity and emotion discrimination tasks while EEG data were recorded. The stimuli consisted of laughs and cries that were either spontaneous or volitional. The ERP analysis focused on the N1, P2, and late positive potential (LPP). Behaviorally, early-blind participants showed intact authenticity perception, but late-blind participants performed worse than controls. There were no group differences in the emotion discrimination task. In brain responses, all groups were sensitive to laughter authenticity at the P2 stage, and to crying authenticity at the early LPP stage. Nevertheless, only early-blind participants were sensitive to crying authenticity at the N1 and middle LPP stages, and to laughter authenticity at the early LPP stage. Furthermore, early-blind and sighted participants were more sensitive than late-blind ones to crying authenticity at the P2 and late LPP stages.Altogether, these findings suggest that early blindness relates to facilitated brain processing of authenticity in voices, both at early sensory and late cognitive-evaluative stages. Late-onset blindness, in contrast, relates to decreased sensitivity to authenticity at behavioral and brain levels.

Telehealth Implementation in Federally Qualified Health Centers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Changes to Care Provision

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) experienced rapid telehealth adoption, which drastically shifted how FQHCs delivered care to underserved patients. While studies indicate clinicians and patients would like to continue to use telehealth after the pandemic, questions remain about telehealth care quality, and there are opportunities for improvement in FQHCs. Objective The aim of this paper is to explore changes to care provision that occurred in FQHCs between 2020 and 2021 and identify opportunities to address challenges and maximize benefits as virtual care evolves. Methods A total of 15 semistructured interviews were conducted with clinic personnel (leaders, physicians, and staff) at 2 FQHCs in Northern California, between December 2020 and April 2021, to examine telehealth adoption and use of 2 synchronous modalities (audio-video and audio-only or phone) during the pandemic. Results Physicians and staff reported several positive changes as a result of using telehealth, including increases in patient reach, reductions in no-show rates, and an improved ability to discuss specific medications that patients generally have nearby for reference at home. Other changes occurring during telehealth use had mixed or negative impacts on care provision. For example, the elimination of body language cues, a reduction in the amount of information exchanged, and a reported reduced ability to develop and foster interpersonal connections affected the patient-physician relationship. Respondents also described distractions that were present in some virtual appointments, such as background noise, interruptions, or when patients were multitasking (ie, cooking and cleaning). Modifications to clinic workflow and care processes were reported as well, including the need to triage appointment types (in person vs virtual), and to conduct previsit intake interviews by phone. Clinics developed work-arounds for addressing social and nonmedical needs, such as mailing or emailing resources or pamphlets to patients or providing referrals and support by phone. Respondents also described additional considerations or processes to address newfound privacy needs of telehealth, including confirming whether patients were in a private space during the visit, switching from video to phone visits to increase privacy if necessary, and requesting follow-up from physicians if the patient was unable to share pertinent information due to a lack of privacy during a virtual appointment. Conclusions Telehealth implementation in FQHCs required modifications to care processes and impacted the patient-physician relationship. These findings highlight unique challenges and opportunities for disseminating and sustaining telehealth in settings that deliver care to safety net populations. Guidelines and evidence-based practices are needed to improve telehealth use in FQHCs, including strategies to increase information exchange during virtual appointments and support interpersonal connections between patients and physicians. The following are also needed: best practices for how clinics can most effectively triage virtual appointments; protocols to further mitigate privacy issues and decrease distractions during telehealth appointments; and identifying when telehealth can best supplement in-person care to improve patient outcomes and clinic efficiency. Conflicts of Interest None declared.

Predicting apparent personality from body language: benchmarking deep learning architectures for adaptive social human–robot interaction

First impressions of personality traits can be inferred by non-verbal behaviours such as head pose, body postures, and hand gestures. Enabling social robots to infer the apparent personalities of their users based on such non-verbal cues will allow robots to gain the ability of adapting to their users, constituting a further step towards the personalisation of human–robot interactions. Deep learning architectures such as residual networks, 3D convolutional networks, and long-short time memory networks have been applied to classify human activities and actions in computer vision tasks. These same architectures are beginning to be applied to study human emotions and personality by focusing mainly on facial features in video recordings. In this work, we exploit body language cues to predict apparent personality traits for human–robot interactions. We customised four state-of-the-art neural network architectures to the task, and benchmarked them on a dataset of short side-view videos of dyadic interactions. Our results show the potential for deep learning architectures to predict apparent personality traits from body language cues. While the performance varied between models and personality traits, our results show that these models could still be able to predict sole personality traits, as exemplified by the results on the conscientiousness trait.

Validity of Psychiatric Evaluation of Asylum Seekers through Telephone

The goal of the psychiatric assessment of asylum seekers is to evaluate the asylum seeker's mental health and credibility. The shortage of mental health providers trained in this particular type of evaluation makes in-person evaluation not always feasible. Telephonic interview has been occasionally utilized to fill this void. The validity of such evaluations in assessing credibility has yet to be fully established. In the case of telephonic interviews, evaluators are limited with no access to facial or body language cues that can indicate deception or honesty. We will present a case of a client evaluated via telephone that was deemed credible and eventually released to pursue asylum in the US. Assessment of credibility relied solely on cues obtained from the client's narrative, reported symptoms, and their style of interaction with the evaluator. We will highlight the findings from the client's interview that supported credibility in the case and discuss the challenges of assessing asylum seeker's credibility via telephonic interview. Telephonic evaluation of credibility can be considered a valid method despite major challenges, but psychiatric evaluators should be aware of the limitations of telephonic evaluations given the high possibility of secondary gains and deception.

Development in children's interpretation of pitch cues to emotions.

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to emotions in interactive tasks. Only 4- to 5-year-olds consistently interpreted exaggerated, stereotypically happy or sad pitch contours as evidence that a puppet had succeeded or failed to find his toy (Experiment 1) or was happy or sad (Experiments 2, 3). Two- and 3-year-olds exploited facial and body-language cues in the same task. The authors discuss the implications of this late-developing use of pitch cues to emotions, relating them to other functions of pitch.

Enhanced Extrastriate Activation during Observation of Distorted Finger Postures

AbstractHand and finger postures of other people are important body language cues that strongly contribute to the observer's decision about the person's intentions, thoughts, and attentional state. We compared neuromagnetic cortical activation elicited by color images of natural and distorted finger postures. The distorted postures contained computer-deformed joint angles and thereby easily caught the observer's attention. From about 260 msec onwards, extrastriate occipital areas of both hemispheres were activated more strongly by distorted than natural finger postures. We interpret this result as an early topdown effect of emotional valence on the processing of unusual hand shapes in the extrastriate visual cortex.