Cues Of Others Research Articles

Supplemental Material for Social Bodies: Preliminary Evidence That Awareness of Embodied Emotions Is Associated With Recognition of Emotions in the Bodily Cues of Others

Supplemental Material for Social Bodies: Preliminary Evidence That Awareness of Embodied Emotions Is Associated With Recognition of Emotions in the Bodily Cues of Others

Social bodies: Preliminary evidence that awareness of embodied emotions is associated with recognition of emotions in the bodily cues of others.

Social bodies: Preliminary evidence that awareness of embodied emotions is associated with recognition of emotions in the bodily cues of others.

Sexual Consent Perceptions of a Fictional Vignette: A Latent Growth Curve Model

Sexual consent can be conceptualized as a process of accumulating cues that build toward and continue throughout a consensual sexual encounter. How people perceive the cues of others during this process is an important aspect of consent. However, previous research has not investigated the trajectories of people’s consent perceptions throughout such a process. Using a novel staggered vignette protocol, we examined participants’ (N = 1218; 64.4% female) perceptions of fictional targets’ sexual consent at 11 time points. We tested latent growth curve models using multilevel structural equation modeling to examine trajectories in consent perceptions over the course of the vignette. We hypothesized that mean differences and rates of change would be associated with several constructs relevant to sexual consent. We found that initial consent perceptions and trends over the course of the vignette varied by whether the participant was a university student, by an alcohol manipulation in the vignette, by the fictional target’s sex, and by type of sexual behavior. Researchers should examine whether our findings on consent perceptions of a fictional vignette extend to people’s actual sexual encounters, including potential associations between the three primary aspects of sexual consent: perceptions, feelings, and communication.

Does Seeing What Others Do Through Social Media Influence Vaccine Uptake and Help in the Herd Immunity Through Vaccination? A Cross-Sectional Analysis.

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination is the next major step in fighting the pandemic. However, significant variations are observed in the willingness to take the vaccination by citizens across different countries. Arguably, differences in vaccination intentions will be influenced by beliefs around vaccines to influence health. Often perceptions of what others are doing and the information available guide individuals' behaviors for vaccination. This is more so in the digital age with the influence of the internet and media. This study aims to determine the factors that impact willingness to vaccinate for COVID-19. We examined factors associated with acceptance of vaccine based on (1) constructs of the Health Belief Model (HBM), (2) sources of information, (3) social media usage, (4) knowledge of COVID-19 treatment, and (5) perception of government's efforts for mitigation. Randomly sampled online survey data was collected by a global firm between December 2020 and January 2021 from 372 citizens (with a response rate of 96.6%) from multiple regions, including North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Ordered probit regression suggests that the health belief model constructs hold. Perceived severity of COVID-19 (P < 0.001) and action cues of others taking the vaccine positively influences a subject's vaccine intent (P < 0.001), perceived benefits and perceived efficacy of the vaccine positively influences a subject's vaccine intent (P < 0.001). Perceived barriers negatively influence vaccine intent (P < 0.001). Interestingly as for media usage, mainstream media (e.g., TV, newspaper) (P = 0.006) and social media (P = 0.013) both negatively influence a subject's vaccine intent. Social media platforms that are more entertainment and social-based, such as Whatsapp, Instagram, and YouTube, have a negative and significant influence on vaccine intent (P = 0.061), compared to other more information-based social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn). Knowledge of COVID-19 treatment positively influences vaccine intent (P = 0.023). Lastly, governmental efforts' perceived reliability in mitigation strategy (P = 0.028) and response efforts (P = 0.004) negatively influence vaccine intent. The study highlights the “wait-and-see” action cue from others and leaders in the community. It also informs the importance of shaping media information for vaccination through informative media and social media outlets to counteract any misinformation.

Are Urban or Rural Congressional Districts More Paretian?

Power laws are skewed, heavy-tailed distributions that are widely found in both natural and social settings, including electoral returns. Within the context of social phenomena in general and electoral context in particular, many have argued that the appearance of power law distributions is a sign of “information cascades,” also known as “bandwagoning,” in which voters pay more attention to the cues of others than their own preferences. Using a data set consisting of a single state’s congressional districts in a single election, I show that urban districts are more skewed than rural ones, suggesting that urban districts are more likely to exhibit a “bandwagon effect” than rural districts. This is important because it indicates either that the theory of “bandwagoning” is flawed—or that a conventional view of the differences between the urban and rural environments is.

Social Symptoms of Parkinson's Disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is typically well recognized by its characteristic motor symptoms (e.g., bradykinesia, rigidity, and tremor). The cognitive symptoms of PD are increasingly being acknowledged by clinicians and researchers alike. However, PD also involves a host of emotional and communicative changes which can cause major disruptions to social functioning. These incude problems producing emotional facial expressions (i.e., facial masking) and emotional speech (i.e., dysarthria), as well as difficulties recognizing the verbal and nonverbal emotional cues of others. These social symptoms of PD can result in severe negative social consequences, including stigma, dehumanization, and loneliness, which might affect quality of life to an even greater extent than more well-recognized motor or cognitive symptoms. It is, therefore, imperative that researchers and clinicans become aware of these potential social symptoms and their negative effects, in order to properly investigate and manage the socioemotional aspects of PD. This narrative review provides an examination of the current research surrounding some of the most common social symptoms of PD and their related social consequences and argues that proactively and adequately addressing these issues might improve disease outcomes.

Teachers' Beliefs About Children's Anger and Skill in Recognizing Children's Anger Expressions.

Everyday beliefs often organize and guide motivations, goals, and behaviors, and, as such, may also differentially motivate individuals to value and attend to emotion-related cues of others. In this way, the beliefs that individuals hold may affect the socioemotional skills that they develop. To test the role of emotion-related beliefs specific to anger, we examined an educational context in which beliefs could vary and have implications for individuals’ skill. Specifically, we studied 43 teachers’ beliefs about students’ anger in the school setting as well as their ability to recognize expressions of anger in children’s faces in a dynamic emotion recognition task. Results revealed that, even when controlling for teachers’ age and gender, teachers’ belief that children’s anger was useful and valuable in the school setting was associated with teachers’ accuracy at recognizing anger expressions in children’s faces. The belief that children’s anger was harmful and not conducive to learning, however, was not associated with teachers’ accuracy at recognizing children’s anger expressions. These findings suggest that certain everyday beliefs matter for predicting skill in recognizing specific emotion-related cues.

Using Improvisation to Develop Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is emerging as critical to success in today’s workplaces. Business schools must, therefore, equip students with techniques to develop their emotional intelligence. EI is learnable, and research indicates that active and experiential approaches are more effective in developing EI than lecture-based methods. We, therefore, suggest that the highly engaging style of improvisational theater can be used as an effective training technique to develop EI. Furthermore, improv’s foundational “yes-and” principle requires participants to listen nonjudgmentally and actively support each other. We present six improvisational exercises that will enable students to identify and develop some of the social skills relevant to EI, namely, empathy, collaboration, and understanding the emotional cues of others. Our detailed instructions to run and debrief the exercises ensure that instructors with no prior experience with improvisational theater can also easily use them in their classes.

Spontaneous attention and psycho-physiological responses to others' injury in chimpanzees.

Previous studies have shown that humans experience negative emotions when seeing contextual cues of others' pain, such as injury (i.e., empathic pain), even without observing behavioral expressions of distress. However, this phenomenon has not been examined in nonhuman primates. We tested six chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to experimentally examine their reactions to others' injury. First, we measured viewing responses using eye-tracking. Chimpanzees spontaneously attended to injured conspecifics more than non-injured conspecifics, but did not do so in a control condition in which images of injuries were scrambled while maintaining color information. Chimpanzees did not avoid viewing injuries at any point during stimulus presentation. Second, we used thermal imaging to investigate chimpanzees' physiological responses to others' injury. Previous studies reported that reduced nasal temperature is a characteristic of arousal, particularly arousal associated with negative valence. We presented chimpanzees with a realistic injury: a familiar human experimenter with a prosthetic wound and artificial running blood. Chimpanzees exhibited a greater nasal temperature reduction in response to injury compared with the control stimulus. Finally, chimpanzees were presented with a familiar experimenter who stabbed their (fake) thumb with a needle, with no running blood, a situation that may be more challenging in terms of understanding the cause of distress. Chimpanzees did not physiologically distinguish this condition from the control condition. These results suggest that chimpanzees inspect others' injuries and become aroused by seeing injuries even without observing behavioral cues, but have difficulty doing so without explicit (or familiar) cues (i.e., open wound and blood).

Using remote peers' influence to promote healthy food choices among preschoolers.

Prior studies have demonstrated that social norms or cues of others' eating behaviors serve as powerful guides for one's own eating behaviors. Yet it remains underexplored whether young children are susceptible to social pressure by remote peers when faced with a conflict between what they prefer and the healthy choices of a group majority. Here we examined whether preschool-aged children conformed to healthy food choices of remote peers. Following a modified Asch conformity paradigm, the present study used videos of remote confederates' food preferences to test whether 89 3- to 6-year-old Singaporean preschoolers conformed to remote peers' healthy food choices (fruits and vegetables). Participants were asked to make a series of food choices when faced with two food options (healthy, unhealthy), both independently and after having viewed remote peers make healthy food choices (fruits, vegetables). Results showed a significant level of conformity, such that participants altered their initially unhealthy food choices to match the healthy choices of remote peers for 29% of trials. Age and BMI z-scores were also associated with rates of food choice conformity. The finding that young children may conform to food-related behaviors of remote peers offers the potential promise of interventions involving remote peers in promoting healthier dietary choices of young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Capuchin monkeys' use of human and conspecific cues to solve a hidden object-choice task.

Learning by watching others can provide valuable information with adaptive consequences, such as identifying the presence of a predator or locating a food source. The extent to which nonhuman animals can gain information by reading the cues of others is often tested by evaluating responses to human gestures, such as a point, and less often evaluated by examining responses to conspecific cues. We tested whether ten brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus [Sapajus] apella) were able to use cues from monkeys and a pointing cue from a human to obtain hidden rewards. A monkey could gain access to a reward hidden in one of two locations by reading a cue from a conspecific (e.g., reaching) or a human pointing. We then tested whether they could transfer this skill from monkeys to humans, from humans to monkeys, and from one conspecific to another conspecific. One group of monkeys was trained and tested using a conspecific as the cue-giver and was then tested with a human cue-giver. The second group of monkeys was trained and tested with a human cue-giver and was then tested with a monkey cue-giver. Monkeys that were successful with a conspecific cue-giver were also tested with a novel conspecific cue-giver. Monkeys learned to use a human point and conspecific cues to obtain rewards. Monkeys that had learned to use the cues of a conspecific to obtain rewards performed significantly better than expected by chance when they were transferred to the cues of a novel conspecific. Monkeys that learned to use a human point to obtain rewards performed significantly better than expected by chance when tested while observing conspecific cues. Some evidence suggested that transferring between conspecific cue-givers occurred with more facility than transferring across species. Results may be explained by simple rules of association learning and stimulus generalization; however, spontaneous flexible use of gestures across conspecifics and between different species may indicate capuchins can generalize learned social cues within and partially across species.

Reflections for a Year of Caring and Understanding

As we start 2017 after a most interesting 2016,1 hope you will grant me the liberty to take a few minutes of your time to read a viewpoint that is philosophical in nature. As faculty members and/or administrators, we continue to solve existing and new challenges as we strive for excellence in the education of our undergraduate students, doctor of pharmacy students, graduate students, residents, and post-doctoral fellows. We also continue to work to promote the success of our fellow academicians and their work in advancing the biomedical, pharmaceutical, clinical, and social administrative sciences necessary for promoting and enhancing pharmacy practice. Perhaps you have a different perspective, but I find it discouraging watching the increasing rhetoric and too many events demonstrating the lack of or unwillingness to value what each individual brings to his or her community. I reflect in these situations on what small things we can do as educators to demonstrate to those in our colleges and schools of pharmacy that we value each individual for their unique backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and talents and truly care for their individual successes and the collective successes of our institution. I respectfully propose we can make small changes by refocusing our thinking, thus providing the foundation for enhancing our understanding and caring for others. Understanding and care require deep listening, which can only occur if we are really present in our interactions with others. I would encourage us to have more personal interactions with our colleagues that don't involve computers or mobile devices, whether it is for one-on-one interactions, meetings or seminars. If we truly focus on listening to one another and what is happening in a meeting or seminar rather than a new e-mail or other work, then we will be able to better observe the non-verbal cues of others around us. Turning off or not bringing a personal electronic device is unlikely to change the course of any given day or project. Furthermore, all of us have experienced what we perceived to be a lack of caring or understanding when talking with another when they are focused more on their own phone or other mobile device. What potential new relationships could we develop or what new knowledge or perspective could we acquire if we were just to be in the present with those around us? I challenge each of you to start by having just one meeting per week where phones and other electronic devices are not allowed. Use that time to focus on what you can learn or better understand. Understanding and caring require us to think about our words and to move by leaving our desk and talking with others outside our offices, classrooms, laboratories, and clinics. Words and how they are spoken matter particularly in a time of stress and anxiety in our colleges and schools of pharmacy. We all can remember a time when something spoken caused us to become disengaged and discouraged. The other individual may not have even known the impact of these words, but these can have long-lasting repercussions in our relationships with others. Yet, perhaps these instances can be minimized if we take the time to get to know our colleagues outside of any e-mail trails, meetings or teaching activities. How many of us take the time to go for coffee or to lunch with our colleagues? I would think that most of us would agree that the most important relationships that we have developed have resulted by spending time together when we can share and learn from each other in an open and positive environment. I have always found it compelling during a memorial service when faculty colleagues share touching stories about a colleague who recently passed and the time they spent together at lunch, in a faculty lounge or other settings outside their offices and classrooms. They rarely reminisce about the times together while in meetings or in classrooms. What has caused us to be too busy to find time for a cup of coffee or lunch with a colleague? …

The Disappearing Audience and Reflexive Visibility

Contrary to popular opinion and some academic writing that celebrates the renewed visibility of new media audiences, this essay argues that they are increasingly going into retreat. To understand how new media audiences “disappear” from view of one another, I borrow from Brighenti’s typology of visibility and develop the idea of “reflexive visibility.” The latter describes the ability to socially orient ourselves in a digital environment through the textual and contextual cues of others—an activity that is of utmost importance not only to researchers wishing to “see” various audiences but also for audiences writ large, wishing to know themselves.

Testosterone reduces functional connectivity during the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test

Women on average outperform men in cognitive-empathic abilities, such as the capacity to infer motives from the bodily cues of others, which is vital for effective social interaction. The steroid hormone testosterone is thought to play a role in this sexual dimorphism. Strikingly, a previous study shows that a single administration of testosterone in women impairs performance on the ‘Reading the Mind in Eyes’ Test (RMET), a task in which emotions have to be inferred from the eye-region of a face. This effect was mediated by the 2D:4D ratio, the ratio between the length of the index and ring finger, a proxy for fetal testosterone. Research in typical individuals, in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), and in individuals with brain lesions has established that performance on the RMET depends on the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that a single administration of testosterone in 16 young women significantly altered connectivity of the left IFG with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the supplementary motor area (SMA) during RMET performance, independent of 2D:4D ratio. This IFG-ACC-SMA network underlies the integration and selection of sensory information, and for action preparation during cognitive empathic behavior. Our findings thus reveal a neural mechanism by which testosterone can impair emotion-recognition ability, and may link to the symptomatology of ASC, in which the same neural network is implicated.

Voicing the real Self

Voicing the real Self

The integrative functioning of aspects of cognitive, affective and somatic processes in the experience of intuitive style

Intuitive style is an individual differences experience consisting of aspects of cognitive, affective and somatic processes and is used to understand individual differences in business and education. However, the integrative functioning of these processes in the experience of intuitive style is not well understood. To this end, a psychoneurobiological framework was applied to delineate these processes in the experience of intuitive style. Models for positive and negative affects were examined separately via bootstrapped multiple serial mediation. The largest indirect effect was found in the negative affect model for observing the non-verbal cues of others in the intuitive style experience. Positive affect was also shown to have an indirect effect in the intuitive style experience. Findings for affects went beyond previous research highlighting their importance in intuitive style. The multiple ways in which aspects of the cognitive, affective and somatic processes functioned together in the experience of intuitive style were demonstrated.

Using gaze patterns to predict task intent in collaboration.

In everyday interactions, humans naturally exhibit behavioral cues, such as gaze and head movements, that signal their intentions while interpreting the behavioral cues of others to predict their intentions. Such intention prediction enables each partner to adapt their behaviors to the intent of others, serving a critical role in joint action where parties work together to achieve a common goal. Among behavioral cues, eye gaze is particularly important in understanding a person's attention and intention. In this work, we seek to quantify how gaze patterns may indicate a person's intention. Our investigation was contextualized in a dyadic sandwich-making scenario in which a “worker” prepared a sandwich by adding ingredients requested by a “customer.” In this context, we investigated the extent to which the customers' gaze cues serve as predictors of which ingredients they intend to request. Predictive features were derived to represent characteristics of the customers' gaze patterns. We developed a support vector machine-based (SVM-based) model that achieved 76% accuracy in predicting the customers' intended requests based solely on gaze features. Moreover, the predictor made correct predictions approximately 1.8 s before the spoken request from the customer. We further analyzed several episodes of interactions from our data to develop a deeper understanding of the scenarios where our predictor succeeded and failed in making correct predictions. These analyses revealed additional gaze patterns that may be leveraged to improve intention prediction. This work highlights gaze cues as a significant resource for understanding human intentions and informs the design of real-time recognizers of user intention for intelligent systems, such as assistive robots and ubiquitous devices, that may enable more complex capabilities and improved user experience.

The Decision Making of Adolescent Mothers during Labor and Birth

Poster Presentation Objective To explore decision making during labor among a group of U.S. urban adolescent mothers. Design Constructivist grounded theory study employing Schatzman's dimensional analysis and Clarke's situational analysis. Setting Urban clinics, schools, and support programs for adolescent mothers in the San Francisco Bay area. Sample Eighteen adolescent mothers age 16 to 20 from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Methods Prenatal and postpartum interviews with adolescent mothers and observations of childbirth classes for adolescents. Results Adolescent mothers felt their decision making during labor indicated their inherent mothering abilities. Decisions were made in the context of their belief that the strength to give birth and care for a child emerged naturally during labor. Conditions affecting decisions included the mother's expectations, available support, and others' control over decisions and communication. Key processes included going natural versus going epidural; being strong for the baby; and interpreting the perceived cues of others. After birth, mothers who felt empowered by their decisions during labor felt more confident, whereas mothers who felt pressured into unwanted decisions felt regretful and anxious about their ability to cope with their mothering responsibilities. Conclusion/Implications for Nursing Practice Adolescent mothers' experiences of decision making during labor may have lasting effects. Empowering decision making during labor for adolescent mothers may support optimal transition to motherhood and postpartum health in this vulnerable population.

Examining relationships between facial emotion recognition, self-control, and psychopathic traits in a non-clinical sample

Although psychopathy is a low prevalence disorder, individuals with sub-clinical psychopathic traits have been shown to reside within the community. One account of psychopathy proposes that deficits in self-control play a causal role. Other theorists propose that psychopathy-related antisocial behaviour can be attributed to a constitutional deficit of empathy, resulting from an inability to interpret and respond to the affective cues of others. These theoretical perspectives may both be relevant if psychopathy is understood as a dimensional construct, with primary psychopathy the consequence of a neurological vulnerability to emotional deficits, and secondary psychopathy reflecting an environmental adaptation and subsequent failure of self-control. Using a non-clinical sample (n=479), this study examined the relationship between sub-clinical psychopathic traits, self-control and the identification of facial emotion. Both primary and secondary psychopathic traits were associated with reduced accuracy in identifying facial affect, with more pronounced impairments seen for primary psychopathy. While both primary and secondary psychopathic traits were found to be related to deficits in dispositional self-control, the effect was significantly greater for secondary psychopathy.

Affective empathy differs in male violent offenders with high- and low-trait psychopathy.

This study investigated affective and cognitive empathic processes in incarcerated violent offenders with lower and higher psychopathic traits and healthy controls. Participants witnessed painful expressions of others displayed on video clips. Skin conductance responses (SCR) were recorded to assess autonomic emotional arousal, and various empathy ratings were used as measures of self-reported vicarious responses. Reduced SCRs occurred during the observation of pain in others in lower and higher psychopathic-trait participants alike, compared to controls. Despite these diminished autonomic responses indicating reduced vicarious responses, only inmates with higher psychopathic traits provided empathy ratings comparable to those of the controls. These findings indicate that violent offenders display reduced autonomic arousal in response to distress cues of others, irrespective of psychopathy. However, only higher psychopathic-trait offenders were able to provide self-report in a way that let them appear to be as empathic as controls-enabling them to know, yet not to feel, what others feel.