Human Greeting Research Articles

Opening interspecies encounters – Greetings between humans and nonhuman animals

This paper investigates how interspecies greeting routines between humans and horses/dogs are organized. The aim is to understand how humans and animals jointly organize ‘becoming socially co-present’ (Pillet-Shore, 2008). The data comprises 12 h of video recordings with 30 humans, 40 horses and 7 dogs participating in every-day activities such as walks, dinner parties and grooming sessions. Multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Mondada, 2019) is used to investigate how humans and horses/dogs initiate and respond to greetings, and image based transcriptions of human and animal actions are used to avoid species hierarchy. The analyses reveal that humans and animals make a distinction between being physically co-present and socially co-present in interspecies interaction, and that all involved species take initiatives to greet and respond to such initiatives. The findings show both similarities and differences to human–human greetings, which is are addressed in a concluding discussion. By including animals’ systematic communicative actions in the investigation of social life and co-operative action we gain knowledge on how understanding both within and across species boundaries is achieved, which may have implications for how humanity views other living species on the planet.

Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth, by Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding

<i>Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth</i>, by Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding

Chimpanzee ethnography reveals unexpected cultural diversity.

Human ethnographic knowledge covers hundreds of societies, whereas chimpanzee ethnography encompasses at most 15 communities. Using termite fishing as a window into the richness of chimpanzee cultural diversity, we address a potential sampling bias with 39 additional communities across Africa. Previously, termite fishing was known from eight locations with two distinguishable techniques observed in only two communities. Here, we add nine termite-fishing communities not studied before, revealing 38 different technical elements, as well as community-specific combinations of three to seven elements. Thirty of those were not ecologically constrained, permitting the investigation of chimpanzee termite-fishing culture. The number and combination of elements shared among individuals were more similar within communities than between them, thus supporting community-majority conformity via social imitation. The variation in community-specific combinations of elements parallels cultural diversity in human greeting norms or chopstick etiquette. We suggest that termite fishing in wild chimpanzees shows some elements of cumulative cultural diversity.

Understanding the visual perception of awkward body movements: How interactions go awry

Dyadic interactions can sometimes elicit a disconcerting response from viewers, generating a sense of "awkwardness." Despite the ubiquity of awkward social interactions in daily life, it remains unknown what visual cues signal the oddity of human interactions and yield the subjective impression of awkwardness. In the present experiments, we focused on a range of greeting behaviors (handshake, fist bump, high five) to examine both the inherent objectivity and impact of contextual and kinematic information in the social evaluation of awkwardness. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to discriminate whether greeting behaviors presented in raw videos were awkward or natural, and if judged as awkward, participants provided verbal descriptions regarding theawkward greeting behaviors. Participants showed consensus in judging awkwardness from raw videos, with a high proportion of congruent responses across a range of awkward greeting behaviors. We also found that people used social-related and motor-related words in their descriptions for awkward interactions. Experiment 2 employed advanced computer vision techniques to present the same greeting behaviors in three different display types. All display types preserved kinematic information, but varied contextual information: (1) patch displays presented blurred scenes composed of patches; (2) body displays presented human body figures on a black background; and (3) skeleton displays presented skeletal figures of moving bodies. Participants rated the degree of awkwardness of greeting behaviors. Across display types, participants consistently discriminated awkward and natural greetings, indicating that the kinematics of body movements plays an important role in guiding awkwardness judgments. Multidimensional scaling analysis based on the similarity of awkwardness ratings revealed two primary cues: motor coordination (which accounted for most of the variability in awkwardness judgments) and social coordination. We conclude that the perception of awkwardness, while primarily inferred on the basis of kinematic information, is additionally affected by the perceived social coordination underlying human greeting behaviors.

Vocal greeting during mother-infant reunions in a nocturnal primate, the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus)

In human societies, ritualized greeting behavior includes gestural and vocal displays to signal the social acceptance of an encountering person. These displays are universal across cultures suggesting a pre-human origin. Vocal greeting displays are only reported for monkeys and apes with complex social systems, but none of these studies confirmed that greeting signals fulfill all criteria characterizing human greeting behavior. In this study, we analyzed for the first time whether vocal exchanges between mother and infants in a non-human primate fulfill the criteria of human greeting behavior and whether vocal greeting behavior is present in a basal primate with a less complex social system, the gray mouse lemur. By comparing spontaneous leave-takings and reunions, we found that vocal exchanges during mother-infant reunions fulfilled all six criteria characterizing human greeting behavior. Thus, predictable reciprocal vocal exchanges occurred at the start of the reunion (but not during leave-taking), when mother and infant had visual contact to each other. Thus, we argued that mother-infant vocal exchanges governing reunions are essential to establish social bonds and to ritualize the greeting function. Our findings suggest that ritualized vocal greeting has its origins deeply rooted in mammalian phylogeny and derives from vocal exchanges during parent-infant reunions.

Sex differences in human greeting behaviors in waiting and meeting situations: a field study in Japan.

In this study, I observed the greeting behaviors of 3,008 people or 1,504 dyads while they were waiting for and meeting another person at a station in Japan. I recorded human greeting behaviors and evaluated the factors that influenced them. I classified the greeting behaviors as body contact, wave, hail or bow. At least one of these four behaviors was observed in 43.4% of all. The greeting behaviors occurred more frequently in the person that arrived the second at the waiting location than in the first. Sex differences in greeting behaviors were also observed. For example, females waved their hands most frequently whereas males raised their hands to hail most frequently. Similarly, the greeting behaviors differed according to the sex patterns of the actors and the recipients. These findings suggest the possibility that relationship differences among male same-sex pairs, female same-sex pairs and opposite-sex pairs create sex differences in greeting behaviors like nonhuman animals.

Effects of Time Lag of Utterances to Communicative Actions on Embodied Interaction With Robot and CG Character

The timing involved in generating communicative actions and utterances in a face-to-face greeting interaction for application in robot–human and computer-generated (CG) character–human interaction support systems is analyzed by synthesis. First, an analysis of human greeting clarifies the average pause and the average time delay in the utterance to a communicative action. Then, a synthesis-based analysis is performed by using an embodied robot system. This analysis confirms that the variation in the pause and the lag in the utterance to communicative actions produce different communicative effects, for example, a lag of about 0.3 sec is desirable for a familiar greeting and a longer lag is appropriate for a polite greeting. In addition, the synthesis-based analysis performed on a CG character system confirms the timing control effects. These results demonstrate the importance of timing control in embodied interactions as well as the applicability of such interactions in advanced communications with robots and CG characters.

Aggression and conflict management at fusion in spider monkeys

In social systems characterized by a high degree of fission-fusion dynamics, members of a large community are rarely all together, spending most of their time in smaller subgroups with flexible membership. Although fissioning into smaller subgroups is believed to reduce conflict among community members, fusions may create conflict among individuals from joining subgroups. Here, we present evidence for aggressive escalation at fusion and its mitigation by the use of embraces in wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi). Our findings provide the first systematic evidence for conflict management at fusion and may have implications for the function of human greetings.

Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters.

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Some context for Context Analysis: a view of the origins of structural studies of face-to-face interaction 3. Some functions of gaze direction in two-person conversation 4. Movement co-ordination in social interaction 5. Some functions of the face in a kissing round 6. A description of some human greetings 7. Spatial organisation in social encounters: the F-formation system 8. Behavioural foundations for the process of frame-attunement in face-to-face interaction List of films cited References Index.