Simple Social Interactions Research Articles

Virtual reality roleplays for patients with depression: A user experience evaluation

BackgroundVirtual reality (VR) has been used successfully and effectively in psychotherapy for a variety of disorders. In the field of depression, there are only a few VR interventions and approaches. Although simple social interactions have been successfully modeled in VR for several mental disorders, there has been no transfer to the field of depression therapy. VR may be employed for psychodynamic psychotherapy to work on interpersonal conflict patterns. In this study, we developed and evaluated a VR intervention for the simulation of roleplay situations in the context of supportive-expressive therapy. MethodsWe conducted a clinical user experience (UX) study at a psychotherapeutic clinic in Düsseldorf, Germany. Eight inpatients with depression and four therapists were included. Semi-structured interviews and qualitative content analysis were used to identify UX issues of the developed VR intervention. Usability questionnaires and technical usage data were also considered. The VR intervention consisted of two therapist-controlled roleplay scenarios designed to support work on the core conflictual relationship theme by allowing patients to interact in typical problematic social situations. Recorded VR roleplays allow for therapeutic debriefing with a change of perspective. Therapists were given the option of using the roleplay in multiple sessions. ResultsAll therapists conducted one session per patient with the VR intervention. From the patient interviews, 26 UX issues were extracted, of which one technical malfunction and two unclarities in the interaction with the VR agent were rated as major problems. From the therapist interviews, 14 UX issues were extracted, of which five were rated as major problems related to the interface in the dialog control or the complex system setup. ConclusionThe main problem was designing a dialog structure that allows both complex conversational flows and a clear control interface. In principle, VR roleplays could be integrated well and safely into therapy. The VR intervention shows promise for providing an emotional experience of interpersonal conflict patterns in the context of psychotherapy. Additionally, other roleplay situations involving various social problem areas must be created and evaluated in terms of the fit to the patients' core conflictual relationship themes.

Examining the social in the prosocial: Episode-level features of social interactions and kind acts predict social connection and well-being.

Experiments prompting people to engage in more prosocial behavior (e.g., acts of kindness) or simple social interactions (e.g., acting extraverted) have both shown promise in boosting well-being. However, little is known about how much the impact on well-being depends on the type of interpersonal interaction (i.e., social vs. prosocial) or on other proximal features (e.g., whether the interaction takes place online vs. in-person, the closeness of the relationship, or amount of social connection associated with a given interaction). We randomly assigned a sample of full-time employees recruited via a special employed mTurk sample (N = 754) to perform weekly acts of kindness online versus in-person, to engage in weekly social interactions online versus in-person, or to list their daily activities (control) over the course of 4 weeks. First, on average, all conditions reported improvements in well-being (i.e., increases in positive affect and life satisfaction, decreases in negative affect) across the 4-week intervention period. Second, relative to controls, the four experimental groups reported increases in general social connectedness over time. Finally, according to auxiliary analyses collapsed across the experimental condition, closer relationship with target and non-digital medium of delivery predicted episode-level social connection, which, in turn, was associated with general social connectedness and positive affect. We conclude that the "who" and the "how" of a behavior (i.e., its target, its delivery method, and the feelings of social connection generated) are important for well-being, but not the "what" (i.e., whether the behavior is social or prosocial). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning from humans to build social cognition among robots.

Self-organized groups of robots have generally coordinated their behaviors using quite simple social interactions. Although simple interactions are sufficient for some group behaviors, future research needs to investigate more elaborate forms of coordination, such as social cognition, to progress towards real deployments. In this perspective, we define social cognition among robots as the combination of social inference, social learning, social influence, and knowledge transfer, and propose that these abilities can be established in robots by building underlying mechanisms based on behaviors observed in humans. We review key social processes observed in humans that could inspire valuable capabilities in robots and propose that relevant insights from human social cognition can be obtained by studying human-controlled avatars in virtual environments that have the correct balance of embodiment and constraints. Such environments need to allow participants to engage in embodied social behaviors, for instance through situatedness and bodily involvement, but, at the same time, need to artificially constrain humans to the operational conditions of robots, for instance in terms of perception and communication. We illustrate our proposed experimental method with example setups in a multi-user virtual environment.

Developing a sentence level fairness metric using word embeddings

Fairness is a principal social value that is observable in civilisations around the world. Yet, a fairness metric for digital texts that describe even a simple social interaction, e.g., ‘The boy hurt the girl’ has not been developed. We address this by employing word embeddings that use factors found in a new social psychology literature review on the topic. We use these factors to build fairness vectors. These vectors are used as sentence level measures, whereby each dimension reflects a fairness component. The approach is employed to approximate human perceptions of fairness. The method leverages a pro-social bias within word embeddings, for which we obtain an F1 = 79.8 on a list of sentences using the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). A second approach, using principal component analysis (PCA) and machine learning (ML), produces an F1 = 86.2. Repeating these tests using Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (SBERT) produces an F1 = 96.9 and F1 = 100 respectively. Improvements using subspace representations are further suggested. By proposing afirst-principles approach, the paper contributes to the analysis of digitaltexts along an ethical dimension.

Alternative model systems for cognitive variation: eusocial-insect colonies.

Understanding the origins and maintenance of cognitive variation in animal populations is central to the study of the evolution of cognition. However, the brain is itself a complex, hierarchical network of heterogeneous components, from diverse cell types to diverse neuropils, each of which may be of limited use to study in isolation or prohibitively challenging to manipulate in situ. Consequently, highly tractable alternative model systems may be valuable tools. Eusocial-insect colonies display emergent cognitive-like properties from relatively simple social interactions between diverse subunits that can be observed and manipulated while operating collectively. Here, we review the individual-scale mechanisms that cause group-level variation in how colonies solve problems analogous to cognitive challenges faced by brains, like decision-making, attention, and search.

Fostering Friendship

Fostering Friendship

Explosive Contagion in Networks

The spread of social phenomena such as behaviors, ideas or products is an ubiquitous but remarkably complex phenomenon. A successful avenue to study the spread of social phenomena relies on epidemic models by establishing analogies between the transmission of social phenomena and infectious diseases. Such models typically assume simple social interactions restricted to pairs of individuals; effects of the context are often neglected. Here we show that local synergistic effects associated with acquaintances of pairs of individuals can have striking consequences on the spread of social phenomena at large scales. The most interesting predictions are found for a scenario in which the contagion ability of a spreader decreases with the number of ignorant individuals surrounding the target ignorant. This mechanism mimics ubiquitous situations in which the willingness of individuals to adopt a new product depends not only on the intrinsic value of the product but also on whether his acquaintances will adopt this product or not. In these situations, we show that the typically smooth (second order) transitions towards large social contagion become explosive (first order). The proposed synergistic mechanisms therefore explain why ideas, rumours or products can suddenly and sometimes unexpectedly catch on.

Sleep Restriction and Time‐Of‐Day Impacts on Simple Social Interaction

Simple bargaining games are the foundation of more complex social interactions necessary for healthy relationships and well‐functioning societies. Neuroscience research has shown that high‐level deliberative thinking processes are necessary for social‐decision making - it seems cognitively less demanding to be greedy or to mistrust. In this paper, our focus is on how commonly‐experienced adverse sleep states, which are known to harm deliberative thinking, impact outcomes in the classic simple bargaining games (ultimatum, dictator, and trust games). Specifically, we experimentally manipulate sleep states of 184 young‐adult subjects who took part in a 3 week experimental protocol.Subjects were administered each game twice: once after a full week of sleep restriction and once after a full week of well‐rested sleep levels. Subjects were also randomly assigned to early morning (7:30 am) or later evening (10:00 pm) sessions to manipulate the optimality of the time‐of‐day of the decisions. We find a robust result of increased greed, reduced trust, and reduced trustworthiness following sleep restriction, after controlling for demographics and session indicators. We find no significant direct impact of circadian timing on decisions for these tasks. However, the mediating variable for these sleep manipulation effects is subjective sleepiness, and both sleep restriction and suboptimal circadian timing significantly increase self‐reported sleepiness. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that increased sleepiness reduces the relative input of deliberate thinking in social interactions.

Using Evolutionary Models with Mutations to Predict Long-Term Trends in Simple Social Interactions

Using Evolutionary Models with Mutations to Predict Long-Term Trends in Simple Social Interactions

Fashion, Cooperation, and Social Interactions

Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being different is the essence. Fashion color is fashionable in the first sense, and Lady Gaga in the second. We investigate a model where the population consists of the afore-mentioned two groups of people that are located on social networks (a spatial cellular automata network and small-world networks). This model captures two fundamental kinds of social interactions (coordination and anti-coordination) simultaneously, and also has its own interest to game theory: it is a hybrid model of pure competition and pure cooperation. This is true because when a conformist meets a rebel, they play the zero sum matching pennies game, which is pure competition. When two conformists (rebels) meet, they play the (anti-) coordination game, which is pure cooperation. Simulation shows that simple social interactions greatly promote cooperation: in most cases people can reach an extraordinarily high level of cooperation, through a selfish, myopic, naive, and local interacting dynamic (the best response dynamic). We find that degree of synchronization also plays a critical role, but mostly on the negative side. Four indices, namely cooperation degree, average satisfaction degree, equilibrium ratio and complete ratio, are defined and applied to measure people’s cooperation levels from various angles. Phase transition, as well as emergence of many interesting geographic patterns in the cellular automata network, is also observed.

Social Interaction, Noise and Antibiotic-Mediated Switches in the Intestinal Microbiota

The intestinal microbiota plays important roles in digestion and resistance against entero-pathogens. As with other ecosystems, its species composition is resilient against small disturbances but strong perturbations such as antibiotics can affect the consortium dramatically. Antibiotic cessation does not necessarily restore pre-treatment conditions and disturbed microbiota are often susceptible to pathogen invasion. Here we propose a mathematical model to explain how antibiotic-mediated switches in the microbiota composition can result from simple social interactions between antibiotic-tolerant and antibiotic-sensitive bacterial groups. We build a two-species (e.g. two functional-groups) model and identify regions of domination by antibiotic-sensitive or antibiotic-tolerant bacteria, as well as a region of multistability where domination by either group is possible. Using a new framework that we derived from statistical physics, we calculate the duration of each microbiota composition state. This is shown to depend on the balance between random fluctuations in the bacterial densities and the strength of microbial interactions. The singular value decomposition of recent metagenomic data confirms our assumption of grouping microbes as antibiotic-tolerant or antibiotic-sensitive in response to a single antibiotic. Our methodology can be extended to multiple bacterial groups and thus it provides an ecological formalism to help interpret the present surge in microbiome data.

THE EVOLUTION OF FAIRNESS IN A BIOLOGICAL MARKET

Human beings universally express a concern for the fairness of social interactions, and it remains an open question that which ultimate factors led to the evolution of this preference. Here, we present a model accounting for the evolution of fairness on the basis of individual selection alone. We consider a simple social interaction based on the Dictator Game. Two individuals, a "proposer" and a "responder," have an opportunity to split a resource. When they have no choice but to interact together, the most powerful (here the proposer) reaps all the profits and fairness cannot evolve. Partner choice is the key lever to overcome this difficulty. Rather than just two individuals, we consider a population composed of two classes of individuals (either proposers or responders), and we allow the responders to choose their partner. In such a "biological market," fairness evolves as an "equilibrium price," resulting from an ecological equivalent of the law of supply and demand. If a class is disadvantaged by the chosen resource partition (i.e., if it frequently receives less than half of the resource), it is outcompeted by the other one, and automatically becomes rarer. This rarity grants it an advantage on the market, which yields in turn to the evolution of a more favorable partition. Splitting the resource into two identical halves, or more generally in a way that equalizes the payoffs of the two classes, is then the only evolutionarily stable outcome. Beyond human fairness, this mechanism also opens up new ways of explaining the distribution of benefits in many mutualistic interactions.

Social interactions and the salience of social identity

We explore the effect of identity salience on behaviour in a simple social interaction. Specifically, we compare ultimatum bargaining across three treatments: priming subjects with a shared identity, priming subjects with an identity distinct from those with whom they will interact, and priming subjects with no particular identity. We find that subjects are most cooperative in the identity-priming treatment and least cooperative in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. Similarly, subjects reveal the highest demands in the identity-priming treatment and the lowest demands in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. We discuss the implications of these results with respect to the literature on organizational identity.

Bargaining and trust: the effects of 36‐h total sleep deprivation on socially interactive decisions

Although it is well known that sleep loss results in poor judgement and decisions, little is known about the influence of social context in these processes. Sixteen healthy young adults underwent three games involving bargaining ('Ultimatum' and 'Dictator') and trust, following total sleep deprivation (TSD) and during rested wakefulness (RW), in a repeated-measures, counterbalanced design. To control for repeatability, a second group (n = 16) was tested twice under RW conditions. Paired anonymously with another individual, participants made their simple social interaction decisions facing real monetary incentives. For bargaining, following TSD participants were more likely to reject unequal-split offers made by their partner, despite the rejection resulting in a zero monetary payoff for both participants. For the trust game, participants were less likely to place full trust in their anonymous partner. Overall, we provide novel evidence that following TSD, the conflict between personal financial gain and payoff equality is focused upon avoidance of unfavourable inequality (i.e. unfairness). This results in the rejection of unfair offers at personal monetary cost, and the lack of full trust which would expose one to being exploited in the interaction. As such, we suggest that within a social domain decisions may be more influenced by emotion following TSD, which has fundamental consequences for real-world decision-making involving social exchange.

Context-dependent interaction leads to emergent search behavior in social aggregates

Locating the source of an advected chemical signal is a common challenge facing many living organisms. When the advecting medium is characterized by either high Reynolds number or high Peclet number, the task becomes highly nontrivial due to the generation of heterogeneous, dynamically changing filamental concentrations that do not decrease monotonically with distance to the source. Defining search strategies that are effective in these environments has important implications for the understanding of animal behavior and for the design of biologically inspired technology. Here we present a strategy that is able to solve this task without the higher intelligence required to assess spatial gradient direction, measure the diffusive properties of the flow field, or perform complex calculations. Instead, our method is based on the collective behavior of autonomous individuals following simple social interaction rules which are modified according to the local conditions they are experiencing. Through these context-dependent interactions, the group is able to locate the source of a chemical signal and in doing so displays an awareness of the environment not present at the individual level. This behavior illustrates an alternative pathway to the evolution of higher cognitive capacity via the emergent, group-level intelligence that can result from local interactions.

Social Interactions and the Salience of Social Identity

In this paper, we explore the effect of identity salience on behavior in a simple social interaction. Specifically, we compare behavior in a ultimatum game across three treatments: priming subjects with a shared identity, priming subjects with an identity distinct from those with whom they will interact, and priming subjects with no particular identity. We find that subjects are most cooperative in the identity-priming treatment and least cooperative in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. Similarly, subjects reveal the highest demands in the identity-priming treatment and the lowest demands in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. We discuss the implications of these results with respect to literature on organizational identity.

Towards Energy Optimization: Emergent Task Allocation in a Swarm of Foraging Robots

This article presents a simple adaptation mechanism to automatically adjust the ratio of foragers to resters (division of labor) in a swarm of foraging robots and hence maximize the net energy income to the swarm. Three adaptation rules are introduced based on local sensing and communications. Individual robots use internal cues (successful food retrieval), environmental cues (collisions with team-mates while searching for food) and social cues (team-mate success in food retrieval) to dynamically vary the time spent foraging or resting. Simulation results show that the swarm demonstrates successful adaptive emergent division of labor and robustness to environmental change (in food source density), and we observe that robots need to cooperate more when food is scarce. Furthermore, the adaptation mechanism is able to guide the swarm towards energy optimization despite the limited sensing and communication abilities of the individual robots and the simple social interaction rules. The swarm also exhibits the capacity to collectively perceive environmental changes; a capacity that can only be observed at a group level and cannot be deduced from individual robots.

Facilitating Social Interactions in the Community for a Transition-Age Student with Severe Disabilities

We studied a strategy for facilitating social interactions in community settings for a transition-age woman with severe disabilities (Juanita). The intervention involved identifying a person without intellectual disabilities who frequented the same setting as Juanita, who was interested in meeting her, and who was willing to schedule mutually preferred activities for them to interact within. Results suggest that this relatively simple social interaction strategy may be one option for improving social integration in community settings for transition-age students.

Simple Social Interactions and the Emergence of Rationality

Simple Social Interactions and the Emergence of Rationality

MEASURING AND INCREASING THE HAPPINESS OF PEOPLE WITH PROFOUND MENTAL RETARDATION AND PHYSICAL HANDICAPS

Applied research in mental retardation has focused on skill training and education to the relative neglect of measuring and increasing happiness in the lives of people with mental retardation. Here we report the results of four preliminary studies that were conducted to develop and demonstrate methodologies for measuring happiness in people with profound mental retardation and other severe handicaps. These results suggest that: (1) facial expressions can provide a valid measure of happiness, and can be measured reliably by relatively untrained observers; (2) the rate of spontaneous smiling is highly variable across individuals; (3) some individuals’ happiness can be increased dramatically by very simple social interactions; and (4) clients’ differential emotional reactions to various caregivers may be useful in tracking the development of social relationships. Suggestions for future research include systematic replication of these preliminary findings with a larger number and variety of subjects, and demonstration of how these measures can be applied to quality assurance systems.