Triadic Conversations Research Articles

Behavioral Intervention for Adults With Autism on Distribution of Attention in Triadic Conversations: A/B-Tested Pre-Post Study.

Cross-neurotype differences in social communication patterns contribute to high unemployment rates among adults with autism. Adults with autism can be unsuccessful in job searches or terminated from employment due to mismatches between their social attention behaviors and society's expectations on workplace communication. We propose a behavioral intervention concerning distribution of attention in triadic (three-way) conversations. Specifically, the objective is to determine whether providing personalized feedback to each individual with autism based on an analysis of their attention distribution behavior during an initial conversation session would cause them to modify their orientation behavior in a subsequent conversation session. Our system uses an unobtrusive head orientation estimation model to track the focus of attention of each individual. Head orientation sequences from a conversation session are analyzed based on five statistical domains (eg, maximum exclusion duration and average contact duration) representing different types of attention distribution behavior. An intervention is provided to a participant if they exceeded the nonautistic average for that behavior by at least 2 SDs. The intervention uses data analysis and video modeling along with a constructive discussion about the targeted behaviors. Twenty-four individuals with autism with no intellectual disabilities participated in the study. The participants were divided into test and control groups of 12 participants each. Based on their attention distribution behavior in the initial conversation session, 11 of the 12 participants in the test group received an intervention in at least one domain. Of the 11 participants who received the intervention, 10 showed improvement in at least one domain on which they received feedback. Independent t tests for larger test groups (df>15) confirmed that the group improvements are statistically significant compared with the corresponding controls (P<.05). Crawford-Howell t tests confirmed that 78% of the interventions resulted in significant improvements when compared individually against corresponding controls (P<.05). Additional t tests comparing the first conversation sessions of the test and control groups and comparing the first and second conversation sessions of the control group resulted in nonsignificant differences, pointing to the intervention being the main effect behind the behavioral changes displayed by the test group, as opposed to confounding effects or group differences. Our proposed behavioral intervention offers a useful framework for practicing social attention behavior in multiparty conversations that are common in social and professional settings.

Associations between physicians' SDM behaviour and participation of older patients and family members in triadic decision-making: An observational study

BackgroundMedical consultations with older patients often include triadic conversations and decision-making processes involving physicians, patients, and family members. The presence of family members may change the communication dynamics and therefore increase the complexity of the consultation and decision-making process. ObjectiveThis study explored associations between physicians' shared decision-making (SDM) behaviour and patients' and family members' participation in the decision-making process. MethodsUsing an observational design, we analysed 95 recorded consultations between medical specialists, patients aged ≥65 years, and accompanying family members at a Dutch hospital. The OPTIONMCC was used to assess the physicians' SDM behaviour and patients' and family members' levels of involvement in SDM. ResultsWe found a strong positive correlation between physicians' behaviour and patients' and family members' participation in SDM (0.68 and 0.64, respectively, p < .01). Family members were more involved in SDM for patients aged 80 and older. ConclusionWhile not asserting causation, our study suggests physicians potentially play a facilitating role in shaping the SDM process together with proactive contributions from patients and family members. InnovationThe results offer new insights into triadic SDM and provide suggestions for refining the OPTIONMCC. Further research is recommended into participants' mutual directional influences in triadic SDM.

Investigating conversational dynamics in triads: Effects of noise, hearing impairment, and hearing aids.

Communication is an important part of everyday life and requires a rapid and coordinated interplay between interlocutors to ensure a successful conversation. Here, we investigate whether increased communication difficulty caused by additional background noise, hearing impairment, and not providing adequate hearing-aid (HA) processing affected the dynamics of a group conversation between one hearing-impaired (HI) and two normal-hearing (NH) interlocutors. Free conversations were recorded from 25 triads communicating at low (50 dBC SPL) or high (75 dBC SPL) levels of canteen noise. In conversations at low noise levels, the HI interlocutor was either unaided or aided. In conversations at high noise levels, the HI interlocutor either experienced omnidirectional or directional sound processing. Results showed that HI interlocutors generally spoke more and initiated their turn faster, but with more variability, than the NH interlocutors. Increasing the noise level resulted in generally higher speech levels, but more so for the NH than for the HI interlocutors. Higher background noise also affected the HI interlocutors' ability to speak in longer turns. When the HI interlocutors were unaided at low noise levels, both HI and NH interlocutors spoke louder, while receiving directional sound processing at high levels of noise only reduced the speech level of the HI interlocutor. In conclusion, noise, hearing impairment, and hearing-aid processing mainly affected speech levels, while the remaining measures of conversational dynamics (FTO median, FTO IQR, turn duration, and speaking time) were unaffected. Hence, although experiencing large changes in communication difficulty, the conversational dynamics of the free triadic conversations remain relatively stable.

Competition Reduces Response Times in Multiparty Conversation.

Natural conversations are characterized by short transition times between turns. This holds in particular for multi-party conversations. The short turn transitions in everyday conversations contrast sharply with the much longer speech onset latencies observed in laboratory studies where speakers respond to spoken utterances. There are many factors that facilitate speech production in conversational compared to laboratory settings. Here we highlight one of them, the impact of competition for turns. In multi-party conversations, speakers often compete for turns. In quantitative corpus analyses of multi-party conversation, the fastest response determines the recorded turn transition time. In contrast, in dyadic conversations such competition for turns is much less likely to arise, and in laboratory experiments with individual participants it does not arise at all. Therefore, all responses tend to be recorded. Thus, competition for turns may reduce the recorded mean turn transition times in multi-party conversations for a simple statistical reason: slow responses are not included in the means. We report two studies illustrating this point. We first report the results of simulations showing how much the response times in a laboratory experiment would be reduced if, for each trial, instead of recording all responses, only the fastest responses of several participants responding independently on the trial were recorded. We then present results from a quantitative corpus analysis comparing turn transition times in dyadic and triadic conversations. There was no significant group size effect in question-response transition times, where the present speaker often selects the next one, thus reducing competition between speakers. But, as predicted, triads showed shorter turn transition times than dyads for the remaining turn transitions, where competition for the floor was more likely to arise. Together, these data show that turn transition times in conversation should be interpreted in the context of group size, turn transition type, and social setting.

Managing relationships through repetition

AbstractThis study examines cross-speaker repetition in triadic conversations in the Japanese language. For the analysis, three sets of triadic conversations between close friends taken from a TV talk show are used. The results reveal that repetition in triadic conversations performs distinctive functions that are not observed in dyadic conversations: repetition often takes place between only two participants of the triad and allows the two to team up and strengthen their bond exclusively (teaming repetition), or even playfully tease the third participant (teasing repetition). Repetition is also shared between the three participants. In such cases, it allows the participants to create an instant bond by joking or referring to shared circumstances (immediate threefold repetition), or to gradually establish rapport by connecting their utterances and co-constructing a story (repetition relay). All these types of repetition express the participants’ points of view and contribute efficiently to their relationships that shift from moment to moment. The study further demonstrates cases in which one participant makes good use of various repetition types in a short period of time and efficiently allocates thoughts and feelings to the other two participants. The study concludes that repetition plays a significant role in Japanese conversation, helping speakers to converse smoothly and manage the dynamic relationships efficiently.

General trust impedes perception of self-reported primary psychopathy in thin slices of social interaction.

Little is known about people’s ability to detect subclinical psychopathy from others’ quotidian social behavior, or about the correlates of variation in this ability. This study sought to address these questions using a thin slice personality judgment paradigm. We presented 108 undergraduate judges (70.4% female) with 1.5 minute video thin slices of zero-acquaintance triadic conversations among other undergraduates (targets: n = 105, 57.1% female). Judges completed self-report measures of general trust, caution, and empathy. Target individuals had completed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Judges viewed the videos in one of three conditions: complete audio, silent, or audio from which semantic content had been removed using low-pass filtering. Using a novel other-rating version of the LSRP, judges’ ratings of targets’ primary psychopathy levels were significantly positively associated with targets’ self-reports, but only in the complete audio condition. Judge general trust and target LSRP interacted, such that judges higher in general trust made less accurate judgments with respect to targets higher in primary and total psychopathy. Results are consistent with a scenario in which psychopathic traits are maintained in human populations by negative frequency dependent selection operating through the costs of detecting psychopathy in others.

A Linguistic Study of Borrowing in Moroccan Teenage Talk

This paper aims to examine one of the most productive linguistic resources Moroccan teenagers use widely to create novel lexical and phrasal items–borrowing. Of particular interest to us are the varied aspects of their borrowings’ innovativeness, which has often been reported to be one of the main features of youngspeak. The examples are taken from recorded dyadic and triadic conversations mainly between six female high school mates and relaxed group interviews involving four of the latter and two female others from the same school. The results reveal first that Moroccan teenagers are ‘linguistic doers’ capable of creating, through borrowing, novel words and expressions to talk about their concerns, interests, and attitudes. Second, they corroborate findings of previous research that teenagers are highly innovative. To achieve innovativeness, they employ various linguistic and rhetorical devices and break the linguistic norms of both the source and recipient languages. The product is thus a distinct language that is colourful, vivid, and expressive, which scholars largely agree teenagers use to express their autonomy and affiliation to their peers.

Derivation in Moroccan Teenage Talk

The objective of this paper is to explore one of the most productive linguistic devices Moroccan teenagers employ extensively to create novel lexical items–namely derivation, and uncover some aspects of its innovativeness, which has widely been acknowledged to characterise youngspeak in general. The items analysed are extracted from relaxed group interviews involving six secondary school girls and recorded dyadic and triadic conversations mainly between four of them and two other female school mates. The results corroborate previous research findings that teenagers use derivational processes creatively. More specifically, Moroccan teenagers achieve innovativeness through the violation of some of the well-established derivational norms of their mother tongue, Moroccan Arabic (MA), at times, and their combination with some semantic and rhetorical tools such as unconventional metaphor, semantic shift, and hyperbole, at others. The outcome is thus a distinct language in which old words are reshaped to convey concepts that seem significant in their culture and through which, scholars claim, teenagers in general voice their distance from the world of adults on the one hand and affiliation and loyalty to their peers on the other.

Defectors Cannot Be Detected during“Small Talk” with Strangers

To account for the widespread human tendency to cooperate in one-shot social dilemmas, some theorists have proposed that cooperators can be reliably detected based on ethological displays that are difficult to fake. Experimental findings have supported the view that cooperators can be distinguished from defectors based on “thin slices” of behavior, but the relevant cues have remained elusive, and the role of the judge's perspective remains unclear. In this study, we followed triadic conversations among unacquainted same-sex college students with unannounced dyadic one-shot prisoner's dilemmas, and asked participants to guess the PD decisions made toward them and among the other two participants. Two other sets of participants guessed the PD decisions after viewing videotape of the conversations, either with foreknowledge (informed), or without foreknowledge (naïve), of the post-conversation PD. Only naïve video viewers approached better-than-chance prediction accuracy, and they were significantly accurate at predicting the PD decisions of only opposite-sexed conversation participants. Four ethological displays recently proposed to cue defection in one-shot social dilemmas (arms crossed, lean back, hand touch, and face touch) failed to predict either actual defection or guesses of defection by any category of observer. Our results cast doubt on the role of “greenbeard” signals in the evolution of human prosociality, although they suggest that eavesdropping may be more informative about others' cooperative propensities than direct interaction.

Communication after traumatic brain injury in adolescence

Communication in everyday life can be severely affected in adolescence after a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Abilities associated with vocal verbal response, gesture, gaze, facial expression and posture are frequently impaired. While much effort is often invested in clinical assessments, altered communicative functions in a real life setting are explored to a much lesser extent. In this case study, we discuss the usability of a triangulation of methods for analysis, involving a 16-year-old adolescent with TBI. Communication Management (CM) is explored, based on self-evaluation by the participant in video recordings of dyadic and triadic conversations. Ratings created independently by the subject and his parents on The Communicative Effectiveness Index (CETI) are analysed. A comparison is made with a selection of clinical test results on cognition, speech and language. We discuss how the methods can be applied to analyse communicative functions that are not readily detected in a clinical environment.

Who gets to talk? An alternative framework evaluating companion effects in geriatric triads

Most studies evaluating companion effects on medical triadic interaction focus on the doctors' part, e.g., how the companion's presence diverts doctors' attention away from the patient. In contrast to this mainstream approach, the current research proposes an alternative framework by focusing on the patient parties--especially on how companion participation reshapes the discourse sequences where patient parties provide information, and how it affects patient full turns and priority in providing complete first-hand information to doctors. By examining fifteen geriatric triadic conversations collected in a teaching hospital in southern Taiwan, this proposed framework concludes that in the companion's presence, the information providing sequences are restructured into eight patterns, among which sole information provider is preferred to joint providers. Furthermore, the more companions participate in providing information, the less patients by themselves volunteer information or respond to doctors' questions prior to companions' verbal involvement. A more striking companion effect shows that even in the triads with a low-participation companion, whenever the companion does participate, the patient rarely has a full turn or priority to complete an information unit. The patient's turns are either taken, are simultaneous with, or cut-off by the companion's participation.

Linguistic skills of 16- and 23-month-old twins and singletons in a triadic context

Previous studies of twins' language development have failed to control for possible context effects. We examined 16- and 23- month-old twins' and singletons' language productions in a triadic context. The triads included either two same-age toddlers and an adult experimenter, or a set of twins and the same adult experimenter. Since there are only two communicative roles - agent and recipient - for three participants, each child in turn experienced momentary exclusion as the consequence of the conversation between the other two. Explicit verbal attempts to tackle exclusion and participate in dyadic or triadic conversations were investigated. Results showed that 23-month-old twins' language production outstripped singletons' in terms of quantity and quality. The specific developmental course of linguistic skills for children living mostly in a multi-participant context is discussed.

Joint Attention and Conversation in Mother-Infant-Sibling Triads

The current study investigated the general nature of joint attentional and conversational interaction in mother-infant-sibling triads. 9 19-month-old infants and 9 24-month-old infants were videotaped during 20 min of free play with their mothers and preschool-aged siblings around a common activity. Analyses revealed that even 19-month-old infants were capable of participating in triadic interactions and conversations, and that the proportional frequency of both these measures increased with age. Triadic conversations were nearly 3 times longer and elicited nearly twice as many infant turns per conversation as dyadic conversations. Infants were more likely to join into an ongoing conversational topic than to initiate one themselves, and they were more likely to take a turn in those conversations if they were in a joint attentional state with the speaker. Infants were just as likely to respond to a comment or request directed to another person as they were to one directed to themselves, indicating reliable comprehension of language not addressed to them. These results suggest that the mother-infant-sibling interactive context differs in important ways from the mother-infant dyadic context and that it is a richer language learning environment than previously supposed.