Triadic Interactions Research Articles

Participation in communication and decisions with regards to nursing care: The role of children

The study was to examine the role of children in communication and decisions regarding their nursing care in a paediatric oncology ward in Malaysia. The principles of focused ethnography underpinned the study design. Fieldwork took place over six months in one 32-bedded paediatric oncology ward. Twenty-one children, ranging in ages from 7 to 12 years diagnosed with leukaemia, their parents and 19 nurses participated. Data collection consisted of participant observation and semi-structured interview. Hospitalized children employed different roles of passive or active participants during the communication and decisions about their nursing care. Importantly, children are more likely to become active participants in the communication process when nurses interact directly with them, listening to them and giving them opportunities to ask questions in either the presence or absence of their parents. Equally, children are likely to be more passive participants when nurses do not communicate directly with them, choosing instead to directly interact with the child's parents. This study highlighted that the role of children as active and passive participants is not permanently engaged by individual children, rather their role fluctuates throughout the hospitalization journey. The fluctuations of a child's role are highly dependent on their preferences: how and when they want to be included in the communication and decisions process. Children's roles in communication and decisions are also varied and dependent on their particular contexts. A child's participation in one situation does not consistently reflect their participation with their role in other situations. The ways in which the children participate were oscillated throughout their hospitalization. This study provides empirical insight into children's experiences of triadic (child-nurse-parent) interaction during the decisions about their nursing care in paediatric oncological setting. A key recommendation calls for the development of assessment strategies to determine the 'ideal' position children would like to occupy, at any given point in time, throughout their hospitalization.

Triadic interactions support infants' emerging understanding of intentional actions.

Infants' understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social-cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants' developing understanding of others as intentional agents. Infants' spontaneous tendency to participate in triadic engagement was assessed in a semi-structured play session with a researcher. Intentional action understanding was assessed by evaluating infants' ability to visually predict the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 1 (N=88) revealed that 8- to 9-month-olds who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 2 (N=114) confirmed these findings using a longitudinal design and demonstrated that infants who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement at 6-7months were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action 3months later. Cross-lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6-7months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around. Finally, evidence from both studies revealed the unique contribution of triadic over dyadic forms of engagement. These results highlight the importance of social interaction as a developmental mechanism and suggest that infants enrich their understanding of intentionality through triadic interactions with social partners.

Observing Collaboration in Small-Group Interaction

In this study, we define and test measures that capture aspects of collaboration in interaction within groups of three participants performing a task. The measures are constructed upon turn-taking and lexical features from a corpus of triadic task-based interactions, as well as upon demographic features, and personality, dominance, and satisfaction assessments related to the corpus participants. Those quantities were tested for significant effects and correlations they have with each other. The findings indicate that determinants of collaboration are located in measures quantifying the differences among dialogue participants in conversational mechanisms employed, such as number and frequency of words contributed, lexical repetitions, conversational dominance, and in psychological and sentiment variables, i.e., the participants’ personality traits and expression of satisfaction.

Subordination signals improve the quality of social relationships in Verreaux's Sifaka: Implications for the evolution of power structures and social complexity.

Unidirectional dominance-related signals can be used to communicate submission (an immediate behavioral response) or subordination (the status of an established relationship). Subordination signals are defined as emitted during peaceful interactions and are hypothesized to be critical for the evolution of social complexity and robust power structures because they reduce uncertainty in social relationships. The chatter vocalization in Verreaux's sifaka (Propithecus verreauxi) is a unidirectional submissive signal. I tested the hypothesis that chatter vocalizations can signal subordination and thereby reduce agonism in a dyad. I examined 780 chatters from 18 dyads collected over 881 observation hours on four groups of sifaka in Kirindy Forest, Madagascar. Sifaka emitted 63% of chatters in the peaceful context. Peaceful chatters significantly predicted grooming rate, fighting rate, reconciliation, and proportion of wins in a dyad but did not predict time in proximity. Dyad-type significantly predicted the frequency of peaceful chatters, with intrasexual dyads exhibiting chatters in peaceful contexts more often than intersexual dyads. Sifaka communicate both submission and subordination with chatter vocalizations. Subordination signaling increased tolerance and affiliation. It reduced conflicts and the probability dominant individuals usurped resources. Moreover, intrasexual power may be more institutionalized than intersexual power in sifaka. The finding of complex and cognitively demanding social communication in a lemur with low levels of cooperation (1) challenges previous assumptions that the evolution of social complexity is dependent on frequent triadic interactions and high levels of cooperation, and (2) highlights the need for taxonomic diversity in studies of social complexity.

On the thermal equilibrium state of large-scale flows

In a forced three-dimensional turbulent flow the scales larger than the forcing scale have been conjectured to reach a thermal equilibrium state forming a $k^{2}$ energy spectrum, where $k$ is the wavenumber. In this work we examine the properties of these large scales in turbulent flows with the use of numerical simulations. We show that the choice of forcing can strongly affect the behaviour of the large scales. A spectrally dense forcing (a forcing that acts on all modes inside a finite-width spherical shell) with long correlation times may lead to strong deviations from the $k^{2}$ energy spectrum, while a spectrally sparse forcing (a forcing that acts only on a few modes) with short correlated time scale can reproduce the thermal spectrum. The origin of these deviations is analysed and the involved mechanisms is unravelled by examining: (i) the number of triadic interactions taking place, (ii) the spectrum of the nonlinear term, (iii) the amplitude of interactions and the fluxes due to different scales and (iv) the transfer function between different shells of wavenumbers. It is shown that the spectrally dense forcing allows for numerous triadic interactions that couple one large-scale mode with two forced modes and this leads to an excess of energy input at the large scales. This excess of energy is then moved back to the small scales by self-interactions of the large-scale modes and by interactions with the turbulent small scales. The overall picture that arises from the present analysis is that the large scales in a turbulent flow resemble a reservoir that is in (non-local) contact with a second out-of-equilibrium reservoir consisting of the smaller (forced, turbulent and dissipative) scales. If the injection of energy at the large scales from the forced modes is relative weak (as is the case for the spectrally sparse forcing) then the large-scale spectrum remains close to a thermal equilibrium and the role of long-range interactions is to set the global energy (temperature) of the equilibrium state. If, on the other hand, the long-range interactions are dominant (as is the case for the spectrally dense forcing), the large-scale self-interactions cannot respond fast enough to bring the system into equilibrium. Then the large scales deviate from the equilibrium state with energy spectrum that may display exponents different from the $k^{2}$ spectrum.

The social-political roles of NGOs: a study on a triadic business network

PurposeThis study examines the institutional setting and decision-making structures among key industry actors in the Malaysian housing industry, using the IMP network approach and institutional theory as theoretical lenses. The purpose of this study is to uncover the role of NGOs, housing developers and the government at a collective level within a highly regulated housing market. This study uses “relationships” as the unit of analysis, focusing on triadic interactions of NGOs, housing developers and the government.Design/methodology/approachThis study applies the qualitative case-study-research approach, using 20 in-depth interviews from the purposefully selected industry actors within the housing market, online observations and documents.FindingsThe findings suggest that NGOs play an influential role in housing-industry interactions and outcomes. In particular, the Real Estate and Housing Developers Association can influence the members’ decisions through supportive and disruptive actions.Originality/valueThis study contributes to our understanding of how NGOs interact with their regulator and housing developers and how these three parties co-evolve and respond to institutional demands in a housing market that is bound by a highly restricted housing policy. By understanding how actors interact within a network and how it affects each other’s decision, it may assist policymakers in formulating policies that can improve market efficiency. It also aids businesses in formulating their collective strategies.

Coparentalidade aos três meses de vida do bebê

O objetivo do presente estudo foi investigar a coparentalidade aos três meses de vida do bebê. Participaram 26 famílias nucleares, com filho único. Mãe e pai responderam a entrevistas. A análise de conteúdo qualitativa revelou responsabilidade predominantemente materna nos cuidados do bebê na maioria das famílias. A mãe parecia ocupar uma posição de guardiã da relação pai-bebê, apresentando comportamentos facilitadores ou inibidores do envolvimento paterno. Todos os participantes mencionaram apoio ao papel coparental, embora também tenha sido identificada depreciação materna à contribuição paterna. O envolvimento triádico ocorria principalmente nos cuidados básicos do bebê. Verbalizações dos genitores sugeriram boa qualidade na comunicação familiar, além de bons níveis de acordo sobre os cuidados. Salientam-se aspectos gratificantes e desafiadores da coparentalidade aos três meses de vida do bebê, período em que os genitores estão se adaptando à nova identidade e aos novos papeis, para atender às necessidades do filho.

Identifying similar networks using structural hierarchy

Comparing structural similarities among complex networks is an important task in several scientific and social science applications. Existing techniques for quantifying network similarity range from network-centric methods that consider global network topology to node-centric methods that consider local node-level sub-structures.In this paper, we address the research gap between computationally expensive network-centric approaches and myopic node-centric network comparison methods by introducing a novel approach to quantify network similarity based on hierarchical graph decomposition. The approach adequately captures both global and local topology and is motivated by the observation that networks from diverse domains such as physical, chemical, biological and social systems exhibit an inherent structural hierarchy that emerges from local dyadic and triadic interactions. The proposed algorithm, Network Similarity via graph Decomposition (NSD), extracts network signatures from hierarchical decomposition of networks and uses Canberra distance to quantify the similarity between signatures. We use two well-known graph decomposition methods to expose network hierarchy resulting in two variations of NSD. We find that our approach groups similar networks better than competing algorithms. Experimentation using 40 real-world networks, 15 massive networks, and 30 large synthetic networks establishes that the proposed methodology is effective, scalable, sensitive and applicable to wide variety of networks.

Subharmonic resonant interaction of a gravity–capillary progressive axially symmetric wave with a radial cross-wave

We theoretically investigate the problem of subharmonic resonant interaction of a progressive (axially symmetric) ring wave with a radial cross-wave in the context of the potential-flow formulation for gravity-capillary waves. The objective is to understand the nonlinear mechanism governing energy transfer from a progressive ring wave to its subharmonic cross-waves through triadic resonant interactions. We first show that for an arbitrary three-dimensional body floating in an unbounded free surface, there exists a set of homogeneous solutions at any frequency in the gravity-capillary wave context. The homogeneous solution depends solely on the mean free-surface slope at the waterline of the body and physically represents a progressive radial cross-wave. Unlike standing cross-waves, a progressive cross-wave loses energy during propagation by overcoming the work done by surface tension at the waterline and through wave radiation. We then consider the subharmonic interaction of a progressive ring wave, which is forced by a radial swelling–contraction deformation of a vertical circular cylinder, with subharmonic cross-waves. We derive the nonlinear spatial–temporal evolution equation governing the motion of the cross-wave by use of the average Lagrangian method. In addition to energy-input terms from the interaction with the forced ring wave, the evolution equation contains a damping term associated with energy loss in cross-wave propagation. We show that the presence of the damping term leads to a non-trivial threshold value of the ring wave steepness (or amplitude) beyond which the cross-wave becomes unstable and grows with time by taking energy from the ring wave. Finally, we extend this analysis to the experimental case of Tatsuno et al. (Rep. Res. Inst. Appl. Mech. Kyushu University, vol. 17, 1969, pp. 195–215) in which asymmetric wave patterns are observed during high-frequency vertical oscillations of a surface-piercing sphere. The theoretical prediction of the threshold value of oscillation amplitude and characteristic features of generated radial cross-waves agrees reasonably well with experimental observations.

Quality home visits: Activities to promote meaningful interactions.

Examination of and support for specific practices that promote high-quality home visiting are essential as family support programs continue to expand across the country. The current study used direct observation of 91 home visits across 41 home visitors to examine relations among interaction partners, content of the interactions, the home-visitors' activities, and quality of home-visitors' practices and family-members' engagement within programs funded by the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program. More time spent in triadic interactions focused on child-related content, as measured by the Home Visit Rating Scale-Revised, was related to higher quality of family engagement in home visits, as measured with the Home Visit Observation Rating Scales. Time spent in adult-focused interactions and administrative tasks, however, was related to lower quality of home-visiting practices and family engagement. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Forms of Participation in a Mental Health Care Consultation with a Nonpresent Interpreter

ABSTRACTInterpreter-mediated interactions via phone are becoming increasingly frequent, especially in medical settings. I examine one case of a mental care consultation with a nonpresent interpreter. My aim is to explore how the three participants—mental health practitioner, client, and nonpresent interpreter—use multimodal resources to manage the possible interactional relations among themselves. I will show how, at certain points, they use gaze and body orientation to integrate into the overall triadic interaction a series of exchanges between practitioner and client. The data are in Arabic and French with an English translation.

Interactional Synchrony and Child Gender Differences in Dyadic and Triadic Family Interactions

Based on family systems theory, our objectives were to examine the association between dyadic parent–child interactional synchrony (mother–child and father–child) and triadic mother–father–child interactional synchrony and the effect of the child’s gender on the family interactional synchrony at the child’s third year. Forty-three low-income Brazilian families (mother, father, and child) were observed in free play interaction. Multidimension assessments of the degree of dyadic and triadic interactional synchronies were made (interpersonal distance, visual and body orientation, play involvement, and shared affect). Results indicated that father–child dyadic interaction was more strongly associated with triadic family interaction than mother–child interaction. Furthermore, father–daughter dyads and triads with girls were more attuned than all other family compositions. Taken together, these results expand research in the field and suggest that fathers may have a greater impact on child gender development than previously thought. Our findings also add empirical evidence to the unique contribution of the triadic family context for understanding of parental roles and family dynamics.

Hostile interactions in the family: Patterns and links to youth externalizing problems.

In line with family systems theory, we examined patterns of hostile interactions within families and their associations with externalizing problems among early-adolescent children. Using hostility scores based on observational data of six dyadic interactions during a triadic interaction (n = 462) (i.e., child-to-mother, mother-to-child, child-to-father, father-to-child, mother-to-father, father-to-mother)-Latent Profile Analysis supported three distinct profiles of hostility. The Low/Moderate Hostile profile included families with the lowest levels of hostility across dyads; families in the Mutual Parent-Child Hostile profile scored higher on parent-child hostility, but lower on interparental hostility; the Hostile Parent profile showed higher levels of parent-to-child and interparental hostility, but lower child-to-parent hostility. Concerning links to youth outcomes, youth in the Mutual Parent-Child Hostile profile reported the highest level of externalizing problems, both concurrently and longitudinally. These results point to the importance of examining larger family patterns of hostility to fully understand the association between family hostility and youth adjustment.

Transitivity Types Predict Communicative Abilities in Infants at Risk of Autism*

Abstract To examine predictors of preschool language abilities, thirty-seven infants at high risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were recorded longitudinally from 5-14 months as they interacted with their caregivers and toys at home. Triadic interactions were coded, categorized as transitive, intransitive or vacuously transitive, and then related to the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI-III) and the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL) at 36 months. The results show that prior to 14 months, early transitive interactions correlate positively and intransitive interactions correlate negatively with CDI-III and MSEL scores at 36 months. By categorizing interactions between 5-14 months by transitivity, we have demonstrated that recurring triadic patterns can predict communicative abilities at 36 months.

Gaze and overlap resolution in triadic interactions

This paper presents a corpus study on the role of gaze for overlap resolution in German and Dutch triadic interactions. The focus is on overlap due to a simultaneous start by two speakers with one speaker abandoning her TCU before reaching a point of completion. The gaze behaviours of all three participants in the conversations were recorded with mobile eye tracking glasses. The analysis of the eye tracking data reveals the following gaze patterns: speakers who prevail in the competition for the turn space use gaze aversion away from the competing speaker as both a turn-holding and turn-yielding strategy. Withdrawing speakers, in turn, maintain gaze at the co-speaker or direct their gaze at her during overlap. Third participants often single out the later prevailing speaker and either keep looking at her or shift gaze to her during the overlap phase.

Collision Avoidance With Multiple Walkers: Sequential or Simultaneous Interactions?

Collision avoidance between multiple walkers, such as pedestrians in a crowd, is based on a reciprocal coupling between the walkers with a continuous loop between perception and action. Such interpersonal coordination has previously been studied in the case of dyadic locomotor interactions. However, when walking through a crowd of people, collision avoidance is not restricted to dyadic interactions. We examined how dyadic avoidance (1 vs. 1) compared to triadic avoidance (1 vs. 2). Additionally, we examined how the dynamics of a passable gap between two walkers affected locomotor interactions. To this end, we manipulated the starting formation of two walkers that formed a potentially pass-able gap for the other walker. We analyzed the interactions in terms of the evolution over time of the Minimal Predicted Distance and the Dynamics of the Gap, which both provide information about what action is afforded (i.e., passing in front/behind and the pass-ability of the gap). Results showed that some triadic interactions invited for sequential interactions, resulting in avoidance strategies comparable with dyadic interactions. However, some formations resulted in simultaneous interactions where the dynamics of the pass-ability of the gap revealed that the coordination strategy emerged over time through the bi-directional interactions between all walkers. Future work should address which circumstances invite for simultaneous and which for sequential interactions between multiple walkers. This study contributed toward understanding how collision is avoided between multiple walkers at the level of the local interactions.

Effects of distributed roughness on crossflow instability through generalized resonance mechanisms

Experiments have shown that micron-sized distributed surface roughness can significantly promote transition in a three-dimensional boundary layer dominated by crossflow instability. This sensitive effect has not yet been fully explained physically and mathematically. Past studies focused on surface roughness exciting crossflow vortices and/or changing the local stability characteristics. The present paper seeks possible additional mechanisms by investigating the effects of distributed surface roughness on crossflow instability through resonant interactions with eigenmodes. A key observation is that the perturbation induced by roughness with specific wavenumbers can interact with two eigenmodes (travelling and stationary vortices) through triadic resonance, or interact with one eigenmode (stationary vortices) through Bragg scattering. Unlike the usual triadic resonance of neutral, or nearly neutral, eigenmodes, the present triadic resonance can take place among modes with $O(1)$ growth rates, provided that these are equal; unlike the usual Bragg scattering involving neutral waves, crossflow stationary vortices can also be unstable. For these amplifying waves, the generalized triadic resonance and Bragg scattering are put forward, and the resulting corrections to the growth rates are derived by a multiple-scale method. The analysis is extended to the case where up to four crossflow vortices interact with each other in the presence of suitable roughness components. The numerical results for Falkner–Skan–Cooke boundary layers show that roughness with a small height (a few percent of the local boundary-layer thickness) can change growth rates substantially (by a more-or-less $O(1)$ amount). This sensitive effect is attributed to two facts: (i) the resonant nature of the triadic interaction and Bragg scattering, which makes the correction to the growth rate proportional to the roughness height, and (ii) the wavenumbers of the roughness component required for the resonance are close to those of the neutral stationary crossflow modes, as a result of which a small roughness can generate a large response. Another important effect of roughness is that its presence renders the participating eigenmodes, which are otherwise independent, fully coupled. Our theoretical results suggest that micron-sized distributed surface roughness influences significantly both the amplification and spectral composition of crossflow vortices.

Coexistence of Weak and Strong Wave Turbulence in Incompressible Hall Magnetohydrodynamics

We report a numerical investigation of three dimensional, incompressible, Hall magnetohydrodynamic turbulence with a relatively strong mean magnetic field. Using helicity decomposition and cross-bicoherence analysis, we observe that the resonant three--wave coupling is substantial among ion cyclotron and whistler waves. A detailed study of the degree of non-linearity of these two populations shows that the ion cyclotron component experiences a transition from weak to strong wave turbulence going from large to small scales, while the whistler fluctuations display a weak wave turbulence character for all scales. This non-trivial coexistence of the two regimes with the two populations of waves gives rise to anomalous anisotropy and scaling properties. The weak and strong wave turbulence components can be distinguished rather efficiently using spatio-temporal Fourier transforms. The analysis shows that while resonant triadic interactions survive the highly non-linear bath of ion cyclotron fluctuations at large scales for which the degree of non-linearity is low for both populations of waves, whistler waves tend to be killed by the non-linear cross-coupling at smaller scales where the ion cyclotron component is in the strong wave turbulent regime. Such situation may have far-reaching implications for the physics of magnetized turbulence in many astrophysical and space plasmas where different waves coexist and compete to transfer non-linearly energy across scales.

Scale interactions and spectral energy transfer in turbulent channel flow

Spectral energy transfer in a turbulent channel flow is investigated at Reynolds number $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}\simeq 1700$, based on the wall shear velocity and channel half-height, with a particular emphasis on full visualization of triadic wave interactions involved in turbulent transport. As in previous studies, turbulent production is found to be almost uniform, especially over the logarithmic region, and the related spanwise integral length scale is approximately proportional to the distance from the wall. In the logarithmic and outer regions, the energy balance at the integral length scales is mainly formed between production and nonlinear turbulent transport, the latter of which plays the central role in the energy cascade down to the Kolmogorov microscale. While confirming the classical role of the turbulent transport, the triadic wave interaction analysis unveils two new types of scale interaction processes, highly active in the near-wall and the lower logarithmic regions. First, for relatively small energy-containing motions, part of the energy transfer mechanisms from the integral to the adjacent small length scale in the energy cascade is found to be provided by the interactions between larger energy-containing motions. It is subsequently shown that this is related to involvement of large energy-containing motions in skin-friction generation. Second, there exists a non-negligible amount of energy transfer from small to large integral scales in the process of downward energy transfer to the near-wall region. This type of scale interaction is predominant only for the streamwise and spanwise velocity components, and it plays a central role in the formation of the wall-reaching inactive part of large energy-containing motions. A further analysis reveals that this type of scale interaction leads the wall-reaching inactive part to scale in the inner units, consistent with the recent observation. Finally, it is proposed that turbulence production and pressure–strain spectra support the existence of the self-sustaining process as the main turnover dynamics of all the energy-containing motions.

A mixed-methods feasibility study protocol to assess the communication behaviours within the dental health professional-parent-child triad in a general dental practice setting

BackgroundThe promotion of twice yearly application of fluoride varnish (FVA) to the teeth of pre-school children in the dental practice is one component of Scotland’s child oral health improvement programme (Childsmile). Nevertheless, evidence shows that application rates of FVA are variable and below optimal levels. The reasons are complex, with many contextual factors influencing activity. However, we propose that one possible reason may be related to the communication challenges when interacting with younger children. Therefore, the primary aim of the study is to assess the feasibility of conducting a video observational study in primary dental care. The secondary aim is to assess the communication behaviours of dental professionals and those of the parents to predict child cooperation when receiving FVA using this video observational study design.MethodsApproximately 50 eligible pairs of parents and child patients aged between 2 years and 5 years from general dental practices will be recruited to participate in the study. The consecutive mixed-method study will consist of two parts. The first part will be cross-sectional observations of the dental health professional-child-parent communication during dental appointments conducted in the general dental practice setting, using video recording. The second part will be a post-observation, semi-structured interview with parents and dental health professionals respectively. This will be implemented to explore their views on the acceptability and feasibility of being observed using video cameras during treatment provision.DiscussionThe mixed-methods study will allow for directly observing the communication behaviours in the clinical setting and uncovering the views of participating dental health professionals and parents. Therefore, the study will enable us to [i] explore new ways to study the nature of triadic interaction of dental health professional-child-parent, [ii] identify dental health professionals’ effective communication behaviours that promote child patient and parent’s experience of using preventive dental service and [iii] to assess the feasibility of the study through uncovering the views of dental health professionals and parents.