Expansive and contractive communication scope: A construal level perspective on the relationship between interpersonal distance and communicative abstraction

A new approach for social group detection based on spatio-temporal interpersonal distance measurement

Visual-based social group detection aims to cluster pedestrians in crowd scenes according to social interactions and spatio-temporal position relations by using surveillance video data. It is a basic technique for crowd behaviour analysis and group-based activity understanding. According to the theory of proxemics study, the interpersonal relationship between individuals determines the scope of their self-space, while the spatial distance can reflect the closeness degree of their interpersonal relationship. In this paper, we proposed a new unsupervised approach to address the issues of interaction recognition and social group detection in public spaces, which remits the need to intensely label time-consuming training data. First, based on pedestrians' spatio-temporal trajectories, the interpersonal distances among individuals were measured from static and dynamic perspectives. Combined with proxemics' theory, a social interaction recognition scheme was designed to judge whether there is a social interaction between pedestrians. On this basis, the pedestrians are clustered to identify if they form a social group. Extensive experiments on our pedestrian dataset “SCU-VSD-Social” annotated with multi-group labels demonstrated that the proposed method has outstanding performance in both accuracy and complexity.

Undermining Your Case to Enhance Your Impact: A Framework for Understanding the Effects of Acts of Receptiveness in Persuasion

Past research has uncovered actions that would seem to undermine but in fact frequently enhance persuasion. For example, expressing doubt about one's view or presenting arguments against it would seem to weaken one's case, but can sometimes promote it. We propose a framework for understanding these findings. We posit that these actions constitute acts of receptiveness-behaviors that signal openness to new information and opposing viewpoints. We review four classes of acts of receptiveness: conveying uncertainty, acknowledging mistakes, highlighting drawbacks, and asking questions. We identify conditions under which and mechanisms through which these actions boost persuasion. Acts of receptiveness appear to be more persuasive when they come from expert or high-status sources, rather than non-expert or low-status sources, and to operate through two primary mechanisms: increased involvement and enhanced source perceptions. Following a review of this work, we delineate potentially novel acts of receptiveness and outline directions for future research.

An objective evaluation of the beholder's response to abstract and figurative art based on construal level theory

Does abstract art evoke a different cognitive state than figurative art? To address this question empirically, we bridged art theory and cognitive research and designed an experiment leveraging construal level theory (CLT). CLT is based on experimental data showing that psychologically distant events (i.e., occurring farther away in space or time) are represented more abstractly than closer events. We measured construal level elicited by abstract vs. representational art and asked subjects to assign abstract/representational paintings by the same artist to a situation that was temporally/spatially near or distant. Across three experiments, we found that abstract paintings were assigned to the distant situation significantly more often than representational paintings, indicating that abstract art was evocative of greater psychological distance. Our data demonstrate that different levels of artistic abstraction evoke different levels of mental abstraction and suggest that CLT provides an empirical approach to the analysis of cognitive states evoked by different levels of artistic abstraction.