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

Two Meanings of “Social Skills”: Proposing an Integrative Social Skills Framework

Business leaders and HR professionals have long recognized the importance of social skills for effective organizational functioning, particularly in roles requiring high levels of interpersonal interaction. Accordingly, organizational science scholars have produced a large amount of research that can be organized under the broad heading of social skills. Yet, three key issues in the literature are hampering progress: (1) the lack of a well-accepted articulation of the social skills phenomenon, what it is and what it is not; (2) conceptual redundancy and conflation among the set of social skills-related concepts (e.g., individual differences, skills, behavior, evaluations, etc.), and (3) full consideration of the importance of social behavior in understanding social skills. We propose solutions for understanding social skills that begin to resolve these issues and help strengthen future empirical research. Specifically, we present two distinct, but related, conceptualizations of social skills: social skills enactment and social skills reputation. We then offer a theoretically grounded perspective, the Social Skills Framework, which incorporates these conceptualizations of social skills, provides a structure into which existing social skills concepts can be integrated and evaluated for conceptual clarity, and centers social behavior. After describing the framework, we offer a research agenda that focuses on refining the framework and investigating key issues related to the two conceptualizations of social skills.

Aesthetic preferences for causality in biological movements arise from visual processes

"People watching" is a ubiquitous component of human activities. An important aspect of such activities is the aesthetic experience that arises naturally from seeing how elegant people move their bodies in performing different actions. What makes some body movements look better than others? We examine how the human visual system gives rise to aesthetic experience from observing actions, using "creatures" generated by spatially scrambling locations of a point-light walker's joints. Observers rated how aesthetically pleasing and lifelike creatures were when the trajectories of joints were generated either from an upright walker (thus exhibiting gravitational acceleration) or an inverted walker (thus defying gravity), and were either congruent to the direction of global body displacements or incongruent (as in the moonwalk). Observers gave both higher aesthetic and animacy ratings for creatures with upright compared to inverted trajectories, and congruent compared to incongruent movements. Moreover, after controlling for animacy, aesthetic preferences for causally plausible movements (those in accord with gravity and body displacement) persisted. This systematicity in aesthetic impressions, even in the absence of explicit recognition of the moving agents, suggests an important role of automatic perceptual mechanisms in determining aesthetic experiences.

Guidelines for Robot-to-Human Handshake From the Movement Nuances in Human-to-Human Handshake

The handshake is the most acceptable gesture of greeting in many cultures throughout many centuries. To date, robotic arms are not capable of fully replicating this typical human gesture. Using multiple sensors that detect contact forces and displacements, we characterized the movements that occured during handshakes. A typical human-to-human handshake took around 3.63 s (SD = 0.45 s) to perform. It can be divided into three phases: reaching (M = 0.92 s, SD = 0.45 s), contact (M = 1.96 s, SD = 0.46 s), and return (M = 0.75 s, SD = 0.12 s). The handshake was further investigated to understand its subtle movements. Using a multiphase jerk minimization model, a smooth human-to-human handshake can be modelled with fifth or fourth degree polynomials at the reaching and return phases, and a sinusoidal function with exponential decay at the contact phase. We show that the contact phase (1.96 s) can be further divided according to the following subphases: preshake (0.06 s), main shake (1.31 s), postshake (0.06 s), and a period of no movement (0.52 s) just before both hands are retracted. We compared these to the existing handshake models that were proposed for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). From our findings in human-to-human handshakes, we proposed guidelines for a more natural handshake movement between humanoid robots and their human partners.