Power and vulnerability: managing sensitive language in organizational communication

Organizational responsibilities can give people power but also expose them to scrutiny. This tension leads to divergent predictions about the use of potentially sensitive language: power might license it, while exposure might inhibit it. Analysis of peoples' language use in a large corpus of organizational emails using standardized Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) measures shows a systematic difference in the use of words with potentially sensitive (ethnic, religious, or political) connotations. People in positions of relative power are ~3 times less likely to use sensitive words than people more junior to them. The tendency to avoid potentially sensitive language appears to be independent of whether other people are using sensitive language in the same email exchanges, and also independent of whether these words are used in a sensitive context. These results challenge a stereotype about language use and the exercise of power. They suggest that, in at least some circumstances, the exposure and accountability associated with organizational responsibilities are a more significant influence on how people communicate than social power.

Working with roubles and failures in conversation between humans and robots: workshop report

This paper summarizes the structure and findings from the first Workshop on Troubles and Failures in Conversations between Humans and Robots. The workshop was organized to bring together a small, interdisciplinary group of researchers working on miscommunication from two complementary perspectives. One group of technology-oriented researchers was made up of roboticists, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers and dialogue system experts. The second group involved experts from conversation analysis, cognitive science, and linguistics. Uniting both groups of researchers is the belief that communication failures between humans and machines need to be taken seriously and that a systematic analysis of such failures may open fruitful avenues in research beyond current practices to improve such systems, including both speech-centric and multimodal interfaces. This workshop represents a starting point for this endeavour. The aim of the workshop was threefold: Firstly, to establish an interdisciplinary network of researchers that share a common interest in investigating communicative failures with a particular view towards robotic speech interfaces; secondly, to gain a partial overview of the "failure landscape" as experienced by roboticists and HRI researchers; and thirdly, to determine the potential for creating a robotic benchmark scenario for testing future speech interfaces with respect to the identified failures. The present article summarizes both the "failure landscape" surveyed during the workshop as well as the outcomes of the attempt to define a benchmark scenario.

"Who's there?": Depicting identity in interaction

Social robots have limited social competences. This leads us to view them as depictions of social agents rather than actual social agents. However, people also have limited social competences. We argue that all social interaction involves the depiction of social roles and that they originate in, and are defined by, their function in accounting for failures of social competence.

Engaging With Contemporary Dance: What Can Body Movements Tell us About Audience Responses?

In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. Do these movements provide clues to people's level of engagement with a performance? Our basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience-performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live from recorded performance and underpins live performers' moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analyzed using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The meaning of audience movements were analyzed by comparing clips of the audience at moments of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is an especially salient signal of audience engagement.

Editors' Introduction: Miscommunication

Miscommunication is a neglected issue in the cognitive sciences, where it has often been discounted as noise in the system. This special issue argues for the opposite view: Miscommunication is a highly structured and ubiquitous feature of human interaction that systematically underpins people's ability to create and maintain shared languages. Contributions from conversation analysis, computational linguistics, experimental psychology, and formal semantics provide evidence for these claims. They highlight the multi-modal, multi-person character of miscommunication. They demonstrate the incremental, contingent, and locally adaptive nature of the processes people use to detect and deal with miscommunication. They show how these processes can drive language change. In doing so, these contributions introduce an alternative perspective on what successful communication is, new methods for studying it, and application areas where these ideas have a particular impact. We conclude that miscommunication is not noise but essential to the productive flexibility of human communication, especially our ability to respond constructively to new people and new situations.

Miscommunication in Doctor-Patient Communication

The effectiveness of medical treatment depends on the quality of the patient-clinician relationship. It has been proposed that this depends on the extent to which the patient and clinician build a shared understanding of illness and treatment. Here, we use the tools of conversation analysis (CA) to explore this idea in the context of psychiatric consultations. The CA "repair" framework provides an analysis of the processes people use to deal with problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. These problems are especially critical in the treatment of psychosis where patients and health care professionals need to communicate about the disputed meaning of hallucinations and delusion. Patients do not feel understood, they are frequently non-adherent with treatment, and many have poor outcomes. We present an overview of two studies focusing on the role of repair as a mechanism for producing and clarifying meaning in psychiatrist-patient communication and its association with treatment outcomes. The first study shows patient clarification or repair of psychiatrists' talk is associated with better patient adherence to treatment. The second study shows that training which emphasizes the importance of building an understanding of patients' psychotic experiences increases psychiatrists' self-repair. We propose that psychiatrists are working harder to make their talk understandable and acceptable to the patient by taking the patient's perspective into account. We conclude that these findings provide evidence that repair is an important mechanism for building shared understanding in doctor-patient communication and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. The conversation analytic account of repair is currently the most sophisticated empirical model for analyzing how people construct shared meaning and understanding. Repair appears to reflect greater commitment to and engagement in communication and improve both the quality and outcomes of communication. Reducing potential miscommunication between psychiatrists and their patients with psychosis is a low-cost means of enhancing treatment from both the psychiatrist and patient perspective. Given that misunderstanding and miscommunication are particularly problematic in psychosis, this is critical for improving the longer term outcomes of treatment for these patients who often have poor relationships with psychiatrists and health care services more widely.

Running Repairs: Coordinating Meaning in Dialogue

People give feedback in conversation: both positive signals of understanding, such as nods, and negative signals of misunderstanding, such as frowns. How do signals of understanding and misunderstanding affect the coordination of language use in conversation? Using a chat tool and a maze-based reference task, we test two experimental manipulations that selectively interfere with feedback in live conversation: (a) "Attenuation" that replaces positive signals of understanding such as "right" or "okay" with weaker, more provisional signals such as "errr" or "umm" and (2) "Amplification" that replaces relatively specific signals of misunderstanding from clarification requests such as "on the left?" with generic signals of trouble such as "huh?" or "eh?". The results show that Amplification promotes rapid convergence on more systematic, abstract ways of describing maze locations while Attenuation has no significant effect. We interpret this as evidence that "running repairs"-the processes of dealing with misunderstandings on the fly-are key drivers of semantic coordination in dialogue. This suggests a new direction for experimental work on conversation and a productive way to connect the empirical accounts of Conversation Analysis with the representational and processing concerns of Formal Semantics and Psycholinguistics.

Robot Comedy Lab: experimenting with the social dynamics of live performance

The success of live comedy depends on a performer's ability to “work” an audience. Ethnographic studies suggest that this involves the co-ordinated use of subtle social signals such as body orientation, gesture, gaze by both performers and audience members. Robots provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of these signals experimentally. Using a life-size humanoid robot, programmed to perform a stand-up comedy routine, we manipulated the robot's patterns of gesture and gaze and examined their effects on the real-time responses of a live audience. The strength and type of responses were captured using SHORE™computer vision analytics. The results highlight the complex, reciprocal social dynamics of performer and audience behavior. People respond more positively when the robot looks at them, negatively when it looks away and performative gestures also contribute to different patterns of audience response. This demonstrates how the responses of individual audience members depend on the specific interaction they're having with the performer. This work provides insights into how to design more effective, more socially engaging forms of robot interaction that can be used in a variety of service contexts.

Divergence in dialogue

One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker) more likely? It has been claimed that syntactic repetition caused by structural priming is ubiquitous in conversation. However, previous work has not tested for general syntactic repetition effects in ordinary conversation independently of lexical repetition. Here we analyse patterns of syntactic repetition in two large corpora of unscripted everyday conversations. Our results show that when lexical repetition is taken into account there is no general tendency for people to repeat their own syntactic constructions. More importantly, people repeat each other's syntactic constructions less than would be expected by chance; i.e., people systematically diverge from one another in their use of syntactic constructions. We conclude that in ordinary conversation the structural priming effects described in the literature are overwhelmed by the need to actively engage with our conversational partners and respond productively to what they say.

Participation during first social encounters in schizophrenia

Background

Patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia are socially excluded. The aim of this study was to investigate how patients participate in first encounters with unfamiliar healthy participants, who are unaware of their diagnosis.

Methods

Patterns of participation were investigated during interactions involving three-people. Three conversation roles were analysed: (i) speaker, (ii) primary recipient- focus of the speaker’s attention and (iii) secondary recipient- unaddressed individual. Twenty patient interactions (1 patient, 2 healthy controls) and 20 control interactions (3 healthy participants) were recorded and motion captured in 3D. The participation of patients and their partners, in each conversation role, was compared with controls at the start, middle and end of the interaction. The relationship between patients’ participation, their symptoms and the rapport others experienced with them was also explored.

Results

At the start of the interaction patients spoke less (ß = −.639, p = .02) and spent more time as secondary recipient (ß = .349, p = .02). Patients’ participation at the middle and end of the interaction did not differ from controls. Patients’ partners experienced poorer rapport with patients who spent more time as a primary recipient at the start of the interaction (Rho(11) = −.755, p<.01). Patients’ participation was not associated with symptoms.

Conclusion

Despite their increased participation over time, patients’ initial participation appears to be associated with others’ experience of rapport with them. Thus, the opening moments of patients’ first encounters appear to be interpersonally significant. Further investigation of patient and others’ behaviour during these critical moments is warranted in order to understand, and possibly develop interventions to address, the difficulties schizophrenia patients experience here.

Shared understanding in psychiatrist-patient communication: association with treatment adherence in schizophrenia

OBJECTIVE

Effective doctor-patient communication, including a shared understanding, is associated with treatment adherence across medicine. However, communication is affected by a diagnosis of schizophrenia and reaching a shared understanding can be challenging. During conversation, people detect and deal with possible misunderstanding using a conversational process called repair. This study tested the hypothesis that more frequent repair in psychiatrist-patient communication is associated with better treatment adherence in schizophrenia.

METHODS

Routine psychiatric consultations involving patients with (DSM-IV) schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were audio-visually recorded. Consultations were coded for repair and patients' symptoms and insight assessed. Adherence was assessed six months later. A principal components analysis reduced the repair data for further analysis. Random effects models examined the association between repair and adherence, adjusting for symptoms, consultation length and the amount patients spoke.

RESULTS

138 consultations were recorded, 118 were followed up. Patients requesting clarification of the psychiatrist's talk and the clarification provided by the psychiatrist was associated with adherence six months later (OR 5.82, 95% CI 1.31-25.82, p=0.02).

CONCLUSION

The quality of doctor-patient communication also appears to influence adherence in schizophrenia.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Future research should investigate how patient clarification can be encouraged among patients and facilitated by psychiatrists' communication.

Is nonverbal communication disrupted in interactions involving patients with schizophrenia?

BACKGROUND

Nonverbal communication is a critical feature of successful social interaction and interpersonal rapport. Social exclusion is a feature of schizophrenia. This experimental study investigated if the undisclosed presence of a patient with schizophrenia in interaction changes nonverbal communication (ie, speaker gesture and listener nodding).

METHOD

3D motion-capture techniques recorded 20 patient (1 patient, 2 healthy participants) and 20 control (3 healthy participants) interactions. Participants rated their experience of rapport with each interacting partner. Patients' symptoms, social cognition, and executive functioning were assessed. Four hypotheses were tested: (1) Compared to controls, patients display less speaking gestures and listener nods. (2) Patients' increased symptom severity and poorer social cognition are associated with patients' reduced gesture and nods. (3) Patients' partners compensate for patients' reduced nonverbal behavior by gesturing more when speaking and nodding more when listening. (4) Patients' reduced nonverbal behavior, increased symptom severity, and poorer social cognition are associated with others experiencing poorer rapport with the patient.

RESULTS

Patients gestured less when speaking. Patients with more negative symptoms nodded less as listeners, while their partners appeared to compensate by gesturing more as speakers. Patients with more negative symptoms also gestured more when speaking, which, alongside increased negative symptoms and poorer social cognition, was associated with others experiencing poorer patient rapport.

CONCLUSIONS

Patients' symptoms are associated with the nonverbal behavior of patients and their partners. Patients' increased negative symptoms and gesture use are associated with poorer interpersonal rapport. This study provides specific evidence about how negative symptoms impact patients' social interactions.

Graphical language games: interactional constraints on representational form

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to communicate can also affect the structure and organization of symbol systems independently of cognitive change. We propose that mutual-modifiability-opportunities for people to edit or manipulate each other's contributions-is a key constraint on the emergence of complex symbol systems. We discuss the implications for models of language development and the origins of compositionality.

Establishing mutual understanding in interaction: an analysis of conversational repair in psychiatric consultations

The therapeutic relationship is the greatest predictor of treatment outcome, yet its relationship to communication is largely unevaluated. This study explored how psychiatrists and people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia establish mutual understanding in naturalistic communication, and associations with the therapeutic relationship, patient satisfaction and symptoms. In conversation analysis, the concept of repair focuses on how participants in interaction create mutual understanding and address misunderstanding. A standardized protocol measuring the frequency of repair was applied to 15 outpatient consultations. Correlations between repair and the therapeutic relationship, patients' experience of the consultation and symptoms were explored. Patients made most effort to make their contribution understandable, whereas psychiatrists made most effort to repair misunderstandings. The more positively psychiatrists rated the relationship, the more effort they made to understand patients. Although psychiatrists' efforts were not associated with patients' overall view of the relationship, patients felt better emotionally, despite, feeling less understood. Psychiatrists used fewer repairs when patients were more symptomatic. Both parties prioritized understanding similar topics but psychiatrists focused more on medication and patients on voices. Quantifying repair offers a new way of analyzing how mutual understanding is established in interaction, and links communication processes with treatment outcomes.