The influence of emotional body posture on adults' and 8-year-olds' perception facial expressions

The present set of experiments was designed to investigate the development of children's sensitivity of facial expressions observed within emotional contexts. Past research investigating both adults' and children's perception of facial expressions has been limited primarily to the presentation of isolated faces. During daily social interactions, however, facial expressions are encountered within contexts conveying emotions (e.g., background scenes, body postures, gestures). Recently, research has shown that adults' perception of facial expressions is influenced by these contexts. When emotional faces are shown in incongruent contexts (e.g., when an angry face is presented in a context depicting fear) adults' accuracy decreases and their reaction times increase (e.g., Meeren et a1. 2005). To examine the influence of emotional body postures on children's perception of facial expressions, in each of the experiments in the current study adults and 8-year-old children made two-alternative forced choice decisions about facial expressions presented in congruent (e.g., a face displayed sadness on a body displaying sadness) and incongruent (e.g., a face displaying fear on a body displaying sadness) contexts. Consistent with previous studies, a congruency effect (better performance on congruent than incongruent trials) was found for both adults and 8-year-olds when the emotions displayed by the face and body were similar to each other (e.g., fear and sad, Experiment l a ) ; the influence of context was greater for 8-year-olds than adults for these similar expressions. To further investigate why the congruency effect was larger for children than adults in Experiment 1 a, Experiment 1 b was conducted to examine if increased task difficulty would increase the magnitude of adults' congruency effects. Adults were presented with subtle facial and despite successfully increasing task difficulty the magnitude of the. congruency effect did not increase suggesting that the difference between children's and adults' congruency effects in Experiment l a cannot be explained by 8-year-olds finding the task difficult. In contrast, congruency effects were not found when the expressions displayed by the face and body were dissimilar (e.g., sad and happy, see Experiment 2). The results of the current set of studies are examined with respect to the Dimensional theory and the Emotional Seed model and the developmental timeline of children's sensitivity to facial expressions. A secondary aim of the series of studies was to examine one possible mechanism underlying congruency effe cts-holistic processing. To examine the influence of holistic processing, participants completed both aligned trials and misaligned trials in which the faces were detached from the body (designed to disrupt holistic processing). Based on the principles of holistic face processing we predicted that participants would benefit from misalignment of the face and body stimuli on incongruent trials but not on congruent trials. Collectively, our results provide some evidence that both adults and children may process emotional faces and bodies holistically. Consistent with the pattern of results for congruency effects, the magnitude of the effect of misalignment varied with the similarity between emotions. Future research is required to further investigate whether or not facial expressions and emotions conveyed by the body are perceived holistically.

Perceptions of some teachers about the similarities and/or differences in teaching online versus in a classroom environment /

The introduction of computer and communications technology, and particularly the internet, into education has opened up some new possibilities for teaching and learning. Courses designed and delivered in an online environment offer the possibility of highly interactive and individually focussed teaching and learning experiences. However, online courses also present new challenges for both teachers and students. A qualitative study was conducted to explore teachers' perceptions about the similarities and differences in teaching in the online and face-to-face (F2F) environments. Focus group discussions were held with 5 teachers; 2 teachers were interviewed in depth. The participants, 3 female and 2 male, were full-time teachers from a large College of Applied Arts & Technology in southern Ontario. Each of them had over 10 years of F2F teaching experience and each had been involved in the development and teaching of at least one online course. i - -; The study focussed on how teaching in the online environment compares with teaching in the F2F environment, what roles teachers and students adopt in each setting, what learning communities mean online and F2F and how they are developed, and how institutional policies, procedures, and infrastructure affect teaching and learning F2F and online. This study was emic in nature, that is the teachers' words determine the themes identified throughout the study. The factors identified as affecting teaching in an online environment included teacher issues such as course design, motivation to teach online, teaching style, role, characteristics or skills, and strategies. Student issues as perceived by the teachers included learning styles, role, and characteristics or skills. As well, technology issues such as a reliable infrastructure, clear role and responsibilities for maintaining the infrastructure, support, and multimedia capability affected teaching online. Finally, administrative policies and procedures, including teacher selection and training, registration and scheduling procedures, intellectual property and workload policies, and the development and communication of a comprehensive strategic plan were found to impact on teaching online. The teachers shared some of the benefits they perceived about teaching online as well as some of the challenges they had faced and challenges they perceived students had faced online. Overall, the teachers feh that there were more similarities than differences in teaching between the two environments, with the main differences being the change from F2F verbal interactions involving body language to online written interactions without body language cues, and the fundamental reliance on technology in the online environment. These findings support previous research in online teaching and learning, and add teachers' perspectives on the factors that stay the same and the factors that change when moving from a F2F environment to an online environment.

Electrophysiological and behavioural correlates of facial identity and expression perception deficits following a closed head injury /

A large variety of social signals, such as facial expression and body language, are conveyed in everyday interactions and an accurate perception and interpretation of these social cues is necessary in order for reciprocal social interactions to take place successfully and efficiently. The present study was conducted to determine whether impairments in social functioning that are commonly observed following a closed head injury, could at least be partially attributable to disruption in the ability to appreciate social cues. More specifically, an attempt was made to determine whether face processing deficits following a closed head injury (CHI) coincide with changes in electrophysiological responsivity to the presentation of facial stimuli. A number of event-related potentials (ERPs) that have been linked specifically to various aspects of visual processing were examined. These included the N170, an index of structural encoding ability, the N400, an index of the ability to detect differences in serially presented stimuli, and the Late Positivity (LP), an index of the sensitivity to affective content in visually-presented stimuli. Electrophysiological responses were recorded while participants with and without a closed head injury were presented with pairs of faces delivered in a rapid sequence and asked to compare them on the basis of whether they matched with respect to identity or emotion. Other behavioural measures of identity and emotion recognition were also employed, along with a small battery of standard neuropsychological tests used to determine general levels of cognitive impairment. Participants in the CHI group were impaired in a number of cognitive domains that are commonly affected following a brain injury. These impairments included reduced efficiency in various aspects of encoding verbal information into memory, general slower rate of information processing, decreased sensitivity to smell, and greater difficulty in the regulation of emotion and a limited awareness of this impairment. Impairments in face and emotion processing were clearly evident in the CHI group. However, despite these impairments in face processing, there were no significant differences between groups in the electrophysiological components examined. The only exception was a trend indicating delayed N170 peak latencies in the CHI group (p = .09), which may reflect inefficient structural encoding processes. In addition, group differences were noted in the region of the N100, thought to reflect very early selective attention. It is possible, then, that facial expression and identity processing deficits following CHI are secondary to (or exacerbated by) an underlying disruption of very early attentional processes. Alternately the difficulty may arise in the later cognitive stages involved in the interpretation of the relevant visual information. However, the present data do not allow these alternatives to be distinguished. Nonetheless, it was clearly evident that individuals with CHI are more likely than controls to make face processing errors, particularly for the more difficult to discriminate negative emotions. Those working with individuals who have sustained a head injury should be alerted to this potential source of social monitoring difficulties which is often observed as part of the sequelae following a CHI.

The convergence of psychopathy, self-rated vulnerability, and other-rated vulnerability

Previous research has found that victims of crime tend to exhibit asynchronous movement (e.g. Grayson & Stein, 1981), and the fact that victims display different body language suggests that they may be sending inadvertent signals to their own vulnerability (e.g. Murzynski & Degelman, 1996). Body language has also be en linked with s e l f identification as a victim (Wheeler et aI., 2009), and self-identification has be en found to act as a proxy for more severe victimization (Baumer, 2002) and greater fear of crime (Greenberg & Beach, 2004). The first prediction in the present study, then, was that self-perceived vulnerability would be correlated with body language, while number of previous victimizations mayor may not show the same relationship. Findings from the present study indicate that self-perceived vulnerability exhibits a positive correlation with the body language cues that approaches significance r (10) = .45,p =.07, one-tailed. Different types of victimization, however, were not significantly correlated with these cues. A second goal of the study was to examine the relationship between psychopathic traits and accuracy in judgments of vulnerability. Seventy male participants rated the vulnerability of 12 female targets filmed walking down a hallway who had provided selfratings of vulnerability. Individuals scoring higher on Factor 2 and total psychopathy were significantly less discrepant from target self-rat~ngs of vulnerability, r (64) = - .39,p < .001; r (64) = - .29,p >.01, respectively. The final purpose of this study was to determine which body language cues were mos t salient to raters when making judgments of vulnerability. Participants rated the apparent vulnerability of a target in 7 video clips portraying each body language cue in isolation and a natural walk. Results of repeated measures analyses indicate that the videos rated as most vulnerable to victimization were those displaying low energy and l a ck of synchrony, followed by wide stride, short stride, and stiffknees, while the video displaying ne ck stiffness did not receive significantly different ratings from the mode l ' s natural walk. Replication with a larger sample size is necessary to increase confidence in findings and implications.