Andreas Altorfer

Measurement and meaning of head movements in everyday face-to-face communicative interaction.

Methodological approaches in which data on nonverbal behavior are collected usually involve interpretative methods in which raters must identify a set of defined categories of behavior. However, present knowledge about the qualitative aspects of head movement behavior calls for recording detailed transcriptions of behavior. These records are a prerequisite for investigating the function and meaning of head movement patterns. A method for directly collecting data on head movement behavior is introduced. Using small ultrasonic transducers, which are attached to various parts of an index person’s body (head and shoulders), a microcomputer determines receiver-transducer distances. Three-dimensional positions are calculated by triangulation. These data are used for further calculations concerning the angular orientation of the head and the direction, size, and speed of head movements (in rotational, lateral, and sagittal dimensions). Further analyses determine relevant changes in movements, identify segments of movements, and classify the quantifications of movement patterns. The measured patterns of nonverbal behavior can be accurately related to features of verbal communication and other time-related variables (e.g., psychophysiological measures). To estimate the possible meanings of behavioral patterns, a heuristic is proposed that includes the situational context as the basis of interpretation.

Professional musicians listen differently to music.

INTRODUCTION Experience-based adaptation of emotional responses is an important faculty for cognitive and emotional functioning. Professional musicians represent an ideal model in which to elicit experience-driven changes in the emotional processing domain. The changes of the central representation of emotional arousal due to musical expertise are still largely unknown. The aim of the present study was to investigate the electroencephalogram (EEG) correlates of experience-driven changes in the domain of emotional arousal. Therefore, the differences in perceived (subjective arousal via ratings) and physiologically measured (EEG) arousal between amateur and professional musicians were examined. PROCEDURE A total of 15 professional and 19 amateur musicians listened to the first movement of Ludwig van Beethovens 5th symphony (duration=∼7.4min), during which a continuous 76-channel EEG was recorded. In a second session, the participants evaluated their emotional arousal during listening. In a tonic analysis, we examined the average EEG data over the time course of the music piece. For a phasic analysis, a fast Fourier transform was performed and covariance maps of spectral power were computed in association with the subjective arousal ratings. RESULTS The subjective arousal ratings of the professional musicians were more consistent than those of the amateur musicians. In the tonic EEG analysis, a mid-frontal theta activity was observed in the professionals. In the phasic EEG, the professionals exhibited an increase of posterior alpha, central delta, and beta rhythm during high arousal. DISCUSSION Professionals exhibited different and/or more intense patterns of emotional activation when they listened to the music. The results of the present study underscore the impact of music experience on emotional reactions.

The study of emotional processes in communication: I. Measuring emotionalization in everyday face-to-face communicative interaction.

The drawbacks of traditional research into emotional processes have led us to develop a set of methodologies for investigating them in everyday face-to-face communication. The conceptual basis of these procedures is a model of the eliciting conditions of emotional processes as well as a conceptualization of the emotional processes themselves. On the basis of the assumption of conversation as a rule-governed process, one can describe its default temporal, formal, and functional features, for which we use the MAS EDIT and SEQ programs, and the minimal model of communicative exchange, respectively. Violations of these default rules can be identified as unexpected/temporally unpredictable events eliciting emotionalization. The nature of emotionalization is determined by the psychological principle of “standard and deviation.” Its investigation under natural conditions requires the following: A noninvasive method of data acquisition (including procedures for rejecting faulty or missing values), measurement (high-resolution recording of physiological, psychomotor, and vocal variables), and the (nonstatistical) construction of an inventory or “relevant effects” (contrastive and template analysis). Finally, we depict three routes of investigating time courses of activation changes as dependent and independent variables and as a target of modification and reflection.

Eye-Head Coordination Abnormalities in Schizophrenia

Background Eye-movement abnormalities in schizophrenia are a well-established phenomenon that has been observed in many studies. In such studies, visual targets are usually presented in the center of the visual field, and the subjects head remains fixed. However, in every-day life, targets may also appear in the periphery. This study is among the first to investigate eye and head movements in schizophrenia by presenting targets in the periphery of the visual field. Methodology/Principal Findings Two different visual recognition tasks, color recognition and Landolt orientation tasks, were presented at the periphery (at a visual angle of 55° from the center of the field of view). Each subject viewed 96 trials, and all eye and head movements were simultaneously recorded using video-based oculography and magnetic motion tracking of the head. Data from 14 patients with schizophrenia and 14 controls were considered. The patients had similar saccadic latencies in both tasks, whereas controls had shorter saccadic latencies in the Landolt task. Patients performed more head movements, and had increased eye-head offsets during combined eye-head shifts than controls. Conclusions/Significance Patients with schizophrenia may not be able to adapt to the two different tasks to the same extent as controls, as seen by the formers task-specific saccadic latency pattern. This can be interpreted as a specific oculomotoric attentional dysfunction and may support the hypothesis that schizophrenia patients have difficulties determining the relevance of stimuli. Patients may also show an uneconomic over-performance of head-movements, which is possibly caused by alterations in frontal executive function that impair the inhibition of head shifts. In addition, a model was created explaining 93% of the variance of the response times as a function of eye and head amplitude, which was only observed in the controls, indicating abnormal eye-head coordination in patients with schizophrenia.

The study of emotional processes in communication: II. Peripheral blood flow as an indicator of emotionalization

Traditional methods of analyzing human peripheral blood flow (PBF) do not account for its continuous nature or small-scale variation. Sequel transformation is presented as a new methodology for measuring these variations. This analysis generates a richer record of aspects of activation of the autonomous nervous system than traditional interbeat-interval (IBI) measurement. Presumably, in addition to heartbeat (i.e., IBI), other information can be extracted that is consistent with the influence of several physiological and psychological factors. This kind of variation is reflected in the PBF signal. After determining and extracting relevant events from vascular volume data generated by sequel transformation, we demonstrate the use of template analysis to analyze patterns of events as time courses of activation. All procedures are included in the computer program VASC Analyzer.

The effect of stressful and protective communicative events on the autonomic response in schizophrenic and healthy persons

Comparative single-case analyses of specific communicative features and their physiological concomitants in two dialogues between (1) a healthy male partner (A) and a healthy female index person (H), and (2) partner A and a male schizophrenic index person (S) show similarities and differences between persons H and S. Partner As communicative reactions to the index persons stress reaction are dassified as protectors, stressors or mixed; utterances by the index persons following their stress reaction are classified as self-modificatory. A X 2 analysis reveal no significant association between the category of utterance and the index persons physiological response in either conversation. However, in index persons H and S there are clear tendencies: increases or non-decreases in activation accompany partner As mixed or ambiguous reactions, clear protectors and stressors are accompanied by a decrease of activation. The main difference between index persons H and S lies in their frequency of self-modificatory utterances; despite being accompanied by activation decrease in both index persons H and S, self-modificatory reactions are comparably rare in index person S. The projection of these results onto a model of instrumental learning allows formulation of tentative hypotheses to explain index person Ss reluctance to adopt a self-protective behaviour.

Impaired top-down modulation of saccadic latencies in patients with schizophrenia but not in first-degree relatives.

Impaired eye movements have a long history in schizophrenia research and meet the criteria of a reliable biomarker. However, the effects of cognitive load and task difficulty on saccadic latencies (SL) are less understood. Recent studies showed that SL are strongly task dependent: SL are decreased in tasks with higher cognitive demand, and increased in tasks with lower cognitive demand. The present study investigates SL modulation in patients with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives. A group of 13 patients suffering from ICD-10 schizophrenia, 10 first-degree relatives, and 24 control subjects performed two different types of visual tasks: a color task and a Landolt ring orientation task. We used video-based oculography to measure SL. We found that patients exhibited a similar unspecific SL pattern in the two different tasks, whereas controls and relatives exhibited 20–26% shorter average latencies in the orientation task (higher cognitive demand) compared to the color task (lower cognitive demand). Also, classification performance using support vector machines suggests that relatives should be assigned to the healthy controls and not to the patient group. Therefore, visual processing of different content does not modulate SL in patients with schizophrenia, but modulates SL in the relatives and healthy controls. The results reflect a specific oculomotor attentional dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia that is a potential state marker, possibly caused by impaired top-down disinhibition of the superior colliculus by frontal/prefrontal areas such as the frontal eye fields.

Psychophysiological Evaluation of Verbal Interaction during Conversations between Psychotic Patients and their Relatives

In the context of a vulnerability stress model of schizophrenic episodes (e.g., Zubin and Spring, 1977), behavioral events in communication such as negative attitudes in high Expressed Emotion (EE, Leff and Vaughn, 1985), negative Affective Style (AS, Doane et al., 1981) and high Communication Deviance (CD, Doane et al., 1982; Interactional Measure of CD, Velligan et al., 1990) are conceived of as specific stressors which interfere with the patients’ ability to adapt to life outside the confines of the hospital. Numerous studies e.g. from the “Family Research Group” at University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have demonstrated this important relation between specific events during family communication and increased risk of relapse (see reviews by Goldstein, 1987; 1988; 1991).