Billy Lee

Empathy, androids and ‘authentic experience’

Androids of the future will require the capacity for bodily experience, in addition to specific cognitive proficiencies. Interpersonal experiences, such as intimacy, empathy and felicity, provide the crucial sense of solidarity and connection that sustains relationships between humans. This study explores relationships between perceptual experience and perceptual competency and discusses implications for the design of people-oriented androids. Findings from an exploratory study of interpersonal perception indicate there is no relationship between objective performance and subjective experience based on thin slices of actor behaviour. However, correlations between experiences indicate that empathy and intimacy are linked and distinct from felicity. Analysis of gender effects indicates gender-distributed roles for empathy and intimacy. These imply design specifications for future androids that may be required to form relationships with people. Some conjectures on the phenomenology of the empathic and the moral android of the future are explored.

Interpersonal perception in Japanese and British observers

We compared performance of Japanese and British observers in deciphering images depicting Japanese interpersonal relationships. 201 Japanese and 215 British subjects were assessed by means of a test consisting of 31 photograph problems accompanied by two or three alternative solutions one of which was correct. Japanese subjects outperformed British subjects on the test overall (z = 3.981, p < 0.001). A two-factor ANOVA (culture x gender) was performed for each of the problems. A cultural effect was found in 17 problems. Surprisingly, British subjects outperformed Japanese subjects in 7 of these problems. There was a gender effect in 4 problems and a culture x gender interaction in 6 problems. The results indicate that cultural experience facilitates nonverbal appraisal of interpersonal relationships, but it may sometimes cause specific errors. Differences in the perceptual cues used suggest that British subjects had difficulty reading Japanese facial expressions.

Developing therapeutic listening

We present an experience-near account of the development of therapeutic listening in first year counselling students. A phenomenological approach was employed to articulate the trainees lived experiences of their learning. Six students who had just completed a one-year postgraduate certificate in counselling skills were interviewed and the transcripts analysed using the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Developing therapeutic reflexivity emerged as a strong recurrent theme. Four subthemes captured the characteristics of this reflexivity: (1) Learning to hear the self; (2) Listening as relationship; (3) Revelation of otherness; and (4) Thereness. These findings foreground the development of therapeutic openness, bracketing and reflexivity in learning to listen therapeutically, and help to make sense of the complex transition experienced by students during their first year of counselling education.

Aftereffects and the representation of stereoscopic surfaces

The structure of human disparity representation is examined through (i) adaptation experiments and (ii) model simulations of the data. Section 3 presents results of adaptation experiments designed to illuminate the structure of human disparity representation. Section 4 presents model simulations of three different disparity representation schemes. In the experiments, participants adapted to a 0.133 cycle deg−1 sinusoidally corrugated surface with 10 min of arc peak-to-trough disparity. A flat test surface was briefly presented, in which the aftereffect surface was perceived. Adapt and test surfaces were placed on disparity pedestals and thus presented in front of or behind the plane of fixation. The adapt surface could be offset from the fixation plane by ±8 to 24 min of arc. The test surface could be offset from the fixation plane by ±8 to 48 min of arc. The depth aftereffect was measured in different disparity planes by a nulling method and ‘topping-up’ procedure. Aftereffect tuning functions were obtained whose bandwidths, magnitudes, and tuning depended on the disparity planes of both the adapt and test surfaces. These parameters were used to constrain the models tested in section 4. On the basis of the two studies, it is argued that the human stereoscopic system encodes spatial changes of disparity using channels localised within disparity planes. A localised disparity-gradient model of the human representation of disparity is proposed.

Could next generation androids get emotionally close? `Relational closeness' from human dyadic interactions

Studies of human-human interactions indicate that the relational dimensions encoded nonverbally between people include intimacy/involvement, status/control, and emotional valence. In assessing nonverbal behavior a key issue concerns the correct level or unit of behavior to code. Low-level codes, such as head nods, eyebrow flashes, and smiles, are concrete enough to be specified objectively. However, a coding scheme based on them may not match the phenomenology of lay peoples experiences of natural interactions. A high-level code, such as values intimacy, reliably distinguishes secure and insecure attachment styles but is underspecified at the concrete, bodily level. This paper considers what level of behavior codes may realistically be mapped onto next generation androids. New mid-level behavior codes are offered based on an experimental study of relational closeness in human dyadic interactions. These provide act specifications for a possible benchmark of relational closeness. The appropriateness of certain relational behaviors by androids is considered.

‘I have to hear them before I hear myself’: developing therapeutic conversations in British counselling students

Abstract Transcripts of interviews from six students who had just completed a one-year postgraduate certificate in counselling skills were subjected to a qualitative analysis that focused on their accounts of the therapeutic action of talking and listening. The course offered a dialogue between psychodynamic and person-centred theoretical orientations. Interpretative phenomenological analysis, the methodology employed to make sense of their experience offers a dialogue between interpretative and phenomenological philosophical stances, thus mirroring the task faced by the students. Three themes with associated subthemes were surfaced: (1) Therapeutic openness captured the students’ understandings of how the phenomenological principle of openness is experienced in practice; (2) Hearing beyond discourse reflected how their listening deepened during the course; (3) Presence reflected the changing quality of the encounter between the self and the other. These findings reflect British counselling students’ lived experiences of listening and talking in their developing practice. We connect these results to broader themes of theory and research into the role of language in therapeutic conversations.

Well-Being at the Polish Polar Station, Svalbard: Adaptation to Extreme Environments

While the psychological well-being of Antarctic crews has been investigated previously, Arctic crews have received little attention. Antarctic stressors include the permanent darkness of polar night, cramped quarters and harsh weather conditions which demand that the crews work together to survive. These stressors are also present for Arctic crews with the addition of dangerous polar bears. In this study, these psychological stressors were explored at the Polish Polar Station, Svalbard. Nine crew members three of whom were women, took part in the study. They filled in the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and the Symptom Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R) after their arrival, at equinox, during polar night, in spring and during the midnight sun. Depression and hostility were highest in the spring following the isolation of polar night. Vigor reached its lowest point in spring and remained low until mission completion. Confusion continued to decline throughout the mission. The Polish crew adapted by monitoring their feelings to work together and ensure survival. Up until and during the polar night, negative feelings were low. Following the isolation period, depression and hostility increased while vigor declined. This suggests adaptation paradigm wherein the participants stopped to monitor their own feelings as closely after the polar night.

Language matters in counselling diversity

ABSTRACT The paper presents a personal view of some issues around therapeutic conversations involving difference and minority experience. Language, discourse and mother-tongue are explored from different theoretical standpoints and considered alongside concepts of difference, otherness and the unvoiced. Intercultural counselling offers a framework for unpacking the meaning of decolonising practice in conversations with clients or counsellors from ethnic or other minorities undertaking counselling or supervision. I discuss possibilities for practice informed by existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, including gestalt therapy interventions to bring in the body alongside discourse, and phenomenological empathy as a non-colonising resource in working across difference and diversity.

Disparity modulation sensitivity for narrow-band-filtered stereograms viewed out of the plane of fixation

Narrow-band-filtered random-dot stereograms were used to determine stereo thresholds for detecting sinusoidal disparity modulations. These stereograms were designed to stimulate selectively channels tuned to luminance and corrugation spatial frequencies (Schumer and Ganz, 1979 Vision Research 19 1303 – 1314). Thresholds were determined for corrugation frequencies ranging from 0.125 to 1 cycle deg−1, luminance centre spatial frequencies ranging from 1 to 8 cycles deg−1 and disparity pedestal sizes ranging from −32 to +32 min arc. For small disparity pedestals, lowest modulation thresholds were found around 0.5 cycle deg−1 corrugation frequency and 4 cycles deg−1 luminance centre spatial frequency. For large disparity pedestals (±32 arc min), lowest thresholds were shifted towards the lower corrugation frequencies (0.125 cycle deg−1) and lower luminance frequencies (2 cycles deg−1). There was a significant interaction between luminance spatial frequency and disparity pedestal size. For small pedestals, lowest thresholds were found with the highest luminance frequency pattern (4 cycles deg−1). For large pedestals, best performance shifted towards the low-frequency patterns (1 cycle deg−1). This effect demonstrates a massive reduction in stereo-efficiency for high-frequency patterns in the luminance domain at large disparity pedestals which is consistent with the ‘size-disparity relation’ proposed by previous researchers.