Cynthia L. Crown

Infant gaze, head, face and self-touch at 4 months differentiate secure vs. avoidant attachment at 1 year: A microanalytic approach

The study attempted to distinguish avoidant vs. secure infants at 1 year from 4-month infant behavior only, during a face-to-face play interaction with the mother. Thirty-five 4-month-old infants were coded second by second for infant gaze, head orientation, facial expression and self-touch/mouthing behavior. Mother behavior was not coded. At 1 year, 27 of these infants were classified as secure (B), and 8 as avoidant (A) attachment in the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Compared with the B infant, the future A infant spent less time paying ‘focused’ visual attention (a look of a minimum 2 seconds duration) to the mothers face. Only if the A infant engaged in self-touch/mouthing behavior did its focused visual attention match that of the B. Markovian t to t+1 transition matrices then showed that both for future A and for future B infants, focused visual attention on the mother constrained the movements of the head to within 60 degrees from center vis-à-vis, defining head/gaze co-ordination within an attentional-interpersonal space. However, infant maintenance of head/gaze co-ordination was associated with self-touch/mouthing behavior for the A infant but not the B. Positive affect was associated with a disruption of head/gaze co-ordination for the A but not the B. Whereas the B had more variable facial behavior, potentially providing more facial signaling for the mother, the A had more variable tactile/mouthing behavior, changing patterns of self-soothing more often. Thus, infants classified as A vs. B at 12 months showed different behavioral patterns in face-to-face play with their mothers as early as 4 months.

The Influence of Sexually Violent Rap Music on Attitudes of Men with Little Prior Exposure

This article is among the first to focus on commercially available, sexually violent rap music, so-called “gangsta” rap (GR) and its influence on attitudes toward women. Collegiate males with little experience with GR were exposed to GR music, lyrics, both, or neither. Thus the effect of GR music and lyrics were isolated from each other and from acculturation to GR. Collapsing across all attitude measures, neither lyrics alone nor lyrics with music resulted in significantly more negative attitudes toward women than music-only or no-treatment control conditions. Participants in the lyrics conditions had significantly greater adversarial sexual beliefs than no-lyrics participants, however.

Coordinated interpersonal timing in adult-infant vocal interactions: A cross-site replication**

Coordinated interpersonal tinning exists when the temporal pattern of each partner in a dialogue is predictable from that of the other. Using a completely automated microanalytic technique to time the sequence of vocal sounds and silences in an interaction, we studied 28 four-month-old infants in face-to-face play with mother and a female stranger. Fifteen infants were recorded on one site and 13 at another. Time-series regression was used to evaluate the direction and magnitude of interpersonal prediction. Results indicated that (a) significant coordination (or its absence) occurred at both sites for 90% of the comparisons, and (b) the lag that best predicted the partner was 20 to 30 s at both sites. Unlike the labor-intensive microanalytic coding techniques that have dominated mother-infant interaction research, this work has the following advantages: (a) the automated instrumentation times behavior with a precision unobtainable by the unaided human observer; (b) the sound-silence variables are unambiguously defined for computer processing; and (c) the microanalytic method is applicable to large-sample studies. This automated method has shown its clinical utility in its power to predict 1-year developmental outcomes from 4-month coordinated interpersonal timing.

Coordinated Interpersonal Timing of Down-Syndrome and Nondelayed Infants with Their Mothers: Evidence for a Buffered Mechanism of Social Interaction

A longitudinal study of four- and nine-month-old infants indicates that they coordinate the timing of their vocal behavior with that of their mothers and vice versa. Maternal interactions of Down-syndrome and nondelayed infants were analyzed and found not to differ with regard to such temporal coordination, indicating that it is independent of level of cognitive functioning. The capacity for coordinated timing is proposed as a mechanism for the facilitation of social interaction. Such coordination parallels temporal matching observed in a variety of species along the phylogenetic scale.

The perception of speech rate from the sound-silence patterns of monologues

Two experiments asked whether listeners can judge word rate from a speech signal that has been degraded in various ways. In the first, the rates of spontaneous speech were increased by 42% and further transformed to produce tone-silence sequences. The tonesilence sequences were presented to listeners who judged the rate of each sequence. Results clearly indicated that listeners could differentiate the rates of the tone-silence sequences, suggesting that minimal nonlinguistic information may be sufficient to make grossly accurate estimates of speech rates. In the second study, listeners were presented with speech sequences involving three naturally produced rates (slow, moderate, and fast) in three conditions (clear, frequency-inverted, and tone-silence) such that different listeners participated in the three conditions, but heard all rates in each condition. Listeners in the clear and frequency-inverted conditions distinguished all three rates, but those in the tone-silence condition differentiated only the slow and moderate rates. Contrary to expectation, the gender and extroversion scores of the listeners did not affect their judgments.

Gender as a mediator in the perception of speech rate

The perception of speech rate was examined as a function of the gender of the speakers and listeners and the speech rate of the listeners. In the first experiment, the stimuli were moderately paced speech samples from women, with males and females as listeners. The results indicated that although the speech rates of the female listeners were positively related to perceived speech rate, the rates of the male listeners were negatively related. In the second experiment, the stimuli were comparably paced samples of male and female speech, again with men and women as the listeners. The results indicated that the women judged the speech rates of all the speakers to be faster than did the men, and that all the listeners believed that the men talked faster than the women. The results of both studies suggest that gender plays an influential role in the perception of speech rate.

Objective Versus Perceived Vocal Interruptions in the Dialogues of Unacquainted Pairs, Friends, and Couples

Two studies are presented that examined whether men interrupt differently than women and whether they are perceived to interrupt differently. First, 84 individuals participated in 25-minute conversations that were automatically summarized as a set of vocal interruptive behaviors. Statistical analyses indicated no sex differences. The second study had 80 judges rate five of the videotapes from the first study (selected on the basis of highly similar objective interruptions) in terms of the how interruptive the judges viewed the conversationalists to be. Women were perceived to interrupt significantly more then men. Tb help understand the discrepant findings, a subset of the original tapes was recoded using a subjective procedure. Findings replicated those yielded by the objective coding method. This set of findings suggests that differences in the interruptive behavior of men and women may be more perceived than actual.

Expectation and extraversion: Influencing the perceived rate of tone-silence sequences

It was hypothesized that expectation (instructional set) influences the perceived tempo of tone-silence sequences, and that this perception is also affected by the degree to which the perceivers are extraverted. Twenty-two university undergraduates were asked to judge the rates of 10 tone-silence sequences, which were transformations of actual speech samples. The subjects were divided into two groups, one of which was informed about the fact that the sequences were transformations, and the other of which was not told anything about the sequences. After completing their judgments about the sequences, the participants were asked to complete the Eysenck Extraversion scale. Contrary to the hypothesis, the analyses provided no evidence that the perceived rates of the informed participants were different from those of the uninformed participants, but they did indicate that (1) the perceived rates of the sequences were closely related to the tempos (words per minute) of the speech samples from which the sequences were derived, and (2) extraverts judged the rates of the sequences to be faster than did introverts. Implications for the “modular” theory of acoustic perception are discussed.

II. Literature Review

Population ageing is an inevitable outcome of the demographic transition. Due primarily to declines of fertility, and secondarily to mortality declines, the age structure of a population becomes older, with a growing number and proportion of elderly persons. While many countries, especially those in the more developed regions, have experienced such a demographic process for some time, there is great variation among them in terms of the level and pace of population ageing. In recent years, the issue of population ageing has received renewed attention in developed countries, because of the continuance of fertility below the replacement level and ongoing trends towards lower mortality. Thus, the trends of population ageing are expected to increase further in these countries and their populations are projected to level off and decline in the foreseeable future. These changes have profound consequences and far-reaching implications, especially for pension schemes, heath-care systems and the economic vitality and growth of a country. The future population size and age-sex structure of any country depends basically on the three demographic components: fertility, mortality and international migration. As no policies to increase the mortality of a population are socially acceptable, there are, in theory, two possible ways of retarding or reversing demographic ageing. First, a reversal of declines of fertility would lead the age structure of the population back towards a younger one, thus slowing down the ageing process. However, the recent experience of low-fertility countries suggests that there is no reason to assume that their fertility will return anytime soon to the above-replacement level (United Nations, 1997). Hence, as a second option, the potential role that international migration could play in offsetting population decline and population ageing has been considered. Given the possibility of attracting larger number of immigrants into economically affluent developed countries, virtually all of which are experiencing low fertility, it appears appropriate to consider the impact that international migration may have on the demographic challenges of ageing. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) commissioned research on these issues and published in 1991 a special report on the demographic impact of migration (OECD, 1991). A number of studies have examined the demographic impact of a constant influx of migrants on the growth of a population with below replacement fertility. For example, taking the twelve countries in Europe or members of then the European Community (EC) together, Lesthaeghe and others (1988) carried out population projections. With …

Speech rate and gender as mediating factors in person perception

A previous study by the authors found that judgment of speech rate is independently influenced by the gender of the judges and of the speakers. The research of others [e.g., B. Brown et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 54, 29–35 (1973)] has shown that speech‐rate perception mediates other aspects of interpersonal perception. The study reported here, then, investigated the possibilities that: (a) Individuals who speak rapidly are viewed in more positive ways than those who speak slowly; (b) males are viewed in more positive ways than females; and/or (c) speech and gender jointly influence person perception. Seventeen male and 28 female college students listened to and rated, each of ten adjective scales, three male and three female speech samples. An hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that, whereas the male speakers received less positive ratings when they spoke rapidly, the female speakers received less positive ratings both when they spoke rapidly and slowly. The results suggest that person perc...