Felicia Roberts

Self‐reported stress and risk of breast cancer

Many women attribute the development of their breast cancer to psychosocial factors such as stress and depression. Yet investigations of the relationship between breast cancer and stressful life events have had inconsistent outcomes, due in part to studies with small sample sizes and reliance on hospital‐based populations.

Medical Recommendations as Joint Social Practice

Treatment plans can be thought of as one of the products of a medical interaction. As such, treatment for illness has been investigated as an outcome measure and seems to reflect bias in some areas of the practice of medicine. Although the evidence for patterns of differential treatment is compelling, determining the source of treatment bias has been difficult. Based on detailed analysis of transcripts of actual interactions in general medicine and oncology clinics, we propose that treatment plans are negotiated through everyday language practices that work to maximize agreement. We demonstrate that, on the level of individual medical encounters, patient agency is both apparent and operative and that physician power does not unilaterally determine outcomes. Thus, this investigation goes beyond the abstract study of physician and patient preferences or prejudices, focusing closely on the consequences of actual talk in settings where medical recommendations are being made.

The interaction of inter-turn silence with prosodic cues in listener perceptions of ''trouble'' in conversation

The forms, functions, and organization of sounds and utterances are generally the focus of speech communication research; little is known, however, about how the silence between speaker turns shades the meaning of the surrounding talk. We use an experimental protocol to test whether listeners’ perception of trouble in interaction (e.g., disagreement or unwillingness) varies when prosodic cues are manipulated in the context of 2 speech acts (requests and assessments). The prosodic cues investigated were inter-turn silence and the duration, absolute pitch, and pitch contour of affirmative response tokens (‘‘yeah’’ and ‘‘sure’’) that followed the inter-turn silence. Study participants evaluated spoken dialogues simulating telephone calls between friends in which the length of silence following a request/assessment (i.e., the inter-turn silence) was manipulated in Praat as were prosodic features of the responses. Results indicate that with each incremental increase in pause duration (0–600–1200 ms) listeners perceived increasingly less willingness to comply with requests and increasingly weaker agreement with assessments. Inter-turn silence and duration of response token proved to be stronger cues to unwillingness and disagreement than did the response token’s pitch characteristics. However, listeners tend to perceive response token duration as a cue to ‘‘trouble’’ when inter-turn silence cues were, apparently, ambiguous (less than 1 s). � 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Privacy Management in the Military Family during Deployment: Adolescents’ Perspectives

This study examines military adolescents’ experiences of managing private information within their families during a parental deployment. Thirty-eight adolescents were interviewed about how they and their families managed private information across the deployment cycle. Our interviewees suggested that when a deployment occurs: (a) family members should limit the information that they share with the deployed parent about events at home, (b) children should be cautious when talking to the at-home parent about the deployment situation, and (c) parents should filter some deployment-related information from their children. We explore concrete ways these rules are enacted as well as factors (e.g., dialectical tensions, motivations, salient emotions, and rule acquisition) that can shape how these rules are applied. Our analyses also illuminate how boundary turbulence can influence how youth make decisions about sharing private information. Future research should continue to explore deployment with specific attention to how privacy rules change during reintegration.

Perception of utterance relatedness during the first-word-period.

Interactions between six toddlers (aged 1;0 to 1;6) and adults were examined to ascertain adult perceptions of toddler utterance relatedness and to determine temporal and interactional features that underlie those perceptions. Five raters made judgments regarding relatedness of the child utterances to the previous adult utterances; 251 utterances were examined. Utterances judged by adults as related occurred within 4.25 seconds of the preceding adult utterance nearly 90% of the time. This study also points to the need for using interactional categories that go beyond describing utterance relatedness, and introduces terms (i.e. coparticipatory, initiation, narrowed focus) for doing so.

Discourse and Intonation Development in the First-Word Period

The purpose of the current study was to examine the vocal productions of young children acquiring Standard American English and to determine whether intonation production is influenced by discourse context and developmental level (i.e., age). Participants were 24 children with typically developing speech and language, ages 12 to 23 months. A cross-sectional design was used. Data were collected from language samples during 30- to 40-minute play sessions. Child interactions were analyzed according to three discourse categories: co-participatory, initiation, and narrowed focus. Intonation was analyzed using measures of accent range, contour inventory size and contour maturity. The results supported a previous finding that the contour inventory measure of intonation is consistently more useful in demonstrating differences in production related to contour direction and discourse context. An analysis of the contour maturity of intonation revealed that falling contours were more stable than rises, and that rises were produced with more stability in communicative contexts

Gendered Expectations for “Agreeableness” in Response to Requests and Opinions

To address the need for more direct assessment of gendered expectations for communication behaviors, we devised a novel experimental approach that tests whether expectations for “agreeableness” are more salient when evaluating male or female speakers in their affirmative responses to a friend’s request or expression of opinion. Briefly, as lag times are introduced, it appears that females are expected to be more agreeable (or male delay is more tolerated), particularly when alignment with opinion is at stake or when a female is responding to another female. Findings are discussed in the context of Expectation Violations Theory.

Reflection on adverse event disclosure in the postsurgical hospital context.

Surgeons are most likely to fill the role of communicating adverse outcomes following surgery and nearly two-thirds are faced with conveying the news of death during surgery. However, surgeon-patient communication research focuses primarily on presurgery issues such as recommendations and decision making rather than improvement of postsurgical communication. Several studies have examined the consequences of avoiding adverse event disclosure, but as yet, there is no conceptual framework for understanding why these interactions are difficult. In this reflection, we propose that 3 dimensions (relational distance, information-poor environment, and physical harm to patients) distinguish the adverse event context from other physician-patient encounters. We conclude by offering recommendations for educational and research efforts, drawing attention to empathy in the surgical context and barriers to empathic disclosure more broadly.

The neural dynamics of speech perception: Dissociable networks for processing linguistic content and monitoring speaker turn-taking.

The neural circuitry for speech perception is well-characterized, yet the temporal dynamics therein are largely unknown. This timing information is critical in that spoken language almost always occurs in the context of joint speech (i.e., conversations) where effective communication requires the precise timing of speaker turn-taking-a core aspect of prosody. Here, we used event-related potentials to characterize neural activity elicited by conversation stimuli within a large, unselected adult sample (N=115). We focused on two stages of speech perception: inter-speaker gaps and speaker responses. We found activation in two known speech perception networks, with functional and neuroanatomical specificity: silence during inter-speaker gaps primarily activated the posterior pathway involving the supramarginal gyrus and premotor cortex, whereas hearing speaker responses primarily activated the anterior pathway involving the superior temporal gyrus. These data provide the first direct evidence that the posterior pathway is uniquely involved in monitoring speaker turn-taking.