Francesca D’Errico

Agreement and its Multimodal Communication in Debates: A Qualitative Analysis

The paper defines the notion of agreement from a cognitive point of view and analyses types of agreement signals in TV debates. Agreement is defined as a relation of identity, similarity or congruence between the opinions of two or more persons, by contrasting it with confirmation and admission, and the connected notions of proposal, assessment and opinion are overviewed. Research is then presented on the multimodal signals of agreement in debates from the Canal 9 and the AMI corpora; different ways to express agreement are singled out in extensive discourse, single words and body signals, and analysed through an annotation scheme of multimodal data. Different types of agreement are illustrated, including true, indirect and apparent agreement.

Discrediting signals. A model of social evaluation to study discrediting moves in political debates

The paper analyzes the move of discrediting the opponent as a means to persuasion in political debates. After analysis of a corpus of political debates, a typology of discrediting strategies is outlined, distinguished in terms of three criteria: the target—the feature of the opponent specifically attacked (dominance, competence, benevolence); the route through which it is attacked—topic, mode or directly the person; and the type of communicative act that conveys the attack (insult, criticism, correction…). The relevance of body signals in discrediting moves is highlighted.

Blame the Opponent! Effects of Multimodal Discrediting Moves in Public Debates

In political persuasion, the persuader, besides bearing logical arguments and triggering emotions, must present one’s own image (one’s ethos) of a credible and reliable person, by enhancing three dimensions of it: competence, benevolence, and dominance. In a parallel way, she/he may cast discredit on the opponent by criticizing, accusing or insulting, on the same three dimensions. The work provides a description and a typology of multimodal discrediting moves focusing on the discrediter’s multimodal behavior. Based on an Italian corpus of political debates, the analysis points out which facial expressions, gaze behavior, gestures, postures, and prosodic features are used to convey discredit concerning the three target features of competence, benevolence, and dominance. Finally, an experimental study is presented assessing the effects of the different types of discrediting moves on potential electors. Results show that casting discredit on the other’s competence while also performing gestures, and casting discredit on the other’s dominance without gesturing, makes arguments more shareable and convincing.

The mental ingredients of bitterness

In view of multimodal interfaces capable of a detailed representation of the User’s possible emotions, the paper analyses bitterness in terms of its mental ingredients, the beliefs and goals represented in the mind of a person when feeling an emotion. Bitterness is a negative emotion in between anger and sadness: like anger, it is caused by a sense of injustice, but also entails a sense of impotence which makes it similar to sadness. Often caused by betrayal, it comes from the disappointment of an expectation from oneself or anothers with whom one is affectively involved, or from a disproportion between commitment and actual results. The ingredients found in a pilot study were tested through qualitative analysis of a further questionnaire, which confirmed the ingredients hypothesized, further revealing the different nature of bitterness across ages and across types of work.

The embodied morphemes of gaze

The paper presents some empirical studies aimed at singling out the meanings of specific items of gaze and of some of their parameters. It argues that the values on some parameters of gaze items are not comparable to phonemes in a verbal language, but rather to morphemes, since by themselves they convey some specific meanings. The different positions of the upper and lower eyelids are combined and the meanings conveyed by their possible values are investigated. It is found that wide open upper eyelids and raised lower eyelids convey activation and effort, while half open and half closed upper eyelids convey de-activation and relaxation. These embodied morphemes, stemming from particular physical states, become part of the meanings of gaze items conveyed by the combination of these eyelid positions.

Social signals: from theory to applications

The Special Issue Editorial introduces the research milieu in which Social Signal Processing originates, by merging computer scientists and social scientists and giving rise to this field in parallel with Human–Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, and Embodied Conversational Agents, all similarly characterized by high interdisciplinarity, stress on multimodality of communication, and the continuous loop from theory to simulation and application. Some frameworks of the cognitive and social processes underlying social signals are identified as reference points (Theory of Mind and Intersubjectivity, mirror neurons, and the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of communication), while three dichotomies (automatic vs. controlled, individualistic vs. intersubjective, and meaning vs. influence) are singled out as leads to navigate within the theoretical and applicative studies presented in the Special Issue.

Vagueness and dreams: analysis of body signals in vague dream telling

The paper provides a conceptual definition of the notions of vagueness and approximation (a lack of detail or precision in the knowledge one has of something), hesitation and hastiness (the act of waiting before, or hurrying up while speaking), and overviews some reasons why people can be vague, approximate, hesitating or hasty. A study is presented in which participants tell a recent dream of theirs, and a qualitative analysis is proposed of the words, gestures and other bodily signals that communicate vagueness, approximation, hesitation, hastiness, and word search during dream-telling, by pointing out their semantic differences and the features that distinguish them.

Comments by words, face and body

The paper defines the notion of comment as a communicative act that is not requested by the previous turn and conveys additional information to what has been said before, generally concerning an opinion of its Sender and possibly an evaluation. After distinguishing interpretative versus evaluative comments and focusing on the latter, we characterize a verbal comment as an informative or exclamatory sentence containing an evaluative adjective or other direct or indirect ways to express evaluations. Then, a qualitative study is presented on bodily direct and indirect comments in political debates.

When Teachers’ Intervention Makes an Immigrant Child More Dependent

As we are writing this paper the situation in Italy as to the issue of multicultural classes is in a particular and very delicate phase of general discussion in relation to the Italian public school and University system. On the one hand TIMSS 2007 (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study; Martin et al, 2008), an international project of I.E.A. (International Association for the evaluation of educational achievement) has noted that Italian primary schools are among the best in Europe, while on the other hand the national government intends to reform them. This proposed reform reduces the number of teachers and breaks the positive experience of “modules”, (a teaching system based on the differentiation of subjects), due to the lack of funding as a result of the economic crisis.

Feeling Offended: A Blow to Our Image and Our Social Relationships

The paper presents a survey study that investigates the self-conscious emotion of feeling offended and provides an account of it in terms of a socio-cognitive model of emotions. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the participants’ answers, the study provides a definition of offense and of the feeling of offense in terms of its “mental ingredients,” the beliefs and goals represented in a person who feels this emotion, and finds out what are its necessary and aggravating conditions, what are the explicit and implicit causes of offense (the other’s actions, omissions, inferred mental states), what negative evaluations are offensive and why. It also shows that the feeling of offense is not only triggered about honor or public image, but it is mainly felt in personal affective relationships. The paper finally highlights that high self-esteem may protect a person against the feeling of offense and the constellation of negative emotions triggered by it.