Peter Khooshabeh

Getting to know you: a multimodal investigation of team behavior and resilience to stress

Team cohesion has been suggested to be a critical factor in emotional resilience following periods of stress. Team cohesion may depend on several factors including emotional state, communication among team members and even psychophysiological response. The present study sought to employ several multimodal techniques designed to investigate team behavior as a means of understanding resilience to stress. We recruited 40 subjects to perform a cooperative-task in gender-matched, two-person teams. They were responsible for working together to meet a common goal, which was to successfully disarm a simulated bomb. This high-workload task requires successful cooperation and communication among members. We assessed several behaviors that relate to facial expression, word choice and physiological responses (i.e., heart rate variability) within this scenario. A manipulation of an â€oeice breakerâ€x9d condition was used to induce a level of comfort or familiarity within the team prior to the task. We found that individuals in the â€oeice breakerâ€x9d condition exhibited better resilience to subjective stress following the task. These individuals also exhibited more insight and cognitive speech, more positive facial expressions and were also able to better regulate their emotional expression during the task, compared to the control.

Socio-technical communication: The hybrid space and the OLB model for science-based cyber education

ABSTRACT Lessons from safety-critical sociotechnical systems, such as aviation and acute medical care, demonstrate the importance of the human factor and highlight the crucial role of efficient communication between human agents. Although a large proportion of fatal incidents in aviation have been linked to failures in communication, cognitive engineering provides the theoretical framework to mitigate risks and increase performance in sociotechnical systems not only in the civil sector, but also in the military domain. Conducting cyber operations in multidomain battles presents new challenges for military training and education as the increased importance of psychological factors such as metacognitive skills and perspective-taking both in lower and higher ranking staff, becomes more apparent. The Hybrid Space framework (Jøsok et al., 2016) provides a blueprint for describing the cognitive and behavioral constraints for maneuvering between socio-technical and cyber-physical systems whilst cooperating, coordinating or competing with accompanying cognitive styles in the chain of command. We apply the Hybrid Space framework to communicative challenges in the military cyber domain and suggest a three-phase Orienting, Locating, Bridging model for safe and efficient communication between partners. Based on the educational principles of the Norwegian Defence Cyber Academy, we discuss the required skill-sets and knowledge in which cyber officer cadets are trained and taught early in their education, and how these refer to the theoretical framework of the Hybrid Space and the key principles of communication as defined in cognitive engineering.

Virtual Human Role Players for Studying Social Factors in Organizational Decision Making

The cyber domain of military operations presents many challenges. A unique element is the social dynamic between cyber operators and their leadership because of the novel subject matter expertise involved in conducting technical cyber tasks, so there will be situations where senior leaders might have much less domain knowledge or no experience at all relative to the warfighters who report to them. Nonetheless, it will be important for junior cyber operators to convey convincing information relevant to a mission in order to persuade or influence a leader to make informed decisions. The power dynamic will make it difficult for the junior cyber operator to successfully influence a higher ranking leader. Here we present a perspective with a sketch for research paradigm(s) to study how different factors (normative vs. informational social influence, degree of transparency, and perceived appropriateness of making suggestions) might interact with differential social power dynamics of individuals in cyber decision-making contexts. Finally, we contextualize this theoretical perspective for the research paradigms in viable training technologies.

The relationship between task-induced stress, vocal changes, and physiological state during a dyadic team task

It is commonly known that a relationship exists between the human voice and various emotional states. Past studies have demonstrated changes in a number of vocal features, such as fundamental frequency f0 and peakSlope, as a result of varying emotional state. These voice characteristics have been shown to relate to emotional load, vocal tension, and, in particular, stress. Although much research exists in the domain of voice analysis, few studies have assessed the relationship between stress and changes in the voice during a dyadic team interaction. The aim of the present study was to investigate the multimodal interplay between speech and physiology during a high-workload, high-stress team task. Specifically, we studied task-induced effects on participants vocal signals, specifically, the f0 and peakSlope features, as well as participants physiology, through cardiovascular measures. Further, we assessed the relationship between physiological states related to stress and changes in the speakers voice. We recruited participants with the specific goal of working together to diffuse a simulated bomb. Half of our sample participated in an Ice Breaker scenario, during which they were allowed to converse and familiarize themselves with their teammate prior to the task, while the other half of the sample served as our Control. Fundamental frequency (f0), peakSlope, physiological state, and subjective stress were measured during the task. Results indicated that f0 and peakSlope significantly increased from the beginning to the end of each task trial, and were highest in the last trial, which indicates an increase in emotional load and vocal tension. Finally, cardiovascular measures of stress indicated that the vocal and emotional load of speakers towards the end of the task mirrored a physiological state of psychological threat.

Social influence of humor in virtual human counselor's self-disclosure

We explored the social influence of humor in a virtual human counselors self‐disclosure while also varying the ethnicity of the virtual counselor. In a 2 × 3 experiment (humor and ethnicity of the virtual human counselor), participants experienced counseling interview interactions via Skype on a smartphone. We measured user responses to and perceptions of the virtual human counselor. The results demonstrate that humor positively affects user responses to and perceptions of a virtual counselor. The results further suggest that matching styles of humor with a virtual counselors ethnicity influences user responses and perceptions. The results offer insight into the effective design and development of realistic and believable virtual human counselors. Furthermore, they illuminate the potential use of humor to enhance self‐disclosure in human–agent interactions.

Socio-Cultural Effects of Virtual Counseling Interviewers as Mediated by Smartphone Video Conferencing

We explored how users perceive virtual characters that performed the role of a counseling interviewer, while presenting different levels of social class, as well as single or multi-tasking behavior. To investigate this subject, we designed a 2x2 experiment (tasking type and social class of the virtual counseling interviewer). In the experiment, participants experienced the counseling interview interactions over video conferencing on a smartphone. We measured user responses to and perceptions of the virtual human interviewer. The results demonstrate that the tasking types and social class of the virtual counselor affected user responses to and perceptions of the virtual counselor. The results offer insight into the design and development of effective, realistic, and believable virtual human counselors. Furthermore, the results also address current social questions about how smartphones might mediate social interactions, including human-agent interactions.

Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance, Challenges, and Solutions

ABSTRACT Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In this article, we subject different extraction procedures to rigorous tests, underscore challenges by identifying a range of reliabilities, develop new reliability test and coding procedures employing computational methods, and provide solutions that maximize the reliability and validity of moral intuition extraction. In six content analytical studies, including a large crowd-based study, we demonstrate that: (1) traditional content analytical approaches lead to rather low reliabilities; (2) variation in coding reliabilities can be predicted by both text features and characteristics of the human coders; and (3) reliability is largely unaffected by the detail of coder training. We show that a coding task with simplified training and a coding technique that treats moral foundations as fast, spontaneous intuitions leads to acceptable inter-rater agreement, and potentially to more valid moral intuition extractions. While this study was motivated by issues related to MFT and MIME research, the methods and findings in this study have implications for extracting latent content from text narratives that go beyond moral information. Accordingly, we provide a tool for researchers interested in applying this new approach in their own work.

Mixed reality training for tank platoon leader communication skills

Here we describe the design and usability evaluation of a mixed reality prototype to simulate the role of a tank platoon leader, who is an individual who not only is a tank commander, but also directs a platoon of three other tanks with their own respective tank commanders. The domain of tank commander training has relied on physical simulators of the actual Abrams tank and encapsulates the whole crew. The TALK-ON system we describe here focuses on training communication skills of the leader in a simulated tank crew. We report results from a usability evaluation and discuss how they will inform our future work for collective tank training.

When Less is More: Studying the Role of Functional Fidelity in a Low Fidelity Mixed-Reality Tank Simulator

High fidelity military simulators have been a vital part of training and developing warfighters over the last eighty plus years. As military simulator technologies have evolved, continued emphasis tends toward high fidelity as a means to create the most extreme environments that offer novices opportunities to employ a broad spectrum of cognitive and physical skills. However, young and inexperienced trainees may lack the ability to make quick, mature and effective decisions within high fidelity simulators. High fidelity simulators have also proven cumbersome due to a number of factors, which include geographic constraints, limited resource allocation and costly update requirements. This paper explores extreme environment modeling and simulation methods for developing and measuring the effectiveness of low fidelity mixed reality solutions. We also discuss preliminary results from our current project entitled TALK-ON.

The effect of a virtual agent's emotional facial expressions on the Mind's Eye test

In this study, we explored how interacting with a virtual agent under stressful conditions affected situational awareness as assessed by a theory of mind task. Volunteers played a negotiation game in which an embodied, digital virtual agent both displayed an angry, happy, or neutral facial expression and played either cooperatively or competitively. Results indicated that users who negotiated with the angry virtual agent performed significantly worse on the Mind in the Eye Task compared to those who interacted with the happy virtual agent. The results indicate that exposure to an angry virtual agent decreased humans ability to take the mental perspective of another person. These results offer speculations about how negative affect associated with virtual agents can have detrimental implications for human-agent interactions that requires theory of mind type situational awareness, especially regarding virtual agent technology for rehabilitating theory of mind deficits (e.g., for individuals on the Autism spectrum).