A technique for continuous measurement of body movement from video

The movements that we make with our body vary continuously along multiple dimensions. However, many of the tools and techniques presently used for coding and analyzing hand gestures and other body movements yield categorical outcome variables. Focusing on categorical variables as the primary quantitative outcomes may mislead researchers or distort conclusions. Moreover, categorical systems may fail to capture the richness present in movement. Variations in body movement may be informative in multiple dimensions. For example, a single hand gesture has a unique size, height of production, trajectory, speed, and handshape. Slight variations in any of these features may alter how both the speaker and the listener are affected by gesture. In this paper, we describe a new method for measuring and visualizing the physical trajectory of movement using video. This method is generally accessible, requiring only video data and freely available computer software. This method allows researchers to examine features of hand gestures, body movement, and other motion, including size, height, curvature, and speed. We offer a detailed account of how to implement this approach, and we also offer some guidelines for situations where this approach may be fruitful in revealing how the body expresses information. Finally, we provide data from a small study on how speakers alter their hand gestures in response to different characteristics of a stimulus to demonstrate the utility of analyzing continuous dimensions of motion. By creating shared methods, we hope to facilitate communication between researchers from varying methodological traditions.     

Prejudice in interreligious context: The role of metaprejudice and majority–minority status

Samples of two hundred forty‐five majority Sunny Muslims, 87 Ahmadiyya Muslims, and 145 Christians were used to investigate the determinants and mediators of prejudice in interreligious context in Indonesia. First, the study extends the idea of in‐group and out‐group metaprejudice; both of which were found to mediate the relationship between perceived quality of intergroup relationship and personal prejudice. Second, we expected that majority members are more likely to reject a minority and that a minority is more likely to more strongly reject another minority than the majority for self‐serving reasons. Additionally, the Sunni majority will prejudice and reject the Ahmadiyya minority more than the Christian minority due to the strained religious relation between the two Muslim groups. The hypotheses were confirmed. The findings are discussed in the context of stereotyping, and prejudice dynamics in other intergroup conflicts and ways of coping with such conflict are suggested.     

Secondary migration and relocation among African refugee families in the United States

The purpose of this study was to understand the secondary migration and relocation of African refugees resettled in the United States. Secondary migration refers to moves out of state, while relocation refers to moves within state. Of 73 recently resettled refugee families from Burundi and Liberia followed for 1 year through ethnographic interviews and observations, 13 instances of secondary migration and 9 instances of relocation were identified. A family ecodevelopmental framework was applied to address: Who moved again, why, and with what consequences? How did moving again impact family risk and protective factors? How might policies, researchers, and practitioners better manage refugees moving again? Findings indicated that families undertook secondary migration principally for employment, affordable housing, family reunification, and to feel more at home. Families relocated primarily for affordable housing. Parents reported that secondary migration and relocation enhanced family stability. Youth reported disruption to both schooling and attachments with peers and community. In conclusion, secondary migration and relocation were family efforts to enhance family and community protective resources and to mitigate shortcomings in resettlement conditions. Policymakers could provide newly resettled refugees jobs, better housing and family reunification. Practitioners could devise ways to better engage and support those families who consider moving.     

Visual search in the real world: evidence for the formation of distractor representations

Visual search in the real world often requires that we search the same environment a number of times for different targets. What is the fate of information about fixated distractor objects during these searches? Here, participants searched the same array of real objects on a tabletop twice for two different targets successively whilst wearing a head-mounted eye-tracker. We found that fixating an object when it was a distractor in the first search facilitated search for that same object when it became the target in the second search. The results suggest that the location and identity of fixated distractor objects are represented to a level that guides subsequent searches, even when this information is not required at the time of fixation.     

Influences of problem format and SES on preschoolers’ understanding of approximate addition

Recent studies suggest that 5-year-olds can add and compare large numerical quantities through approximate representations of number. However, the nature of this understanding and its susceptibility to environmental influences remain unclear. We examined whether children's early competence depends on the canonical problem format (i.e., arithmetic operations presented on the left side). Sixty children from middle-to-high-SES backgrounds (Experiment 1) and 47 children from low-SES backgrounds (Experiment 2) viewed events that required them to add and compare large numbers. Events were shown in a canonical or noncanonical format. Children from both SES backgrounds performed above chance on the approximate addition tasks, but children from middle-to-high-SES backgrounds performed significantly better. Moreover, children from middle-to-high SES backgrounds performed better when problems were presented in the canonical format, whereas children from low-SES backgrounds did not. These results suggest that children's understanding of approximate number is affected by some of the same environmental factors that affect performance on exact arithmetic tasks.     

Development and validation of an Argentine set of facial expressions of emotion

Pictures of facial expressions of emotion are used in a wide range of experiments. The last decade has seen an increase in the number of studies presenting local sets of emotion stimuli. However, only a few existing sets contain pictures of Latin Americans, despite the growing attention emotion research is receiving in this region. Here we present the development and validation of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Expresiones de Emociones Faciales (UNCEEF), a Facial Action Coding System (FACS)-verified set of pictures of Argentineans expressing the six basic emotions, plus neutral expressions. FACS scores, recognition rates, Hu scores, and discrimination indices are reported. Evidence of convergent validity was obtained using the Pictures of Facial Affect in an Argentine sample. However, recognition accuracy was greater for UNCEEF. The importance of local sets of emotion pictures is discussed.     

Flow at Work and Basic Psychological Needs: Effects on Well‐Being

Recent conceptual work draws meaningful distinctions between experiential and declarative well‐being (Shmotkin, 2005 ), but little has been done to apply such distinctions in organisational psychology. We use this framework to integrate self‐determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985 ) and flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975 ), leading to hypotheses proposing that flow experiences at work (experiential well‐being) lead to declarative well‐being outcomes through their influence on the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for competence and autonomy. Findings from a two‐week experience sampling study of full‐time employees offer support for our hypotheses. This study also shows support for the moderating effect of individual differences in personality on the relationships among flow experiences, need fulfillment, and declarative well‐being.     

A New Normalization Strategy for the Implicational Fragment of Classical Propositional Logic

The introduction and elimination rules for material implication in natural deduction are not complete with respect to the implicational fragment of classical logic. A natural way to complete the system is through the addition of a new natural deduction rule corresponding to Peirce’s formula (((A → B) → A) → A). E. Zimmermann [6] has shown how to extend Prawitz’ normalization strategy to Peirce’s rule: applications of Peirce’s rule can be restricted to atomic conclusions. The aim of the present paper is to extend Seldin’s normalization strategy to Peirce’s rule by showing that every derivation Π in the implicational fragment can be transformed into a derivation Π′ such that no application of Peirce’s rule in Π′ occurs above applications of →-introduction and →-elimination. As a corollary of Seldin’s normalization strategy we obtain a form of Glivenko’s theorem for the classical {→}-fragment.     

Thinking groups: Rhetorical enactment of collective identity in three Israeli Kibbutzim

The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim regarding a disputed school issue: whether to maintain a traditional in-kibbutz high school despite a heavy financial burden or to close it and send kibbutz youths to a public regional school The results served as a demonstration of a 'thinking group' (i.e. of how the collective aims of a group are achieved by the coordinated rhetorical behaviour of individuals according to the formal rules of the collective deliberations). First, video-recordings of six general assembly meetings in which the issue was discussed was analyzed as to their argumentative content. Second, the extracted arguments were presented to a sample of 342 kibbutz members to capture the distribution of opinions in the population. It is proposed that most kibbutz members were willing to preserve their collective living and saw the closure of their in-kibbutz school as a threat to their traditional collective identity. We observed a distinct form of public rhetoric during the deliberations in the general meetings which provides a podium for the disputed opinions, preserves the kibbutz shared identity representation and avoids social friction.