Accompanied Visits as a Tool to Understand Visitors’ Experiences: A Critical Reflection and Proposed Typology

Accompanied visits are commonly used to capture visitors’ spontaneously occurring activities, conversations, and views. However, there is limited reflection on how to implement and analyze accompanied visits, and their use is under-theorized. This article draws on three uses of accompanied visits: in a small gallery, a botanic garden, and a science museum. It describes and critically reflects on the methods used for these visits. Overall, it is argued that although accompanied visits can offer valuable insights into visitors’ views and experiences, it is important to conceptualize them to shape academic discussions and longer-term improvements to museum practice and visitor experience. The article provides a typology of accompanied visits that is based on an ethnographic approach and that shows the benefits and drawbacks of different types of accompanied visits. The typology provides the necessary structure for accompanied visits to understand current audiences and possibly to increase the number and diversity of future audiences.     

Neuropsychological aspects of facial asymmetry during emotional expression: A review of the normal adult literature

This review focuses on facial asymmetries during emotional expression. Facial asymmetry is defined as the expression intensity or muscular involvement on one side of the face (“hemiface”) relative to the other side and has been used as a behavioral index of hemispheric specialization for facial emotional expression. This paper presents a history of the neuropsychological study of facial asymmetry, originating with Darwin. Both quantitative and qualitative aspects of asymmetry are addressed. Next, neuroanatomical bases for facial expression are elucidated, separately for posed/voluntary and spontaneous/involuntary elicitation conditions. This is followed by a comprehensive review of 49 experiments of facial asymmetry in the adult literature, oriented around emotional valence (pleasantness/unpleasantness), elicitation condition, facial part, social display rules, and demographic factors. Results of this review indicate that the left hemiface is more involved than the right hemiface in the expression of facial emotion. From a neuropsychological perspective, these findings implicate the right cerebral hemisphere as dominant for the facial expression of emotion. In spite of the compelling evidence for right-hemispheric specialization, some data point to the possibility of differential hemispheric involvement as a function of emotional valence. An earlier version of this paper by the first author was presented at the XV Annual Symposium of the Society of Craniofacial Genetics, July 12, 1992, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.     

The evaluation of truthfulness in alleged sex offenders' self-reports: 16PF and MMPI validity scales.

The evaluation of response bias (i.e., minimization or exaggeration) is central to forensic psychological evaluations. Yet few studies have assessed forensic samples to investigate the ability of psychological tests to detect response bias. We studied the relationship between the Sixteen Personality Factors Questionnaire (16PF) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) validity scales for 65 alleged sex offenders and assessed the effects of different cutoff scores for the 16PF validity scales. Results indicate consistent significant correlations between the validity scales of the 16PF and the MMPI for measures of minimization and exaggeration. use of a priori cutoff scores resulted in the classification of our sample in proportions parallel to those found in previous research for the 16PF Fake-Good scale but not the Fake-Bad scale. Our results indicate that 16PF validity scales are useful, but interpretations must take into account different base rates of response bias between sex offenders and the general population.     

Age differences in movement time over distances proportional to size.

Investigations of the differences in movement speed over the age span, childhood to early adulthood, have typically confounded age with size differences which bring about mechanical differences in the task. The present study investigated the effect on arm movement time of confounding age and limb length. Young adults and children 7 to 9 yr. of age were tested over a distance proportional to their arm length. Despite moving over a proportionally shorter distance, the children were significantly slower than the adults, suggesting that age differences in performance are not solely attributable to size differences among subjects.     

Skill performance on biorhythm theory's physically critical day.

The hypothesis of a critical day in biorhythm theory predicts that skill performance would be lower than normal on a physically critical day. Participants in an archery league were observed in 346 events. Indoor archery performance provided scores identical to the goal of the task and unaffected by environmental conditions or other competitors. Above-average performances on 34 physically critical days did not differ significantly from the population proportion of above-average performances. No support for the hypothesis was provided by this observation of archery performance.     

Sequential grouping of pure-tone percepts evoked by the segregation of components from a complex tone

A sudden change applied to a single component can cause its segregation from an ongoing complex tone as a pure-tone-like percept. Three experiments examined whether such pure-tone-like percepts are organized into streams by extending the research of Bregman and Rudnicky (1975). Those authors found that listeners struggled to identify the presentation order of 2 pure-tone targets of different frequency when they were flanked by 2 lower frequency "distractors." Adding a series of matched-frequency "captor" tones, however, improved performance by pulling the distractors into a separate stream from the targets. In the current study, sequences of discrete pure tones were substituted by sequences of brief changes applied to an otherwise constant 1.2-s complex tone. Pure-tone-like percepts were evoked by applying 6-dB increments to individual components of a complex comprising harmonics 1-7 of 300 Hz (Experiment 1) or 0.5-ms changes in interaural time difference to individual components of a log-spaced complex (range 160-905 Hz; Experiment 2). Results were consistent with the earlier study, providing clear evidence that pure-tone-like percepts are organized into streams. Experiment 3 adapted Experiment 1 by presenting a global amplitude increment either synchronous with, or just after, the last captor prior to the 1st distractor. In the former case, for which there was no pure-tone-like percept corresponding to that captor, the captor sequence did not aid performance to the same extent as previously. It is concluded that this change to the captor-tone stream partially resets the stream-formation process, and so the distractors and targets became likely to integrate once more.     

Sensitivity of MMPI Validity Scales to Motivational Factors in Psychological Evaluations of Police Officers

To examine whether Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) validity scales are sensitive to motivational sets in a specific forensic population, we compared three groups of 20 police officers being evaluated for fitness to return to duty: those who expressed a desire to return; those desiring not to, and a control group. Results indicate that four validity indices Significantly differentiated experimental groups in the expected directions. Officers wanting to return to duty minimized psychological difficulties significantly more than the other groups. Thus, our study supports the usefulness of MMPI validity scales in assessing response bias in police fitness evaluations. Data suggest that minimization occurs primarily for obvious emotional or characterological problems.