The effects of distance between interactants and subject anxiety on conjugate lateral eye movements

Ehrlichman and Weinberger (1978, Psychological Bulletin 85, 1080-1101) have suggested that the distance between participants during face-to-face interviewing may be a significant determinant of directional patterns of conjugate lateral eye movements (CLEMS). As predicted, at the longer, social distance CLEMS were dependent on the verbal or spatial nature of questions; when interactants were at a closer, personal distance CLEMS became more consistent in direction, regardless of problem type. Distance manipulation also differentially altered CLEM patterns for the two sexes.     

Plenary address – A year of living ‘dangerously’: Reflections on risk,trust, trauma and change

This paper examines the role of emotions in the construction and performance of mis/trustful relations; with medical professionals, their technologies, and ultimately, with oneself. Using personal experience of two common conditions as illustrative examples, it questions what it means and feels like to trust, and how, where and by whom such feelings can be enhanced or undermined. It explores some of the ways in which discourses of risk are mobilized and embodied to create a crisis of trust, asking; what kind of selves and emotionalities surface, and what are the health outcomes, when bodies are viewed as ‘at risk’? Visualizing technologies that probe the interior for data play an increasingly prominent role in healthcare, and are typically considered more trustworthy sources of knowledge about the body than anything that might be produced by the tech-free sensing self. However, not all (even ‘physical’) trauma can be seen or quantified, and not all information is equal. The paper reflects on the emotional dissonance that ensues when one's own perceptions and representations are at odds with those of medical experts for whom one is supposed to perform trust. It examines the feeling rules that are broken when we fail to appreciate our treatment at their hands, and asks: What happens when we resist expert author-ity by telling different stories about our embodied selves, ones that make space for emotions in contexts where they are rarely seen to count, and where only what can be measured matters?     

EVERYONE AT THE TABLE: Religious Activism and Health Care Reform in Massachusetts

Using interviews with activists and Lisa Sowle Cahill's concept of participatory discourse, this article examines how the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) built solidarity for the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law. The analysis explores the morally formative connections between GBIO's activist strategies and its public liturgy for reform. The solidarity generated through this interfaith coalition's activities and religious arguments contrasts with two standard types of policy discourse, economics and liberalism. Arguments for health care reform based on economic efficiency or positive rights are hampered by the lack of solidarity in U.S. political culture. GBIO's congregation‐based organizing offers a performative model of public argumentation for religious groups committed to achieving affordable, quality health care for all Americans.     

Computing with connections in visual recognition of origami objects

This paper summarizes our initial foray in tackling Artificial Intelligence problems using a connectionist approach. The particular task chosen was the visual recognition of objects in the Origami world as defined by. The two major questions answered were how to construct a connectionist network to represent and recognize projected line drawings of Origami objects and what advantages such an approach would have. The structure of the resulting connectionist network can be described as a hierarchy of parameter or feature spaces with each node in each of the feature spaces representing a hypothesis about the possible existence of a specific geometric feature of an Origami object. The dynamic behavior of the network is a form of iterative refinement or relaxation whose major characteristic is to prefer more globally interesting interpretations of the input over locally pleasing ones. Examples from the implementation illustrate the system's ability to deal with forms of noise, occlusion and missing information. Other benefits are an inherently parallel approach to vision, limitation of explicit ordering of the search involved in matching model to instance and the elimination of backtracking due to the sharing of partial results as the search progresses. Extensions and problems are also discussed.     

A longitudinal study on the relationship between adolescents’ medical drama viewing and speeding

The present study aimed to examine whether watching medical drama had a long-term protective effect on speeding behavior. Specifically, this research examined the extent to which medical drama viewing in adolescence predicts risk perceptions, crash fear, speeding attitudes and self-reported speeding behavior in early adulthood. Using a longitudinal research method, 487 adolescents (M_age = 17.7 at baseline) who responded to an earlier survey were re-interviewed five years later. Structural equation modeling indicated that more medical drama viewing at baseline was associated with increased risk perception and higher driving-related fear five years later. The fear of being involved in a traffic crash appeared to be associated with less favorable attitudes toward speeding. Furthermore, in line with the expectations, these speeding attitudes were a significant predictor of self-reported speeding behavior. These results help to provide a better understanding of the relationship between media use and subsequent risk-taking, and have implications for prevention efforts.