The application of the satir model of family therapy to the families in Hong Kong: A personal reflection

Practitioners in Hong Kong have shown an increasing interest in various family therapy approaches since the 1980s. This paper offers a critique of the major concepts and techniques of the Satir model applied to families in Hong Kong. Cultural considerations are examined in relation to the family structure and hierarchy, the Chinese self and self-esteem, communication patterns, and family rules. Implications for the application of the Satir model of family therapy in Hong Kong are discussed.     

Masculine Ideology,Sexual Communication,and Sexual Self‐Efficacy Among Parenting Adolescent Couples

This study examined the relationship between traditional masculine role norms (status, toughness, anti‐femininity) and psychosocial mechanisms of sexual risk (sexual communication, sexual self‐efficacy) among young, low‐income, and minority parenting couples. Between 2007 and 2011, 296 pregnant adolescent females and their male partners were recruited from urban obstetrics clinics in Connecticut. Data regarding participants' beliefs in masculine role norms, frequency of general sex communication and sexual risk communication, and sexual self‐efficacy were collected via computer‐assisted self‐interviews. Generalized estimating equation (GEE) models were used to test for actor effects (whether a person's masculine role norms at baseline influence the person's own psychosocial variables at 6‐month follow‐up) and partner effects (whether a partner's masculine role norms at baseline influence an actor's psychosocial variables at 6‐month follow‐up). Results revealed that higher actor status norms were significantly associated with more sexual self‐efficacy, higher actor toughness norms were associated with less sexual self‐efficacy, and higher actor anti‐femininity norms were significantly associated with less general sex communication, sexual risk communication, and sexual self‐efficacy. No partner effects were found. These results indicate a need for redefining masculine role norms through family centered approaches in pregnant or parenting adolescent couples to increase sexual communication and sexual self‐efficacy. Further research is needed to understand partner effects in the context of a relationship and on subsequent sexual risk behavior.     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

Acquisition of social referencing via discrimination training in infants

This experiment investigated social referencing as a form of discriminative learning in which maternal facial expressions signaled the consequences of the infant's behavior in an ambiguous context. Eleven 4- and 5-month-old infants and their mothers participated in a discrimination-training procedure using an ABAB design. Different consequences followed infants' reaching toward an unfamiliar object depending on the particular maternal facial expression. During the training phases, a joyful facial expression signaled positive reinforcement for the infant reaching for an ambiguous object, whereas a fearful expression signaled aversive stimulation for the same response. Baseline and extinction conditions were implemented as controls. Mothers' expressions acquired control over infants' approach behavior for all participants. All participants ceased to show discriminated responding during the extinction phase. The results suggest that 4- and 5-month-old infants can learn social referencing via discrimination training.     

Relational Message Interpretations of Nonverbal Matching Behavior: An Application of the Social Meaning Model

Abstract

The social meaning model asserts that some nonverbal behaviors have consensually recognized relational meanings within a given social community. According to this perspective, the interpretations made by encoders, decoders, and 3rd-party observers of the same nonverbal behavior should be congruent. The authors applied the model to the identification of relational message interpretations of nonverbal matching behavior. Confederates either matched or did not match the nonverbal behaviors of conversational participants while being watched by nonparticipant observers. All three nonconfederate participants provided interpretations of the confederates' relational messages. As the authors had expected, there were moderate correlations between the 3 perspectives, with observers usually providing less favorable assessments than the conversational participants. The authors also examined the influence of positive and negative stimulus behavior on relational message interpretations.     

Meaning,grounding, and the construction of social reality

Culture has become a critical concept for social psychology over the past quarter of a century. Yet, cultural dynamics, the process and mechanism of formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture, has begun to be investigated only recently. This article reports the current state of play of a research program that takes cultural dynamics as its central question. In this approach, humans are construed as meaning making animals that create, recreate, and exchange information, and turn it into a meaningful basis for action. The locus of meaning making and remaking is an everyday joint activity. The grounding model of cultural transmission describes how cultural information is deliberately or inadvertently transmitted in a joint activity. As we go about our business of living our daily lives, we ground information to our common ground, and construct a social reality that is mutually meaningful and yet only local. If locally grounded information is further generalized to a large collective and disseminated through social networks, repeated and iterative activations of the grounding process maintain the social reality of the collective that we take for granted. Implications of the grounding model of cultural transmission and future research directions are discussed.     

行为免疫系统对个体就医行为倾向的影响

研究首次考察了行为免疫系统与个体就医行为倾向的关系。3个研究一致显示：行为免疫系统特质性激活水平较高的个体更容易对就医持消极态度和延迟就医; 情境性激活行为免疫系统会使得个体更不愿意就医和更倾向于延迟就医; 且行为免疫系统激活对就医态度和就医延迟倾向的影响以对就医感染风险的感知为中介。这支持了进化失配假说, 提示行为免疫系统对现代医学可能缺乏进化的适应性, 并为理解现代人类就医行为提供了新的理论视角。     

Two-step communication for the interaction between automated vehicles and pedestrians

An important challenge of automated vehicles (AV) will be the cooperative interaction with surrounding road users such as pedestrians. One solution to compensate for the missing driver-pedestrian interaction might be explicit communication via external human machine interfaces (eHMIs). Additionally, implicit communication such as a vehicle pitch motion might support AVs when interacting with pedestrians. While previous work explored various explicit and implicit communication cues, these concepts communicated the intention of the AV at one single time point. Currently, empirical findings on two-step communication lack so far. In this study, we empirically test the effect of a two-step AV communication that uses an implicit cue at a long distance and subsequently provides an implicit or explicit cues at a short distance. We compared its efficiency to single-step communication concepts providing implicit or explicit cues at the shorter distance only. To explore whether the right communication cue is used at the right distance, we analyzed pedestrians’ fixations while approaching an AV using an eye tracking device.We conducted a virtual reality study (N = 30) with AV communication concept that provided an active pitch motion or an eHMI and compared them with a two-step AV communication concept that provided an additional active pitch motion at a long distance when approaching the pedestrian. Furthermore, we recorded pedestrians’ fixation behavior while the AV approached.Consistently to previous work, single-step AV communication showed a beneficial effect on crossing behavior. Pedestrians initiated their crossing earlier while approaching an AV with an active pitch motion or an eHMI compared to the baseline condition. While active pitch motion reduced subjective safety feeling, eHMI increased it. However, the two-step communication concept did not further improve pedestrians’ crossing initiation times and their safety feeling. The pattern of fixation behavior differed as a function of AV distance. When the approaching AV was far away, pedestrians exclusively looked at the environment. During the approach, pedestrians gradually fixated the bumper and the hood and only then the windshield of the AV. Hence, it seems to be useful to present an AV intent communication at a certain distance from the pedestrian. These findings posit the importance of considering pedestrians’ fixation behavior when developing communication concepts between AVs and pedestrians.     

Active vehicle pitch motion for communication in automated driving

The number of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to successively increase in the near future. This development has a considerable impact on the informal communication between AVs and pedestrians. Informal communication with the driver will become obsolete during the interaction with AVs. Literature suggests that external human machine interfaces (eHMIs) might substitute the communication between drivers and pedestrians. In the study, we additionally test a recently discussed type of communication in terms of artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, as an informal communication cue for AVs.N = 54 participants approached AVs in a virtual inner-city traffic environment. We explored the effect of three communication concepts: an artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, eHMI and the combination of both. Moreover, vehicle types (sports car, limousine, SUV) were varied. A mixed-method approach was applied to investigate the participantś crossing behavior and subjective safety feeling. Furthermore, eye movement parameters were recorded as indicators for mental workload.The results revealed that any communication concept drove beneficial effects on the crossing behavior. The participants crossed the road earlier when an active pitch motion was present, as this was interpreted as a stronger braking. Further, the eHMI and a combination of eHMI and active pitch motion had a positive effect on the crossing behavior. The active pitch motion showed no effect on the subjective safety feeling, while eHMI and the combination enhanced the pedestrianś safety feeling while crossing. The use of communication resulted in less mental workload, as evidenced by eye-tracking parameters. Variations of vehicle types did not result in significant main effects but revealed interactions between parameters. The active pitch motion revealed no learning. In contrast, it took participants several trials for the eHMI and the combination condition to affect their crossing behavior. To sum up, this study indicates that communication between AVs and pedestrians can benefit from the consideration of vehicle motion.