Marianne Schmid Mast

University of Lausanne | UNIL · Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC)

Background. For more than a decade, the literature has been dominated by the notion that medical students may paradoxically lose their empathy during medical school. However, medical curricula have significantly evolved, and the question is whether this is still the case. The present study aimed to describe the trajectories of different dimensions...

In recent decades, recurring global crises have stemmed from management shortcomings in various organizations, particularly within the financial sector (e.g., the 2000 stock market crash, 2011 UBS rogue trader scandal). Excessive risk-taking attitudes by traders and investment and risk managers are tied to these crises. Identifying high performance...

Background Medical students’ rate of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and burnout have been shown to be higher than those of the same-age general population. However, longitudinal studies spanning the whole course of medical school are scarce and present contradictory findings. This study aims to analyze the longitudinal evolution of mental...

Immersive virtual reality-based training and research are becoming more and more popular and are in continuous development. For instance, it is now possible to be trained by one’s virtual self (i.e., doppelganger), meaning that a trainee can participate in a training program in which the trainer resembles the trainee. While past research involving...

Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated media is used in entertainment, art, education, and marketing. AI-generated faces or facial expressions using deepfake-based technologies might also contribute to nonverbal behavior studies. As a proof of concept, in this research, we test the replicability of past results regarding the positive effects of fac...

Background. Medical students’ rate of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and burnout have been shown to be higher than those of the same-age general population. However, longitudinal studies spanning the whole course of medical school are scarce and present contradictory findings. This study aims to analyze the longitudinal evolution of mental...

Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated media is used in entertainment, art, education, and marketing. AI-generated faces or facial expressions using deepfake-based technologies might also contribute to nonverbal behavior studies. As a proof of concept, in this research, we test the replicability of past results regarding the positive effects of fac...

Despite the growing number of organizations interested in the use of asynchronous video interviews (AVIs), little is known about its impact on interviewee reactions and behavior. We randomly assigned participants ( N = 299) from two different countries (Switzerland and India) to a face‐to‐face interview, an avatar‐based video interview (with an ava...

The use of corpora represents a widespread methodology in interpersonal perception and impression formation studies. Nonetheless, the development of a corpus using the traditional approach involves a procedure that is both time- and cost-intensive and might lead to methodological flaws (e.g., high invasiveness). This might in turn lower the interna...

Structured interviews often feature past‐behavior questions, where applicants are asked to tell a story about past work experience. Applicants often experience difficulties producing such stories. Automatic analyses of applicant behavior in responding to past‐behavior questions may constitute a basis for delivering feedback and thus helping them im...

Our study focuses on the promotion of sustainable actions that individuals can adopt at home. We tested the effectiveness of different formats of conducting promotional campaigns providing pro-environmental knowledge. Specifically, we assessed whether the same message delivered in print, in a video or in an immersive virtual environment, via a virt...

Experimental research conducted with student participants has documented that feeling powerful or powerless (psychological power) affects outcomes with high practical relevance for organizations. However, it is unclear how results from these studies can be generalized to organizational settings in which individuals have various roles that imply mor...

Leadership as a social influence process has always involved a complex set of phenomena that demands an interdisciplinary lens. Leadership scholarship has now entered into a digital era. In a digital era, the overall phenomenon is changing, as are the tools through which we study it, demanding a new “lens” through which we view leadership. Yet, thi...

Objective: To investigate how medical students' empathy is related to their mental health and burnout. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 886 medical students from curriculum years 1-6. The cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions of empathy were measured with self-report questionnaires and an emotion recognition test. Regressi...

Introduction Physician interpersonal competence is crucial for patient care. How interpersonal competence develops during undergraduate medical education is thus a key issue. Literature on the topic consists predominantly of studies on empathy showing a trend of decline over the course of medical school. However, most existing studies have focused...

Accurately reading others’ emotions, personality, intentions etc. (interpersonal accuracy, IPA) is crucial to successful interpersonal interactions. However, most existing tests to measure IPA focus on people’s ability to recognize emotions and do not specifically target the workplace. The newly developed WIPS (Workplace Interpersonal Perception Sk...

The study of nonverbal behavior (NVB), and in particular kinesics (i.e., face and body motions), is typically seen as cost-intensive. However, the development of new technologies (e.g., ubiquitous sensing, computer vision, and algorithms) and approaches to study social behavior [i.e., social signal processing (SSP)] makes it possible to train algor...

The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many ha...

When seeing algorithms err, we trust them less and decrease using them compared to after seeing humans err; this is called algorithm aversion. This paper builds on the algorithm aversion literature and the third-party reactions to mistreatment model to investigate a wider array of reactions to erring algorithms. Using an experimental design deploye...

Interpersonal skills require mastering a wide range of competencies such as communication and adaptation to different situations. Effective training includes the use of videos in which role models perform the desired behaviours such that trainees can learn through behavioural mimicry. However, new technologies allow new ways of designing training....

Power in experimental research has been commonly induced by methods that raise concerns regarding demand effects. In this paper, we investigate the empirical relevance of these concerns. In an incentivized online study (N = 1632), we manipulated the method of power manipulation (power priming vs. resource allocation), the level of power (high-power...

Objectives Physician self-disclosure is typically seen as patient-centered communication because it creates rapport and is seen as an expression of empathy. Given that many physician behaviors affect patients differently depending on whether they are shown by a female or male physician, we set out to test whether physician self-disclosure affects p...

Behavioral adaptability is the ability to adapt one's interpersonal behavior to the expectations of the social interaction partners. In this paper, we investigated two factors that impact the extent to which people express behavioral adaptability. First, we investigated whether behavioral adaptability depends on the interaction partners' social cat...

Asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) are increasingly used by organizations in their hiring process. In this mode of interviewing, the applicants are asked to record their responses to predefined interview questions using a webcam via an online platform. AVIs have increased usage due to employers' perceived benefits in terms of costs and scale. How...

In an evaluative context, does the impression we think we convey to others matter, such that the more positive we think the impression conveyed is, the better we perform? Does this belief need to be accurate to perform better? We investigate the role of meta-perception and meta-accuracy in a public speaking context by asking participants to deliver...

An individual’s speaking time behavior in groups is influenced by many elements. We investigate whether giving feedback on speaking time about how much each group member talks and whether group task interdependence influence hierarchy emergence in problem-solving groups. We also aim to investigate how these effects emerge by looking at whether init...

Objective: The present study explores students' perspective on the added value of a virtual patient (VP) simulation as part of a breaking bad news training in undergraduate medical education. Methods: The VP simulation allows trying out and practicing different ways of disclosing a cancer diagnosis to a VP (avatar) and to react to emotionally-la...

Interpersonal accuracy (IA), which is the ability to correctly assess others, is an important aspect of successful social interactions. But what exactly are the advantages of being interpersonally accurate in social interactions, and how does being able to correctly read and interpret nonverbal cues in others affect the outcomes of social interacti...

We use a Brunswikian lens model approach to address the kinds of emotions powerful people feel and express and how emotional expressions influence power perception. For instance, when a target expresses anger, happiness, or pride, the target is perceived as more powerful. Conversely, when a target expresses shame or sadness, the target is perceived...

Objective: This paper reports on the continuation of an initial study that demonstrated the effectiveness, as rated by experts, of an undergraduate training in breaking bad news (BBN) using simulated patient (SP) and individual feedback. The current study aimed to further explore whether such an individualized training approach also has positive e...

Objective: Healthcare communication research, teaching, and practice is in a period of innovation and disruption from new technologies, consumerization, and emerging models of care delivery. The goal of this commentary is to discuss perceived barriers and provide baseline metrics of academic-industry partnership in health communication. Methods:...

The ability to recognise others’ emotions from nonverbal cues (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is measured with performance-based tests and has many positive correlates. Although researchers have long proposed that ERA is related to general mental ability or intelligence, a comprehensive analysis of this relationship is lacking. For instance, it...

We review the scientific evidence concerning the relation between power and social information processing. Does having or obtaining power affect how we perceive and judge our social interaction partners and how accurately we do this? High power individuals perceive others as more agentic and tend to project characteristics of themselves onto others...

The Cambridge Handbook of Technology and Employee Behavior - edited by Richard N. Landers February 2019

Empathy is a well-defined active ingredient in clinical encounters. To measure empathy, the current gold standard is behavioral coding (i.e., trained coders attribute overall ratings of empathy to clinician behaviors within an encounter), which is labor intensive and subject to important reliability challenges. Recently, an alternative measurement...

In two studies we investigated the behavioral process through which visible female leader role models empower women in leadership tasks. We proposed that women tend to mimic the powerful (open) body postures of successful female role models, thus leading to more empowered behavior and better performance on a challenging leadership task, a process w...

Les leaders qui accumulent les succès ont un point commun : ils sont experts en interactions sociales. Ils s'expriment clairement et efficacement, ils comprennent leurs collaborateurs et s'adaptent à toutes les situations. En tant que leader, vous devez donc non seulement savoir inspirer, motiver et convaincre votre entourage, mais également être à...

We present five studies investigating the predictive validity of thin slices of nonverbal behavior (NVB). Predictive validity of thin slices refers to how well behavior slices excerpted from longer video predict other measured variables. Using six NVBs, we compared predictive validity of slices of different lengths with that obtained when coding is...

People behave differently in different situations. With the advances in ubiquitous sensing technologies, it is now easier to capture human behavior across multiple situations automatically and unobtrusively. We investigate human behavior across two situations that are ubiquitous in hospitality (job interview and reception desk) with the objective o...

Interpersonal accuracy, the ability to correctly assess other people’s states or traits, has been studied for over 60 years, and many correlates have been uncovered. Furthermore, theorists routinely propose that having this kind of skill matters for social and workplace outcomes. However, much of the empirical work concerned with interpersonal accu...

Objective: Understanding nonverbal behavior is key to the research, teaching, and practice of clinical communication. However, the measurement of nonverbal behavior can be complex and time-intensive. There are many decisions to make and factors to consider when coding nonverbal behaviors. Methods: Based on our experience conducting nonverbal beh...

Objective: To compare two different approaches that are commonly used to measure accuracy of personality judgment: the trait accuracy approach wherein participants discriminate among targets on a given trait, thus making intertarget comparisons, and the profile accuracy approach wherein participants discriminate between traits for a given target, t...

Objective: This paper is based on a 2017 Baltimore International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) plenary presentation by the first author and addresses how female and male physicians' communication is perceived and evaluated differently. Female physicians use patient-centered communication which is the interaction style clearly pr...

A physician who communicates in a patient-centered way is a physician who adapts his or her communication style to what each patient needs. In order to do so, the physician has to (1) accurately assess each patient's states and traits (interpersonal accuracy) and (2) possess a behavioral repertoire to choose from in order to actually adapt his or h...

We present how immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology can be used for interpersonal skills training in organizations. We review the distinguishing features of IVR and its potential strengths and limitations for interpersonal skills training. There is a pressing need for more empirical evidence, which is why we propose a research agenda with the...

Les comportements discriminatoires en entreprise sont encore une réalité bien présente. Les recherches passées ont démontré que les comportements discriminatoires adoptés par les membres d’une organisation ne sont pas toujours le résultat de leur propre volonté, mais de pression émanant de leurs supérieur.e.s hiérarchiques. Nous qualifions ce phéno...

In the service industry, customers often assess quality of service based on the behavior, perceived personality, and other attributes of the front line service employees they interact with. Interpersonal communication during these interactions is key to determine customer satisfaction and perceived service quality. We present a computational framew...

Airbnb is changing the landscape of the hospitality industry. For guests, the process of selecting a place to stay is a type of zero-acquaintance situation, and to this day little is known about the inferences that guests make about Airbnb listings. Environmental psychologists were among the first studying home environments, but most works were bas...

People tend to like objects that are looked at by others, especially if the person looking at the object expresses a positive emotion. But not all positive emotions are equal. We investigated the effect of third party gazing while expressing subtle positive emotions on perceivers’ subsequent preferences and evaluations of objects and people. In two...

Interpersonal interactions and relationships can be described as unfolding along two perpendicular dimensions: verticality (power, dominance, control; Burgoon & Hoobler, 2002; Hall, Coats, & LeBeau, 2005) and horizontality (affiliativeness, warmth, friendliness; Kiesler, 1983;Wiggins, 1979). The vertical dimension refers to how much control or infl...

Objective: Training medical students in breaking bad news (BBN) in oncology may be key to improve patient care in an area where many physicians tend to be uncomfortable. Given the lack of evidence in the literature, this study aimed to assess empirically the impact of 2 teaching strategies to prepare students for the task of BBN in oncology: one-t...

Previous research investigated the effects of power poses at the behavioral, subjective, and neuroendocrine level. However, it is not clear whether the same effects would be obtained also by just imagining, rather than adopting, a power pose. We planned to investigate this question by asking 200 participants to either perform or imagine a constrict...

First impressions play a critical role in the hospitality industry and have been shown to be closely linked to the behavior of the person being judged. In this work, we implemented a behavioral training framework for hospitality students with the goal of improving the impressions that other people make about them. We outline the challenges associat...

The present study investigated individual differences in nonverbal self-accuracy (NVSA), which is the ability to accurately recall one's own nonverbal behavior following a social interaction. Participants were videotaped during a social interaction with a stranger and then asked to recall how often they displayed five common nonverbal behaviors. Co...

The approach/inhibition theory by Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson (2003) predicts that powerful people should feel more positive and less negative emotions. To date, results of studies investigating this prediction are inconsistent. We fill this gap with four studies in which we investigated the role of different conceptualizations of power: felt...

In this chapter, we discuss how interpersonal accuracy – the ability to accurately assess others’ states and traits – plays out in hierarchies, particularly those related to workplace and leadership. We begin by discussing the importance of interpersonal accuracy for workplace relationships, such as those with customers, co-workers, and among subor...

We are constantly forming impressions about those around us. Social interaction depends on our understanding of interpersonal behavior - assessing one another's personality, emotions, thoughts and feelings, attitudes, deceptiveness, group memberships, and other personal characteristics through facial expressions, body language, voice and spoken lan...

Research on people's accuracy in perceiving other people's states, traits, and social attributes has existed for over 100 years. In the past few decades, however, it has exploded into a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and international pursuit with relevance to all areas of social, interpersonal, and intrapersonal life. However, researchers typically w...

We tested whether the personality trait of agreeableness predicts different individual reactions to the level of nonverbal affiliativeness shown by a physician, in the context of a simulated bad news delivery. We predicted that individuals with high levels of agreeableness would react better to a physician adopting a highly affiliative communicatio...

Using the theoretical framework of circumplex models, we investigated how the actual nonverbal behaviors of interviewers can hinder female applicants' performance in simulated job interviews. Fifty-seven dyads conducted mock job interviews for a managerial position. Applicants were always women, whereas interviewers were either men or women. Interv...

In this study, we tested whether physicians’ ability to adapt their nonverbal behavior to their patients’ preferences for a paternalistic interaction style is related to positive consultation outcomes. We hypothesized that the more physicians adapt their nonverbal dominance behavior to match their patients’ preferences for physician paternalism, th...

Female leaders are typically evaluated less favorably than their male counterparts. Since physicians are perceived as being high in status and power just like leaders, we propose to examine to what extent female doctors are affected by the same evaluations as female leaders in general. We present a review of the literature showing how the sex of th...

In newly formed groups, informal hierarchies emerge automatically and readily. In this study, we argue that emergent group hierarchies enhance group performance (Hypothesis 1) and we assume that the more the power hierarchy within a group corresponds to the task-competence differences of the individual group members, the better the group performs (...

We investigated whether including an applicant’s photograph on a resume boosts or hampers the accurate assessment of that person’s (Big Five) personality traits and intelligence. A group of 114 participants rated 8 applicants (4 men and 4 women) with respect to their personality traits and intelligence. We used a 3 × 2 (Condition [resume with photo...

Previous research suggests that female physicians may not receive appropriate credit in patients' eyes for their patient-centered skills compared to their male counterparts. An experiment was conducted to determine whether a performance of higher (versus lower) verbal patient-centeredness would result in a greater difference in analogue patient sat...

The goal of the present review is to explain how immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can be used for the study of social interactions and how the use of virtual humans in immersive virtual environments can advance research and application in many different fields. Researchers studying individual differences in social interactions are ty...

There is little consensus regarding how verticality (social power, dominance, and status) is related to accurate interpersonal perception. The relation could be either positive or negative, and there could be many causal processes at play. The present article discusses the theoretical possibilities and presents a meta-analysis of this question. In...

This research examines correlates of accuracy in judging Big Five traits from first-person text excerpts. Participants in six studies were recruited from psychology courses or online. In each study, participants performed a task of judging personality from text and performed other ability tasks and/or filled out questionnaires. Participants who wer...

In this article, we show how the use of state-of-the-art methods in computer science based on machine perception and learning allows the unobtrusive capture and automated analysis of interpersonal behavior in real time (social sensing). Given the high ecological validity of the behavioral sensing, the ease of behavioral-cue extraction for large gro...