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Nonverbal signals

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The purpose of this chapter is to inform educators and teachers about the central role of communication in today's classroom, confronted with the actual reality of cultural diversity. That includes the cultural diversity of children but also of the educators. The author ia particularly interested in helping teachers understand the ways in which diversity influences classroom communication and learning orientations. Analyzing intercultural competencies, there will be a better understanding of student-teacher communication and interaction. The new way of implementing the intercultural education ideas is the culturally responsive teaching, presented in this chapter with its most important characteristics. Teachers can also use different means of communication in classrooms, and that is why the author gave a great importance to exploring the communication skills that are indispensable to any teacher in his/her educational interaction. All these modern educational elements are included in a larger ecological perspective, which includes behavioral modification and a better integration in the environment.
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The aim of the publication is to identify dynamic changes in the mentoring phenomenon in the context of the development of information and communication technologies. Modern e-mentoring uses many platforms and digital tools to facilitate building mentor-mentee relationships. The theoretical part of the monograph reviews the literature on new forms of mentoring on the Internet. The practical one shows good practices in the use of e-mentoring in the business environment.
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Introduction Human emotions can be complex to interpret as they have multiple sources and are often times ambiguous, for example, when the signals sent by different channels of communication are inconsistent. Our study investigates the interaction of linguistic and facial expressions of emotions. Methods In two experiments, participants read short scenarios in German containing a direct utterance with positive or negative emotive markers, in combination with different facial expressions as still images of the speaker (i.e., the protagonist in the story). They answered questions about their perception regarding the intensity of the emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness), the properties of the expresser (e.g., honesty, warmth, likeability) and their relation to the addressee (e.g., closeness), as well as the expresser intention (e.g., irony, joke). Results The findings suggest that facial expressions have a more dominant role in the emotion perception in comparison to emotive markers. Furthermore, consistent and inconsistent combinations of emotive markers and facial expressions convey distinct social meanings and communicative intentions. Conclusion This research points to the importance to consider emotive markers in the emotional context that they occur in.
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In recent years, daily practice at universities all over the world has involved online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching online requires knowledge of new ways to engage with the students, but limited research concerning pedagogical aspects of online formats has been conducted to examine this further. Research shows that the teacher–student relationship is a critical factor in a student’s development and learning in both traditional and online teaching. Limited research has examined teacher–student relationships in online teaching at universities further. In the present pilot study, a university mathematics teacher’s digital relational competence is examined and visualized by using Halliday’s Systematic Function Linguistics to explore what is said, the verbal language, and Burgoon and Hobbler’s framework to visualize how it is said, i.e., the nonverbal language. Data were collected in autumn 2020 and involved a seminar with ten pre-service special educators in mathematics in Sweden; approximately 3 h of video-recorded material was collected. The result shows that the teacher’s verbal language, such as the choice of questions, personal pronouns, and being personal, but also her nonverbal language, involving gestures, facial expressions, and paralanguage, are essential when building supportive teacher–student relationships in mathematics.
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Here we explored nonverbal actions women use to flirt competitively against each other for the purposes of accessing a mate. We also investigated the perceived effectiveness of these competitive flirting actions. Using act nomination, Study 1 (n = 91) yielded 11 actions (eye contact with the man, dancing in his line of sight, smiling at him, touching him, giggling at his jokes, butting in between the other woman and the man, showing distaste for her, brushing against him, hugging him, flirting with other men, waving to him) for competitive flirtation against other women. Actions that signal possession (e.g., tie-signs) were predicted to be perceived as the most effective. While other actions were included in Study 2 (n = 139), results showed the most effective actions were tie-signs: touching him, initiating eye contact, hugging him, giggling at his jokes, and butting in between him and the rival. These findings are discussed in terms of prior research.
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Communicating in social and public environments are considered professional skills that can strongly influence career development. Therefore, it is important to proper train and evaluate students in this kind of abilities so that they can better interact in their professional relationships, during the resolution of problems, negotiations and conflict management. This is a complex problem as it involves corporal analysis and the assessment of aspects that until recently were almost impossible to quantitatively measure. Nowadays, a number of new technologies and sensors have being developed for the capture of different kinds of contextual and personal information, but these technologies were not yet fully integrated inside learning settings. In this context, this paper presents a framework to facilitate the analysis and detection of patterns of students in oral presentations. Four steps are proposed for the given framework: Data collection, Statistical Analysis, Clustering, and Sequential Pattern Mining. Data Collection step is responsible for the collection of students interactions during presentations and the arrangement of data for further analysis. Statistical Analysis provides a general understanding of the data collected by showing the differences and similarities of the presentations along the semester. The Clustering stage segments students into groups according to well-defined attributes helping to observe different corporal patterns of the students. Finally, Sequential Pattern Mining step complements the previous stages allowing the identification of sequential patterns of postures in the different groups. The framework was tested in a case study with data collected from 222 freshman students of Computer Engineering (CE) course at three different times during two different years. The analysis made it possible to segment the presenters into three distinct groups according to their corporal postures. The statistical analysis helped to assess how the postures of the students evolved throughout each year. The sequential pattern mining provided a complementary perspective for data evaluation and helped to observe the most frequent postural sequences of the students. Results show the framework could be used as a guidance to provide students automated feedback throughout their presentations and can serve as background information for future comparisons of students presentations from different undergraduate courses.
Article
Ratings were made by 120 subjects of 18 video‐tapes in which verbal and non‐verbal cues for Inferior, Equal and Superior were varied and combined in a 3 times 3 design. The typed messages (verbal alone) were rated by further subjects, as were video‐tapes of a performer reading numbers (non‐verbal alone); the two sets of cues alone had identical effects on ratings. In combination, both kinds of cue had a reduced effect, but it was found that non‐verbal cues now had 4.3 times the effect of verbal cues on shifts of ratings, and accounted for 10.3 times as most variance; verbal cues were only able to act as multipliers of consistent nonverbal cues. There was little evidence of double‐bind effects. Analysis of individual differences showed that females were relatively more responsive to non‐verbal compared with verbal cues, and that more neurotic subjects found the combination of Superior (non‐verbal) with Inferior (verbal) unpleasant, and responded more to verbal cues for Inferior‐Superior.
Book
What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? In the season of Trump and Hillary, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals."It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNN
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One of the first psychologists to investigate experimentally the role of gaze in human behaviour was Michael Argyle. In 1963 he set up a research group at Oxford with Ted Crossman and Adam Kendon, to study non-verbal communication in human social interaction, which included gaze as an important aspect of this behaviour. Shortly afterwards, Mark Cook joined this group which was funded until 1975, during which time considerable research on gaze had been carried out both at Oxford and elsewhere. This book summarises much of the work done in this field up until that time.
Article
This review of nonverbal communication research, which centers on contributions made by communication scholars, summarizes major thought and research along the following lines: 1) issues regarding definitions and approaches to the study of nonverbal communication, 2) research in the variable-analytic tradition, 3) structural research on code, channel, source, and receiver elements, and 4) functional perspectives.