Alicia McMullan’s research while affiliated with University of Ottawa and other places

The transfer of patient care from one health care worker to another involves communication in high-pressure contexts that are often vulnerable to error. This research project captured current practices for handoffs during the critical care stage of surgical recovery in a hospital setting. The objective was to characterize information flow during transfer and identify patterns of communication between nurses and physicians. Observations were used to document communication exchanges. The data were analyzed qualitatively according to the types of information exchanged and verbal behavior types. Reporting and questions were the most common verbal behaviors, and retrospective medical information was the focus of information exchange. The communication was highly interactive when discussing patient status and future care plans. Nurses proactively asked questions to capture a large proportion of the information they needed. Findings reflect positive and constructive patterns of communication during handoffs in the observed hospital unit. Copyright © 2015 American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Teamwork is prevalent in many work contexts. This study explored the similarities and differences in teamwork processes across different healthcare work contexts with the aim of assessing knowledge transfer feasibility. The research approach was to aggregate team communication analyses from four healthcare contexts to uncover teamwork similarities and differences. The four healthcare contexts included two handoffs and two surgery contexts. The communication analysis segmented communication into meaningful sequences. It categorized utterances into content categories and verbal behaviors. There were a few similar content categories across the four contexts. A clear information structure emerged in the two handoff contexts. In addition, there were more dialogues and requests in the surgeries compared to more reports in the handoffs. The content similarities suggest that some knowledge is transferable among the contexts. However, the differences in communication patterns reflect fundamental differences between handoff and surgery contexts in some teamwork processes. This research demonstrated that using communication analysis can uncover similarities and differences in team cognition and teamwork processes across work contexts. This in turn can help determine what knowledge and methods pertaining to team training, procedures, and technology are transferable across the contexts.

The human face is a rich source of information regarding underlying emotional states. Facial expressions are crucial in showing the emotions as well as increasing the quality of communication and speech comprehension. The detailed study of facial actions involved in the expression of the six universal emotions [1] has helped the computer graphics community develop realistic facial animations. Yet the visual mechanisms by which these facial expressions are altered or combined to convey more subtle information remains less well understood by behavioural psychologists and animators. This lack of a strong theoretical basis for combining facial actions has resulted in the use of ad-hoc methods for blending facial expression in animations [2--3]. They mainly consider the facial movements for transient or combined expressions a simple mathematical function of the main expressions involved. The methods that have emerged are therefore computationally tractable, but the question of their "perceptual" and "psychological" validity has not yet been answered. Examples of such methods are "Sum of two expressions with or without limits," "Weighted averaging," and "MAX operator".