How What We See and What We Know Influence Iconic Gesture Production

In face-to-face communication, speakers typically integrate information acquired through different sources, including what they see and what they know, into their communicative messages. In this study, we asked how these different input sources influence the frequency and type of iconic gestures produced by speakers during a communication task, under two degrees of task complexity. Specifically, we investigated whether speakers gestured differently when they had to describe an object presented to them as an image or as a written word (input modality) and, additionally, when they were allowed to explicitly name the object or not (task complexity). Our results show that speakers produced more gestures when they attended to a picture. Further, speakers more often gesturally depicted shape information when attended to an image, and they demonstrated the function of an object more often when they attended to a word. However, when we increased the complexity of the task by forbidding speakers to name the target objects, these patterns disappeared, suggesting that speakers may have strategically adapted their use of iconic strategies to better meet the task’s goals. Our study also revealed (independent) effects of object manipulability on the type of gestures produced by speakers and, in general, it highlighted a predominance of molding and handling gestures. These gestures may reflect stronger motoric and haptic simulations, lending support to activation-based gesture production accounts.     

Staff burnout from a social perspective

Physical distress, emotional distress, and cognitive fatigue are common symptons of burnout. The consequences of burnout affect the effectiveness of the care giver, the client, and the agency employing the burned out worker. The authors emphasize the societal context in which we all work and the changes in this context that have led to changes in the attitudes, behaviors, and roles of care givers and recipients. The change of role perception and the role behavior has occurred in a wide variety of public agencies. The authors suggest establishing agency guidelines for personal and system limitations concerning assistance to clients. Care givers can also work on an individual basis with clients and outline limits of assistance. As more people seek assistance when resources are limited, the need to build realistic expectations for the care giver, client, and agencies increase.     

Contextual Effects on Surprise Expressions: A Developmental Study

Although research succeeds in eliciting spontaneous feelings of surprise with participants, these participants rarely show a prototypical expression of raising eyebrows, opening mouth, and widening eyes. In other words, there seems to be a discrepancy between the display and feeling of surprise. To get a better understanding of this discrepancy, we assessed what factors influence the display of surprise in children (study 1) and adults (study 2). In both studies, we conducted a quiz-like experiment, in which we manipulated the social context (participants either competed or collaborated), and various quiz questions to extract reactions of surprise (either caused by unexpectedly correct or unexpectedly incorrect answers). Results show that cause and social context did not affect the appearance of specific features in participants’ surprise display. However, we did find these factors to interact with regards to the intensity of perceived surprise displays of adults. For children, these relations were less complex. Overall, we can conclude that the expression of surprise is indeed moderated by contextual factors, namely cause of the surprise, social context, and age.