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PubMed1997

Psychology of computer use: XLII. Problem solving and humor as a function of computer anxiety.

From a pool of 115 undergraduate women, 20 were placed in a Computer-anxious group and 20 in a Computer-nonanxious group based on their scores on the Computer Anxiety Scale. Half of the subjects were randomly assigned to a group to which the computer presented the problems first and half to a group to whom the computer presented the jokes first. Electromyograms from subjects' zygomatic muscles were monitored as well as palmar skin conductance. Behavioral measures were collected prior to and following the computer interaction. Although the electromyogram for zygomatic tension (smiles) was higher in the jokes condition, indicating that subjects responded to jokes as humorous, Computer-anxious subjects showed increased scores on anxiety and depression and relatively high skin conductance on the initial joke. Subjects with high computer-anxiety had less experience with computers, had lower scores on the Rosenberg Self-esteem test, and, likely not being familiar with computer humor, reacted anxiously.

Anxiety↗

PubMed2003

Extending the use of familiar microswitches to difficult daily situations: two case evaluations.

This study assessed the possibility of successfully extending the use of familiar microswitches by two adults with multiple disabilities to a difficult, standing-with-support situation. Analysis showed that the introduction of the familiar microswitches into this situation increased the participants' constructive engagement; they had repeated contacts with the microswitch systems and activated them fairly consistently. For one of the participants, improvement also occurred in terms of mood (smiling) and standing time.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗

PubMed2004

Assessing influence of stimulation on mood and aberrant behavior of persons with multiple disabilities during brief treadmill sessions.

This study assessed the influence of favorite stimuli on indices of happiness, e.g., smiling or excited vocalizations, and aberrant behavior, e.g., cantilena-like vocalizations or hand waving, of two young adults with multiple disabilities during 5-min. treadmill sessions. Several favorite stimuli, e.g., music and vibratory events, were available for the participants. The stimuli were presented in a rotation fashion during the sessions. To control for the effects of the stimuli, treadmill sessions without stimuli were also conducted. Analysis showed that the treadmill sessions with stimuli led to higher indices of happiness and lower aberrant behavior for both participants, compared to the treadmill sessions without stimuli.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗

PubMed1989

Diabetes and illness image: an analysis of diabetic early-adolescents' self-perception through the Draw-a-person test.

To study the self-projective representations expressed by diabetic children, aged between 10 and 15 yr., and to compare these with representations of a control group the Draw-a-person test associated with those for subsequent Draw-a-sick-person were administered to 23 children regularly checked by an Antidiabetic Centre. The diabetic subjects drew an image of "sick person" having projective elements with a regressive value and denoting a refuge in the past, together with depressive signs of retiring into themselves and of less consideration of the self. Also, the diabetic children seemed to be less prone to the cultural stereotype which requires a smiling and happy image of "the healthy person." At the same time there was also a transparent symbolic defense which allowed the diabetics to adapt variously and to move from their anxious state toward psychological recovery.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1990

Effect of exposure to humorous stimuli on induced depression.

In testing the hypothesis that exposure to humor may be used to relieve the symptoms of depression, 38 female undergraduates were shown depressive slides of the Velten (1968) mood statements and then assigned to one of three groups. One group heard a humorous audiotape, the second group heard a nonhumorous tape, while a third waiting control heard no tape. Heart rate and zygomatic (smile) and corrugator (frown) muscle tensions were recoreded during slide and tape presentations. The Multiple Affect Adjective Check List, administered before and after slide and tape presentations, showed depression induction was successful. Only the humor group decreased depression scores to the preexperimental baseline, although both the humor and waiting groups showed significant decreases in depression scores after the treatment. Zygomatic muscle tension was greater during the humor treatment than other treatments. Heart rate decreased across depression induction for the waiting control only, but increased during the humor and nonhumor treatments. Seven women, who were not included in the above analysis because their initial MAACL depression scores were at least one SD above the mean, showed a paradoxical decrease in depression scores after the depression induction. Implications of the results as they relate to possible interventions for depression are discussed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1993

Attitudes towards and observations of nonverbal communication in a psychotherapeutic greeting situation: III. An interview study of outpatients.

An interview study of 50 Swedish nonpsychotic outpatients treated by some kind of psychotherapy was performed to investigate their attitudes towards and observations of nonverbal communication in a greeting situation according to the Questionnaire on Nonverbal Communication (psychotherapy patients' version) in relation to background factors such as gender, age, education, and profession, interest in psychological matters, "reading articles and books in psychology," duration of professional help for psychological troubles, number of occasions waiting for a new therapist, and number of therapeutic sessions before the interview. The greeting situation was the first time a patient and a therapist met in a waiting room. Test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was larger for items about observation of nonverbal communication than for those about attitudes. Face communication (eye contact and smile) was considered by the subjects to constitute the most important nonverbal communication in the greeting process. The importance of the face in communication was stressed when the patient believed that such communication corresponded to more than 50% of the total communication in general, was female, was elderly, or reported special interest in nonverbal communication in the greeting situation. Some effects of bias were discussed. The analyses also showed a considerable consciousness and observation in the greeting situation by many psychotherapeutic outpatients.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Maternal sex-stereotyping of newborns.

Gender as a social category playing a role in the process of how mothers perceive their newborns was investigated. 94 primiparous mothers completed a survey that included a physical and an emotional scale on their newborn infants. Neither scale as a whole discriminated between the male and female newborns; however, a one-way analysis of variance did identify four statistically discriminating items. The four items evidence maternal perceptions that sex-stereotype males as having broad, wide hands, looking tall and large, looking athletic, and being mostly serious--not smiling but not crying. Maternal sex-stereotyped perceptions for daughters would be the inverse of these. 30 items gave similar maternal ratings between the two gender sets. These confirmed prior work in 1974 showing sex-stereotyped physical characteristics outnumber the emotional characteristics. The similarity of current conclusions to the 1974 data suggests less than expected fundamental parental attitudinal change due to increased societal interest and attention to gender and sex-stereotyping.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Effect on tipping of barman drawing a sun on the bottom of customers' checks.

Previous research has demonstrated that a pleasant drawing (a smiling face) on a restaurant bill increased the number of tips left by clients. A similar experiment was carried out using a drawing of the sun since it is known that tips increase on sunny days. The experiment was carried out in local bars and involved clients who have ordered an espresso coffee. Analysis showed that the drawing of the sun led clients to leave a tip more frequently than when this drawing is not present. The size of the tip left was also higher. The hypothesis of the creation of a positive frame of mind by this stimulus is discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Sharing laughter: the humour of pre-school children with Down syndrome.

Humour and laughter have often been portrayed as fundamentally cultural and social phenomena. They can be used to tell us about children's ability to engage socially and to understand others, but have rarely been explored for this purpose. The present paper summarises the results of a study of simple forms of humour in children with Down syndrome and with autism, two groups which are reported to differ in their sociality and interpersonal understanding. Sixteen children with Down syndrome and 19 children with autism, matched on non-verbal mental age, participated in a cross-sectional study. Parental reports and video-tapes of naturalistic interaction between parents and children were analysed to show that although there were no overall differences in the presence or frequency of child or parent laughter between the two groups, there were differences in what sorts of events were more likely to prompt child laughter, the extent to which child laughter was shared, and how the children responded to others' laughter. The children with Down syndrome were more likely than the children with autism to laugh at funny faces and socially inappropriate acts and less likely to laugh in strange or inexplicable situations, and more likely to laugh at shared events. They also responded to others' laughter with attention or smiles more, and tried to re-elicit it through acts of clowning. Children with Down syndrome are thus active participants in humour and laughter, sharing it at both an emotional and a cultural level.

Child Behavior↗

PubMed1986

Facial- and postural-affect recognition in the mentally handicapped and normal young children.

Facial- and postural-effect recognition was assessed in two groups of normal children (average ages of 5 yr., 3 mo. 5 yrs., 9 mo.) and three groups of retarded subjects (mild, moderate and severe). All subjects were tested under five separate conditions, in an attempt to determine if there was an impairment in affect recognition which varied directly as a function of the degree of mental handicap. In the first condition, subjects were presented with a smiling, pouting and a frowning face on each of 18 trials. They were given one prompt per trial, being instructed to point to the happy, sad or angry stimulus. Expressive postural stimuli devoid of facial features were used in Condition 2, and the same prompting procedure was followed. In the remaining three conditions facial and postural expressions were combined in different ways, so that they either agreed or disagreed. The resulting error data were evaluated by use of an analysis of variance. The principal findings showed that the severely retarded performed very poorly in all conditions. The remaining groups performed relatively well and failed to differ significantly from one another in facial-affect recognition. However, the moderately retarded group was significantly more impaired in postural-affect recognition than were the mildly handicapped and normals.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Children's temperament at 3 months and 6 years old: stability, reliability, and measurement issues.

This study examined the stability of temperament characteristics in children over a 6-year period as well as the reliability of Rothbart's infant and child temperament measures. Thirty-seven mothers rated their firstborns' temperaments using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) at 3 months and the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ) at 6 years of age. Paired t tests between matched IBQ/CBQ subscales revealed that children were rated significantly higher in all behavioral subscales at 6 years, with the exception of Soothability, which remained stable. Correlations among matched IBQ/CBQ subscales showed significant positive relationships between Soothability and Smiling over the 6-year period. Estimates of internal consistency on three of the six IBQ subscales were lower than Rothbart's reported values, whereas the CBQ values were similar. Findings suggest there was not long-term stability in temperament estimates from early infancy to childhood, except in positive affective response to the environment and rate of recovery from distress and excitement. Measurement issues related to using the IBQ/CBQ, assessing temperament at an early age, maturational effects, and implications for practice are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

George Fulford and Victorian patent medicine men: Quack mercenaries or Smilesian entrepreneurs?

In the early twentieth century, a time when patent medicine men were stereotyped as evil and dishonest, G. T. Fulford of Brockville, Ontario made his fortune from an iron pill called Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People. Once successful, Fulford remained in Brockville where he served on the town council and gave generously to charities. In 1900 he was appointed by Laurier to the Senate. When he died in 1905 he was remembered as a kind and ethical man. His story, like that of several other prominent patent medicine men, conforms more with the ideals of Samuel Smiles than with the popular image of disrepute.

Canada↗

PubMed2004

[Development of a brief communication ability scale for Japanese demented elderly].

We developed a brief scale to evaluate communication ability of the demented elderly. This scale assesses not only abilities related to overall communication such as verbal function, judgment and emotional function, but also non-verbal communication such as eye-contact, nodding and smiling. The scale places little burden on the demented elderly subject and takes only a few minutes to perform, even if the dementia is severe. We evaluated 106 demented elderly residents of nursing homes using this brief communication ability scale, and the following results were obtained. The validity of this scale was confirmed by the high correlation coefficient between this scale and the formal caregiver questionnaire scores concerning communication ability, and the high-correlation coefficient between this scale and intellectual functions (r = -0.904), emotional functions (r = -0.841) and motor functions (r = -0.679) of dementia syndromes rating scale (Gottfries, Bråne, Steen scale; GBS scale), Hasegawa's Dementia Scale-Revised (HDS-R) (r = 0.625) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMS) (r = 0.733). The reliability of this scale was confirmed by the high interrater reliability coefficient of 0.828, test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.940 and Cronbach alpha coefficient of 0.938. These results indicate that the new scale is useful in the assessment of communication ability among the demented elderly.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

A Web-based study of cerebral asymmetry for perception of emotion.

Many studies have examined cerebral asymmetry via lateralized presentation of stimuli using specialized software. Because these studies typically require extensive control over variables such as stimulus exposure duration, size, location, and so forth, they are not easily transferred to the World Wide Web. The present study replicated a free-vision, chimeric faces task via the Internet, using HTML and JavaScript. Previous results had shown that right-handed participants tend to perceive a chimeric face with a smile to their (the viewers') left as happier than its mirror image. That result was replicated in the Web-based study, and the leftward bias was actually significantly greater than that found using the traditional pencil-and-paper version of the task. Possible reasons for this difference are discussed.

Affect↗

PubMed2005

Effects of identical context on visual pattern recognition by pigeons.

The effects of identical context on pattern recognition by pigeons for outline drawings of faces were investigated by training pigeons to identify (Experiment 1) and categorize (Experiment 2) these stimuli according to the orientation of the mouth-an upright U shape representing a smiling mouth or an inverted U shape representing a sad mouth. These target stimuli were presented alone (Pair 1), with three dots in a triangular orientation to represent a nose and eyes (Pair 2), and with the face pattern surrounded by an oval (Pair 3). In Experiment 1, the pigeons trained with Pair 1 were most accurate, those trained with Pair 2 were less so, and those trained with Pair 3 failed to acquire the discrimination within eighty 100-trial sessions. The same ordering was found in Experiment 2 for pigeons trained on the three pairs simultaneously. The authors suggest that a contrasting finding in humans, the face superiority effect, might be due to a gain in discriminability resulting from recognition of the pattern as a face. An exemplar model of information processing that excludes linguistic coding accounts for the present results.

Animals↗

PubMed1999

An investigation into the perception of dominance from schematic faces: a study using the World-Wide Web.

The World-Wide Web (WWW) is considered to be a viable tool for scientific research, and several investigators have already made use of it in their studies. Although the WWW allows researchers to access a vast subject pool, questions of reliability and validity need to be addressed before it is incorporated into mainstream research. By replicating, on the Internet, an existing study (Keating, Mazur, & Segall, 1977) on the perception of schematic faces, we were able to conclude that experimental work carried out in this manner is not necessarily biased by the medium. One difference from previous work was the effect of a smiling versus a nonsmiling face on the perception of dominance, given an identical brow position for the two faces. This was replicated on a different occasion with different subjects, which may represent a shift in attitudes to this facial configuration since the original study was conducted. Young North American males were overrepresented in our sample, but comparison with other surveys indicates that the population sampled by the Internet is becoming more representative.

Facial Expression↗

PubMed1999

Can a machine tickle?

It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive. Two sorts of explanations have been suggested. The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another person as the source of the touch. The reflex explanation suggests that tickle simply requires an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability and is more like a reflex or some other stereotyped motor pattern. To test these explanations, we manipulated the perceived source of tickling. Thirty-five subjects were tickled twice--once by the experimenter, and once, they believed, by an automated machine. The reflex view predicts that our "tickle machine" should be as effective as a person in producing laughter, whereas the interpersonal view predicts significantly attenuated responses. Supporting the reflex view, subjects smiled, laughed, and wiggled just as often in response to the machine as to the experimenter. Self-reports of ticklishness were also virtually identical in the two conditions. Ticklish laughter evidently does not require that the stimulation be attributed to another person, as interpersonal accounts imply.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1991

Nursing care of cognitively impaired, institutionalized elderly.

Findings indicate the importance of many nursing staff behaviors in relation to the behaviors of demented elderly persons, especially when asking the elder to complete a care task, such as dressing. Nonverbal as well as verbal nursing staff behaviors were related to behaviors of demented elderly persons, especially smiling, eye contact, and manipulating the environment to avoid difficult encounters. The nursing staff's ability to remain relaxed and flexible when assisting with the elder's care was strongly related to the elder's ability to remain flexible, calm, and cooperative during the care procedure. Use of verbal distraction or redirection, praise, and light-hearted, playful approaches were often found to be helpful when the demented elder became upset or paranoid.

Adult↗