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Gaze direction is a cue that regulates feelings of affiliation in social interactions. Phubbing research suggests that phone-gazing during a copresent interaction hampers the development of affiliation in interactions by signaling that one is not fully attentive. Because the phone represents the "virtual other," phone-gazing may be more detrimental than gazing at another object. This experimental vignette study explores whether phone-gazing during a conversation harms affiliation more than newspaper-gazing. Additionally, it examines whether the harmful impact of phubbing can be mitigated or aggravated by the phone gazer's interlocutor rolenamely, that of speaker versus listener. The results reveal that phone-gazing during an interaction harms affiliation more than newspaper-gazing. Also, phone-gazing hampers affiliation more while listening than while speaking. These findings suggest that phone-gazing incurs unique judgments of relational devaluation in the interaction partner. The activation of these judgments, however, is contingent upon interlocutor role.

How does other people's opinion affect judgments of norm transgressions? In our study, we used a modification of the famous Asch paradigm (1951, 1955) to examine conformity in the moral domain. The question we addressed was how peer group opinion alters normative judgments of scenarios involving violations of moral, social, and decency norms. The results indicate that even moral norms are subject to conformity, especially in situations with a high degree of social presence. Interestingly, the degree of conformity can distinguish between different types of norms.

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Confusion caused by misunderstanding of medical terminology is signaled by facial cues that can be automatically detected with currently available facial expression detection technology. The findings are relevant for the development of Web-based services for healthcare consumers.

In an experimental study, we explored the role of auditory perception bias in vocal pitch imitation. Psychoacoustic tasks involving a missing fundamental indicate that some listeners are attuned to the relationship between all the higher harmonics present in the signal, which supports their perception of the fundamental frequency (the primary acoustic correlate of pitch). Other listeners focus on the lowest harmonic constituents of the complex sound signal which may hamper the perception of the fundamental. These two listener types are referred to as fundamental and spectral listeners, respectively. We hypothesized that the individual differences in speakers' capacity to imitate F0 found in earlier studies, may at least partly be due to the capacity to extract information about F0 from the speech signal. Participants' auditory perception bias was determined with a standard missing fundamental perceptual test. Subsequently, speech data were collected in a shadowing task with two conditions, one with a full speech signal and one with high-pass filtered speech above 300 Hz. The results showed that perception bias toward fundamental frequency was related to the degree of F0 imitation. The effect was stronger in the condition with high-pass filtered speech. The experimental outcomes suggest advantages for fundamental listeners in communicative situations where F0 imitation is used as a behavioral cue. Future research needs to determine to what extent auditory perception bias may be related to other individual properties known to improve imitation, such as phonetic talent.

This study demonstrates that rumination is reflected in two behavioural signals that both play an important role in face-to-face interactions and provides evidence for the negative impact of rumination on social cognition. Sixty-one students were randomly assigned either to a condition in which rumination was induced or to a control condition. Their task was to play a speech-based word association game with an Embodied Conversational Agent during which their word associations, pitch imitation and eye movements were measured. Two questionnaires assessed their ruminative tendencies and mind wandering thoughts, respectively. Rumination predicted differences in task-related mind wandering, polarity of lexical associations, pitch imitation, and blinks while mind wandering predicted differences in saccades. This outcome may show that rumination has a negative impact on certain aspects of social interactions.