People are remarkably accurate (approaching ceiling) at deciding whether faces are male or female, even when cues from hair style, makeup, and facial hair are minimised. Experiments designed to explore the perceptual basis of our ability to categorise the sex of faces are reported. Subjects were considerably less accurate when asked to judge the sex of three-dimensional (3-D) representations of faces obtained by laser-scanning, compared with a condition where photographs were taken with hair concealed and eyes closed. This suggests that cues from features such as eyebrows, and skin texture, play an important role in decision-making. Performance with the laser-scanned heads remained quite high with 3/4-view faces, where the 3-D shape of the face should be easiest to see, suggesting that the 3-D structure of the face is a further source of information contributing to the classification of its sex. Performance at judging the sex from photographs (with hair concealed) was disrupted if the photographs were inverted, which implies that the superficial cues contributing to the decision are not processed in a purely 'local' way. Performance was also disrupted if the faces were shown in photographic negatives, which is consistent with the use of 3-D information, since negation probably operates by disrupting the computation of shape from shading. In 3-D, the 'average' male face differs from the 'average' female face by having a more protuberant nose/brow and more prominent chin/jaw. The effects of manipulating the shapes of the noses and chins of the laser-scanned heads were assessed and significant effects of such manipulations on the apparent masculinity or femininity of the heads were revealed. It appears that our ability to make this most basic of facial categorisations may be multiply determined by a combination of 2-D, 3-D, and textural cues and their interrelationships.

Background: Nonverbal communication is a critical feature of successful social interaction and interpersonal rapport. Social exclusion is a feature of schizophrenia. This experimental study investigated if the undisclosed presence of a patient with schizophrenia in interaction changes nonverbal communication (ie, speaker gesture and listener nodding). Method: 3D motion-capture techniques recorded 20 patient (1 patient, 2 healthy participants) and 20 control (3 healthy participants) interactions. Participants rated their experience of rapport with each interacting partner. Patients’ symptoms, social cognition, and executive functioning were assessed. Four hypotheses were tested: (1) Compared to controls, patients display less speaking gestures and listener nods. (2) Patients’ increased symptom severity and poorer social cognition are associated with patients’ reduced gesture and nods. (3) Patients’ partners compensate for patients’ reduced nonverbal behavior by gesturing more when speaking and nodding more when listening. (4) Patients’ reduced nonverbal behavior, increased symptom severity, and poorer social cognition are associated with others experiencing poorer rapport with the patient. Results: Patients gestured less when speaking. Patients with more negative symptoms nodded less as listeners, while their partners appeared to compensate by gesturing more as speakers. Patients with more negative symptoms also gestured more when speaking, which, alongside increased negative symptoms and poorer social cognition, was associated with others experiencing poorer patient rapport. Conclusions: Patients’ symptoms are associated with the nonverbal behavior of patients and their partners. Patients’ increased negative symptoms and gesture use are associated with poorer interpersonal rapport. This study provides specific evidence about how negative symptoms impact patients’ social interactions.

One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker) more likely? It has been claimed that syntactic repetition caused by structural priming is ubiquitous in conversation. However, previous work has not tested for general syntactic repetition effects in ordinary conversation independently of lexical repetition. Here we analyse patterns of syntactic repetition in two large corpora of unscripted everyday conversations. Our results show that when lexical repetition is taken into account there is no general tendency for people to repeat their own syntactic constructions. More importantly, people repeat each other's syntactic constructions less than would be expected by chance; i.e., people systematically diverge from one another in their use of syntactic constructions. We conclude that in ordinary conversation the structural priming effects described in the literature are overwhelmed by the need to actively engage with our conversational partners and respond productively to what they say.

The effectiveness of medical treatment depends on the quality of the patient–clinician relationship. It has been proposed that this depends on the extent to which the patient and clinician build a shared understanding of illness and treatment. Here, we use the tools of conversation analysis (CA) to explore this idea in the context of psychiatric consultations. The CA “repair” framework provides an analysis of the processes people use to deal with problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. These problems are especially critical in the treatment of psychosis where patients and health care professionals need to communicate about the disputed meaning of hallucinations and delusion. Patients do not feel understood, they are frequently non‐adherent with treatment, and many have poor outcomes. We present an overview of two studies focusing on the role of repair as a mechanism for producing and clarifying meaning in psychiatrist–patient communication and its association with treatment outcomes. The first study shows patient clarification or repair of psychiatrists’ talk is associated with better patient adherence to treatment. The second study shows that training which emphasizes the importance of building an understanding of patients’ psychotic experiences increases psychiatrists’ self‐repair. We propose that psychiatrists are working harder to make their talk understandable and acceptable to the patient by taking the patient's perspective into account. We conclude that these findings provide evidence that repair is an important mechanism for building shared understanding in doctor–patient communication and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. The conversation analytic account of repair is currently the most sophisticated empirical model for analyzing how people construct shared meaning and understanding. Repair appears to reflect greater commitment to and engagement in communication and improve both the quality and outcomes of communication. Reducing potential miscommunication between psychiatrists and their patients with psychosis is a low‐cost means of enhancing treatment from both the psychiatrist and patient perspective. Given that misunderstanding and miscommunication are particularly problematic in psychosis, this is critical for improving the longer term outcomes of treatment for these patients who often have poor relationships with psychiatrists and health care services more widely.

Previous research (Davies, Ellis and Shepherd, 1978;Rhodes, Brennan and Carey, 1987) has shown that accurate line drawings of familiar faces are identified rather poorly. However, artists can produce lifelike portraits with pen and ink, and Pearson and Robinson (1985) described an automatic method for producing computer-drawn sketches ('cartoons') of faces which appear very similar to those produced by a human artist. In this paper we show that subjects can identify famous faces depicted in such computer-drawn 'cartoons' almost as well as full grey-scale images. The cartoon algorithm comprises two components. One component draws lines at the locations of intensity changes corresponding to luminance valleys and edges (the 'valledge' detector). The other component applies a 'threshold' to the original intensity distribution, and replaces any area darker than threshold with black. Thus the full cartoon contains both 'line' and 'mass'. Neither the valledges nor the threshold components alone were as well identified as full cartoons containing both components. The results suggest that the addition of the threshold component adds significantly to the identifiability of line drawings of faces.