The others: Universals and cultural specificities in the perception of status and dominance from nonverbal behavior

Bente, Gary; Leuschner, Haug; Issa, Ahmad Al; Blascovich, James J.

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.06.006

Cited by 42 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…To demonstrate that human listeners recruit specifically social cognitive concepts (e.g., agency or intentionality) and processes (e.g., simulation or co-representations) to perceive social-relational meaning in music, one would need to show evidence that listeners are able to use acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer that two or more agents are e.g. in an affiliatory (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2009) or dominant relationship (Bente, Leuschner, Al Issa, & Blascovich, 2010), or simply exhibiting social contingency (McDonnell et al, 2009, Neri et al, 2006). All such evidence exists in the visual domain - sometimes with the mediation of music (Edelman and Harring, 2015, Moran et al, 2015) -, and in non-verbal vocalizations (Bryant et al, 2016), but not in music.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

Aucouturier

Canonne

2017

Cognition

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A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social relations between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, disdainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

Aucouturier

Canonne

2017

Cognition

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“…Considering the above‐mentioned limitations of previous paradigms used to study the processing of social information from dyadic interactions, for the present study, we have chosen to focus on a particular dimension, namely power. The perception of power from nonverbal cues follows universal, transcultural principles [Bente, Leuschner, Al Issa, & Blascovich, ] already recognized by preverbal children [Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold‐Smith, & Carey, ]. Therefore, we identify power as a latent social phenomenon which does not rely on ritualized behaviors but which is nevertheless expressed as interpersonal contingent behavior—there is no dominance without complementary submission and vice versa [Bente et al, ; Dunbar & Burgoon, ; Komter, ; Rogers‐Millar & Millar III, ; Tiedens & Fragale, ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…The ecological validity was ensured by transcribing the movement behavior from real videotaped dyadic interactions onto virtual characters. The original stimulus material pool had been previously validated in studies on nonverbal perception in both TD and ASD [Bente et al, 2008;Bente et al, 2010;Georgescu et al, 2014;Schwartz et al, 2014]. The virtual characters used were two virtual manikin models.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, the perception of power and dominance provides an ideal testbed to analyze how different factors of an interaction modulate social perception in ASD compared to TD. We therefore used stimulus animations with naturalistic movement behavior [Bente, Senokozlieva, Pennig, Al-Issa, & Fischer, 2008;Bente et al, 2010;Georgescu et al, 2014].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inferring power and dominance from dyadic nonverbal interactions in autism spectrum disorder

et al. 2019

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Research studies to date have revealed conflicting results with respect to the processing of nonverbal cues from social interactions in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the contribution of two important factors for the perception of dyadic social interactions, namely (a) the movement contingency and (b) the spatial context. To this end, 26 adult participants with ASD and 26 age‐, sex‐, and IQ‐matched typically developed control participants observed animations presenting nonverbal interactions between two human virtual characters enacting power relationships. We manipulated (a) movement contingency by exchanging one of the two original agents with an agent from another dyad and (b) spatial context by changing agents' spatial orientation to a back‐to‐back position. Participants were asked to rate dominance and submissiveness of these agents. Results showed that the movement contingency manipulation affected accuracy and consistency of power perception and that the spatial context manipulation slowed down reaction times comparably in both groups. With regard to group differences, individuals with ASD were found to judge power relationships slower compared to control participants, potentially suggesting a more explicit processing style in ASD. Furthermore, the spatial context manipulation slowed down the reaction times more in the contingent compared to the non‐contingent conditions only in the ASD group. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate whether individuals with ASD have difficulties in understanding nonverbal cues in a dyadic context by suggesting that they do so in more subtle ways than previously investigated. Autism Res 2019, 12: 505–516 © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary This study shows that the ability and speed of judging who is dominant in a social interaction depends on two factors: (a) whether their movements are matched and (b) whether they are facing each other or not. This is similarly the case for participants with and without autism. Interestingly, however, individuals with autism seem to judge generally slower, suggesting a more explicit processing style. The two factors seem to interact, suggesting that nonverbal processing difficulties are subtler than previously thought.

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“…In a study conducted with German, American, and Arab samples (Bente et al 2010), participants were asked to recognize the status (employee vs. supervisor) of individuals who interacted and who were of the same nationality as the participant. Status could only be recognized above chance-level in the German sample.…”

Section: Cultural Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

20 Power, dominance, and persuasion

Mast¹,

Cousin²

2013

Nonverbal Communication

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"When two persons interact, they continually negotiate two major relationship issues: how friendly or hostile they will be with each other, and how much in charge or control each will be during their transactions" (Kiesler and Auerbach 2003: 1712). Social interactions can be mapped onto two main dimensions that are perpendicular to each other: the affiliation dimension -also called the horizontal dimension (Hall, Coats, and Smith LeBeau 2005), which is characterized by friendliness and warmth on the one end of the dimension and by hostility and aggression on the other end; and the control dimension -also called the vertical dimension -which relates to differences in power, dominance, and influence among two or more social interaction partners (Kiesler and Auerbach 2003;Moskowitz 1993;Tiedens and Jimenez 2003;Wiggins 1979).The vertical dimension of social interactions is present in nearly every social context. We live in a hierarchically organized society in which a member of the parliament is considered a higher status person than a janitor. We are confronted with hierarchies at our workplace when interacting with superiors, peers, and subordinates. Even among friends and family members the power dimension often plays a role. Not all hierarchies are explicit such as they appear in a company's organizational chart. Many hierarchies are more subtle, for instance as when an individual succeeds in convincing his or her group of friends to go watch a particular movie.The vertical or hierarchy dimension affects how we relate to others and it thus greatly impacts on real world outcomes. As an example, the status difference between an airplane captain and the other cockpit members (first officers and flight engineers) can entail ineffective communication leading to human error and ultimately to catastrophe. When an airplane crashes because the higher power position of the captain does not encourage the crew members to voice 2 their concerns or observations about flight irregularities, the hierarchical relationship can contribute to disaster.To maximize effective communication among members possessing different levels of power or status, not only the verbal content of a message is important but also the way the information is conveyed nonverbally plays a role. In the present chapter, we will focus on how the vertical dimension is linked to nonverbal behavior. We will review the expressed nonverbal behavior of people who differ on the vertical dimension and the perception of verticality based on the observation of people's nonverbal behavior. We will also discuss whether people are accurate in judging others' power and dominance. We will present the nonverbal behaviors that are associated with persuasion and we will talk about how nonverbal dominance affects interpersonal relationships and interactions. Finally, we will review individual characteristics that have been shown to moderate the expression or perception of power and dominance. Definition of the terms used to describe the vertical dimensionWe focus on the interp...

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The others: Universals and cultural specificities in the perception of status and dominance from nonverbal behavior

Cited by 42 publications

References 67 publications

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

Inferring power and dominance from dyadic nonverbal interactions in autism spectrum disorder

20 Power, dominance, and persuasion

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