Presentations - Gender & Emotion

GENDER

You guys did a good job on your presentation. The “bunny ears” thing is pretty funny, and I will be interesting to see what other words you guys may find when doing a similar word analysis. It’s pretty amazing you guys found differences in men and women despite participants not even realizing they were there! It brings up a very interesting debate (and further research) about what’s causing this phenomenon linguistically, as well as what implications this may have for the recitation of instructions. I think it would be interesting to see if the linguistic analysis program could detect any of the gender linguistic differences. It would also be interesting to see if these results can be generalized in other mediums — namely FTF and over the phone. Knowing what you know now, it would be cool to see how adding the added cue of voice plays a role, as well as the non-verbal cues of FTF.

EMOTION

I was interested by your study because it seemed so intuitive, and I wanted to know if your hypotheses would prove true. Even though it don’t come out the way you wanted, I think that’s great too because you learned about another variable that might affect the process, which (I think, at least) is cool too.

I liked your presentation. It was clear overall and I enjoyed it (the color coding was a nice touch!). Good work relating things to Jeff’s study. I think people wanting to be amicable upon a first meeting as a face-related procedure definitely would explain your data. I know I would never want to express my sad emotions – especially upon first meeting someone – as I wouldn’t want one instance of my emotions to represent me as a person in someone else’s mind.

Presentation Comments

#1 - Facebook Common Ground

I was interested in your project because it seemed like one of the few studies of the new phenomenon of large groups (myspace, friendster, etc.) online. Great job on your speech and with finding results! First, I liked the diagrams that you used in your presentation - they were cute, well-drawn, and made your concepts easier to understand. One question I had about your project was why the participants did not have any obligation to click on the facebook link in the email you sent them. As you also stated in your presentation, perhaps if you explicitly told the participants to click on the link, you would have obtained more significant results. Also, it seemed like you stated your interpretations of the results as if they were facts; I think you should have emphasized that these were only speculations on your part. However, overall I was excited to hear your interpretations and I thought that given the limitations that you stated, the study turned out very well. Thanks for a ground-breaking study in this field!

#2 - Deception

I was impressed with how well you executed your project - I would imagine it is very difficult to deceive people in studies such as this one. It was also really interesting that your study was a kind of continuation of Professor Hancock's study. I thought that everyone in your group spoke clearly and well, giving your presentation a professional feeling. Also, the division of your results and interpretations into Q1, Q2, etc. helped a lot with clarity. One thing I didn't understand was that your two hypotheses seemed to be contradicting one another. I was also wondering if your choice to put an icebreaker at the beginning of the conversation was based on previous research or your own speculations. Overall, great interpretation of your results and an exciting study!

Comments

Facebook Common Ground:

I really liked the general idea of seeing how people would act when they had knowledge but might not think it polite to put forth their knowledge/common ground directly. The different ways people approached it, from acting like they hadn't seen the Facebook to casually asking questions that would lean towards information they had gleaned from Facebook, was fascinating in what is says about how people determine the most polite or best way to act in conversation. Really interestin stuff. Great work.

Emotion:

Really interesting project, guys. I find the idea of emotion as a contagion and the differences in how accurately people can detect others' emotions in different mediums really fascinating. I agree with the general sentiment that it would be interesting to do the experiment with friends, and see if they fare better. All around, great idea and great analysis.

Comment #2: Emotions Group

Wonderful presentation! I was intrigued by your experiment the moment you decided to do it. I was curious to see whether or not, and to what degree you can truly induce emotion (such as sadness) in participants. It's so fascinating finding out that when the experimental group watched Sophie's Choice, they actually felt a lot more sad than the control group. I thought that the participants would try to repress their emotions since they're participating in an experiment and don't want to seem affected by it. But I'm not surprised at the actual result. However I still think that the induced emotion, however real it might be, is still not strong enough than emotions that people feel in their everyday lives, that is, how they feel when something happens around them. I think that, in order for someone to truly be saddened, they have to either experience something that they can relate to, or something like a sad movie (in which they have to sit through the whole thing and not just watch part of it). Only then will their emotions be strong. Therefore, one possible reason for your result (i.e. dyads couldn't detect their counterpart's emotions accurately) might be that the induced emotions weren't strong enough for others to detect.

Also, someone mentioned that friends might be better at detecting each other's emotions. I think
this is very true. If you know someone, you'll know how they act when they're sad--the subtle facial muscle movements, or the look in their eyes. But if you don't know someone, then you might not be able to pick up these subtle elements that indicate the emotional state that your partner is in.

Comment #1: Grounding Group

Great job on your presentation guys!
I think it's interesting/surprising that you found in your results that your participants were better at assessing each other's knowledge of the poem in an online medium rather than a face-to-face medium. One would think that, if you can see the person that you're talking to, you'd be better at gauging their understanding of the poem because of the abundance of visual/audio cues (i.e. from facial expressions to tone of voice). More generally, I think face-to-face overrules most other communication techniques in terms of aiding in someone's understanding of something. However, as Will mentioned today, we might have overlooked the social aspect of this. That is, when two strangers are put together in a room and are required to interact with each other on a specific topic, not only might it be uncomfortable, but i'd imagine it'd also be awkward. And because of this, the intended effect of having the dyads have a conversation (i.e. so that they can gauge how well each other understood the poem) may not be achieved. Of course, this might not be the case at all. I think with any experiment, it's important to have a large sample size. But given the time limit, I think you guys did great! :D

Comments

Grounding:

Wow, you definitely got some really interesting results. I think the fact that the participants thought they influenced their partner more over AIM than FtF is explainable - there are fewer visual cues that might suggest otherwise (they can't see their partners shake their heads, etc). But the fact that they were more successful in guessing each other's knowledge over aim is quite unintuitive. You'll have to closely analyze the transcripts to see why the conversations were so different. Maybe there was a lot of superfluous material in FtF that distracted from the utterances about the poem. Great job overall!

Emotion:

It's great that your participants were not suspicious of the setup of the experiment and that mood induction worked as planned. They fact that emotion could not be detected by the participants' partners, even though there were clear language differences, is very intriguing but not necessarily surprising given the content of your transcripts. Indeed, for example, most people would probably not associate the use of past tense with being in a sad state. Also, I'm sure that the fact that the two were strangers had an impact - I find it fairly easy to detect the mood of someone I know well over AIM. Nice presentation and good luck on the rest of your analysis!

Presentation Comments #2

Deception/Motivation group:
Your study is fascinating. I think that even though many of your results weren't significant, that still says a lot. Kailyn's comment makes an excellent point that we are simply really bad at detecting deception, in any situation, and we also are accustomed to believing that someone is telling us the truth. I think this definitely contributes to the finding that each group had about the same level of detection. I also think that your finding of a much higher word count in the high motivation condition is really interesting, and unexpected. I would love for you (or anyone) to dig deeper into this, and to try to find out why this actually happens. Great job guys.

Presentation Comments #1

To the gender group:
I really enjoyed your presentation, and hearing your findings. I was amazed that despite the fact that you found so many linguistic differences between men and women, we (as raters) were simply unable to do any better than chance at guessing the gender of the author. I would be really interested to see if, given these linguistic diferences, something like a automated computer program could do better at guessing the gender of the author, as a computer could just focus on these things while we are distracted by so many factors and are unaware of what is truly a difference between men and women's writing styles. Really neat results!