This study examined the relationship that personal pronouns spoken during a marital conversation have with the emotional qualities of those interactions and with marital satisfaction. Middle-aged and older couples (N = 154) engaged in a 15-min conflict conversation during which physiology and emotional behavior were continuously monitored. Verbatim transcripts of the conversations were coded in...

Individual differences in children's language skills have been shown to stem in part from variations in the quantity and quality of parent speech input. However, most research focuses on mothers' input whereas less is known about the effects of variability in father input. In this article, we review the relation between parent input and child language development with a focus on low-income fami...

The goal of this paper is to begin a conversation about two key issues regarding emotion in HCI. First, working definitions of emotion must be included in communications. These definitions provide a framework for asking questions, designing methodologies, and interpreting results. Second, gold standards for assessing the quality of human computer interactions should be established. Conceptualiz...

Existing open-domain human-computer conversation systems are typically passive: they either synthesize or retrieve a reply provided with a humanissued utterance. It is generally presumed that humans should take the role to lead the conversation and introduce new content when a stalemate occurs, and that computers only need to “respond.” In this paper, we propose STALEMATEBREAKER, a conversation...

This research examined whether children with autism could be trained to improve their conversational skills and whether this led to changes in standard tests of theory of mind (ToM). Three high-functioning children with autism participated in a multiple baseline across participants design. The children were taught how to initiate a conversation, take turns during conversation, listen attentivel...

Accurate and comprehensive data form the lifeblood of health care. Unfortunately, there is much evidence that current data collection methods sometimes fail. Our hypothesis is that it should be possible to improve the thoroughness and quality of information gathered through clinical encounters by developing a computer system that (a) listens to a conversation between a patient and a provider, (...

UNLABELLED Background Physician-adolescent sexuality discussions are a recommended element in health maintenance visits, but such discussions - if they occur at all - probably vary by adolescents' characteristics and situations, and physicians' personal beliefs and training. However, little is known about the form and content of physician-adolescent sexuality discussions during health maintenan...

There have been several attempts in recent years to develop a remote communication device using sensory modalities other than speech that would induce a user's positive experience with his/her conversation partner. Specifically, Hugvie is a human-shaped pillow as well as a remote communication device enabling users to combine a hugging experience with telecommunication to improve the quality of...

In unlabeled and unsegmented conversation, i.e. no a-priori knowledge about speakers’ identity and segments boundaries is provided, it is very important to cluster the conversation (make a segmentation and labeling) with the best possible resolution. For low-resolution cases, i.e. the duration of the segment is long; the segments might contain data from several speakers. On the other hand, when...

BACKGROUND There are some existing barriers posed by neuropsychological tests that interfere with the assessment of cognitive functioning by staff who work in long-term care facilities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of assessing cognitive function through conversation. METHODS A total of 100 care staff was randomly selected as participants. Each staff member eva...