Each relationship has its own personality. Almost immediately after a social interaction begins, verbal and nonverbal behaviors become synchronized. Even in asocial contexts, individuals tend to produce utterances that match the grammatical structure of sentences they have recently heard or read. Three projects explore language style matching (LSM) in everyday writing tasks and professional wri...

This paper presents the effect of a robot’s whispering behavior on people’s motivation. Here, “whispering behavior” consists of a whispering cue and a small voice, which provides a natural sense of physical proximity in a context of confidentiality, thus increasing intimacy. A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate this effect. In the experiment, a robot requested the participants t...

Placement tests, along with the growing interest in their validation, have become increasingly important in English as a Second Language programs. To this end, the present paper illustrates procedures in designing a placement test and using it to evaluate students’ language ability by means of statistical analysis. 29 participants from three proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and adva...

BACKGROUND People living with HIV who maintain a positive outlook on their future may manage stress better than those who do not, leading to improved coping behaviors and better health outcomes. METHODS While studying 125 HIV+ adults participating in two clinical trials of expressive writing we assessed their HIV-specific meaningfulness of life with a short, unidimensional scale (the HIVMS). ...

Frontotemporal lobe degeneration (FTLD) refers to a neurodegenerative dementia syndrome, which could be clinically classified into behavioral and language variant. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurological disorder involving both upper motor neuron (UMN) and lower motor neuron (LMN), eventually leading to muscle atrophy and weakness, bulbar palsy, and respiratory failure...

BACKGROUND Texting while driving and other cell-phone reading and writing activities are high-risk activities associated with motor vehicle collisions and mortality. This paper describes the development and preliminary evaluation of the Distracted Driving Survey (DDS) and score. METHODS Survey questions were developed by a research team using semi-structured interviews, pilot-tested, and eval...

To revise 1998 recommendations on childhood obesity, an Expert Committee, comprised of representatives from 15 professional organizations, appointed experienced scientists and clinicians to 3 writing groups to review the literature and recommend approaches to prevention, assessment, and treatment. Because effective strategies remain poorly defined, the writing groups used both available evidenc...