Kinesics

Little research has been done on pain assessment in critical care, especially in patients who cannot communicate verbally. To describe (1) pain indicators used by nurses and physicians for pain assessment, (2) pain management (pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions) undertaken by nurses to relieve pain, and (3) pain indicators used for pain reassessment by nurses to verify the effectiveness of pain management in patients who are intubated. Medical files from 2 specialized healthcare centers in Quebec City, Quebec, were reviewed. A data collection instrument based on Melzack's theory was developed from existing tools. Pain-related indicators were clustered into nonobservable/subjective (patients' self-reports of pain) and observable/objective (physiological and behavioral) categories. A total of 183 pain episodes in 52 patients who received mechanical ventilation were analyzed. Observable indicators were recorded 97% of the time. Patients' self-reports of pain were recorded only 29% of the time, a practice contradictory to recommendations for pain assessment. Pharmacological interventions were used more often (89% of the time) than nonpharmacological interventions (<25%) for managing pain. Almost 40% of the time, pain was not reassessed after an intervention. For reassessments, observable indicators were recorded 66% of the time; patients self-reports were recorded only 8% of the time. Pain documentation in medical files is incomplete or inadequate. The lack of a pain assessment tool may contribute to this situation. Research is still needed in the development of tools to enhance pain assessment in critically ill intubated patients.

The increasing proportion of culturally diverse groups within the United Kingdom has meant that the issue of language barriers in the research situation must be addressed. The recruitment of respondents with English as a second language (ESL) to research studies is essential if their potentially unique and valid perspective is to be acknowledged. This can, however, pose several difficulties for the researcher which need to be recognized and addressed if valid data are to be collected. This paper outlines some of the challenges encountered in one study and describes strategies which were employed to meet these challenges.

Verbal and nonverbal behaviors of nurses during interactions with cancer patients were examined by analyzing videotapes of caregiving. Using techniques of qualitative ethology, four types of attending were identified: doing more, doing with, doing for, and doing tasks. The findings provide support for an alternative method of classifying nurse-patient interactions that captures patterns of caring.

This study tested the universality hypothesis on facial expression judgment by applying cross-cultural agreement tests on Filipinos. The Facial Action Coding System constructed by Ekman and Friesen (1976) was used as basis for creating stimuli photos that 101 college student observers were made to identify. Contextualization for each emotion was also solicited from subjects to provide qualitative bases for their judgments. The results showed that for five of the six emotions studied, excepting fear, the majority of the observers judged the expressions as predicted. The judgment of happiness supplied the strongest evidence for universality, having the highest correctness rate and inter-observer agreement. There was also high agreement among observers and between Filipinos and other cultures about the most intense and second most intense emotion signaled by each stimulus for these five emotions. Difficulty with the recognition of fear, as well as its common association with the emotio...

Резюме. Комуникацията с хора в състояние на психологическа криза е сериозно предизвикател-ство за много професионалисти като психолози и социални работници. Настоящият доклад цели да представи спецификата и значението на невербалната комуникация в процеса на раз-познаване на психологическата криза и при провеждане на кризисна интервенция. На базата на проведени фокус-групи и интервюта с представители на помагащите професии-психолози в кризисен център, психотерапевти, консултанти на телефонни линии-са изведени както ти-пични невербални реакции на кризата, така и начини, по които професионалистите могат да ползват невербалната комуникация с цел по-бързо и ефективно овладяване на кризата, както и за предотвратяване на ескалирането на напрежението. Темата е разгледана през призмата на различните форми на невербална комуникация-кинесика, проксемика, вокализация, значение на външния вид.

Buscamos com este estudo refletir sobre a importância da linguagem corporal, através da identificação do que um grupo de enfermeiras pós-graduandas, sabiam sobre o assunto. Analisamos o conteúdo dos relatos de onde emergiram cinco categorias: conceito, função, importância, significado e formas de manifestação da linguagem corporal. A linguagem corporal foi valorizada pelo grupo como uma forma complexa de interação interpessoal da qual temos pouca consciência, ocorrendo por vezes à margem do nosso controle. Tem por função expressar sentimentos, emoções e transmitir mensagens, cujos significados são influenciados pelo contexto. O conhecimento da linguagem corporal amplia nossa percepção profissional e é mais um instrumento para melhorar a qualidade da assistência de enfermagem.

Nonverbal communication has been a focus of consideration for some time in areas such as corporate performance skills and individual societal skills. However, it has received little consideration, in language teaching as an accompaniment to spoken language, though recent drifts in neuro-linguistic programming concerning reflecting and corresponding body language have sieved into current research and practice. Comparatively very few techniques have been proposed for teaching nonverbal communication compared to its importance. This paper discusses components and tips of non-verbal communication and how to improve them.

This study tested the universality hypothesis on facial expression judgment by applying cross-cultural agreement tests on Filipinos. The Facial Action Coding System constructed by Ekman and Friesen (1976) was used as basis for creating stimuli photos which 101 college student observers were made to identify. Contextualization for each emotion was also solicited from subjects to provide qualitative bases for their judgments. The results showed that for five of the six emotions studied, excepting fear, majority of the observers judged the expressions as predicted. The judgment of happiness supplies the strongest evidence for universality, having the highest correctness rate and inter-observer agreement. There was also high agreement among observers and between Filipinos and other cultures about the most intense and second most intense emotion signaled by each stimulus for these five emotions. Difficulty with the recognition of fear, as well as its common association with the emotion of sadness, has been found. Such findings shall serve as baseline data for the study of facial expressions in the Philippines.

Unpublished galleys of Chapter One of The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY, 2023).

"This is a major contribution to the ontology of film. It extends our understanding of what the human figure on film is, what it does, and some very important ways in which it has attracted scholarly attention. It is still with me, haunting my thinking and teaching about film in the present, and one can hardly ask more of a book." — Jason Jacobs

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Human-Figure-on-Film

The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.

Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

The aim of this contribution is 1) to introduce theoretical advantages for studying communication in daily situations from the complexity perspective and 2) to describe the multi-system method to analyse complex reality of human language and to study interrelations among all the elements of which it consists. We explain first what complexity is through three important principles that help to understand this concept: organizational recursivity, opening up of universe and hologramatic principle. Then we explain phases in multi-system analysis method, its procedures and tools that have been used.

En este artículo queremos1) presentar las ventajas teóricas que comparta adoptar la perspectiva de la complejidad en el estudio de la comunicación cotidiana y 2) describir un método de análisis multisistémico que permite analizar la realidad compleja del lenguaje humano y estudiar las interrelaciones entre todos los elementos que lo componen. Comenzaremos explicando qué es la complejidad y presentando tres  principios que ayudan a entenderla: el principio de recursividad organizacional, el principio de apertura del universo y el principio hologramático. Seguidamente, nos centraremos en la exposición del método que queremos proponer: describiremos las fases, los procedimientos y los instrumentos utilizados.

The “natural history” method in behavioral science flourished between 1950 and 1975. Its principal tools were the 16mm camera and the analytic or multispeed projector. With their aid an investigator could both preserve and parse the streams of behavior of proximate persons. Upon scrutiny it was seen that stream became structure, that behavior was interaction; and by interaction was meant the patterned exchange of verbal and nonverbal signals. In America, the foremost agent of such research was the anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell (1918-1994), the father of “kinesics.” Working first with Gregory Bateson and later the psychiatrist Albert Scheflen, he developed a set of standard procedures for the recording, storage, and symbolic transcription of interaction behavior. His early program was boosted by the needs of Cold War governance and found further application in linguistics, psychotherapy, and child development study. As a general rule of method he assumed that every movement or vocalism captured by the camera was an integral part of the recorded event—of the series of actions and reactions that made up the interaction. More often than not, the result was an infinite regress of data that technics and theory conjointly produced. Four years might be lavished on a thirty-minute record or one hundred hours on one single second.


contact: sethwatter@gmail.com

The forms, functions, and complexity of nonverbal communication used by very young children with autism were investigated. Fourteen children with autism were matched to 14 children with developmental delays and/or language impairments on the basis of CA, MA, and expressive vocabulary. Subjects participated in a structured communication assessment consisting of 16 situations designed to elicit requesting or commenting behavior. Children with autism requested more often and commented less often than controls. Autistic children were less likely to point, show objects, or use eye gaze to communicate, but were more likely to directly manipulate the examiner's hand. The autistic group also used less complex combinations of behaviors to communicate. Implications for early identification and intervention are discussed.

Humans are highly social beings that interact with each other on a daily basis. In these complex interactions, we get along by being able to identify others' actions and infer their intentions, thoughts and feelings. One of the major theories accounting for this critical ability assumes that the understanding of social signals is based on a primordial tendency to simulate observed actions by activating a mirror neuron system. If mirror neuron regions are important for action and emotion recognition, damage to regions in this network should lead to deficits in these domains. In the current behavioural and EEG study, we focused on the lateral prefrontal cortex including dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex and utilized a series of task paradigms, each measuring a different aspect of recognizing others' actions or emotions from body cues. We examined 17 patients with lesions including (n = 8) or not including (n = 9) the inferior frontal gyrus, a core mirror neuron system regio...

The field of English for specific purposes (ESP), which addresses the communicative needs and practices of particular professional or occupational groups, has developed rapidly in the past forty years to become a major force in English language teaching and research. ESP draws its strength from an eclectic theoretical foundation and a commitment to research-based language education which seeks to reveal the constraints of social contexts on language use and the ways learners can gain control over these. In this chapter, I will briefly point to some of the major ideas and practices that currently influence ESP, focusing on needs analysis, ethnography, critical approaches, contrastive rhetoric, social constructionism, and discourse analysis. I then go on to look briefly at some of the effects ESP has had on language teaching and research, arguing that it has encouraged teachers to highlight communication rather than language, to adopt a research orientation to their work, to employ collaborative pedagogies, to be aware of discourse variation, and to consider the wider political implications of their role. Together these features of ESP practice emphazise a situated view of literacy and underline the applied nature of the field.

Language has many definitions, and is viewed as an important medium of communication. It is also considered a unique human trait. However, a review of many theories of communication shows that language is probably not as critical to communication as is generally believed. For example, the work of the Ethnolinguists and the Semiologists only helps to highlight the improbability of effective communication. Even the Mathematical Theory demonstrates that the more distorted a message, the more informative it appears to be. Research also shows that we might even be predisposed by our genders to view realities in different ways. Further, the study of Kinesics reveals that there exists a range of patterned body motion behaviour, limited to a particular culture, which might account for a phenomenal 93% of the meaning that is generated in any interaction. Therefore, an accurate use of language (if there were such a thing) cannot by itself ensure communication effectiveness. What is needed is ...

On the present paper we consider the results obtained after applying the multisystem analysis method taking into account the German modal particle ‘denn’. Multisystem analysis is made up of different analysis levels (intra- and intersystem analysis) of different semiotic systems (Intonation and Kinesics). The first level refers to intrasystem analysis of the melodic and kinesic features in sentences with German modal particle ‘denn’. The selected data are 61 utterances, where German modal particle ‘denn’ is pronounced, and they are obtained from spontaneous interactions between different subjects on TV programmes. To perform the melodic intrasystem analysis we follow the steps described in Cantero’s Melodic Analysis of Speech (2002). Kinesic intrasystem analysis is based on the structure and organization of kinesic sequence proposed by Kendon (1987, 2004) and McNeill (1992, 2000). Then we carry out the intersystem analysis of the obtained data to survey the co-relation between different analysed semiotic systems. We conclude that using multisystem analysis can be observed co-relations at the intersystem level between melodic marks, kinesic marks and the German modal particle ‘denn’ taking into account the hierarchical structure of the different elements in each analyzed system.


El presente artículo es el resultado de la aplicación del método de análisis multisistémico tomando como elemento de análisis la partícula modal alemana ‘denn’. La aplicación de este método analítico consiste, en primer lugar, en analizar intrasistémicamente las características melódicas y las características kinésicas que se manifiestan durante la emisión de las partículas modales del alemán. El corpus de datos seleccionado para la realización del análisis intrasistémico está formado por 61 enunciados en los que aparece la partícula modal 'denn'.
Los enunciados se han obtenidos a partir de producciones de habla espontánea y genuina de diferentes informantes. Para llevar a cabo el análisis intrasistémico de la materia fónica se emplea el método de Análisis Melódico del Habla (Cantero 2002). El análisis kinésico intrasistémico se fundamenta en la estructuración y organización de la secuenciación kinésica que se propone en Kendon (1987 y 2004) y en McNeill (1992 y 2000). En segundo lugar, se lleva a cabo el análisis intersistémico de los datos obtenidos, que consiste en estudiar la correlación que se establece entre los diferentes sistemas semióticos analizados. Las conclusiones que se derivan confirman que mediante la aplicación del método de análisis multisistémico es posible establecer correlaciones a nivel intersistémico entre marcas melódicas, kinésicas y la partícula modal 'denn' a partir de la estructuración jerárquica existente entre los diferentes elementos de cada sistema analizado.

Partindo da concepción da estrutura tripla básica da comunicación humana de Poyatos (1994a, 1994b) e as
consecuencias teóricas e analíticas que se derivan da mesma, concibo a comunicación humana como un todo indisolúbel
no que a comunicación verbal non se pode separar do comportamento do corpo. Neste artigo analizo as categorías non verbais que se empregan na comunicación oral. O corpus de estudo consiste nunha narración oral en galego na que,
empregando o modelo proposto por Bouvet (2001),  individualizo algúns quinemas (unidades mínimas de movemento corporal con significado) que permitan completar a explicación das categorías non verbais con exemplos tirados da gravación.

Sign language descriptions that use an analytic model borrowed from spoken language structural linguistics have proved to be not fully appropriate. Pictorial and action-like modes of expression are integral to how signed utterances are constructed and to how they work. However, observation shows that speakers likewise use kinesic and vocal expressions that are not accommodated by spoken language structural linguistic models, including pictorial and action-like modes of expression. These, also, are integral to how speaker utterances in face-to-face interaction are constructed and to how they work. Accordingly, the object of linguistic inquiry should be revised, so that it comprises not only an account of the formal abstract systems that utterances make use of, but also an account of how the semiotically diverse resources that all languaging individuals use are organized in relation to one another. Both language as an abstract system and languaging should be the concern of linguistics.

Teachers and educators are responsible in promoting effective teaching and learning to ensure intellectual development of the students. For that reason, being able to communicate well is essential for the students' academic and employability purpose. Hence, it is important for every learner to be equipped with good speaking skill. However, it is common for ESL speakers to experience speaking anxiety which hinders them to communicate well. This study, therefore, explores speaking anxiety that occurs during oral presentation through kinesics. Kinesics provides meaningful information to the listener/audience, in which messages are conveyed through the speakers' gesture, body movement and facial expression. It was found that speaking anxiety was shown by the speaker through kinesics during an oral presentation. Videos of speakers' presentation were recorded and narrated to obtain the findings. Results of this study provide useful implication towards ESL teaching and learning.

Human body postures convey useful information for understanding others' emotions and intentions. To investigate at which stage of visual processing emotional and movement-related information conveyed by bodies is discriminated, we examined event-related potentials elicited by laterally presented images of bodies with static postures and implied-motion body images with neutral, fearful or happy expressions. At the early stage of visual structural encoding (N190), we found a difference in the sensitivity of the two hemispheres to observed body postures. Specifically, the right hemisphere showed a N190 modulation both for the motion content (i.e. all the observed postures implying body movements elicited greater N190 amplitudes compared with static postures) and for the emotional content (i.e. fearful postures elicited the largest N190 amplitude), while the left hemisphere showed a modulation only for the motion content. In contrast, at a later stage of perceptual representation, r...