Kadambi Akila, Ichien Nicholas, Qiu Shuwen, Lu Hongjing
Department of Psychology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Computer Sciences, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 Jul;82(5):2544-2557. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01948-5.
Dyadic interactions can sometimes elicit a disconcerting response from viewers, generating a sense of "awkwardness." Despite the ubiquity of awkward social interactions in daily life, it remains unknown what visual cues signal the oddity of human interactions and yield the subjective impression of awkwardness. In the present experiments, we focused on a range of greeting behaviors (handshake, fist bump, high five) to examine both the inherent objectivity and impact of contextual and kinematic information in the social evaluation of awkwardness. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to discriminate whether greeting behaviors presented in raw videos were awkward or natural, and if judged as awkward, participants provided verbal descriptions regarding the awkward greeting behaviors. Participants showed consensus in judging awkwardness from raw videos, with a high proportion of congruent responses across a range of awkward greeting behaviors. We also found that people used social-related and motor-related words in their descriptions for awkward interactions. Experiment 2 employed advanced computer vision techniques to present the same greeting behaviors in three different display types. All display types preserved kinematic information, but varied contextual information: (1) patch displays presented blurred scenes composed of patches; (2) body displays presented human body figures on a black background; and (3) skeleton displays presented skeletal figures of moving bodies. Participants rated the degree of awkwardness of greeting behaviors. Across display types, participants consistently discriminated awkward and natural greetings, indicating that the kinematics of body movements plays an important role in guiding awkwardness judgments. Multidimensional scaling analysis based on the similarity of awkwardness ratings revealed two primary cues: motor coordination (which accounted for most of the variability in awkwardness judgments) and social coordination. We conclude that the perception of awkwardness, while primarily inferred on the basis of kinematic information, is additionally affected by the perceived social coordination underlying human greeting behaviors.
二元互动有时会引发观众令人不安的反应，产生一种“尴尬”的感觉。尽管尴尬的社交互动在日常生活中无处不在，但尚不清楚哪些视觉线索表明人类互动的怪异之处并产生尴尬的主观印象。在本实验中，我们聚焦于一系列问候行为（握手、碰拳、击掌），以研究在尴尬情境的社会评价中，情境和运动学信息的内在客观性及其影响。在实验1中，参与者被要求辨别原始视频中呈现的问候行为是尴尬的还是自然的，如果判断为尴尬，参与者要对尴尬的问候行为进行口头描述。参与者在判断原始视频中的尴尬程度时表现出了一致性，在一系列尴尬的问候行为中，有很高比例的一致反应。我们还发现，人们在描述尴尬互动时使用了与社交和运动相关的词汇。实验2采用先进的计算机视觉技术，以三种不同的显示类型呈现相同的问候行为。所有显示类型都保留了运动学信息，但情境信息有所不同：（1）补丁显示呈现由补丁组成的模糊场景；（2）身体显示在黑色背景上呈现人体轮廓；（3）骨骼显示呈现运动身体的骨骼轮廓。参与者对问候行为的尴尬程度进行评分。在不同的显示类型中，参与者始终能够区分尴尬和自然的问候，这表明身体动作的运动学在指导尴尬判断中起着重要作用。基于尴尬评分相似性的多维尺度分析揭示了两个主要线索：运动协调性（它占尴尬判断中大部分变异性）和社交协调性。我们得出结论认为，尴尬感的感知虽然主要基于运动学信息推断，但还会受到人类问候行为背后所感知到的社交协调性的影响。
