The body: Postures, gait, proxemics, and haptics.

2016 ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Matsumoto ◽  
Hyisung C. Hwang ◽  
Mark G. Frank
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Postures

Rattlesnake strike behavior: kinematics

1998 ◽  
Vol 201 (6) ◽  
pp. 837-850 ◽  
Author(s):  
K V Kardong ◽  
V L Bels
Keyword(s):  
High Speed ◽  
Predatory Behavior ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Body Segments ◽  
Impact Forces ◽  
Tactile Stimuli ◽  
High Speed Film ◽  
Rodent Prey ◽  
Subsequent Loss

The predatory behavior of rattlesnakes includes many distinctive preparatory phases leading to an extremely rapid strike, during which venom is injected. The rodent prey is then rapidly released, removing the snake's head from retaliation by the prey. The quick action of the venom makes possible the recovery of the dispatched prey during the ensuing poststrike period. The strike is usually completed in less than 0.5 s, placing a premium on an accurate strike that produces no significant errors in fang placement that could result in poor envenomation and subsequent loss of the prey. To clarify the basis for effective strike performance, we examined the basic kinematics of the rapid strike using high-speed film analysis. We scored numerous strike variables. Four major results were obtained. (1) Neurosensory control of the strike is based primarily upon sensory inputs via the eyes and facial pits to launch the strike, and upon tactile stimuli after contact. Correction for errors in targeting occurs not by a change in strike trajectory, but by fang repositioning after the jaws have made contact with the prey. (2) The rattlesnake strike is based upon great versatility and variation in recruitment of body segments and body postures. (3) Forces generated during acceleration of the head are transferred to posterior body sections to decelerate the head before contact with the prey, thereby reducing impact forces upon the snake's jaws. (4) Body acceleration is based on two patterns of body displacement, one in which acute sections of the body open like a gate, the other in which body segments flow around postural curves similar to movements seen during locomotion. There is one major implication of these results: recruitment of body segments, launch postures and kinematic features of the strike may be quite varied from strike to strike, but the overall predatory success of each strike by a rattlesnake is very consistent. <P>

Perception, Expression, and Social Function of Pain: A Human Ethological View

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wulf Schiefenhövel
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Field Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Small Children ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Culture Independent ◽  
Health And Well Being

The ArgumentPain has important biomedical socioanthropological, semiotic, and other facets. In this contribution pain and the experssion of pain are looked at from the perspective of evolutionary biology, utilizing, among others, cross-cultural data from field work in Melanesia.No other being cares for sick and suffering conspecifics in the way humans do. Notwithstanding aggression and neglect, common in all cultures, human societies can be characterized as empathic, comforting, and promoting the health and well-being of their members. One important stimulus triggering this caring response in others is the expression of pain. The nonverbal channel of communication, particularly certain universal — i.e., culture-independent facial expressions, gestures, and body postures, convey much of the message from the painstricken person to the group.These behaviors signal the person's physical and psychical pain, sadness, grief, and despair in ways very similar to the signs given by infants and small children: the body loses tonus and sinks or drops to the ground, the gestures are those of helplessness. Pain and grief may be so strong that control is lost not only over the body's posture but also over the mind's awareness. In such cases the afflicted person may carry out actions endangering himself or others. In general, these behavior patterns resemble those of infants in situations of distress and danger, and it is not surprising that the response of the members of the group is basically parental: taking care, assisting and consoling.Perceptive and behavioral patterns which developed in the course of avian and mammalian phylogeny to serve the well-being of the young have proven, as was shown by Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989), to be powerful building blocks for actions in other spheres of human interaction. Love is one such field, the reactions to a conspecific suffering pain is another.

Deviant Treatment of the Body as a Mortuary Ritual

2020 ◽  
pp. 347-360
Author(s):  
Takeshi Ishikawa
Keyword(s):  
Prone Position ◽  
Skeletal Remains ◽  
Decay Process ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Posture ◽  
Faunal Remains ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Mortuary Ritual ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines the social meaning of deviant mortuary practices from an osteoarchaeological perspective using skeletal remains from the Middle Jomon Period (ca. 3500–2500 cal BC) found at the Kusakari shell mound. The analyses focus on attributes associated with mortuary body treatments: 1) arrangements of remains, 2) body posture and direction, and 3) the location of burials within the cemetery. Although the usual body postures were dorsal during the period, one individual was laid in a prone position with an unusual body direction compared with other burials. The skeletal arrangement also revealed that the individual had been disarticulated early in the postmortem decay process; however, the remains were located within the usual cemetery area. Based on these results and the extraordinary amount of varied faunal remains in the vicinity, the deviant mortuary treatments appeared to arise from a specific social persona rather than an unusual context of death, such as drowning, suicide, warfare, or other cause.

scholarly journals Contact-free unconstraint respiratory measurements with load cells under the bed in awake healthy volunteers: breath-by-breath comparison with pneumotachography

2019 ◽  
Vol 126 (5) ◽  
pp. 1432-1441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiroh Isono ◽  
Natsuko Nozaki-Taguchi ◽  
Makoto Hasegawa ◽  
Shinichiro Kato ◽  
Shinsuke Todoroki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Respiratory Rate ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Load Cell ◽  
The Body ◽  
Phase Changes ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Load Cells ◽  
Centroid Shift ◽  
Lower Load ◽  
Contact Free

Rate of respiration is a fundamental vital sign. Accuracy and precision of respiratory rate measurements with contact-free load cell sensors under the bed legs were assessed by breath-by-breath comparison with the pneumotachography technique during two different dynamic breathing tasks in 16 awake human adults resting on the bed. The subject voluntarily increased and decreased the respiratory rate between 4 and 16 breaths/min ( n = 8) and 10 and 40 breaths/min ( n = 8) at every 2 breaths in 6 different lying postures such as supine, left lateral, right lateral, and 30, 45, and 60° sitting postures. Reciprocal phase changes of the upper and lower load cell signals accorded with the respiratory phases indicating respiratory-related shifts of the centroid along the long axis of the bed. Bland-Altman analyses revealed 0.66 and 1.59 breaths/min standard deviation differences between the techniques (limits of agreement: −1.22 to 1.36 and −2.96 to 3.30) and 0.07 and 0.17 breaths/min fixed bias differences (accuracy) (confidence interval: 0.04 to 0.10 and 0.12 to 0.22) for the mean respiratory rates of 10.5 ± 3.7 and 24.6 ± 8.9 breaths/min, respectively, regardless of the body postures on the bed. Proportional underestimation by this technique was evident for respiratory rates >40 breaths/min. Sample breath increase up to 10 breaths improved the precision from 1.59 to 0.26 breaths/min. Abnormally faster and slower respirations were accurately detected. We conclude that contact-free unconstraint respiratory rate measurements with load cells under the bed legs are accurate and may serve as a new clinical and investigational tool. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Four load cells placed under the bed legs successfully captured a centroid shift during respiration in human subjects lying on a bed. Breath-by-breath comparison of the breaths covering a wide respiratory rate range by pneumotachography confirmed reliability of the contact-free unconstraint respiratory rate measurements by small standard deviations and biases regardless of body postures. Abnormally faster and slower respirations were accurately detected. This technique should be an asset as a new clinical and investigational tool.

Attentional biases using the body in the crowd task: Are angry body postures detected more rapidly?

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 700-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Gilbert ◽  
Rachael Martin ◽  
Mark Coulson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Body Postures

scholarly journals Weapons, Body Postures, and the Quest for Dominance in Robberies

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floris Mosselman ◽  
Don Weenink ◽  
Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard
Keyword(s):  
Violent Crime ◽  
Video Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Qualitative Analyses

Objective: A small-scale exploration of the use of video analysis to study robberies. We analyze the use of weapons as part of the body posturing of robbers as they attempt to attain dominance. Methods: Qualitative analyses of video footage of 23 shop robberies. We used Observer XT software (version 12) for fine-grained multimodal coding, capturing diverse bodily behavior by various actors simultaneously. We also constructed story lines to understand the robberies as hermeneutic whole cases. Results: Robbers attain dominance by using weapons that afford aggrandizing posturing and forward movements. Guns rather than knives seemed to fit more easily with such posturing. Also, victims were more likely to show minimizing postures when confronted with guns. Thus, guns, as part of aggrandizing posturing, offer more support to robbers’ claims to dominance in addition to their more lethal power. In the cases where resistance occurred, robbers either expressed insecure body movements or minimizing postures and related weapon usage or they failed to impose a robbery frame as the victims did not seem to comprehend the situation initially. Conclusions: Video analysis opens up a new perspective of how violent crime unfolds as sequences of bodily movements. We provide methodological recommendations and suggest a larger scale comparative project.

scholarly journals Effects of maintaining different body positions on attentional allocation of obese and non-obese women

Kinesiology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-275
Author(s):  
Fernando Garbeloto dos Santos ◽  
Umberto Cesar Côrrea ◽  
Ricardo Drews ◽  
Go Tani ◽  
Flavio Henrique Bastos
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Time ◽  
Postural Control ◽  
The Body ◽  
Obese Women ◽  
Visual Reaction Time ◽  
Attentional Allocation ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
Visual Reaction ◽  
Different Levels

Studies have shown that obese individuals may require more attentional resources to perform postural control compared to non-obese individuals. However, it is unclear if this difference in the allocation of attention can only be observed in body positions that lead to a higher level of instability. The objective of this study was to investigate if obesity affects the allocation of attention for maintaining body postures with different levels of balance demand. Ten obese women (BMI=41.7±8.5) and ten non-obese women (BMI=21.8±1.3) volunteers were assigned into two groups (M age=39.7±7.6): obese and eutrophic. The visual reaction time simultaneous with the maintenance of the body positions with different levels of balance demand (sitting, standing and unipedal stance) was used to infer the allocation of attentional resources. A longer reaction time was observed in the unipedal stance, compared to the other positions, for both groups. However, no difference was observed between the obese and eutrophic groups, for any of the body positions. The results diverge from the existing literature, showing that obesity does not affect the allocation of attention for postural control.

Distinct adaptation patterns between grip dynamics and arm kinematics when the body is upside-down

2021 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 862-874
Author(s):  
L. Opsomer ◽  
F. Crevecoeur ◽  
J-L. Thonnard ◽  
J. McIntyre ◽  
P. Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Reference Frames ◽  
Parabolic Flight ◽  
Arm Movements ◽  
The Body ◽  
Common Mechanism ◽  
Altered Gravity ◽  
Movement Kinematics ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Arm Kinematics

During rhythmic arm movements performed in an upside-down posture, grip control adapted very quickly, but kinematics adaptation was more progressive. Our results suggest that grip control and movement kinematics planning might operate in different reference frames. Moreover, by comparing our results with previous results from parabolic flight studies, we propose that a common mechanism underlies adaptation to unfamiliar body postures and adaptation to altered gravity.

Effects of clothing ease and body postures on the air gap and clothing coverage

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 578-594
Author(s):  
Shitan Wang ◽  
Xiuhua Wang ◽  
Yunyi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Air Gap ◽  
The Body ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Gap Size ◽  
Lower Body ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Body Postures ◽  
Body Regions ◽  
Gap Models ◽  
The Right

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of clothing ease and body postures on the size and distribution of the air gap as well as the body coverage with the clothing. Design/methodology/approach Visual and quantitative analyses were conducted using a 3D body scanner and Geomagic Software. The air gap size and clothing area factor (fcl) in three test coverall and seven selected postures were calculated and compared. Findings The results indicated that both the clothing ease and body postures had a strong effect on the air gap and clothing coverage, especially the more complex the postures, the wider the range of influence. Nevertheless, these effects varied over body regions, being stronger at the lower body than the upper body. The air gap size at the left side of the body was generally larger than the right side. It was also found that the clothing coverage was linearly correlated with the air gap size and could be employed as an indicator to evaluate clothing protective capabilities. Practical implications The findings suggested that greater attention should be paid to the protection and flexibility at the lower body and asymmetrical distribution of the air gap should be considered in the future air gap modeling. Originality/value The outcomes provided useful information to improve the protective clothing and develop more realistic air gap models to simulate the heat and mass transfer.

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