scholarly journals Voice-Based Agents as Personified Things: Assimilation and Accommodation as Equilibration of Doubt

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Katrin Etzrodt ◽  
Sven Engesser

We aim to investigate the nature of doubt regarding voice-based agents by referring to Piaget’s ontological object–subject classification “thing” and “person,” its associated equilibration processes, and influential factors of the situation, the user, and the agent. In two online surveys, we asked 853 and 435 participants, ranging from 17 to 65 years of age, to assess Alexa and the Google Assistant. We discovered that only some people viewed voice-based agents as mere things, whereas the majority classified them into personified things. However, their classification is fragile and depends basically on the imputation of subject-like attributes of agency and mind to the voice-based agents, increased by a dyadic using situation, previous regular interactions, a younger age, and an introverted personality of the user. We discuss these results in a broader context.

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Lortie ◽  
Isabelle Deschamps ◽  
Matthieu J. Guitton ◽  
Pascale Tremblay

Purpose The factors that influence the evaluation of voice in adulthood, as well as the consequences of such evaluation on social interactions, are not well understood. Here, we examined the effect of listeners' age and the effect of talker age, sex, and smoking status on the auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice, voice-related psychosocial attributions, and perceived speech tempo. We also examined the voice dimensions affecting the propensity to engage in social interactions. Method Twenty-five younger (age 19–37 years) and 25 older (age 51–74 years) healthy adults participated in this cross-sectional study. Their task was to evaluate the voice of 80 talkers. Results Statistical analyses revealed limited effects of the age of the listener on voice evaluation. Specifically, older listeners provided relatively more favorable voice ratings than younger listeners, mainly in terms of roughness. In contrast, the age of the talker had a broader impact on voice evaluation, affecting auditory-perceptual evaluations, psychosocial attributions, and perceived speech tempo. Some of these talker differences were dependent upon the sex of the talker and his or her smoking status. Finally, the results also show that voice-related psychosocial attribution was more strongly associated with the propensity of the listener to engage in social interactions with a person than auditory-perceptual dimensions and perceived speech tempo, especially for the younger adults. Conclusions These results suggest that age has a broad influence on voice evaluation, with a stronger impact for talker age compared with listener age. While voice-related psychosocial attributions may be an important determinant of social interactions, perceived voice quality and speech tempo appear to be less influential. Supplemental Materials https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5844102


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ezgi Dogan-Sander ◽  
Elisabeth Kohls ◽  
Sabrina Baldofski ◽  
Christine Rummel-Kluge

Background: As the majority of studies examining mental health during the pandemic are cross-sectional, little is known about the changes in mental health during the pandemic, especially in university students. Most studies indicate a worsening of mental health conditions. This study aimed to evaluate the mental health status of German university students during the third wave of the pandemic in 2021 and to compare the results to a sample of a congruent cross-sectional study from 2020.Methods: Two cross-sectional and anonymous online surveys among university students were conducted (first survey: July-August 2020, N = 3,382; second survey: March-April 2021, N = 5,642). Mental health status was assessed with standardized measures (depressive symptoms, alcohol and drug consumption, and eating disorder symptoms), and social and emotional aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic were assessed. In addition to descriptive statistics and group comparisons of the two survey samples from 2020 and 2021, respectively, risk and protective factors related to mental health were analyzed.Results: There were significant differences in severities of depressive symptoms and alcohol and drug consumption between the two online surveys from 2020 and 2021. Findings suggest an increase in the severity of depressive symptoms as well as alcohol and drug consumption. Significantly more respondents reported suicidal ideation in the survey from 2021. Lower self-efficacy, less social support and lower resilience as well as higher perceived stress and more loneliness were reported by the participants of the survey from 2021 compared to 2020. Regarding factors predicting mental health symptoms, being female was a positive predictor for hazardous alcohol use and anorexia nervosa in comparison to men. Further, younger age, being diverse, higher perceived stress and loneliness were positive predictors for all mental health outcomes.Conclusion: This study reveals an increase in severities of depressive symptoms, including suicidal ideation, drug and alcohol consumption among students. Being diverse, younger age, higher perceived stress and loneliness were mutual risk factors for higher depressive and eating disorder symptoms as well as alcohol consumption. Universities and health care policy should recognize and address mental health issues of young adults during ongoing times of crisis and invest in easy-to-access interventions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Mosolova ◽  
Dmitry Sosin ◽  
Sergey Mosolov

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers (HCWs) have been subject to increased workload while also exposed to many psychosocial stressors. Most studies reported high levels of depression and anxiety among HCWs worldwide. Our study is based on two online surveys of 2195 HCWs from different regions of Russia during spring and autumn epidemic outbreaks revealed the rates of anxiety, stress, depression, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and perceived stress as 32.3%, 31.1%, 45.5%, 74.2%, 37.7%,67.8%, respectively. Moreover, 2.4% of HCWs reported suicidal thoughts. Revealed risk factors included: female gender, younger age, working for over 6 months, living outside of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, the fear of getting infected or infecting family and friends. These results demonstrate the need for urgent supportive programs for HCWs fighting COVID-19 that fall into higher risk factors groups.


2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonghong Jade Xu

Structured within an expanded econometric theoretical framework, this study uses national data sources to identify the critical factors that influence college graduates' advance to and persistence in graduate education and to compare the systematic differences between students in the STEM and non-STEM majors. The findings indicate that there is a high attrition rate from graduate education in both STEM and non-STEM majors. Male, Caucasian, and students who received their bachelor degree at a traditional (younger) age are more likely to attend and complete graduate education, regardless of academic major. Major-based differences are apparent in the impact from variables including parents' education, total undergraduate debt, institution selectivity, and student's academic background measured by SAT/ACT scores and cumulative GPA in undergraduate major.


Author(s):  
Maryna Krasiukova

The article is devoted to the problems of the use of information technologies (IT) in sociological research, in particular in the process of studying the phenomenon of socialization of the individual. The material consists of three parts, which highlight the essential characteristics of the category of socialization, the current trends in the use of information technology in sociology, and some areas of application of information technology in the process of studying the socialization of the individual. Socialization of personality is an important social-pedagogical phenomenon, as the process of human entry into society is often accompanied by problems. Currently, the relevance of intelligence on the problems of socialization has increased significantly, which is largely connected with social changes. The article presents the definition and the main features of the category "socialization", scientific approaches to the interpretation of this concept, as well as a brief overview of the methods of diagnosing the level of socialization of a person. The formation of a digital society led to the appearance of computing social sciences and the separation of digital sociology at the beginning of the XXIst century. The peculiarity of the modern period is the use of various sources of secondary sociological information, in particular those which are based on the objective recording of the real behavior of people. The gathering of sociological information takes place with the use of methods of content analysis, analysis of texts and social networks, etc. The vast majority of these methods involve the use of information technology. In addition, methodologies for working with data from Big Data and Data Mining are now widely used to gather and analyze large volumes of heterogeneous data and to generate new useful information on existing or potential interconnections between phenomena on this basis. So, sociology is now focused on the use of new information tools. At the same time, the use of traditional information and communication technologies is still remains of current interest (tools for conducting surveys, statistical analysis programs, etc.), which can significantly reduce the waste of time, reduce the probability of errors of different types, carry out the different methods of analysis. In the process of the socialization of a person studying a variety of surveys are widely used, the results of which must be systematized and analyzed. In order to collect such data, it is expedient to use the possibilities of the Internet, which allows reaching a large audience of respondents and reduce the waste of time both by respondents and researchers. Currently online surveys are often used by Google Forms, which provides tools for creating questionnaires of different types of questions, storing received replies, transferring them to spreadsheets in Google Drive, and initial analysis. In the case of increased requirements to the complexity and quality of the questionnaire, as well as the need to reach a large number of respondents, you should turn to specialized web resources, such as SurveyMonkey. The data obtained during the online survey can be analyzed using statistical programs (Statgraphics, Statistica, S-plus, SPSS, Systat, etc.). In particular, such programs provide an opportunity for cluster and factor analysis to classify the phenomena studied and identify the most influential factors. Consequently, important steps in the study of the phenomenon of socialization and the level of socialization of the individual are the collection of data (through online surveys using Google Forms) and their analysis using software (office spreadsheets, general-purpose statistical packages or specialized programs aimed at performing specific statistical procedures).


2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 1271-1276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michio Yoneda ◽  
Masayuki Yamamoto ◽  
Tetsuo Yamada ◽  
Makoto Takahashi ◽  
Yasuhiro Shima

Temperature is one of the most influential factors for the sexual maturation of fishes, but understanding of the extent to which temperature affects the maturational schedules is limited in multiple-spawning fishes over a protracted season. This study examined the effect of temperature on sexual maturation of Japanese anchovy Engraulis japonicus siblings under high and low temperature regimes on different birthdates. The maturation probability differed between the two temperature regimes. Specimens in high temperature regimes matured at much smaller size and younger age than their counterparts. Also, a significant difference in the maturation probability between sexes was found at low temperatures, but not at high temperatures. Our findings show that temperature affects the maturational schedules of siblings of Japanese anchovy, suggesting that the size and age at sexual maturation could differ among cohorts, even in a given sampling location and/or year.


MANUSYA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-59
Author(s):  
Phanintra Teeranon

This paper aims to analyze the acoustic characteristics of initial consonant voicing perturbation of the fundamental frequency of oral vowels and nasal vowels of Ban Doi Pwo Karen. Three age groups of informants were selected: over-sixty years old (>60), middle aged (35-45), and under-twenty years old (<20). The acoustic analysis method was employed to analyze the mean vowel duration (msec), mean vowel amplitude (dB), and mean vowel fundamental frequency (Hz). The results show that voiceless initial consonants tend to cause a lower fundamental frequency than that of the voiced initial consonants. This has excited controversy concerning the tonogenesis theory of initial voicing perturbation on vowels. However, it was later found that the vowels followed by voiceless initial consonants were breathy and it was the voice register of vowels that caused the low fundamental frequency values. In contrast to other studies, the nasal vowels were not always higher in fundamental frequency when compared to oral vowels. In all age groups, nasal vowels following either voiceless or voiced consonants were found to be higher in fundamental frequency than oral vowels, except in the younger age group where the fundamental frequency of nasal vowels following voiced consonants was lower than that of the oral vowels following voiced consonants.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document