Ross Buck - US grants

culture; emotions;

The broad, long-term objective of this project is to develop a deeper understanding of the interaction between biologically-based spontaneous emotional expression and cultural experience. The interaction of universal tendencies toward emotional expression and learned patterns of inhibition and control produce culturally- specific "styles" of expression. There are direct health implications in the understanding of the nature of such expressive styles, for they can become sources of cultural misunderstanding and conflict, and the suppression of expression may be indirectly associated with negative physiological effects. The specific aim of this proposal is to continue and expand a study of spontaneous emotional communication in French and German students. Students are shown emotionally-loaded slides while, unknown to them, their facial/gestural responses are videotaped. Later, the same students view the videotaped responses and attempt to guess the type of slide shown on each trial. The resulting communication data are analyzed by Kenny's Social Relations Model, with estimates of general sending accuracy and receiving ability, and unique communication scores, for each cultural group. The stream of spontaneous expression is analy by segmentation techniques. Data collected to date suggest that this slide-viewing technique has been successful in eliciting different "styles" of expression in French and German students. The proposed research will: (1) describe and document cultural differences in expressive style; and the relationships between individual differences (sex, cultural experience) and the specific ways in which expressive styles are manifested; (2) explore whether expressive styles are related to the language being used rather than cultural experience per se, in a study of bilingual individuals who respond to the slides in both German and French; (3) explore the expressive styles of British students; (4) develop and validate a cross-cultural version of the Communication of Affect Receiving Ability Test (CARAT-CC); (5) develop and validate the Spontaneous Expression Culture Identification Measure: French- German version (CSEEM-FG); and (6) study whether cross-cultural decoding ability and the ability to use expressive cues to identify culture constitute useful measures of cultural sensitivity.

End-users' online behavior can significantly affect the reliability and security of next-generation software systems. For instance, skipping repeated requests to update software or ignoring security warnings while visiting unknown websites, while extremely dangerous, are not uncommon. Although end-users' actions (or inactions) often open up the opportunity for cyber-attacks, the lack of emotional appeals and poor design of the current software update/warning messages are to blame to a large extent for such risky behavior, which is addressed as follows. First, this project identifies the limitations of the current software update/warning messages from an affective-cognitive perspective, and addresses the shortcomings by incorporating emotional appeals that command attention and evoke emotions more effectively. Also, message designs are changed adaptively based on the context and user's past behavior to counter the habituation-effect. Finally, to increase the compliance rate, this project develops emotional education and inoculation strategies that enable users to recognize and avoid the temptation associated with risky online behavior. Successful completion of this project will greatly advance the understanding of the impact of emotion on the decision making process in regards to safe online behavior, and will revolutionize the way software vendors communicate the risks of running vulnerable software and warn users. The research findings will be published in premier academic venues, and will be disseminated through project website. Research agendas will be integrated with the curriculum development activities. Existing programs at UConn will be leveraged to promote diversity and engage students from underrepresented communities.