Social signals and the action - Cognition loop. The case of overhelp and evaluation

The paper explores the action – cognition loop by investigating the relation between overhelp and evaluation. It presents a study on the helping and overhelping behaviors of teachers with students of their own vs. of a stigmatized culture, and analyses them in terms of a taxonomy of helping behavior, and adopting an annotation scheme to assess the multimodal behavior of teachers and pupils. Results show that overhelping teachers induce more negative evaluations, more often concerning general capacities, and frequently expressed indirectly. This seems to show that the overhelp offered blocks a child's striving for autonomy since it generates a negative evaluation, in particular the belief of an inability of the receiver.