Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

Cross-cultural psychologists have widely discussed “gaze avoidance” as a sociocultural norm to describe reduced mutual gaze in East Asians (EAs) compared Western Caucasians (WCs). Supportive evidence is primarily based on self-reports and video recordings of face-to-face interactions, but more objective techniques that can investigate the micro-dynamics are scarce. The current study used dual h...

Advancement in communication technologies continues to fuel the growth of geographically distributed teams. Managers and team members have expressed concerns about negative impacts when individuals work at a distance from each other since such changes in work structure can affect social interactions among individuals in teams. The social relationships, shared experiences, and ongoing interperso...

BACKGROUND Vancomycin and related glycopeptide antibiotics exert their antimicrobial effect by binding to carboxy-terminal peptide targets in the bacterial cell wall and preventing the biosynthesis of peptidoglycan. Bacteria can resist the action of these agents by replacing the peptide targets with depsipeptides. Rational efforts to design new agents effective against resistant bacteria requir...

Knowledge of how groups of people interact is important in many disciplines, e.g. organizational behavior, social network analysis, knowledge management and ubiquitous computing. Existing studies of social network interactions have either been restricted to online communities, where unambiguous measurements about how people interact can be obtained (available from chat and email logs), or have ...

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literatureonracial segregation. Wefindthat ideological segregationofonlinenews consump...

Productive collaboration is an integral component of socially constructed perspectives of learning. Yet effective collaboration is quite challenging and not without its own risks. Collaboration, both distributed and face-to-face, must be nurtured; technologies can support or undermine its positive growth in learning communities. We present an exploratory investigation of the types of social int...

Productive collaboration is an integral component of socially constructed perspectives of learning. Yet effective collaboration is quite challenging and not without its own risks. Collaboration, both distributed and face-to-face, must be nurtured; technologies can support or undermine its positive growth in learning communities. In this paper, we present an exploratory investigation of the type...

The human dynamics group at the MIT Media Laboratory proposes that active pattern analysis of face-to-face interactions within the workplace can radically improve the functioning of the organization. There are several different types of information inherent in such conversations: interaction features, participants, context, and content. By aggregating this information, high-potential collaborat...