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A psycho-ethological approach to social signal processing

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Abstract

The emerging field of social signal processing can benefit from a theoretical framework to guide future research activities. The present article aims at drawing attention to two areas of research that devoted considerable efforts to the understanding of social behaviour: ethology and social psychology. With a long tradition in the study of animal signals, ethology and evolutionary biology have developed theoretical concepts to account for the functional significance of signalling. For example, the consideration of divergent selective pressures responsible for the evolution of signalling and social cognition emphasized the importance of two classes of indicators: informative cues and communicative signals. Social psychology, on the other hand, investigates emotional expression and interpersonal relationships, with a focus on the mechanisms underlying the production and interpretation of social signals and cues. Based on the theoretical considerations developed in these two fields, we propose a model that integrates the processing of perceivable individual features (social signals and cues) with contextual information, and we suggest that output of computer-based processing systems should be derived in terms of functional significance rather than in terms of absolute conceptual meaning.

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Notes

  1. Though not extensively, this paper will also consider notions of linguistics and pragmatics.

  2. Although this topic is still hotly debated (Owren et al. 2010; Seyfarth and Cheney 2003), semantic aspects may also be present in the communication system of non-human primates (Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006; Seyfarth et al. 1980).

  3. We will discuss the issue of encoding in a later section of this paper.

  4. Although the development of the capacity to speak can be relatively costly, once that capacity is acquired, there is little variability in cost for the production of different types of words/signals.

  5. Although similar, our concept of meta-communicative component is not precisely the same as the concept of meta-communicative signal introduced by Bekoff (1972).

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme Theme 3, Information and Communication Technologies, European Network of Excellence Social Signal Processing Network (SSPNet), grant number 231287.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, 7 rue des Battoirs, 1205, Geneva, Switzerland

    Marc Mehu & Klaus R. Scherer

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  1. Marc Mehu
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  2. Klaus R. Scherer
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Correspondence to Marc Mehu.

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This article is part of the Supplement Issue on ‘Social Signals. From Theory to Applications’, guest-edited by Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico and Alessandro Vinciarelli.

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Mehu, M., Scherer, K.R. A psycho-ethological approach to social signal processing. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 2), 397–414 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0435-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0435-2

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