Background: Social anxiety has been found to influence certain characteristics of the voice during various structured speaking tasks, but its assessment in more naturalistic contexts is scarce....Show moreBackground: Social anxiety has been found to influence certain characteristics of the voice during various structured speaking tasks, but its assessment in more naturalistic contexts is scarce. When directly looked at, socially anxious individuals feel more intimidated compared to when their social partner averts their eye gaze. The primary aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between social anxiety and five vocal characteristics (including mean voice intensity, mean fundamental frequency, rate, pausing, and speech duration) during a face-to-face conversation. A secondary aim was to examine the moderating effect of a social partner’s gaze direction (direct vs. averted gaze) on this relationship. Methods: Fifty-two university students (M = 21.27 years old, 86.5% female) participated in a face-to-face conversation task with a same-sex confederate. Both the participants and the confederates were given four question cards which they were asked to answer interchangeably. The confederates’ cards also included instructions about gaze direction without the participants knowing. Throughout the conversation task, participants’ voices were recorded using high-quality wearable eye-trackers. Results: The analyses revealed that neither social anxiety nor social partner gaze direction affected vocal characteristics during the conversation task. Conclusion: Increased mean fundamental frequency and degree of pausing and decreased mean voice intensity, speech rate, and duration were not identified as potential physiological indicators of social anxiety. Though translating such findings into real-life social interactions proved to be a difficult venture, future researchers could further investigate this topic with the hope of better clarifying the relationship between social anxiety and atypical voice patterns, as well as the moderating effect of confederate gaze direction on the speech patterns of more or less socially anxious individuals.Show less
Chinese migrant workers, who have moved from rural to urban areas to work, are structurally marginalized in cities and rarely get to speak for themselves in public discourses. In this thesis, I...Show moreChinese migrant workers, who have moved from rural to urban areas to work, are structurally marginalized in cities and rarely get to speak for themselves in public discourses. In this thesis, I explore how migrant worker women’s voices were negotiated in the community theater project The Maternity Chronicles (生育纪事). The relationship between director and participants in community theater is inherently inequal. In this case, migrant worker women themselves played a significant role in most parts of the making of this play, thanks to the community leadership, the attitude of the director, and choices of form. Including the women in the play required not only a space for them to speak, but also active encouragement to take that space. The Maternity Chronicles provided a platform for migrant worker women and others to speak about their experiences with abortion, which is normally considered taboo. The methods of community theater in combination with the tight social fabric and trust within the community facilitated the process of breaking this taboo. This theater project also shows the important emotional function of having voice for those who speak and get to tell their stories. As a community theater project, The Maternity Chronicles aimed to prioritize the voices of participants, and I think it succeeded in creating a space for participants to speak as individuals and as part of the community. We still need to ask to what extent individuals can speak and dissent when they speak as part of a group. Intergenerational differences and claims to the ownership of the experiences portrayed exemplify the diversity that exists within the group of migrant worker women.Show less
Wind energy companies intend to successfully implement wind farms without opposition from the local residents. The present study experimentally investigated the effect of local residents' “voice”...Show moreWind energy companies intend to successfully implement wind farms without opposition from the local residents. The present study experimentally investigated the effect of local residents' “voice” on perceived procedural fairness of the decision-making procedure and willingness to accept the wind energy project's implementation. An online survey was published on Prolific, in which participants (N = 199) were asked to sympathize with a fictitious town where they were residents and a wind farm project was planned. The experimental conditions were; no-voice, voice and pseudo-voice. The amount of “say” the residents had in the decision-making process of the project and whether their input was taken into account, differed between conditions. I hypothesized and found that participants who had an opportunity to voice their opinion and had their ideas implemented, perceive the decision-making process as more fair than those who were in a no-voice or pseudo-voice situation. Contrary to my prediction, participants in the pseudo-voice situation perceived the process as more fair (instead of less fair) than those in the no-voice situation. As predicted, the voice situation led to a greater willingness to accept the project than the pseudo-voice and slightly higher than the no-voice situation. I further predicted that the no-voice situation would lead to higher acceptance than the pseudo-voice situation, but found no difference in acceptance between the two conditions. Finally, the results provided evidence for the idea that effects of voice procedure on project acceptance are mediated by perceived procedural fairness of the decision-making process when comparing voice to pseudo-voice and no-voice situations.Show less
This thesis investigates hybrid documentary-fiction films that were constructed through a close collaboration between the filmmakers and the subjects, and in which the subjects’ personal...Show moreThis thesis investigates hybrid documentary-fiction films that were constructed through a close collaboration between the filmmakers and the subjects, and in which the subjects’ personal experiences and ideas about self-representation influenced both the content and the form of the film. The objective of the filmmakers is to raise questions about how to understand somebody else’s experiences, what it means to insert oneself as a filmmaker into the lives of others and how to make the spectator aware of these issues. They do so by using formal methods that are usually associated with fiction filmmaking and by foregrounding the film’s construction. Since the filmmakers do not offer a conclusive perspective on the story or an interpretation of the images, the spectator is made to invest his or her own experiences, which are equally valuable as those of the filmmakers and the subjects of the films. Taking Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectatorship as a guideline, I will investigate which formal methods associated with fiction filmmaking can employed to activate the spectator, how, and to what effect. I have divided my thesis into three chapters that each treats a specific formal method: identification through ambiguous focalisation; the uncertain relation between voice, text, and image; and database logic as an alternative to narrative logic.Show less
