"Who's there?": Depicting identity in interaction.

Social robots have limited social competences. This leads us to view them as depictions of social agents rather than actual social agents. However, people also have limited social competences. We argue that all social interaction involves the depiction of social roles and that they originate in, and are defined by, their function in accounting for failures of social competence.

Impact of Volume and Type of Overnight Pages on Resident Sleep During Home Call.

BACKGROUND: Little research exists regarding factors that contribute to resident fatigue during home call. OBJECTIVE: We objectively tracked the number and type of pages received, as well as residents' sleep time, during home call. We then examined the relationship between paging volume, resident sleep, and resident fatigue. METHODS: A total of 4 of 4 urology residents (100%) at a single institution wore a FitBit Charge HR device from July 2015 to July 2016 to track sleep. Between January and July 2016, pages received by the on-call resident were counted as either floor (urology inpatient unit), clinic (after-hours answering service), or other. Postcall residents were defined as fatigued and excused at noon if they reported they were too tired to safely perform clinical duties. RESULTS: Residents slept an average of 408 minutes per night while not on call, versus 368 minutes while on call but not fatigued, and 181 minutes while on call and fatigued (P < .05). The most senior resident received fewer pages per night on average than the most junior resident. Each page was associated with 4.71 fewer minutes asleep on average for all residents. Pages in the other category were associated with 7.74 fewer minutes asleep per page for all residents, but only the most junior resident had significantly less sleep, 9.02 minutes, per floor page. CONCLUSIONS: Objective sleep data correlate with subjective assessment of resident fatigue and with volume and type of pages received. Senior residents spent less time awake per page and received fewer pages.

Editors' Introduction: Miscommunication.

Miscommunication is a neglected issue in the cognitive sciences, where it has often been discounted as noise in the system. This special issue argues for the opposite view: Miscommunication is a highly structured and ubiquitous feature of human interaction that systematically underpins people's ability to create and maintain shared languages. Contributions from conversation analysis, computational linguistics, experimental psychology, and formal semantics provide evidence for these claims. They highlight the multi-modal, multi-person character of miscommunication. They demonstrate the incremental, contingent, and locally adaptive nature of the processes people use to detect and deal with miscommunication. They show how these processes can drive language change. In doing so, these contributions introduce an alternative perspective on what successful communication is, new methods for studying it, and application areas where these ideas have a particular impact. We conclude that miscommunication is not noise but essential to the productive flexibility of human communication, especially our ability to respond constructively to new people and new situations.

Tolerance of uncertainty: A systematic review of health and healthcare-related outcomes.

BACKGROUND: Uncertainty tolerance (UT) is thought to be a characteristic of individuals that influences various outcomes related to health, healthcare, and healthcare education. We undertook a systematic literature review to evaluate the state of the evidence on UT and its relationship to these outcomes. METHODS: We conducted electronic and bibliographic searches to identify relevant studies examining associations between UT and health, healthcare, or healthcare education outcomes. We used standardized tools to assess methodological quality and analyzed the major findings of existing studies, which we organized and classified by theme. RESULTS: Searches yielded 542 potentially relevant articles, of which 67 met inclusion criteria. Existing studies were heterogeneous in focus, setting, and measurement approach, were largely cross-sectional in design, and overall methodological quality was low. UT was associated with various trainee-centered, provider-centered, and patient-centered outcomes which were cognitive, emotional, and behavioral in nature. UT was most consistently associated with emotional well-being. CONCLUSIONS: Uncertainty tolerance is associated with several important trainee-, provider-, and patient-centered outcomes in healthcare and healthcare education. However, low methodological quality, study design limitations, and heterogeneity in the measurement of UT limit strong inferences about its effects, and addressing these problems is a critical need for future research.

Running Repairs: Coordinating Meaning in Dialogue.

People give feedback in conversation: both positive signals of understanding, such as nods, and negative signals of misunderstanding, such as frowns. How do signals of understanding and misunderstanding affect the coordination of language use in conversation? Using a chat tool and a maze-based reference task, we test two experimental manipulations that selectively interfere with feedback in live conversation: (a) "Attenuation" that replaces positive signals of understanding such as "right" or "okay" with weaker, more provisional signals such as "errr" or "umm" and (2) "Amplification" that replaces relatively specific signals of misunderstanding from clarification requests such as "on the left?" with generic signals of trouble such as "huh?" or "eh?". The results show that Amplification promotes rapid convergence on more systematic, abstract ways of describing maze locations while Attenuation has no significant effect. We interpret this as evidence that "running repairs"-the processes of dealing with misunderstandings on the fly-are key drivers of semantic coordination in dialogue. This suggests a new direction for experimental work on conversation and a productive way to connect the empirical accounts of Conversation Analysis with the representational and processing concerns of Formal Semantics and Psycholinguistics.