Thursday, March 27, 2014

Plain Style



Introduction
This study investigated whether emotional facial expressions can be accurately identified in peripheral vision, how much recognition is impaired relative to central vision, and what mechanisms account for the recognition advantage of some expressions. / In most of the prior studies, the face stimuli have been presented at fixation and thus available to foveal vision. However, little is known about facial expression processing in the visual periphery before the faces are fixated. / This issue is theoretically important because it deals with the processing of social signals outside the focus of overt attention with the low-resolution peripheral retina, the extent to which expression encoding is affected by stimulus eccentricity, and how much recognition performance varies with type of expression under impoverished perceptual conditions. / This issue has also practical implications because, in real-life social settings, faces often appear initially in the visual periphery, among other objects or within a group of people. It would thus be highly beneficial if the cognitive system could extract expression information before the eyes land on the face: This would facilitate early attentional selection, orienting to, and processing of the most relevant faces among the multiple, simultaneously occurring stimuli, and, as a consequence, allow viewers to react promptly with preparatory adaptive behavior to important social cues.

Original Article:
Facial expression recognition in peripheral versus central vision: role of the eyes and the mouth

Readability Formula
Score
3.3
Grade Levels
A grade level (based on the USA education system) is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. Scores over 22 should generally be taken to mean graduate level text.
Readability Formula
Grade
21.5
26
17.9
18.6
23.1
Average Grade Level
21.4
Text Statistics
Character Count
1,203
Syllable Count
417
Word Count
210
Sentence Count
6
Characters per Word
5.7
Syllables per Word
2.0
Words per Sentence
35.0
























The role of official language
This psychological research was published in 2013. The full title is also the research topic-- “Facial expression recognition in peripheral versus central vision: role of eyes and the mouth.” The main thesis is talking about “how peripheral vision influence people to be identified.”As psychological research, it should use official language to interpret theoretical approaches and analyze the research results for some professional psychologists. As a science article about “facial expression” in a magazine, it has arouse a wild public concern because it is a popular topic which really close to our daily life that every day we have chances to meet new friends and we desire to know how to use our facial expression to give other people a good impression. From this research, the author wanted the readers to know not only how their five sense organs influence their facial expression, but also how to use their facial expression to get this good impression. Searching some information about the main readers of this psychological research, it was popular in people who want to find a job these days or want to improve their social competence because by learning how to use facial expression, they can learn how to make a friendly expression and make other people feel comfortable. Considering about the different audience just like learners or jodhunters, researchers will know it is not easy to write only use one kind of language.
This research was finished by three famous scientists who are also the professors in the universities, and they have published a lot of papers and researches before. They are good at analyzing the face perception and the connection with social work. At the first page, their information is in the footnotes which include their working locations and their e-mail addresses. The research was based on their working places—universities which would provide enough theoretical support and technical assistance. From the “Acknowledgments” before the reference page, the authors expressed gratitude to the company which gave the financial support, and the funds which helped the research to get more professional equipments and results. This background made this research full of authority. Authors for readers to consider, they give their e-mail addresses in order to get the feedback and questions from the readers. This is the follow-up step for a science research.
The research includes three main parts, abstract, introduction and experiments. The abstract part focuses on the whole research’s results. If people don’t have enough time to read the whole research or they want to judge whether the research will supply the knowledge which they want to learn, this abstract part is a good choice to read because they can get the abstract points of the article, and it will help them to think about whether they need to continue to read it. Short languages are the best choices to use for conclusions because conclusions need to be clear, short and easy to understand. Experiment part focuses on the concrete steps for experiment and the comparison for the results. This part which includes research methods, procedures, measures and results, is prepared for some professional learners. It concludes some mathematical linguistics and graphical analysis. I choose “Introduction” -----the most important part of the research because it includes the general summary of the experimental purpose and value of the research. As the first part read by readers, introduction needs describe the psychological research clearly because there are many scientific language descriptions in the research which is difficult to understand as an unprofessional reader. Authority and scientificity are necessary for a psychological research because it decides whether people want to read or not and how much they want to believe. A good introduction will attract more readers to read it. Language in this part needs to be more forma,l and official language will help to achieve the goal because using official language will get rid of the personal view of authors and increase its professional. The most efficient way to use official language is using impersonal and passive words. Sometimes, “professional words” can also help us get more authority. Even though we need to use official language when we write a research, it doesn’t mean that we need to make every sentence into official language. In my opinion, when we write research, we need use official language as main part, but some short and simple language to explain some issue more clearly.
I separate this Introduction into four parts and indicate them with “/”.  First part is talking about the purposes of the research. This is a long sentence which includes three clauses to indicate the subtitle of the research. The character of this sentence is “easy to learn.” This sentence doesn’t obey the rule of official language because it is a long sentence but it is easy to read. In order for different people’s reading levels, some simple sentences will get an efficient work.  A part of readers are not professional learners or scientists, and they are not interested in how to proof this result. They just want to know how to get a better facial expression. So some direct language plays an important role. Revealing all specific research database for professional psychologists is important, it is also necessary to use simple words to explain the whole research to the people who are just interested in this research. When students write some research, they would like to try our best using some official language. They make all sentences complex and difficult to read. Actually, short sentence make the article more clearly. So this beginning summary is necessary to give specific description to all readers.
The second part points some unknown knowledge about facial expression which attract the readers to continue to read. The author begins with “The most of the prior studies”, this sentence can increase the authority of this psychological research because this is an objective evidence. Authority is one way to show official style. This sentence is regarded as an obvious evidence or knowledge and increase the reliability of the text. Next sentence begins with “little is known,” this is a typical official style which is changed from “we know little about.” In order to increasing the authority of the research, we need to use passive voice like this, especially impersonal. Passive voice directly connects with authority because passive voice helps authors to get rid of the first person. When we use too much first person, it will make the research more like a personal analysis but not a scientific study. Using the passive voice is the simplest way to make a common voice to official language. This is so important because we need to share the results from the science perspective but not a personal view. Nobody will believe a research which has no scientific evidence.
The third part is talking about the importance of the study. It began with “This issue is theoretically important.” This is also a official style because the formal style is “ This issue is important in the theory.” The word “theoretically” is not common to a speech, it is a written word used increase the authority of this research. In common life, we won’t communicate with this high level adverb. When we change theory to the form of adverb, we make the sentence more complex because we add more modifiers. This whole sentence is a totally complex sentence because it is long and full of many structures.
 The forth part is talking about the value of this research. It is a common way to use official language, like “It would be highly beneficial…” We are used to talking like “we will get benefit when we…” From this transfer, we can see the author uses official language often, especially he focuses on the impersonal. Decreasing some subjective description is a good choice in a research article.
From this psychological research, I get some conclusions. First, official language is necessary when we write some papers, reviews or critiques, but we need to connect official language with simple language. Trying to make all sentences become official sentences is not a perfect choice. Second, passive voice is the simplest way to use official language. We need to explain some ideas from objective perspective. Just like the example, “we know little about that”, we transfer it to “little is known that.” We get rid of the word “we” to make the sentence more authority and powerful. In the research, there are many data analysis and math equations. So a clear introduction helps readers to understand it well. The only question is about the difference between abstract and introduction I think there are some same ideas in abstract and introduction. Both of them include some general ideas about the whole research but the author still want to separate them. It seems to be a conflict of the research. I think the difference is that abstract use simple language for the whole part, so from this view, how to distribute the official language part and plain English part in a psychological research? In a psychological research, why does the author choose to use official language? Do you think that someday the official language will be replaced and we can use a simple way to show some results?
For the whole research, we can see even it is a professional psychological research, it still clear for all readers because the author is good at choosing language. It has the part which prepared for common readers and the part for professional learners. It has a high value in today’s society because people in today’s society pay more attention on their appearance especially on their face. We can also read the value of the official language. Official language helps the professional paper become more efficient and get more power.
                                                                                                           ZEYAO WU


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