RISC Videos

Social communication is usually complex and hardly ever straightforward. What is said and what is understood is often not the same, and listeners have to infer what speakers mean. Are they sincere? Are they telling a white lie to protect my feelings? Are they being sarcastic or teasing? Understanding how humans communicate their underlying intentions is a critical aspect of our daily social interaction.

Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is an (English-language) database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social relationship between communication partners (e.g., boss/employee, couple) and the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations, physical objects) while controlling for major differences in the linguistic content of matched items. We believe that RISC is a highly constructive as a tool in research on social cognition, interpersonal communication, and the interpretation of speaker intentions in both healthy adults and clinical populations.

Publication: ROTHERMICH, K., & Pell, M.D (2015). Introducing RISC: A new video inventory for testing social perception. PLOS ONE 10 (7), 1-24.