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A significant body of literature has developed which examines why meat consumption continues to be so important to Americans. Our paper contributes to this literature by examining how fear of stigmatization may be a barrier to avoiding meat consumption. This is an important subject because there is evidence that suggests that individuals who avoid meat, especially vegans, are stigmatized for disrupting social conventions related to food. In this paper, we present data from a series of focus groups in which vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous college students discussed perceptions of vegans and veganism. Our analysis shows that non-vegans anticipate stigma associated with eating like vegans. We identify two strategies by which non-vegans attempt to avoid this stigma: social and behavioral distancing. These results suggest that vegan stigma is a barrier that inhibits dietary shifts toward a plant-based diet. Our results are important because they can be used to improve the efficacy of public health initiatives focused on encouraging plant-based diet adoption and meat consumption reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a case study of animals in wartime to ask how historical animal geographers might approach the historical geography of emotions. Its substantive focus is the entangled emotional experiences of humans and companion animals during the Second World War on the British home front. Arguing against a focus on the practical and political difficulties of keeping pets, this paper moves away from the preemptive killing of pets during the phoney war of 1939–1940 to evidence for the value placed on pets by pet owners, civilians in general and the British state. Drawing principally on Mass-Observation surveys, this paper investigates the complexities of the emotional dynamics of the home front, where affect and emotion between people and individual companion animals were transmitted and amplified. Moreover, it is emphasised that transpecies emotions were portrayed as valuable to wartime morale, and thus became part of governmental calculation. Taking morale as a distinct form of collective affect targeted by the wartime state, we can thus add a more-than-human dimension to historical geographies of emotion. In sum, this paper argues that emotion should be considered as both a transpersonal and a transpecies phenomenon: transpersonal because collectively mediated, and transpecies because of the emotional interactions between people and nonhuman animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review explores how the experience of living with environmental contamination is related to residents' mental health and psychological wellbeing. MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science were searched for peer-reviewed literature reporting relevant original empirical data published before 1 April 2021. The search identified 40 papers for full review. Of these, 25 articles examined how living with environmental contamination influenced pre-clinical mental health symptoms, including depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, 17 reported on emotions, such as worry and concern, and seven considered associations with clinical mental health disorders, such as major depressive disorder. Most articles (n = 38) identified some statistically significant or anecdotal evidence of an association between mental health and the experience of living with environmental contamination. Through the critical interpretive synthesis of our review, the factors associated with mental health and wellbeing outcomes in the included papers were thematically organised into five categories: intrinsic, extrinsic (sociodemographic and personal), social, environmental, and regulatory. The conceptual framework contributes to our understanding of how environmental contamination impacts mental health and wellbeing, which may assist in preventing poor mental health outcomes in contaminated neighbourhoods. • Reviewed how the experience of living with environmental contamination relates to residents' mental health. • Screened 1970 articles, with 40 meeting the study inclusion criteria. • Most articles identified evidence of mental health being adversely affected by the experience of living contamination. • Constructed a socioecological framework of the factors associated with mental health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an empirical study centred on a participatory game design activity with 8–10 years old primary-school children, split in different sessions. The study assesses how children perform in game design and whether they are engaged in design tasks. To this end, the study gathers data concerning the quality of children's game design products, regarded as indicators of children's performance in game design. It collects data concerning children's emotions, which are taken as indicators of their engagement in game design. The paper statistically analyses and discusses how emotions and quality of products evolve across the game design experience, and how emotions are related to children's quality of products. Results of this work can help researchers, educators and practitioners manage a complex design experience with and for children, and identify key emotions for promoting quality of design work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer behavior in sales areas is strongly influenced by the perception of surroundings and feelings of well-being. By using dynamic retail solutions of basic, accent and dramatic lighting it is possible to attract attention, create a unique in-store environment and give customers a reason to stay and return to the store. The simplest and also the most successful method to reach customer attention in food selection (buying) process is through eye-catchingly illuminated visuals of products. Visual senses has evolved to top ranks in the sensory hierarchy, therefore visual stimuli have a tendency to overcome all other senses. The paper deals with a comprehensive interdisciplinary research of the influence of light and color on the emotional state of consumers (valence) on the food market. It integrates the measurement of light intensity, color temperature or emitted color spectrum in grocery stores, recognition of emotional response and the time of its occurrence among respondents due to different lighting types and color in simulated laboratory conditions. The research is focused on accent lighting in the segment of fresh unpackaged food. Using a mobile 16-channel electroencephalograph (EEG equipment) from EPOC company and a mini camera we observed the response time and the emotional status (valence), in order to reveal true consumer preferences in different lighting conditions (color temperature and color rendering index) and their non-traditional color (yellow, purple, red, blue and green) for the selected food type. The paper suggests possibilities for rational combination of the effective, efficient and energy-saving accent lighting, by which the retailer can achieve not only an eye-catching and attractive presentation of merchandised products, but also significant savings within operating their stores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging use of devices and wearables for tracking a variety of daily behaviors such as sleep quality and calorie counts. While tracking such behavior has proven to be beneficial for physical health, less is known about the benefits of tracking mental health. This paper examines the impact of tracking daily emotions on emotional and subjective well-being. Two longitudinal studies (N = 1025) show that tracking people's emotions (i.e., reporting and reminding participants of their past emotions) has an asymmetric persistence effect, such that positive (but not negative) emotions are more likely to linger the next day. The results shed light on the importance and benefits of tracking emotions for improving consumers' mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Filbrich, Torta, Vanderclausen, Azanon, and Legrain (2016) commented on a paper in which we used a tactile Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) task to show that expecting pain on a specific body location biased attention to that location (Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Durnez, & Van Damme, 2015). Their main criticism is that the effects are likely to reflect response bias rather than genuine attentional bias. We agree that the TOJ task used may be susceptible to response bias, and welcome the authors’ methodological suggestions to control for such bias. However, we feel that certain aspects of our work are misrepresented in their paper. Most importantly, we contest their argument that our instructions made the threat location task-relevant, thereby increasing risk of response bias. Further, we reply to other methodological and theoretical issues raised by these authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We design, develop, deploy an Android application TouchSense, which traces different touch interactions and develop a personalized machine learning model by jointly modeling the different types of touch interaction features. • We trace different touch interactions like typing, swyping in a smartphone and perform a detailed analysis to find the role of individual and combined influence of these interactions on emotion detection. • We carry out a detail user study to find the suitability of this model. We also perform a post-study user analysis to find the usability of the proposed application. There are different modes of interaction with a software keyboard on a smartphone, such as typing and swyping. Patterns of such touch interactions on a keyboard may reflect emotions of a user. Since users may switch between different touch modalities while using a keyboard, therefore, automatic detection of emotion from touch patterns must consider both modalities in combination to detect the pattern. In this paper, we focus on identifying different features of touch interactions with a smartphone keyboard that lead to a personalized model for inferring user emotion. Since distinguishing typing and swyping activity is important to record the correct features, we designed a technique to correctly identify the modality. The ground truth labels for user emotion are collected directly from the user by periodically collecting self-reports. We jointly model typing and swyping features and correlate them with user provided self-reports to build a personalized machine learning model, which detects four emotion states (happy, sad, stressed, relaxed). We combine these design choices into an Android application TouchSense and evaluate the same in a 3-week in-the-wild study involving 22 participants. Our key evaluation results and post-study participant assessment demonstrate that it is possible to predict these emotion states with an average accuracy (AUCROC) of 73% (std dev. 6%, maximum 87%) combining these two touch interactions only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Third version of Romanian Emotion Lexicon (RoEmoLex v.3.) was created. • Improvements over RoEmoLex v.2. in the form of revisions and additions. • There exists a relationship between emotional content and semantic field of a word. • Meaningful word sets are delineated by emotional content in lexicon (EmoSynsets). • EmoSynsets can be used to compute relative emotion scores. RoEmoLex (Romanian Emotion Lexicon) is a resource developed for emotion detection in Romanian language, now at its third version. Initially translated automatically from an English version and containing terms annotated with eight primary emotions and two polarity tags, this lexicon has undergone a series of changes. New tags were attached to words, including derived emotions, part-of-speech, additional polarity scores and conceptual category information. Moreover, the lexicon was expanded with synonyms of the original terms and words and phrases from similar resources. This paper presents the current version of the emotion lexicon, describing improvements over the previous forms and presenting summary statistics. Through Formal Concept Analysis, a knowledge discovery technique, we examine the structure and content of the lexicon. Dependencies between words at the emotional level are discovered, conceptual hierarchies are built and comparisons with information from another Romanian lexical resource (RoWordNet) are made. The results encourage further research and the possibility to integrate RoEmoLex as a subcomponent of emotion analysis systems for Romanian text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While nowadays the most usual way to show emotions in digital contexts is via virtual characters, its use may raise false expectations (the user attributes human abilities to the virtual character). This paper proposes and explores an approach to express emotions which intends to minimize the user's expectations by using a non-anthropomorphic model. Emotions are represented in terms of arousal and valence dimensions. They are visualized in a simple way through the behaviour and appearance of a series of cartoonish clouds. In particular, the arousal value is expressed through the movement of these clouds (controlled by a flocking algorithm), while the valence value is expressed through their degree of darkness. Furthermore, the paper describes a user experiment which investigated whether the arousal and valence expressed by our model are appropriately interpreted by the users or not. The results suggest that movement and darkness are interpreted as arousal and valence respectively and that they are independent of each other. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Traditional emotion models, when tagging single emotions in documents, often ignore the fact that most documents convey complex human emotions. In this paper, we join emotion analysis with topic models to find complex emotions in documents, as well as the intensity of the emotions, and study how the document emotions vary with topics. Hierarchical Bayesian networks are employed to generate the latent topic variables and emotion variables. On average, our model on single emotion classification outperforms the traditional supervised machine learning models such as SVM and Naive Bayes. The other model on the complex emotion classification also achieves promising results. We thoroughly analyze the impact of vocabulary quality and topic quantity to emotion and intensity prediction in our experiments. The distribution of topics such as Friend and Job are found to be sensitive to the documents’ emotions, which we call emotion topic variation in this paper. This reveals the deeper relationship between topics and emotions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that 1 suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that 'against the grain' archival readings of BC's past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading 'along the archival grain' as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The main objective of this paper was to examine the involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories. For this purpose, young adults, older adults, and patients with a clinical diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were asked to remember autobiographical events in two conditions: after being exposed to their own chosen music, and in silence. Compared to memories evoked in silence, memories evoked in the “Music” condition were found to be more specific, accompanied by more emotional content and impact on mood, and retrieved faster. In addition, these memories engaged less executive processes. Thus, with all these characteristics and the fact that they are activated by a perceptual cue (i.e., music), music-evoked autobiographic memories have all the features to be considered as involuntary memories. Our paper reveals several characteristics of music-evoked autobiographical memories in AD patients and offers a theoretical background for this phenomenon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights • Psychosocial neglect is a multidimensional construct. • Caregivers vary in their provision of emotional and cognitive input. • Preliminary data indicate that emotional and cognitive input are separable. • The effects of this input on development may be moderated by caregiver sensitivity. Abstract The nature and consequences of threat in the caregiving environment have been widely studied and discussed. The construct of psychosocial neglect, however, has received less attention. In this paper, we advance a novel framework for examining the nature and consequences of neglect, which we posit can be represented as variations along a continuum from severe psychosocial neglect to environmental enrichment. Recognizing that caregiving is multi-dimensional, we conceptualize enriching input from caregivers as falling along two dimensions. Specifically, we propose that caregivers vary in their provision of emotional and cognitive input, and that the effects of this input on child development are moderated by caregiver sensitivity. Further, we present preliminary data indicating that emotional and cognitive input are separable. Conceptualizing the caregiving environment along these two dimensions advances the field in terms of (1) characterizing variation in early life experience; (2) understanding predictors of child developmental outcomes; and (3) identifying optimal targets for interventions to improve the well-being of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Emotional human–computer interactions are attracting increasing interest with the improvement in the available technology. Through presenting affective stimuli and empathic communication, computer agents are able to adjust to users'' emotional states. As a result, users may produce better task performance. Existing studies have mainly focused on the effect of only a few basic emotions, such as happiness and frustration, on human performance. Furthermore, most research explored this issue from the psychological perspective. This paper presents an emotion and performance relation model in the context of vehicle driving. This general emotion–performance model is constructed on an arousal–valence plane and is not limited to basic emotions. Fifteen paid participants took part in two driving simulation experiments that induced 115 pairs of emotion–performance sample. These samples revealed the following: (1) driving performance has a downward U-shaped relationship with both intensities of arousal and valence. It deteriorates at extreme arousal and valence. (2) Optimal driving performance, corresponding to the appropriate emotional state, matches the “sweet spot” phenomenon of the engagement psychology. (3) Arousal and valence are not perfectly independent across the entire 2-D emotion plane. Extreme valence is likely to stimulate a high level of arousal, which, in turn, deteriorates task performance. The emotion–performance relation model proposed in the paper is useful in designing emotion-aware intelligent systems to predict and prevent task performance degradation at an early stage and throughout the human–computer interactions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present paper aims at filling the lack that currently exists with respect to databases containing emotional manifestations. Emotions, such as strong emotions, are indeed difficult to collect in real-life. They occur during contexts, which are generally unpredictable, and some of them such as anger are less frequent in public life than in private. Even though such emotions are not so present in existing databases, the need for applications, which target them (crisis management, surveillance, strategic intelligence, etc.), and the need for emotional recordings is even more acute. We propose here to use fictional media to compensate for the difficulty of collecting strong emotions. Emotions in realistic fictions are portrayed by skilled actors in interpersonal interactions. The mise-en-scene of the actors tends to stir genuine emotions. In addition, fiction offers an overall view of emotional manifestations in various real-life contexts: face-to-face interactions, phone calls, interviews, emotional event reporting vs. in situ emotional manifestations. A fear-type emotion recognition system has been developed, that is based on acoustic models learnt from the fiction corpus. This paper aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the various factors that may influence the system behaviour: the annotation issue and the acoustic features behaviour. These two aspects emphasize the main feature of fiction: the variety of the emotional manifestations and of their context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract This paper is based in a conception of culture that is rooted in contextual/demographic parameters. It is argued that the degree of formal education is influencing the age of first parenthood, the number of children and family composition. Particular norms and values as well as behavioral conventions are related to the socio demographic milieus. Socialization goals, parenting beliefs and parenting behaviors are framed by these cultural models. Two prototypical cultural models, psychological autonomy with psychological relatedness, characteristic for Western middle class parents and hierarchical relatedness with action autonomy, characteristic for non Western rural farmers will be outlined with respect to children's learning environments during infancy. Consequences for socioemotional development will be highlighted with respect to children's socio emotional development. It is important to apply mixed method methodologies to assess local meaning systems along with behavioral observations. It is concluded that one system cannot be evaluated according the assumptions and values of another other system – a practice that unfortunately is widespread. Implications for application are discussed and ethical challenges are diagnosed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions can offer instrumental benefits, but people do not always take advantage of them. In this paper, we identify one factor that might propel people to seek emotions that have instrumental value – namely, the level at which a situation is construed. According to construal level theory, construing a situation in high-level terms increases preferences reflecting self-control (i.e., preferences for delayed over immediate outcomes). Therefore, we hypothesized that activating a high-level construal would motivate people to experience emotions that are perceived as instrumental for achieving their goals in the long-run, even if they may be aversive in the short-run. In three studies, inducing a high (vs. low) level mindset increased participants' preferences for useful, albeit unpleasant, emotions. Participants in a high (vs. low) level mindset expressed a stronger preference for anger when they were asked to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which anger was presented as more useful for goal pursuit (Studies 1–2) and when they played an economic game in which anger was potentially useful (Study 3). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The goal of the present paper was to demonstrate the influence of general evaluations and stereotype associations on emotion recognition. Earlier research has shown that evaluative connotations between social category members and emotional expression predict whether recognition of positive or negative emotional expressions will be facilitated (e.g. ). In the current paper we tested the hypothesis that stereotype associations influence emotion recognition processes, especially when the difference between valences of emotional expressions does not come into play. In line with this notion, when participants in the present two studies were asked to classify positive versus negative emotional expressions (i.e. happy versus anger, or happy versus sadness), valence congruency effects were found. Importantly, however, in a comparative context without differences in valence in which participants were asked to classify two distinct negative emotions (i.e. anger versus sadness) we found that recognition facilitation occurred for stereotypically associated discrete emotional expressions. With this, the current results indicate that a distinction between general evaluative and cognitive routes can be made in emotion recognition processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Several years ago Hidalgo and Hernandez reported a curvilinear, U-shaped, relationship between scale of place (apartment, neighborhood, city) and strength of attachment to the place. In this paper four studies are presented, carried out in four Central-European cities, that (1) confirmed the reported curvilinear relationship using five places (apartment, building, neighborhood, city district, city) in three out of four cities and for five items of the Place Attachment Scale, (2) revealed a consistent curvilinear, inverse U-shaped relationship between scale of place and percentage of variance of place attachment predicted by three groups of factors: physical (type of housing, size of building, upkeep and personalization of house precincts, etc.), social (neighborhood ties and sense of security in the residence place), and socio-demographic (age, education, gender, length of residence, family size), and (3) identified strength of direct and indirect effects of the three groups of predictors on attachment to the five types of places. The curvilinear relationship between place scale and place attachment was particularly strong in highly attractive cities and in those scale items that described people''s emotional reactions to places whereas a linear relationship was obtained in the least attractive city and in the items that referred to sense of security, amount of control and knowledge of place. In all four cities the best predicted variable was attachment to middle ranges of the place scale (building and neighborhood). The overall best direct predictor of place attachment was neighborhood ties, followed by direct and indirect effects of length of residence, building size, and type of housing. In conclusion it is argued that the usual choice of predictors of place attachment is biased by researchers'' interest in the middle scales of place (neighborhood) at the expense of other place scales. In the paper a claim is made that attachments to smaller (apartments, homes) and larger (city) scales of place along with their unique predictors deserve more attention from environmental psychologists. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper proposes a cultural–developmental approach to moral psychology. The approach builds on and synthesizes findings from different research traditions, including the cognitive-developmental, domain, two orientations, three ethics, and moral identity traditions. The paper introduces a conception termed a cultural–developmental template. The template charts developmental patterns across the life course for moral reasoning in terms of the three Ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. The template, however, is not one-size-fits-all. Its general developmental patterns accommodate to the different constellations of Ethics held by culturally diverse peoples. From the present theoretical proposal follows a set of specific research expectations as well as a set of broader research implications for how to conduct research on morality from the vantage points of both culture and development. These expectations and implications include consideration of moral emotions, definitions of morality, and cultural variation in the life course itself. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• In this paper, a novel hierarchical state recurrent neural network (HSRNN) is proposed. It incorporates hierarchical state recurrent neural network to capture long-range dependencies and the key semantic hierarchical information of a document. • Moreover, instead of incrementally reading a sequence of words or sentences as in traditional recurrent neural networks, the proposed approach encodes the hidden states of all words or sentences simultaneously at each recurrent step to capture long-range dependencies precisely. • Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs remarkably better than the state-of-the-art emotion ranking approaches. What's more, the visualization results indicate that the important words/sentences highlighted by HSRNN indeed represent the evoked emotions in documents. Text generation with auxiliary attributes, such as topics or sentiments, has made remarkable progress. However, high-quality labeled data is difficult to obtain for the large-scale corpus. Therefore, this paper focuses on social emotion ranking aiming to identify social emotions with different intensities evoked by online documents, which could be potentially beneficial for further controlled text generation. Existing studies often consider each document as an entirety that fail to capture the inner relationship between sentences in a document. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical state recurrent neural network for social emotion ranking. A hierarchy mechanism is employed to capture the key hierarchical semantic structure in a document. Moreover, instead of incrementally reading a sequence of words or sentences as in traditional recurrent neural networks, the proposed approach encodes the hidden states of all words or sentences simultaneously at each recurrent step to capture long-range dependencies precisely. Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs remarkably better than the state-of-the-art social emotion ranking approaches and is useful for controlled text generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• People behave more socially toward an intimate virtual counselor than a nonintimate one. • The perception of virtual intimacy is a strong predictor of social presence and user experience. • Perceiving virtual intimacy in human-agent interactions elicits positive emotions in users. • The social characteristics of the interaction could have a direct effect on the user's emotions. Professional embodied conversational agents (ECAs) deployed in the market are dedicated to satisfying the digital customer relationship. However, ECAs still suffer from a lack of user adoption, in particular because most of them have few social skills. Inspired by social presence theories and based on the ergonomic components of user experience (CUE) model (Mahlke and Lindgaard, 2007), the paper focuses on one social skill, i.e. , virtual intimacy, a 3-dimensional concept including honesty and genuineness, positivity and mutual comprehension. Virtual intimacy may be a way to reinforce the social dimension of human-agent interactions and to provide a better user experience. We therefore propose an interactive experiment that incorporates natural interactions between real tourists and an autonomously intimate virtual counselor who is an expert in tourism and able to express intimacy-related behaviors in verbal and nonverbal communication. The paper studies the impact of the agent's expression of intimacy-related behaviors on the perception of virtual intimacy, social presence and the user experience. The results show that users adopt a social attitude toward the intimate counselor, and although they do not significantly perceive virtual intimacy, they clearly perceive the dimension of honesty and genuineness. Moreover, the agent's expression of intimacy only enhances copresence, the first perceptive level of social presence. Except for user social status, which is enhanced, the user experience is also not significantly influenced by intimate expression. The study results further demonstrate that perceiving virtual intimacy is a good predictor of social presence and user experience, especially user emotional reactions. Perceiving virtual intimacy influences user experience independently of social presence, which thereby indicates that independent intimacy-related mechanisms, such as emotional contagion, may be involved. Mediation analyses also underline that perceiving virtual intimacy has a direct effect on user emotional reactions, but this finding is not supported by the CUE model. The findings in this study provide new evidence that perceiving virtual intimacy in human-agent interaction elicits emotions in users and enhances user experience. In line with this, we propose an outline for an ECA-adapted, user experience model based on the CUE model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empathy, as defined in behavioral sciences, expresses the ability of human beings to recognize, understand and react to emotions, attitudes and beliefs of others. In this paper, we address two related problems in automatic affective behavior analysis: the design of the annotation protocol and the automatic recognition of empathy from human–human dyadic spoken conversations. We propose and evaluate an annotation scheme for empathy inspired by the modal model of emotions. The annotation scheme was evaluated on a corpus of real-life, dyadic spoken conversations. In the context of behavioral analysis, we designed an automatic segmentation and classification system for empathy. Given the different speech and language levels of representation where empathy may be communicated, we investigated features derived from the lexical and acoustic spaces. The feature development process was designed to support both the fusion and automatic selection of relevant features from a high dimensional space. The automatic classification system was evaluated on call center conversations where it showed significantly better performance than the baseline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of detecting emotions is essential in different fields such as user experience (UX), affective computing, and psychology. This paper explores the possibility of detecting emotions through user-generated bodily sensation maps (BSMs). The theoretical basis that inspires this work is the proposal by Nummenmaa et al. (2014) of BSMs for 14 emotions. To make it easy for users to create a BSM of how they feel, and convenient for researchers to acquire and classify users’ BSMs, we created a mobile app, called EmoPaint. The app includes an interface for BSM creation, and an automatic classifier that matches the created BSM with the BSMs for the 14 emotions. We conducted a user study aimed at evaluating both components of EmoPaint. First, it shows that the app is easy to use, and is able to classify BSMs consistently with the considered theoretical approach. Second, it shows that using EmoPaint increases accuracy of users’ emotion classification when compared with an adaptation of the well-known method of using the Affect Grid with the Circumplex Model, focused on the same set of 14 emotions of Nummenmaa et al. Overall, these results indicate that the novel approach of using BSMs in the context of automatic emotion detection is promising, and encourage further developments and studies of BSM-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indirect forms of intergroup contact, such as extended and vicarious contact, are thought to provide a promising alternative to direct contact, but very few studies have compared the effectiveness of these two types of contact to confirm this claim. Furthermore, Wright, Aron, McLaughlin-Volpe, and Ropp (1997) postulated, but did not test, that the usefulness of extended (or vicarious) over direct contact lies in these forms of indirect contact being likely to elicit less anxiety and more group salience at the time of the interaction, both of which are beneficial for contact. The present paper reports two experiments comparing the effects of direct and vicarious contact on: (i) outgroup attitudes and anxiety for future contact both immediately after contact (posttest) as well as a week later (delayed posttest), and (ii) their elicited interaction-induced anxiety and group salience. Both studies were conducted in Cyprus, with Greek Cypriot participants and the Turkish Cypriot community as the outgroup. Results did not support Wright et al.’s postulations. They furthermore showed that direct contact had a relative advantage over vicarious contact in leading to more positive outgroup attitudes at posttest, but that attitudes reverted to pretest levels for both conditions at delayed posttest. Vicarious, unlike direct, contact, did, however, lead to a persistent reduction of anxiety for future contact, thus suggesting that the greatest utility of indirect forms of contact may lie in their emotionally preparing individuals for subsequent face-to-face interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of research suggests compromise of autobiographical memory in Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). The present paper extends this literature by investigating the subjective experience of autobiographical recall in the syndrome. Patients with KS and controls were asked to retrieve autobiographical memories. After memory retrieval, participants were asked to rate phenomenological characteristics of their memories (i.e., reliving, back in time, remembering, realness, visual imagery, auditory imagery, language, emotion, rehearsal, importance, spatial recall and temporal recall). Analysis showed lower “Mean Phenomenological Experience” in the Korsakoff patients than in controls. However, the Korsakoff patients attributed relatively high emotional value and importance to their memories. Although our findings suggest compromised phenomenological reliving of autobiographical memory in patients with KS, affective characteristics such as emotion and importance are likely to play a main role in the subjective experience of the past in these patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational transmission is a long-standing interest of social science research. However, little attention has been devoted to the study of transmission of relationship quality between several generations of family members. Exploiting multigenerational multi-actor data from the German Family Panel ( pairfam ), we estimate multilevel models to investigate whether, in three-generation families, relationship quality between the middle generation and the oldest (that is, grandparent) generation predicts relationship quality between the youngest generation of adolescent children and the middle generation. Our results reveal evidence of intergenerational transmission of emotional closeness, conflict, and ambivalence. Transmission was more consistently observed when emanating from ties to grandfathers than from ties to grandmothers. A hypothesis concerning differences in the strength of transmission between East Germany and West Germany found no support. The paper concludes with a discussion of limitations and perspectives for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluative conditioning (EC) appears when a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). Most studies on EC have focused on the influence of procedural factors (e.g., number of presentations) and awareness, while emotional factors have been understudied. However, literature shows that emotional processes could be involved. In this paper, we assume that, upon appraisal, the US elicits a particular emotion that is then paired with the CS. In this perspective, the ability to regulate emotions could modulate how individuals pay attention to stimuli, appraise them, and, more generally, use them. For these reasons, emotion regulation could be an interindividual moderator of the EC. To test this assumption, we explore whether (i) emotional dysregulation and (ii) emotional regulation strategies moderate EC effects. We conducted an integrative analysis (n = 236) based on two studies using the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and an observational study using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (n = 128). Higher levels of emotional dysregulation were associated with less positive conditioning. Furthermore, the reappraisal strategy was associated with higher positive conditioning. Therefore, people differ in how they are conditioned (particularly positively conditioned), and part of it is because of emotion regulation differences. This contribution opens several new questions for the EC field to understand more precisely when and where these emotional processes are involved. • The EC effect is related to how people deal with their emotions and the information they give about the environment. • Emotion dysregulation is associated with a lower positive EC effect. • The propensity to use the reappraisal strategy seems to be associated with a stronger positive emotion regulation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the particular voice register observed in the majority of parents in interaction with their infants and differs from natural speech used in conversations with adults by showing exaggerated prosodic features. These prosodic features are supposed to have effects on regulating infant arousal and attention, fostering infant pre-linguistic and linguistic competences and enhancing the expression of positive affect. The present set of meta-analyses was conducted to test these associations and the role of moderators during the first two years of infant life. The results confirmed an overall association between IDS prosody and infant outcomes with prosodic values typical of IDS associated with better outcomes. This association was confirmed for attentional, pre-linguistic and linguistic outcomes with a greater effect on pre-linguistic than linguistic outcomes. An insufficient number of studies was found to test the association with infant emotion expression. Many limitations in the existing body of literature were found, such as a lack of empirical papers exploring IDS prosody in relation to infant outcomes using natural observations. The results and limitations were discussed in light of the necessity to examine the interplay between the quality of IDS prosody and other aspects of parental communicative and caregiving competences. To do so, the contribution of scholars from different fields is needed with the aim to fully understand the multidimensional determinants and influential mechanisms of IDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By departing from social norms regarding food behaviors, vegetarians acquire membership in a distinct social group and can develop a salient vegetarian identity. However, vegetarian identities are diverse, multidimensional, and unique to each individual. Much research has identified fundamental psychological aspects of vegetarianism, and an identity framework that unifies these findings into common constructs and conceptually defines variables is needed. Integrating psychological theories of identity with research on food choices and vegetarianism, this paper proposes a conceptual model for studying vegetarianism: The Unified Model of Vegetarian Identity (UMVI). The UMVI encompasses ten dimensions-organized into three levels (contextual, internalized, and externalized)-that capture the role of vegetarianism in an individual's self-concept. Contextual dimensions situate vegetarianism within contexts; internalized dimensions outline self-evaluations; and externalized dimensions describe enactments of identity through behavior. Together, these dimensions form a coherent vegetarian identity, characterizing one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding being vegetarian. By unifying dimensions that capture psychological constructs universally, the UMVI can prevent discrepancies in operationalization, capture the inherent diversity of vegetarian identities, and enable future research to generate greater insight into how people understand themselves and their food choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals commonly enter a task domain with pre-existing emotions. These pre-existing emotions, known as incidental emotions, can potentially shape subsequent goal-setting behaviors without individuals’ awareness, and in unique ways based on the characteristics associated with each emotion. Existing literature, however, does little to inform us about the specific effects of these emotions on goal-setting behaviors. In this paper, we draw on the theory of self-regulation of action and affect to argue that incidental anger and sadness originating from an ostensibly unrelated domain will have distinct effects on individuals’ goal-setting behaviors on a task. The theory suggests that anger is associated with approach behavioral tendencies while sadness is associated with deactivation behavioral tendencies. Hence, we hypothesize that individuals who are experiencing anger from an unrelated source will experience higher self-efficacy and in turn set higher goals after receiving task feedback as compared to individuals who are experiencing sadness. Results from a field study and an experimental study, both with undergraduate samples, supported our hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inferring the intentions and beliefs of another is an ability that is fundamental for social and affiliative interactions. A substantial amount of empirical evidence suggests that making sense of another's intentional and belief states (i.e. theory of mind) relies on exteroceptive (e.g. visual and auditory) and proprioceptive (i.e. motor) signals. Yet, despite its pivotal role in the guidance of behaviour, the role of the observer's interoceptive (visceral) processing in understanding another's internal states remains unexplored. Predicting and keeping track of interoceptive bodily states - which inform intentions and beliefs that guide behaviour - is one of the fundamental purposes of the human brain. In this paper, we will focus on the role of interoceptive predictions, prescribed by the free energy principle, in making sense of internal states that cause another's behaviour. We will discuss how multimodal expectations induced at deep (high) hierarchical levels - that necessarily entail interoceptive predictions - contribute to inference about others that is at the heart of theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the detection of emotional expressions is, in its early stages, informationally encapsulated. I clarify and defend such a view via the appeal to data from social perception on the visual processing of faces, bodies, facial and bodily expressions. Encapsulated social perception might exist alongside processes that are cognitively penetrated, and that have to do with recognition and categorization, and play a central evolutionary function in preparing early and rapid responses to the emotional stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although computers could offer emotional support as well as task support when aiding a user for a complex task, there is little current understanding of how they might do this. Moreover existing demonstrations of emotional support, though promising, only cover a small number of types of support and investigate a limited number of algorithms designed by hand. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation that starts from first principles, determining different categories of stressors for which emotional support might be useful, different categories of emotional support utterances and promising algorithms for deciding the content and form of textual emotional support messages according to the stressors present. At each stage, the results are validated through empirical experiments with human participants who, for instance, are required to place statements into categories, evaluate possible support messages in different imagined situations and compose their own emotional support from options offered. This development methodology allows us to avoid potentially challenging ethical issues in presenting people with stressful situations. Although our algorithms are attempting to choose emotional support based on the general, “naive” competence of human speakers, we use as a running example situations that can arise when attending a medical emergency and awaiting expert help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two lines of previous research have found that revenge can make people feel worse, contrary to conventional wisdom about the hedonic benefits (i.e. “sweetness”) of revenge (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008; Lambert, Peak, Eadeh, & Schott, 2014). However, such findings appear inconsistent with general principles arising from the justice literature, which implies that people should feel satisfaction when they perceive that transgressors have been punished for their misdeeds. In this paper, we use a variety of different measures of affect (mood, linguistic analyses, direct ratings of emotional reactions) to show that revenge is capable of producing both negative (“bitter”) and favorable (“sweet”) reactions. In particular, we find support for a bittersweet model of revenge, in that such acts concurrently elicit genuinely positive appraisals, over and above the elicitation of negative affect. We consider the implications of our research for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of revenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Face-to-Face Still-Face (FFSF) paradigm is a widely adopted experimental procedure to assess infants' response to socio-emotional stress during the first months of life. Previous reviews demonstrated that this procedure elicits specific behavioral responses, including an increase in negative emotionality and gaze aversion as well as a decrease in positive emotionality and social engagement. Infants also give evidence of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity to the FFSF. Unfortunately, previous studies reported inconsistencies in the association between the exposure to the FFSF paradigm and HPA activation during the first months of life. In this paper, the HPA axis correlates of FFSF stress regulation were examined through a narrative review and a meta-analysis. A literature search was conducted on three databases (i.e., Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed) and led to 17 studies included in the review and 10 included in the meta-analysis. The findings suggested that infants tend to show a clearly observable activation of the HPA axis in response to the socio-emotional stress elicited by the FFSF paradigm, although considerable variation in methodology and sample characteristics was documented. A five-episode repeated-exposure version of the FFSF procedure emerged as a more suitable procedure to elicit a significant neuroendocrine response. In summary, the FFSF appears to elicit HPA axis activation in response to socio-emotional stress, but only in specific contextual conditions. As such, open questions remain and require continuity in FFSF research efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An evolutionary psychological perspective suggests that emotions can be understood as coordinating mechanisms whose job is to regulate various psychological and physiological programs in the service of solving an adaptive problem. This paper suggests that it may also be fruitful to approach hunger from this coordinating mechanism perspective. To this end, I put forward an evolutionary task analysis of hunger, generating novel a priori hypotheses about the coordinating effects of hunger on psychological processes such as perception, attention, categorization, and memory. This approach appears empirically fruitful in that it yields a bounty of testable new hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the possible existence of comparative perceptual bias (CPB) related to environmental hazards, the influence of perceived credibility (in messages and the media) and negative feelings on such CPB, and the existence of homogenous groups related to the cited variables and sociodemographics. The results from a Spanish sample (n = 537) show pessimistic CPB toward environmental hazards, and it is greater in those having a local impact than those with a global impact. Only the credibility of the message (not the media) relevantly explains the CPB. Negative emotions have poor explanatory power. Two groups are detected (Skeptical-Indifferent vs. Credulous-Pessimistic). We conclude that people tend to feel emotions that produce inhibition of behavior because of both cultural pessimism and ignorance. A higher proven and trustworthy scientific or technical knowledge implies greater pessimistic CPB related to the possible impact from environmental hazards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to model the concept of emotion and to extract the emotional impact from images, one may search suitable image processing features. However, in the literature, there is no consensus on the ones to consider since they are often linked to the application. Obviously, the perception of emotion is not only influenced by the content of the images, it is also modified by some personal experiences like cultural aspects and semantic associated to some colours or objects. In this paper, we choose low level features frequently used in CBIR especially those based on SIFT descriptors. To take into account the complex process of emotion perception, we also consider colour and texture features and one global scene descriptor: GIST. We supposed the chosen features could implicitly encode high-level information about emotions due to their accuracy in the different CBIR applications of the literature. We test our methodology on two databases: SENSE and IAPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on recognizing the human interaction relative to human emotion, and addresses the problem of interaction features representation. We propose a two-layer feature description structure that exploits the representation of spatio-temporal motion features and context features hierarchically. On the lower layer, the local features for motion and interactive context are extracted respectively. We first characterize the local spatio-temporal trajectories as the motion features. Instead of hand-crafted features, a new hierarchical spatio-temporal trajectory coding model is presented to learn and represent the local spatio-temporal trajectories. To further exploit the spatial and temporal relationships in the interactive activities, we then propose an interactive context descriptor, which extracts the local interactive contours from frames. These contours implicitly incorporate the contextual spatial and temporal information. On the higher layer, semi-global features are represented based on the local features encoded on the lower layer. And a spatio-temporal segment clustering method is designed for features extraction on this layer. This method takes the spatial relationship and temporal order of local features into account and creates the mid-level motion features and mid-level context features. Experiments on three challenging action datasets in video, including HMDB51, Hollywood2 and UT-Interaction, are conducted. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed structure, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed context descriptor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have established a link between body shame and eating disorder symptoms and behaviours. However, few have differentiated current feelings of body shame from those anticipated with weight change and none has examined the effects of these on subsequent eating behaviour. In this paper, a measure of body pride and shame was developed (Study 1) for the purposes of using it in a subsequent longitudinal study (Study 2). Two hundred and forty two women were recruited from a university and the general population and participated in Study 1, completing the Body Pride and Shame (BPS) scale either online or offline, as well as a number of validating measures. In Study 2, 40 female students completed the BPS, as well as a measure of dietary restraint, and subsequently recorded their dietary intake everyday for the next seven days. Study 1 identified and validated subscales of current body pride/shame as well as pride/shame that is anticipated were the individual to gain weight or lose weight. In Study 2, over and above levels of dietary restraint, current feelings of body shame predicted eating more calories over the next 7 days while the anticipation of shame with weight gain predicted eating fewer calories. Although previous research has only measured current feelings of body shame, the present studies showed that anticipated shame also impacts on subsequent behaviour. Interventions that regulate anticipated as well as current emotions, and that do not merely challenge cognitions, may be important in changing eating behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions are a major part of the human existence and social interactions. Some might say that emotions are one of the aspects that make us truly human. However, while we express emotions in various life settings, the world of computing seems to struggle with supporting and incorporating the emotional dimension. In the last decades, the concept of affect has gotten a new upswing in research, moving beyond topics like market research and product development, and further exploring the area of emotion-enhanced interaction. In this paper, we highlight techniques that have been employed more intensely for emotion measurement in the context of affective interaction. Besides capturing the functional principles behind these approaches and the inherent volatility of human emotions, we present relevant applications and establish a categorization of the roles of emotion detection in interaction. Based on these findings, we also capture the main challenges that emotion measuring technologies will have to overcome in order to enable a truly seamless emotion-driven interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What evidence could bear on questions about whether humans ever perceptually experience any of another’s mental states, and how might those questions be made precise enough to test experimentally? This paper focusses on emotions and their expression. It is proposed that research on perceptual experiences of physical properties provides one model for thinking about what evidence concerning expressions of emotion might reveal about perceptual experiences of others’ mental states. This proposal motivates consideration of the hypothesis that categorical perception of expressions of emotion occurs, can be facilitated by information about agents’ emotions, and gives rise to phenomenal expectations. It is argued that the truth of this hypothesis would support a modest version of the claim that humans sometimes perceptually experience some of another’s mental states. Much available evidence is consistent with, but insufficient to establish, the truth of the hypothesis. We are probably not yet in a position to know whether humans ever perceptually experience others’ mental states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are reflective, adaptive, and social. They recall the past, sometimes discuss these recollections with others and become nostalgic; yet, previous research has not examined nostalgia in social media. This paper investigates the expression of nostalgia within Facebook conversations. The specific themes of nostalgic longing and the expression of personal emotions are investigated in two studies. Study 1 examines 375,857 Facebook posts, and Study 2 expands on this by comparing a sample of 10,000 Facebook and 10,000 general (non-nostalgic) posts. Content analyses of these posts reveal significant evidence of nostalgic expressions in Facebook conversations. Cluster analysis reveals newer themes of nostalgic longing related to family, life stories, historical events (presidential elections, man on the moon and Gandhi), spirituality, appreciation of life, romanticism and fun. General posts tend to focus on spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment greetings, emotions, and day of the week. Nostalgic posts, in contrast, are more reflective, more emotional, and frequently include both positive and negative emotions, which is consistent with a deeper, bittersweet character to nostalgia. The concurrent utilization of past- and present-tense words in nostalgic posts suggests that, for some Facebook users, nostalgia helps interpret and navigate present circumstances. The research concludes with theoretical and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes Oudjat , a new software program which has been developed in order to conduct recognition experiments. Oudjat is dedicated to the manual annotation facial expressions of emotion (FEE). Considering the existence of other software applications in that field, Oudjat provides a compromise solution between the currently existing tools. For the investigators, it is an easy-to-configure interface to set up relevant behaviors to be annotated. For the annotators, it is an easy-to-use interface. This tool can perform complex annotations procedures utilizing multiple responses panels such as buttons, scales (e.g., Likert scales), and free labelling. Oudjat also allows to chain response panels or to conduct sequence marking annotations (i.e., two-steps temporal annotation). As it can be configured in any language, Oudjat is particularly suited for intercultural experiments. Four annotation procedures are presented to illustrate Oudjat’ s possibilities with FEE annotation. Oudjat is an open source software available to the scientific community, and can be freely be obtained on request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an emotion transplantation method capable of modifying a synthetic speech model through the use of CSMAPLR adaptation in order to incorporate emotional information learned from a different speaker model while maintaining the identity of the original speaker as much as possible. The proposed method relies on learning both emotional and speaker identity information by means of their adaptation function from an average voice model, and combining them into a single cascade transform capable of imbuing the desired emotion into the target speaker. This method is then applied to the task of transplanting four emotions (anger, happiness, sadness and surprise) into 3 male speakers and 3 female speakers and evaluated in a number of perceptual tests. The results of the evaluations show how the perceived naturalness for emotional text significantly favors the use of the proposed transplanted emotional speech synthesis when compared to traditional neutral speech synthesis, evidenced by a big increase in the perceived emotional strength of the synthesized utterances at a slight cost in speech quality. A final evaluation with a robotic laboratory assistant application shows how by using emotional speech we can significantly increase the students’ satisfaction with the dialog system, proving how the proposed emotion transplantation system provides benefits in real applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social/emotional skills in early childhood are associated with education, labor market, and family formation outcomes throughout the life course. One explanation for these associations is that poor social/emotional skills in early childhood interfere with the development of cognitive skills. In this paper, we use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study ( N = 2302) to examine how the timing of social/emotional skills—measured as internalizing, externalizing, and attention problem behaviors in early childhood—is associated with cognitive test scores in middle childhood. Results show that externalizing problems at age 3 and attention problems at age 5, as well as externalizing and attention problems at both ages 3 and 5, are associated with poor cognitive development in middle childhood, net of a wide array of control variables and prior test scores. Surprisingly, maternal engagement at age five does not mediate these associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates whether the processing of emotion language in the context of a second language (L2) entails motor simulations and whether simulation models extend to negation also for L2. Participants were exposed to sentences in L2 describing emotional expressions while facial muscle activity was continuously measured. Sentences mapped either directly upon the zygomatic muscle (e.g., “I am smiling”) or did not (e.g., “I am frowning”), and were presented in the affirmative and negative form. Similarly to studies involving first language (L1), the zygomatic muscle was activated when reading affirmative sentences relevant to the muscle. In contrast, and differently from what previously observed in L1, reading sentences in the negative form (“I am not smiling”) did not lead to relaxation/inhibition of the zygomatic muscle. These results extend the simulation models to the comprehension of L2 but they also provide important constraints and contribute to the debate about grounding of the abstract and concrete concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]