Basic Emotion Theory Research Articles

Extending speech emotion recognition systems to non-prototypical emotions using mixed-emotion model

In the conventional approach to speech emotion recognition (SER), the classifier is usually trained on acted emotional speech data to predict individual basic emotions. In this work, we extend the SER systems with the realistic assumption of the coexistence of multiple basic emotions in an utterance. We utilize the MSP-Podcast database for developing the SER system, which contains spontaneous speech utterances. From the primary and secondary emotion annotations of this database, we organize six prototypical and seven non-prototypical emotions. We then propose the mixed-emotion model and express the non-prototypical emotions as a linear combination of prototypical emotions. The combination weights of the mixed-emotion model are computed using a normalized dominance scale based algorithm inspired by the integration of basic emotion theory and dimensional emotion theory in human psychology. We first train a prototypical SER model using the ECAPA-TDNN architecture. The softmax predictions from this model serve as emotion profile inputs to the mixed-emotion model, which then predicts the non-prototypical emotions. Assuming the coexistence of multiple emotions, we only apply the utterances with uniform emotion profiles to the mixed-emotion model. The developed system continues with the conventional SER model if the emotion profile tends to delta function owing to the probable occurrence of a single prototypical emotion. We develop the proposed mixed-emotion model based SER framework using MFCC and wav2vec 2.0 extracted features. Further, we show that due to human perception variations, there exist prominent annotation variations in the non-prototypical emotion ground truths. To address that, we extend the supervised evaluation protocols in four different formulations that capture the subjective variability at different levels. The proposed system shows a best-case performance improvement of 7.10% and 8.39% over the conventional prototypical SER model for the MFCC and wav2vec 2.0 features, respectively.

Typology of Parent-to-Child Emotions: A Study of Japanese Parents of a Foetus up to a 12-Year-Old Child.

Background: Emotions are the fundamental origin of parent-child bonding, which is measurable by the Scale for Parent-to-Child Emotions (SPCE) based on the theories of basic and self-conscious emotions. Methods: This study is based on the data from a cross-sectional study that we previously reported. The data consist of fathers and mothers who had a child/children, whose eldest child's age was at the foetal stage up to 12 years old, and were recruited via the Internet (N = 4600). A series of cluster analyses using factor scores (theta[Ө]s) of all domains of the SPCE were conducted. After the clusters emerged, the fathers and mothers allocated to each cluster were compared by the child's age stage. The validation of the classifications was also conducted using ANOVAs and chi-squared tests. A discriminant function analysis was conducted. Results: The participant mothers and fathers were classified into Cluster 1 (Lack of Bonding Emotions, n = 509), Cluster 2 (Bonding Disorder, n = 1471), Cluster 3 (Ambivalent Bonding Emotions, n = 1211), and Cluster 4 (Positive Bonding, n = 1409). Across the four clusters, there were no differences in the age of the parents or the gender of the child. During the second trimester, mothers made up the majority of Cluster 4 (Positive Bonding), totalling 81 cases (37.5%), whereas fathers made up the majority of Cluster 2 (Bonding Disorder), totalling 126 cases (60.0%). The three linear discriminants (LDs) well predicted the four clusters, and their functions showed cross validation. Conclusions: The typology of the SPCE is helpful to understand individual differences in terms of parental emotional bonding.

Healthy and Happy? An Ethical Investigation of Emotion Recognition and Regulation Technologies (ERR) within Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to technologies that track daily activities of persons in need of care to enhance their autonomy and minimise their need for assistance. New technological developments show an increasing effort to integrate automated emotion recognition and regulation (ERR) into AAL systems. These technologies aim to recognise emotions via different sensors and, eventually, to regulate emotions defined as “negative” via different forms of intervention. Although these technologies are already implemented in other areas, AAL stands out by its tendency to enable an inconspicuous 24-hour surveillance in the private living space of users who rely on the technology to maintain a certain degree of independence in their daily activities. The combination of both technologies represents a new dimension of emotion recognition in a potentially vulnerable group of users. Our paper aims to provide an ethical contextualisation of the novel combination of both technologies. We discuss different concepts of emotions, namely Basic Emotion Theory (BET) and the Circumplex Model of Affect (CMA), that form the basis of ERR and provide an overview over the current technological developments in AAL. We highlight four ethical issues that specifically arise in the context of ERR in AAL systems, namely concerns regarding (1) the reductionist view of emotions, (2) solutionism as an underlying assumption of these technologies, (3) the privacy and autonomy of users and their emotions, (4) the tendency of machine learning techniques to normalise and generalise human behaviour and emotional reactions.

Envy: An Insidious Emotion in Medieval Anglo-Norman Tradition of England

There are two main categories of emotion theories: basic emotion and componential theories. While these theories are generally focused on the contemporary world, they may provide new perspectives on medieval literature. Roman de Horn and Boeve de Haumtone are Anglo-Norman romances that tell the stories of noble, handsome, and good-looking heroes who become courageous along their journeys. Although they somehow begin their journey with bad luck, they both triumph in the end. All these seemingly spectacular characteristics of the heroes naturally evoke envy among others. Envy occurs when someone's autonomy or closely identified persons/property is threatened. In both romances, the heroes battle against false accusations made by their enviers. In this respect, the major concern of this article is to explore how the philosophical and emotional significance of envy performs in medieval tradition.

On the Invalidity of Neta and Kim's Argument That Surprise is Always Valenced

In a challenge to Basic Emotion theories, Ortony suggested in a recent article that the existence of affect-free surprise means that surprise is not necessarily valenced and therefore arguably not an emotion. In an article in response, Neta and Kim argued that surprise is always valenced and therefore is an emotion, with apparent cases of affect-free surprise actually being cases of the cognitive state of unexpectedness rather than surprise. We view Neta and Kim's position as resting on an idiosyncratic stipulation of word usage. We further suggest that rejecting affect-free surprise by appealing to examples of affect-laden surprise has no bearing on whether surprise is always valenced, and propose that when surprise appears to be affect-laden the locus of the experienced valence is a co-occurring emotion.

Basic Emotions or Constructed Emotions: Insights From Taking an Evolutionary Perspective.

The ongoing debate between basic emotion theories (BETs) and the theory of constructed emotion (TCE) hampers progress in the field of emotion research. Providing a new perspective, here we aim to bring the theories closer together by dissecting them according to Tinbergen's four questions to clarify a focus on their evolutionary basis. On the basis of our review of the literature, we conclude that whereas BETs focus on the evolution question of Tinbergen, the TCE is more concerned with the causation of emotion. On the survival value of emotions both theories largely agree: to provide the best reaction in specific situations. Evidence is converging on the evolutionary history of emotions but is still limited for both theories-research within both frameworks focuses heavily on the causation. We conclude that BETs and the TCE explain two different phenomena: emotion and feeling. Therefore, they seem irreconcilable but possibly supplementary for explaining and investigating the evolution of emotion-especially considering their similar answer to the question of survival value. Last, this article further highlights the importance of carefully describing what aspect of emotion is being discussed or studied. Only then can evidence be interpreted to converge toward explaining emotion.

Embracing the Emotion in Emotional Intelligence Measurement: Insights from Emotion Theory and Research.

Emotional intelligence (EI) has gained significant popularity as a scientific construct over the past three decades, yet its conceptualization and measurement still face limitations. Applied EI research often overlooks its components, treating it as a global characteristic, and there are few widely used performance-based tests for assessing ability EI. The present paper proposes avenues for advancing ability EI measurement by connecting the main EI components to models and theories from the emotion science literature and related fields. For emotion understanding and emotion recognition, we discuss the implications of basic emotion theory, dimensional models, and appraisal models of emotion for creating stimuli, scenarios, and response options. For the regulation and management of one's own and others' emotions, we discuss how the process model of emotion regulation and its extensions to interpersonal processes can inform the creation of situational judgment items. In addition, we emphasize the importance of incorporating context, cross-cultural variability, and attentional and motivational factors into future models and measures of ability EI. We hope this article will foster exchange among scholars in the fields of ability EI, basic emotion science, social cognition, and emotion regulation, leading to an enhanced understanding of the individual differences in successful emotional functioning and communication.

Effects of emotion words activation and satiation on facial expression perception: evidence from behavioral and ERP investigations.

The present study investigated the impact of emotion concepts obtained from external environmental experiences on the perception of facial expressions by manipulating the activation and satiation of emotion words, which was based on the argument between basic emotion theory and constructed emotion theory. Experiment 1 explored the effects of emotion activation on happy, disgusted, emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in a facial expression judgment task through behavioral experimentation. Experiment 2 explored the effect of semantic satiation on emotion-label words and emotion-laden words using the event-related potential technique. Experiment 1 found that facial expression perception was influenced by both types of emotion words and showed a significant emotional consistency effect. Experiment 2 found that N170 exhibited a more negative amplitude in the consistent condition compared to the inconsistent condition in the right hemisphere. More importantly, in the later stage of facial expression processing, emotion-label words and emotion-laden words both obstructed the perception of disgusted facial expressions and elicited more negative N400 amplitude in the emotion consistency condition, showing a reversed N400 effect. These results suggested that emotion concepts in the form of language influenced the perception of facial expressions, but there were differences between happy and disgusted faces. Disgusted faces were more dependent on emotion concept information and showed different performances in semantic activation and satiation conditions.

Affective responses to robots

The traditional distinction between social robots and service robots is gradually being eroded in the design, planning and public presentation of physically embodied artificial intelligence. The paper is mainly concerned with two case studies: a service robot named Spot, from Boston Dynamics, and two social robots named Kaspar and Zeno, advertised as useful therapeutic tools for children in the autistic spectrum. The discussion centers on three key factors that play a role in the affective responses robots may elicit in the public: 1) the “uncanny valley effect,” i.e., the cognitive and affective dissonance that may be provoked by machines that are very close to reaching lifelike appearance, but fail to replicate it with respect to behavior, fine motor skills or perceptual cues. 2) the capacity to evoke affective responses thanks to the symbolic connotations that may be associated with the robot’s appearance. 3) The relevance of situational and contextual factors.
 The paper reaches three conclusions: 1) producers sometimes fail to consider carefully the symbolic connotations that may be associated with the design chosen for their robots. 2) The context in which robots are meant to be used ought to play a more significant role in a fair-handed and pluralistic approach to robot production. 3) it is to be hoped that producers, in collaboration with psychologists and philosophers of emotion, extend their understanding of affectivity beyond the theories of basic emotions upon which they mostly rely. It is important and urgent to reflect on the relevance of social context with respect both to emotion recognition and to the affective response of the public.

Eye movements and ERP biomarkers for face processing problems in avoidant attachment-style individuals.

Avoidant attachment poses a serious risk to intimate relationships and offspring. However, there are few studies on the face-processing characteristics and impairments of avoidant individuals based on basic emotion theory. Therefore, this study investigated the issues of emotional processing and deactivation strategies in individuals with avoidant attachment. Avoidant and secure individuals were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment and a two-choice oddball task in which they had to distinguish facial expressions of basic emotions (sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral). Eye fixation durations to various parts of the face, including the eyes, nose, and mouth, were measured, and three event-related potentials (ERP) components (P100, N170, and P300) were monitored. Avoidant individuals could not process facial expressions as easily as secure individuals. Avoidant individuals focused less on the eyes of angry faces when compared to secure individuals. They also exhibited a more positive P100 component and a less negative N170 component when processing faces and a larger amplitude of the P300 component than secure individuals when processing emotional expressions. Avoidant individuals use deactivating strategies and exhibit specific characteristics at different stages, which are of great significance in social interaction.

Human Intelligence versus AI: Implications for Emotional Aspects of Human Communication

The affective computing approach of artificial intelligence has made it possible for machines to not only think, behave and communicate like humans, but to also emote like humans. This dimension of AI is substituting human capacities due to its benefits in diverse spheres of life. While studies abound in the comparison between AI and human intelligence in terms of their cognitive capacities, very few have focused on the emotional aspect. This study therefore, utilized secondary data by reviewing empirical studies to examine the implications of AI in the emotional aspects of human communication. The study is anchored on basic emotion theory and technological determinism which enunciate the fundamentals of emotional AI and its effects. The paper argues that the complexity and subjectivity of human intelligence and emotion cannot be adequately replicated by AI as it lacks innate emotion and the ability to understand abstracts. It recommends media literacy skills for users and ethical guidance for technological companies designing AI to ensure it is less detrimental to human and the society.

Semantic Space Theory: Data-Driven Insights Into Basic Emotions

Here we present semantic space theory and the data-driven methods it entails. Across the largest studies to date of emotion-related experience, expression, and physiology, we find that emotion is high dimensional, defined by blends of upward of 20 distinct kinds of emotions, and not reducible to low-dimensional structures and conceptual processes as assumed by constructivist accounts. Specific emotions are not separated by sharp boundaries, contrary to basic emotion theory, and include states that often blend. Emotion concepts such as “anger” are primary in the unfolding of emotional experience and emotion recognition, more so than core affect processes of valence and arousal. We conclude by outlining studies showing how these data-driven discoveries are a basis of machine-learning models that are serving larger-scale, more diverse studies of naturalistic emotional behavior.

Basic emotions do not reliably co-occur with predicted facial expressions: Reply to Witkower et al. (2023).

Replies to the comments made by Witkower, et al. (see record 2023-63008-004) on the current authors original article (see record 2022-03375-001). A core assumption of Basic Emotion Theory is that the conscious experience of a basic emotion co-occurs with a facial expression signal of that same emotion. Our analysis of available evidence found co-occurrence in only 13% of cases-thus calling into question basic and applied studies in which the emotion is inferred from the face. Our second analysis counted as a co-occurrence even when only part of the facial signal was observed. Co-occurrence was found in only 23% of cases. Witkower et al.'s rebuttal failed to undermine these important findings. They claimed that similar degrees of correlation are found in other areas of psychology, but they confuse co-occurrence of two intrinsic manifestations of the same event (expression and experience of emotion) with the correlation between one potential causal antecedent and an observed event (e.g., effects of meditation on anxiety). Our results stand as a major challenge to Basic Emotion Theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion word use patterns and eating disorder symptoms: Considering the circumplex model of affect and basic emotions theory.

No prior research has examined whether the types of emotion words individuals use to describe their affective experiences cluster along affective dimensions inherent within leading affect theories, or how such emotion word use maps onto eating disorder (ED) symptoms. To address these gaps, latent profile analysis was used to empirically-identify groups of young adults (N=352) by how often they use emotion words characterized by the circumplex model of affect's valence-arousal dimensions and basic emotions theory's basic versus complex emotion word categorizations. Auxiliary analyses examined differences in groups' ED symptoms (binge eating, purging, restricting, excessive exercising, muscle building, body dissatisfaction, and cognitive restraint). The 5-profile valence-arousal model and 4-profile basic-complex model were the best-fitting theoretically-supported solutions. Valence-arousal profiles with greater negative affect valence generally exhibited worse ED pathology than others, whereas profiles with greater positive affect valence produced inconsistent risk- and protective-factor relations with distinct ED symptoms. Basic-complex profiles characterized by frequent use of both basic and complex emotion words generally had the greatest ED severity, and profiles with greater basic emotion word use exhibited elevated binge eating. Individual-differences in young adults' emotion word use patterns, versus sample-level averages only, warrant further consideration in ED prevention and research. The present findings suggest that young adults differ in the types of words they use to describe their emotional experiences, and that these unique emotion word use patterns are linked to distinct eating disorder symptoms. These sources of variation warrant further consideration in eating disorders prevention efforts and future research seeking to advance affect-based eating disorders theories.

Approaches to Blushing: Context Matter

This paper offers a systematic treatment of the social and cultural context of the blush. The paper looks into how different emotion theories approach blushing and does so by differentiating between basic emotion theories, which consider contextual factors but do not make them central to understanding emotional expressions, and contextual emotion theories, which make contextual factors central to understanding emotional expressions. The paper argues that blushing might be best explained by theories that make context central to understanding emotional expression.

The neurobiological basis of affect is consistent with psychological construction theory and shares a common neural basis across emotional categories

Affective experience colours everyday perception and cognition, yet its fundamental and neurobiological basis is poorly understood. The current debate essentially centers around the communalities and specificities across individuals, events, and emotional categories like anger, sadness, and happiness. Using fMRI during the experience of these emotions, we critically compare the two dominant conflicting theories on human affect. Basic emotion theory posits emotions as discrete universal entities generated by dedicated emotion category-specific neural circuits, while psychological construction theory claims emotional events as unique, idiosyncratic, and constructed by psychological primitives like core affect and conceptualization, which underlie each emotional event and operate in a predictive framework. Based on the findings of 8 a priori-defined model-specific prediction tests on the neural response amplitudes and patterns, we conclude that the neurobiological basis of affect is primarily characterized by idiosyncratic mechanisms and a common neural basis shared across emotion categories, consistent with psychological construction theory. The findings provide further insight into the organizational principles of the neural basis of affect and brain function in general. Future studies in clinical populations with affective symptoms may reveal the corresponding underlying neural changes from a psychological construction perspective.

The Emotions of Hope: From Optimism to Sanguinity, from Pessimism to Despair

The concept of hope has become a topic of growing interest across many areas of sociological research and theory, motivated in part by the widening perception of an uncertain future given the deterioration of the social fabric of contemporary societies. Hope has been theorized to be primarily a cognitive assessment of a goal-intention, a state of mind based upon the prospect that some desired objective, outcome, or situation will be realized, and where obstacles, obstructions, and unforeseen circumstances, even fate, can determine success or failure. The cognitivist theory of hope as necessarily involving agency and planning is critically evaluated, and it is argued that hope, while not itself an emotion, is an affect-laden phenomenon. Hope theorists have not systematically investigated the specific emotions that might be involved in hope. To address this lacuna, a sociological theory of the emotions of hope is presented. This conceptualization utilizes basic-emotion theory and the author’s hierarchical classification of primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions. As whatever is hoped for is seen with increasing optimism or pessimism, opposite clusters of emotions––the tertiary-level emotions of sanguinity and despair––emerge at the valenced poles of hope, hopefulness and hopelessness. Sanguinity includes in its meaning the primary emotions acceptance, joy–happiness, and anticipation, and the secondary emotions optimism, fatalism and love. But if pessimism ensues from plans unravelling and obstacles becoming unsurmountable, a sense of hopelessness comes to include an opposite set of emotions, consisting of the primary emotions disgust, sadness, and surprise, and the secondary emotions loneliness, disappointment, and shock. Sanguinity is a positive resource, but can become pathological if based on an unrealistic sense of over-confidence. The phenomenological nature of despair is explored in terms of the collapse of one’s social resources and social involvements, the demise of one’s social world, and a disintegration of self-representation. The ambiguous nature of hope is discussed, as what is hoped for is apt to be abstract and ill-defined, so that the reality of a hope, realized, can differ from what was imagined, and can involve self-deception concerning the sociomoral reality of what has actually happened.

Personality and emotion based cyberbullying detection on YouTube using ensemble classifiers

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the effect of users’ personality traits and emotions expressed through textual communications on YouTube to detect cyberbullying using a series of ensemble classifiers. Personality traits were determined using the Big Five model whereas emotions were based on Ekman’s basic emotion theory. Annotated YouTube textual comments in English (N = 5152; i.e. 2576 number of bullying versus 2576 non-bullying instances) were used to detect cyberbullying incidents using several ensemble classifiers, including Random Forest and AdaBoost. Performance metrics revealed both personality traits and emotion to significantly improve the identification of cyberbullying presence, with accuracy and F-score values of more than 95%. Further fine-grained analysis revealed anger and openness to be more profound compared to other emotions and personalities. Further, neurotic individuals tend to be driven to cyberbullying by joy, disgust and fear. The findings show that personality and emotions play pertinent roles in cyberbullying, and the identification of specific traits and emotions can help in designing a more strategic intervention programme.

Emotion concept in perception of facial expressions: Effects of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words

Emotion perception, the ability to detect and categorize the emotions of others, is an important component of social competence. The basic emotion theory and constructed emotion theory remain controversial over the role of emotional semantic information in the processing of facial expressions. In the present study, in order to explore the mechanism of emotional semantic information in different processing stages of facial expressions, we used the ERPs to investigate the effects of emotion-label words (e.g., happy, disgusted) and emotion-laden words (e.g., flower, maggot) on the perception of happy and disgusted faces. The results showed that disgusted faces were more susceptible to emotion words, and there were differences between word types and consistency conditions in the N170 component. More importantly, disgusted faces showed a significant N400 effect in the emotion-label words condition, that is, the amplitude in the emotion inconsistent condition was negative compared with that in the emotion consistent condition. The processing of happy faces was not significantly affected by the emotional information of words, and no significant effects related to consistency or to word types were found. These results found that disgusted faces exhibited emotional semantic conflict in the inconsistent emotion-label words condition, suggesting that emotion words moderated the perception of disgusted faces, supporting the hypothesis that emotional semantic information influenced the perception of facial expressions.

Emotions in specialised genres: Power, manipulation and persuasion from the Affect Spectrum Theory

This paper seeks to examine professional genres from a novel perspective linking social constructivism and basic emotion theory, making the assumption that emotions are intrinsically social, and that social phenomena (such as professional communities) have an emotional nature (TenHouten, 2021). Thus, we aim to consider the constructive role of emotions in the creation and development of specialised texts (occasionally focusing specifically on the legal field), and, in turn, on the professional communities from which these texts emerge. Our work builds on the socio-evolutionary theory of emotions, or affect-spectrum theory (AST), which is developed in dissonance with other Cartesian and rational-choice models that set reason and emotion in opposition and assert that society only progresses to the extent that the former can control, suppress and triumph over the latter. Specifically, it is our underlying hypothesis that specialised and professional communication is articulated around emotions –and power, manipulation and persuasion, among other negative or positive emotional expressions. Thus, textual mechanisms or genres, as communicative instruments of specialised communities reveal the tensions that occur centripetally or centrifugally, i.e., inwards or outwards from that community. They do so from an agonistic relational model, in a centripetal tension that promotes agency through coercion and/or manipulation, or from a hedonistic relational model, in a centrifugal tension where interpersonal relationships of persuasion and dissemination are established in order to engage in communal relationships.