Current Moods Research Articles

Evaluation of Extended Decision Outcomes

ABSTRACTSome decision outcomes consist of sequences of single experiences. The aim is to propose a conceptualization of how such sequences are evaluated if affective evaluations of single experiences evoke transient emotional responses with lasting changes in current mood. The conceptualization implies three modes in which the sequences of single experiences are evaluated: (i) Aggregation of affective evaluations of the single experiences retrieved from memory; (ii) Aggregation of current moods associated with emotional responses to the single experiences retrieved or reconstructed from memory; and (iii) Updating of current mood. Simulations of parametrized models are used to compare the different evaluation modes to each other and to show to which extent the simulation results are consistent with some common findings in previous research. The previous research has primarily investigated different rules for aggregation of affective evaluations of single experiences. The simulation results motivate research comparing this mode to the other proposed modes.

EMOTION BASED MUSIC RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM

The daily lives of people are greatly influenced by music. Everyone wants to listen to music that suits their personal tastes and mood. Users are constantly needed to manually browse the music and construct a playlist based on their mood. The suggested project, which creates a music playlist depending on users' current moods, is quite effective. The most effective approach to convey a person's current mood is through their facial expressions. Webcams are used to capture facial expressions, which are then fed into a learning algorithm to determine the most likely emotion. The emotion recognition system is built using the FER 2013 dataset for training, which allows it to identify seven different emotions. Its operation involves capturing live video input from a webcam, processing it through the model, and then providing a prediction of the detected emotion. By employing webcams to capture real-time facial expressions, the system dynamically adapts playlist recommendations to match the user's emotional state. This seamless integration of emotion recognition technology with music selection enhances user experience by ensuring that the music aligns with their current feelings, thereby fostering a more immersive and personalized listening experience.

Structural Analysis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This paper explores one of the most influential conspiracy theories of all time, as described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by employing the method of structural analysis. The “master myth” of the Protocols represents a basic structure of the conspiracy narrative, whose motifs were subsequently modified throughout the 20th and 21st centuries according to current events and moods. However, to understand the pamphlet as a whole, it is also important to shed a little light on its specific historical context and the religious, political, and social fervour of the time, which eventually gave rise to this text. The text is one we can still consider a blueprint of contemporary conspiracy narratives about the global cabal that occupies a prominent place within the modern conspiracy culture.

Transformer-based Automatic Music Mood Classification Using Multi-modal Framework

The mood is a psychological state of feeling that is related to internal emotions and affect, which is how emotions are expressed outwardly. According to studies, music affects our moods, and we are also inclined to choose a theme based on our current moods. Audio-based techniques can achieve promising results, but lyrics also give relevant information about the moods of a song which may not be present in the audio part. So a multi-modal with both textual features and acoustic features can provide enhanced accuracy. Sequential networks such as long short-term memory networks (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit networks (GRU) are widely used in the most state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. A transformer model uses self-attention to compute representations of its inputs and outputs, unlike recurrent unit networks (RNNs) that use sequences and transformers that can parallelize over input positions during training. In this work, we proposed a multi-modal music mood classification system based on transformers and compared the system's performance using a bi-directional GRU (Bi-GRU)-based system with and without attention. The performance is also analyzed for other state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed transformer-based model acquired higher accuracy than the Bi-GRU-based multi-modal system withsingle-layer attention by providing a maximum accuracy of 77.94\%.

A Psychodrama Intervention to Loneliness Due to COVID-19

Loneliness as a psychological state is affective and cognitive discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people stayed at home, afraid of contracting COVID-19. As youths followed lectures via the internet for long hours without physical participation, they became more and more withdrawn and socially isolated. This study explores psychodrama as an intervention to reduce loneliness in university students. COVID-19 pandemic durations seemed to be caused loneliness for all people. The short-version of the ULCA loneliness scale was applied to 358 university students. 24 students were selected for the study based on their higher scores on the assessment. These students also accepted that COVID-19 negatively affected their loneliness state. The average age of participants was 21 years old, and no one was younger than 19 years old. Randomly they were divided into two groups as experimental and controlling with equal representation of number. The experimental group joined 15 weeks of psychodrama groups for 90 minutes each week. All sessions were held with via internet video platform meeting program. In psychodrama method of psychotherapy, clients enacted their concerns to achieve new insight about themselves and others. The psychodrama program started with introducing group participants and expression of why they are in the group to each other. The group was guided with an experienced group leader. With the techniques of psychodrama such as warmup, mirror, doubling, and role reversal, participants self-disclosed their current moods. K-square statistical analyses suggested that the group of university students who joined psychodrama overcame their loneliness. Education policy makers should bear in mind that today’s Covid-19 society suffers from psychological treatment deficits in the area of loneliness. Group action methods should be taken immediately. Group guidance, counseling, and drama in education and psychodrama can be useful for students to cope with problems resulting from of COVID-19. Youths truly need to share their suffering with professionals. Preventive guidance activities should be given importance in schools.

Review and assessment of self-reports of travel-related emotional wellbeing

IntroductionTravel behavior research has only started to address how travel affects emotional wellbeing. The development of measurement methods is an important goal of this research. MethodsA review and assessment of methods of measuring travel-related emotional wellbeing is presented guided by a conceptual framework specifying what is measured (cognitive evaluations, emotional responses, or moods), the way it is measured (proactively, instantaneously, or retrospectively), and when it is measured (before, during, or after travel). Anticipated, current, residual and recalled moods are the objects of the measurement. Only studies of commuting or other types of daily travel are addressed. ResultsWe find that no research has measured anticipated moods, some research has measured current moods before, after and during travel, and most research has measured recalled moods. ConclusionsThe most valid and reliable method is to measure current mood instantaneously at several points in time, before, during, and after travel. A measure of emotional wellbeing can then be obtained by objective aggregation. An approximate more feasible method is to retrospectively measure recalled moods for a given specified time period that may not only include travel. The available methods for measuring recalled moods have acceptable psychometric properties but research is needed to validate these methods by comparing the results to an objective aggregation of instantaneous measures of current mood at different points in time.

Ecological Momentary Assessment in Behavioral Research: Addressing Technological and Human Participant Challenges.

BackgroundEcological momentary assessment (EMA) assesses individuals’ current experiences, behaviors, and moods as they occur in real time and in their natural environment. EMA studies, particularly those of longer duration, are complex and require an infrastructure to support the data flow and monitoring of EMA completion.ObjectiveOur objective is to provide a practical guide to developing and implementing an EMA study, with a focus on the methods and logistics of conducting such a study.MethodsThe EMPOWER study was a 12-month study that used EMA to examine the triggers of lapses and relapse following intentional weight loss. We report on several studies that informed the implementation of the EMPOWER study: (1) a series of pilot studies, (2) the EMPOWER study’s infrastructure, (3) training of study participants in use of smartphones and the EMA protocol and, (4) strategies used to enhance adherence to completing EMA surveys.ResultsThe study enrolled 151 adults and had 87.4% (132/151) retention rate at 12 months. Our learning experiences in the development of the infrastructure to support EMA assessments for the 12-month study spanned several topic areas. Included were the optimal frequency of EMA prompts to maximize data collection without overburdening participants; the timing and scheduling of EMA prompts; technological lessons to support a longitudinal study, such as proper communication between the Android smartphone, the Web server, and the database server; and use of a phone that provided access to the system’s functionality for EMA data collection to avoid loss of data and minimize the impact of loss of network connectivity. These were especially important in a 1-year study with participants who might travel. It also protected the data collection from any server-side failure. Regular monitoring of participants’ response to EMA prompts was critical, so we built in incentives to enhance completion of EMA surveys. During the first 6 months of the 12-month study interval, adherence to completing EMA surveys was high, with 88.3% (66,978/75,888) completion of random assessments and around 90% (23,411/25,929 and 23,343/26,010) completion of time-contingent assessments, despite the duration of EMA data collection and challenges with implementation.ConclusionsThis work informed us of the necessary preliminary steps to plan and prepare a longitudinal study using smartphone technology and the critical elements to ensure participant engagement in the potentially burdensome protocol, which spanned 12 months. While this was a technology-supported and -programmed study, it required close oversight to ensure all elements were functioning correctly, particularly once human participants became involved.

Current Mood vs. Recalled Impacts of Current Moods after Exposures to Sequences of Uncertain Monetary Outcomes

Events in a sequence may each be evaluated as good or bad. We propose that such good-bad evaluations evoke emotional responses that change current mood. A model of recurrent updating of current mood is developed and compared to a model of how a sequence of events evoking emotional responses is evaluated retrospectively. In Experiment 1, 149 undergraduates are presented sequences of lottery outcomes with a fixed probability of losing or winning different amounts of money. Ratings of current mood are made after the sequence. Retrospective evaluations are either made after the ratings of current mood or, in a control condition, when no ratings of current mood are made. The results show an expected effect on current mood of the valence of the end of the sequence. The results are less clear in showing an expected beginning effect on the retrospective evaluations. An expected beginning effect on retrospective evaluations is found in Experiment 2 in which 41 undergraduates are first asked to remember the different amounts of money, then to evaluate the sequence as lottery outcomes.

Age shock: misperceptions of the impact of age on fertility before and after IVF in women who conceived after age 40

What do older women understand of the relationship between age and fertility prior and subsequent to delivering their first child? Women who were first-time parents over the age of 40 did not accurately perceive the relationship between age and fertility prior to conceiving with IVF. While increases in women's age at their first birth have been most pronounced in relatively older women, the rapidity of fertility decline is not appreciated by most non-infertility specialist physicians, the general public or men and women who are delaying childbearing. Qualitative retrospective interviews were conducted from 2009 to 2011 with 61 self-selected women who were patients in one of two fertility clinics in the USA. All participants had delivered their first child following IVF when the woman was 40 years or older. The data include women's responses to the semi-structured and open-ended interview questions 'What information did you have about fertility and age before you started trying to get pregnant?' and 'What did you learn once you proceeded with fertility treatment?' Of the women, 30% expected their fertility to decline gradually until menopause at around 50 years and 31% reported that they expected to get pregnant without difficulty at the age of 40. Reasons for a mistaken belief in robust fertility included recollections of persistent and ongoing messaging about pregnancy prevention starting in adolescence (23%), healthy lifestyle and family history of fertility (26%), and incorrect information from friends, physicians or misleading media reports of pregnancies in older celebrity women (28%). Participants had not anticipated the possibility that they would need IVF to conceive with 44% reporting being 'shocked' and 'alarmed' to discover that their understanding of the rapidity of age-related reproductive decline was inaccurate'. In retrospect, their belated recognition of the effect of age on fertility led 72% of the women to state that they felt 'lucky' or had 'beaten the odds' in successfully conceiving after IVF. Of the women, 28% advocated better fertility education earlier in life and 23% indicated that with more information about declining fertility, they might have attempted conception at an earlier age. Yet 46% of women acknowledged that even if they had possessed better information, their life circumstances would not have permitted them to begin childbearing earlier. Both the self-selected nature of recruitment and the retrospective design can result in biases due to memory limitations or participant assimilation and/or contrast of past events with current moods. The cohort did not reflect broad homogeneity in that the participants were much more likely to be highly educated, Caucasian and better able to pay for treatment than national population norms. As attitudes of older women who were unsuccessful after attempting IVF in their late 30s or early 40s are not represented, it is possible (if not likely) that the recollections of women who did not conceive after IVF would have been more strongly influenced by feelings of regret or efforts to deflect blame for their inability to conceive. While the failure to appreciate the true biological relationship between aging and fertility may be common and may reflect inaccessibility or misinterpretation of information, it is not sufficient to explain the decades-long socio-demographic phenomenon of delayed childbearing.

Happily Distracted: Mood and a Benefit of Attention Dysregulation in Older Adults

Positive mood states are believed to broaden the focus of attention in younger adults, but it is unclear whether the same is true for older adults. Here we examined one consequence of broader attention that has been shown in young adults: that memory for distraction is greater for those in a positive mood. In the current study, positive and neutral moods were induced in older adults (M = 67.9) prior to a 1-back task in which participants were instructed to attend to relevant pictures and ignore distracting words. Following a 10-min filled interval, participants performed a word fragment completion task that tested implicit memory for the distracting words from the 1-back task. Older adults in the positive mood group showed greater implicit memory for previous distraction compared to those in the neutral mood group. These findings suggest that affect influences the ability to regulate attention in a similar manner for younger and older adults.

Factors Affecting the Extent of Monday Blues: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis of 34 samples identified a small but reliable "Monday blues" effect (-.08 < or = d < or = -.06) in samples reporting current or real-time moods for each day of the week. However, the size of the effect in samples reporting recalled summaries of moods experienced over the course of a day varied depending on whether the sample involved university students or nonstudents. University students reporting recalled summaries of daily moods showed a large Monday blues effect (d = -.25), whereas married men who were not students reported smaller effects with greater variance (-.19 < or = d <or = -.01). The 34 samples reporting recalled summaries of moods experienced over multiple days produced effects ranging from -.25 to -1.28, but the variance among these samples was too great to estimate an aggregated statistic.

Correlation between mood and heart rate variability indices during daily life

We investigated the correlation between mood and heart rate variability (HRV) indices during daily life. The RR-interval and body acceleration of 40 normal male subjects were recorded using ambulatory device for 48 to 72 hours. Every hour that the subjects were awake they registered their current mood on a Visual Analogue Scale questionnaire. The questionnaire scales eight of the subjects’ current moods. Those are happiness, tension, fatigue, worry, depression, anger, vigor, and confusion. The following four HRV indices were calculated. Those are heart rate, root mean square of successive differences of RR-interval sequence, the normalized high-frequency (0.15 - 0.4 Hz) power of RR-in- terval variability, and mean frequency in the high-frequency band of RR-interval variability. The calculated HRV indices data and the mood data were normalized individually, the data with body acceleration exceeding 30 mG were excluded from the analysis to reduce the effect of exercise, and the differences from the first day (?mood and ?HRV-index) were taken to reduce the effect of circadian rhythm. The most three highly correlated combinations were ?vigor and ?HFnu (R = –0.24, p < 0.0001), ?vigor and ?RMSSD (R = –0.24, p < 0.0001), and ?vigor and ?HR (R = 0.22, p < 0.001). Vigor exhibited the most significant correlations with HRV indices of eight moods.

The Pataphysic Institute

The Pataphysic Institute (PI) is a research prototype multi-player game world. In PI, the personalities of the inhabitants are the base for the game mechanics. When interacting with other characters the potential emotional reactions depend upon avatars' current mood and personality. PI is built with inspiration from personality psychology and affect theory in an attempt to mimic possible emotional responses in order to give the player support in role-playing. The mental states of characters depend on their personalities and on their current moods. Moods differ according to context and to recent experiences. Emotional experiences become memories and define the relationships between characters. The mental state is the sum of the character and governs what actions can be performed in a given moment. In order to do certain things the characters need to be in certain moods — and for this the players need to game their avatars' emotions, and game their relationships.

Current negative mood encourages changes in end-of-life treatment decisions and is associated with false memories

To investigate the effects of mood on people's end-of-life treatment decisions and their false memories of those decisions, participants took part in two sessions. At Time 1, participants were experimentally induced into positive or negative moods. They decided whether they would want to receive or refuse treatments in a range of hypothetical medical scenarios, such as tube feeding while in a coma. Four weeks later, at Time 2, participants were induced into the same or the opposite mood and made these decisions a second time. They also recalled their previous decisions. Participants in negative moods at Time 2 changed more of their current decisions and falsely remembered more of their previous decisions than participants in positive moods. These findings suggest that people's current moods influence whether they change their treatment decisions; current decisions in turn bias recall of past decisions

Daily life hour by hour, with and without cocaine: an ecological momentary assessment study

Effects of an intervention cannot be understood without precise knowledge of the baseline behavior on which the intervention is superimposed. For misusers of illicit drugs, patterns of daily activities and moods have not been studied in a way that is amenable to statistical aggregation. The aim of the study was to compare hour-by-hour daily activities in cocaine-dependent outpatients during urine-verified periods of use and abstinence. In a cohort design, a volunteer sample of 112 methadone-maintained cocaine- and heroin-abusing outpatients provided ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data on handheld computers for 10,781 person-days. EMA responses to questions about current location, activities, companions, moods, and recent exposure to putative drug-use triggers were compared across periods of use and abstinence using SAS Proc Glimmix (for binary outcomes) and Proc Mixed (for continuous outcomes). Periods of cocaine use were associated with idle, solitary, affectively negative afternoons but, unexpectedly, were also associated with a greater likelihood of early-morning or late-evening work. The whole-day concomitants of cocaine use were often distinct from the acute predecessors of use seen in prior analyses from the same sample. Several measures of negative mood increased during abstinence. Weeks of cocaine use and abstinence in outpatients are associated with distinct patterns of mood and behavior; the detailed hourly data reported here should help inform treatment interventions aimed at changing daily activities. The findings also argue against the contention that cocaine abstinence symptoms decrease monotonically from the day of cessation.

感性に基づくマルチメディアデータ検索システムにおける一気分適応法

This paper proposes a method of adapting moods to Kansei multimedia data retrieval system. This type of adaptation is called the mood adaptation. The proposed method of the mood adaptation uses the personal adaptation method based on the matrix transformation. This paper also presents a method of making the retrieval easy by considering the mood. This method enables users to retrieve pictures without any specification but their current moods. This method uses the score matrices obtained in the experiments in some moods, and the retrieval action types. By capturing the user's action type a priori, the retrieval system estimates the i mpression words and their weights to retrieve pictures.

Validation of a Swedish short self‐report measure of core affect

This research aimed at validating two self-report composite rating scales of core affect that are useful when quick assessments are required, for instance, of current mood or recalled, anticipated, and experienced emotional reactions. The ratings were derived from the Swedish Core Affect Scales (SCAS) comprising six self-report rating scales of the two orthogonal dimensions of core affect, valence (unpleasantness-pleasantness) and activation (quietness-excitement). In three samples of university students who were requested to rate current moods, affect-inducing sounds, or affect-inducing pictures, the composite ratings were compared to SCAS, two widely used graphical rating scales of valence and activation, and skin conductance responses and the acceleratory peak of heart rate. Three different rating formats were also compared. The results showed that the composite ratings were reliable and yielded the expected correlations with the other ratings and with the physiological affect indicators. No effects of rating format were detected. It is concluded that the composite ratings of valence and activation may be used if quick assessments are called for. Choices can be made of any of three rating formats depending on purpose with the assessments.

L'enseignement de la Shoah dans les écoles juives

Teaching the Holocaust in Jewish schoolsTeaching the Holocaust in Jewish schools is as difficult a task as it is in the regular French public schools. One must also bear in mind the fact that Jewish schools are highly heterogeneous and, to some extent, an insular universe.After a long period of avoidance, in which the Holocaust was considered a non-event, Jewish schools have now gradually developed their own educational Holocaust-teaching tools, all the while being careful to circumvent the complicated issue of God in relation to the Holocaust. Every student is duty bound not only to remember (Zachor – a Jewish diktat) but also to cultivate a heightened awareness of current moods in both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds.The existing challenge facing Jewish schools in France today is to abandon their traditional particularism and to take a greater interest in general current affairs.

Actuarial assessment of risk among sex offenders.

The appraisal of risk among sex offenders has seen recent advances through the advent of actuarial assessments. Statistics derived from Relative Operating Characteristics (ROCs) permit the comparison of predictive accuracies achieved by different instruments even among samples that exhibit different base rates of recidivism. Such statistics cannot, however, solve problems introduced when items from actuarial tools are omitted, when reliability is low, or when there is high between-subject variability in the duration of the follow-up. We present empirical evidence suggesting that when comprehensive actuarial tools (VRAG and SORAG) are scored with high reliability, without missing items, and when samples of offenders have fixed and equal opportunity for recidivism, predictive accuracies are maximized near ROC areas of 0.90. Although the term "dynamic" has not been consistently defined, such accuracies leave little room for further improvement in long-term prediction by dynamic risk factors. We address the mistaken idea that long-term, static risk levels have little relevance for clinical intervention with sex offenders. We conclude that highly accurate prediction of violent criminal recidivism can be achieved by means of highly reliable and thorough scoring of comprehensive multi-item actuarial tools using historical items (at least until potent therapies are identified). The role of current moods, attitudes, insights, and physiological states in causing contemporaneous behavior notwithstanding, accurate prediction about which sex offenders will commit at least one subsequent violent offense can be accomplished using complete information about past conduct.

Neuroticism and extraversion as predictors of negative and positive emotional information processing: comparing Eysenck's, Gray's, and Newman's theories

This study compared how extraversion, neuroticism, and extraversion × neuroticism are related to processing of pleasant and unpleasant emotional information as predicted by Eysenck's, Gray's, and Newman's theories. Initially, the participants' levels of extraversion (as measured by the sociability subscale) and neuroticism were assessed with Eysenck's Personality Inventory. They were then tested individually. After completing a questionnaire of current positive and negative moods, they completed three tasks measuring processing of pleasant, unpleasant, and also neutral information. The results showed that extraversion was associated positively with the processing of pleasant information, while neuroticism was associated positively with the processing of unpleasant information. These findings support predictions from Eysenck's theory. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.