Emotional Attributes Research Articles

Selective visual and crossmodal impairment in the discrimination of anger and fear expressions in severe alcohol use disorder

BackgroundSevere alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is associated with impaired discrimination of emotional expressions. This deficit appears increased in crossmodal settings, when simultaneous inputs from different sensory modalities are presented. However, so far, studies exploring emotional crossmodal processing in SAUD relied on static faces and unmatched face/voice pairs, thus offering limited ecological validity. Our aim was therefore to assess emotional processing using a validated and ecological paradigm relying on dynamic audio-visual stimuli, manipulating the amount of emotional information available. MethodThirty individuals with SAUD and 30 matched healthy controls performed an emotional discrimination task requiring to identify five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) expressed as visual, auditory, or auditory-visual segments of varying length. Sensitivity indices (d’) were computed to get an unbiased measure of emotional discrimination and entered in a Generalized Linear Mixed Model. Incorrect emotional attributions were also scrutinized through confusion matrices. ResultsDiscrimination levels varied across sensory modalities and emotions, and increased with stimuli duration. Crucially, performances also improved from unimodal to crossmodal conditions in both groups, but discrimination for anger crossmodal stimuli and fear crossmodal/visual stimuli remained selectively impaired in SAUD. These deficits were not influenced by stimuli duration, suggesting that they were not modulated by the amount of emotional information available. Moreover, they were not associated with systematic emotional error patterns reflecting specific confusions between emotions. ConclusionsThese results clarify the nature and extent of crossmodal impairments in SAUD and converge with earlier findings to ascribe a specific role for anger and fear in this pathology.

In search of the appeal of the ‘DILF’

ABSTRACT Contemporary culture has afforded a new sexualised identity to fatherhood. Fathers are often labelled as nurturing, dominant, and domesticated; attributes demonstrably appealing to females. Colloquially, the sexy dad has come to be referred to as ‘DILF’ (i.e., Dad I’d Like to Fuck), a concept popularised in the media since its debut online in 2011. DILFs are increasingly searched for by women on pornography websites, evidence of an increasing sexual interest in or awareness of the DILF phenomenon. As the DILF is reflective of shifts in popular culture pertaining to media, gendered parenting, notions of masculinity, and women’s sexual expression, this study explored whether women find DILFs more attractive than otherwise equally attractive men without children. Female participants were randomly assigned to one of two possible male profile conditions of the same attractive man (with children versus without children). Results revealed that women rated the male target with children as possessing more positive attributes relative to the male target without children. Follow-up analyses revealed more positive emotional attributes ascribed to the DILF target condition, whereas more positive social attributes were ascribed to the non-DILF target condition. Results are discussed in reference to the changing landscape of masculinity and fatherhood.

MD Codes\u2122: A Methodological Approach to Facial Aesthetic Treatment with Injectable Hyaluronic Acid Fillers

BackgroundPatients often seek aesthetic correction of facial deficiencies (e.g., lines and folds) that are rarely the underlying cause of dissatisfaction with their appearance. Use of a more holistic approach focused on improving the emotional messages of the face (e.g., looking less sad) may improve patient satisfaction with treatment outcomes. The MD Codes™ system was developed to increase clinician success rates by reducing variability in the technical aspects of hyaluronic acid (HA) filler treatment and focusing on addressing unfavorable emotional attributes of the face.MethodsThe MD Codes, or medical codes, represent specific anatomical subunits for injection of HA fillers. Each MD Code includes information regarding the target depth of injection, the proper delivery tool (needle or cannula) and delivery technique (e.g., aliquot, bolus, fanning), and the minimum product volume recommended to achieve visible, reproducible results (active number). During treatment planning, the appropriate MD Codes are selected using algorithms focused on lessening unfavorable facial attributes (a saggy, tired, sad, or angry look) and enhancing positive attributes (an attractive, younger, more contoured, or feminine [soft] or masculine look).ResultsThree case studies are presented to illustrate how the MD Codes and their algorithms were used to address sagginess, tiredness, and sadness in two women and one man.ConclusionsMD Codes provide a universal symbolic language for reducing variability in injection technique. The platform provides user-friendly algorithms to help clinicians increase patient satisfaction by going beyond treatment of lines and folds and to focus on reducing unfavorable facial attributes.Level of Evidence IVThis journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266.

Examining public stigma of Alzheimer's disease and its correlates among Korean Americans.

This study examined public stigma associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) among Korean Americans and identified factors affecting their public stigma. Data used in the study were collected using a cross-sectional survey with 268 Korean Americans. Guided by attribution theory, different domains of public stigma were assessed: pity, antipathy, and social distance. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine the effects of sociodemographic characteristics, exposure to AD, social networking, and AD knowledge on each stigma domain. The influence of emotional attributions (pity and antipathy) on behavioral attributions (social distance) in the stigma process suggested in attribution theory was also examined. Results show that pity is most prevalent followed by social distance and antipathy. Being more proficient in English, knowing fewer relatives/friends with AD, and knowing less about AD risk factors are associated with having more pity stigma. Being less socially engaged and knowing less about AD risk factors are related to having more antipathy stigma. Being younger and more proficient in English and having stronger antipathy stigma are associated with having more social distance stigma. Findings reveal multifaceted nature of public stigma associated with AD in Korean Americans and suggest that we need to work on both positive and negative sides of public stigma for stigma change. Findings of different factors associated with each public stigma domain can be considered when trying to foster and/or reduce certain stigmatic beliefs and behaviors associated with AD.

Theory of mind in Parkinson's disease: evidences in drug-naïve patients and longitudinal effects of dopaminergic therapy.

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states to one self and others and to understand that others have beliefs different from one's own. Different subcomponents of ToM have also been identified: cognitive and affective. Cognitive ToM refers to the capacity to infer others' beliefs and intentions, while affective ToM implies the ability to appreciate others' emotional states. The aim of this study was to explore ToM in drug-naïve Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and to investigate the effects of chronic dopaminergic therapy on different subcomponents of ToM during a 3months and 1year of follow-up. We examined 16 PD patients in three conditions: before (un-medicated) and after dopaminergic therapy (medicated 3months: T1 and medicated 1year: T2). We also compared our PD's ToM abilities with 11 healthy individuals. ToM was explored with 5 different tasks: Faux Pas Test, Picture Sequencing Task Capture Story, Emotion Attribution Task, Strange Stories Task, and Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces. Our study confirms that PD patients present deficits in cognitive components of ToM and preserved performances in the affective ones in early stages of disease. We also find a significant effect of dopaminergic therapy on ToM already after 3months with a good persistency after 1year of treatment.

Theory of Mind in multiple system atrophy: comparison with Parkinson's disease and healthy subjects.

Theory of Mind is defined as the ability to attribute mental state and emotions to other people and is relevant to social relationships. The cortical and subcortical regions involved in Theory of Mind are damaged by neurodegenerative processes of Parkinsonian syndromes, so the aim of the present study was to explore, for the first time, possible deficits of Theory of Mind and their cognitive correlates in multiple system atrophy (MSA). Twenty-six patients with MSA, 25 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 25 healthy subjects were enrolled. Cognitive and affective subcomponents of Theory of Mind, executive functions, long-term memory and apathy were evaluated. The three groups did not differ on demographic variables. MSA and PD groups performed worse than healthy subjects on both cognitive (advanced test of ToM) and affective (emotion attribution task) ToM tasks, but no significant difference was found between patients' groups. However, when using another affective ToM task (Eyes Test), MSA group had poorer performance than healthy subjects and Parkinsonian patients, whereas Parkinsonian patients had similar performance to healthy subjects. Regression analysis revealed an association between poor cognitive flexibility and dysfunctional cognitive component of Theory of Mind. Deficit of cognitive and affective components of Theory of Mind occurred in MSA. Dysfunction of cognitive component was related to executive dysfunction (i.e. cognitive rigidity). These findings might suggest the usefulness of an early evaluation of social cognition in MSA to identify individuals with impaired Theory of Mind who are at risk of social withdrawal, and reduced quality of life.

Speech emotion recognition using fusion of three multi-task learning-based classifiers: HSF-DNN, MS-CNN and LLD-RNN

Speech emotion recognition plays an increasingly important role in emotional computing and is still a challenging task due to its complexity. In this study, we developed a framework integrating three distinctive classifiers: a deep neural network (DNN), a convolution neural network (CNN), and a recurrent neural network (RNN). The framework was used for categorical recognition of four discrete emotions (i.e., angry, happy, neutral and sad). Frame-level low-level descriptors (LLDs), segment-level mel-spectrograms (MS), and utterance-level outputs of high-level statistical functions (HSFs) on LLDs were passed to RNN, CNN, and DNN, separately. Three individual models of LLD-RNN, MS-CNN, and HSF-DNN were obtained. In the models of MS-CNN and LLD-RNN, the attention mechanism based weighted-pooling method was utilized to aggregate the CNN and RNN outputs. To effectively utilize the interdependencies between the two approaches of emotion description (discrete emotion categories and continuous emotion attributes), a multi-task learning strategy was implemented in these three models to acquire generalized features by simultaneously operating classification of discrete categories and regression of continuous attributes. Finally, a confidence-based fusion strategy was developed to integrate the power of different classifiers in recognizing different emotional states. Three experiments on emotion recognition based on the IEMOCAP corpus were conducted. Our experimental results show that the weighted pooling method based on attention mechanism endowed the neural networks with the capability to focus on emotionally salient parts. The generalized features learned in the multi-task learning helped the neural networks to achieve higher accuracies in the tasks of emotion classification. Furthermore, our proposed fusion system achieved weighted accuracy of 57.1% and unweighted accuracy of 58.3%, which were significantly higher than those of each individual classifier. The effectiveness of the proposed approach based on classifier fusion was thus validated.

Affective states influence emotion perception: evidence for emotional egocentricity

Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other’s emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli to induce happy, neutral and sad transient states. After each emotion induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying a mixture of happiness and sadness. Using an adaptive psychophysics procedure, we estimated the tendency to perceive the faces as happy under each of the induced affective states. Results demonstrate the occurrence of egocentric projections, such that faces were more likely judged as happy when participants reported being happy as compared to when they were sad. Moreover, the degree of emotional egocentricity was associated with individual differences in perspective-taking, with smaller biases being observed in individuals with higher disposition to take the perspective of others. Our findings extend previous literature on emotional egocentricity by showing that self-projection occurs when we make emotion attributions based on the other’s emotional expressions, and supports the notion that perspective-taking tendencies play a role in the ability to understand the other’s affective states.

Biophilia and Biophobia as Emotional Attribution to Nature in Children of 5 Years Old

IntroductionConnectedness to nature is a concept that reflects the emotional relationship between the self and the natural environment, based on the theory of biophilia, the innate predisposition to the natural environment. However, the biophobic component has largely been ignored, despite, given its adaptive functional role, being an essential part of the construct. If there is a phylogenetic component underlying nature connectedness, biophilic, and/or biophobic, there should be evidence of this record from early childhood. The main aim of this study is therefore to describe the emotional attributions identified in 5 years old.MethodologyTwo studies were conducted. In the first, 94 children expressed their concept of nature and made basic emotional attributions to a set of 30 images of natural, using a software designed for the study. In the second, 39 children repeated the procedure and provided explanations for their responses.ResultsThe main results show that, in general, children use both positive and negative emotions, which may be related to a three-dimensional model of emotional attributions to nature. The most widely attributed emotion is happiness. However, fear is the second most common attribution. The role of happiness could be explained by a feeling of security and familiarity, while the importance of fear in nature could show an adaptive response of the fear of wild nature in children. This interpretation could be confirmed when analyzing specifically the emotional attributions, classifying the images according to biological and ecosystemic criteria. Thus, for example, more emotional attributions are explained by the “pleasantness” attributed to primary producers and landscapes (e.g., flora), versus attributions of “harm” to the images of secondary and tertiary consumers (e.g., hunters).ConclusionThese results provide evidence in favor of a didactic procedure to study emotional attributions to images of nature in preschool children. They suggest the incorporation of biophobia as an important adaptive factor in connectedness to nature and a tripartite emotional hypothesis based on the valences of the attributed emotions.

The influence of the age of dementia onset on college students\u2019 stigmatic attributions towards a person with dementia

BackgroundResearch in the area of public stigma and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is limited to examining stigmatic beliefs towards persons aged 65 and over (i.e., persons with late-onset dementia). The aim of the present study was to compare college students’ stigmatic attributions towards an older and a younger person with AD, using an attributional model of stigma.MethodA cross-sectional study was conducted with 375 college students (mean age = 25.5, 58.9% female, 64.3% Jewish) who answered a computerized, self-administered, structured questionnaire after being presented with one of two randomly distributed vignettes varying in the age of the person with AD – 80 or 50 years of age. Cognitive, emotional and behavioral attributions of stigma were assessed using an adapted version of the Attribution Questionnaire. Other variables examined included background information, experiences and concerns about developing AD. T-tests and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) hierarchical regressions were used to analyze results.ResultsSimilar to previous studies, students’ levels of dementia stigma were low to moderate. Negative attributions were consistently and significantly higher (β = .17 to .33, p < .01), and positive attributions were significantly lower (β = −.26, p < .01) when the target person was younger rather than older.ConclusionThe differences in stigmatic beliefs towards a younger and older person with AD point to the theoretical and practical importance of clearly stating the age of the target person in stigma studies as well as in programs aimed at reducing public stigma towards persons with AD.

Feeling the right way: Normative influences on people's use of emotion concepts

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling therightway.

Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders: Relationship With Oxidative Stress.

The authors hypothesized that personality disorders characterized by interpersonal hypersensitivity would be associated with an elevated concentration of 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxyguanosine (8-OH-DG), the oxidized form of guanine, and a biomarker of oxidative stress burden. One hundred ninety-five male and female adults underwent semistructured diagnostic interviews, completed questionnaire measures of social cognition and emotional attribution, and had blood drawn for determination of plasma 8-OH-DG. A hierarchical linear regression model revealed that narcissistic and borderline personality disorders predicted 8-OH-DG level independently of the effects of age, gender, recent alcohol and cigarette use, current major depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. In all subjects, 8-OH-DG level was also correlated with the number of borderline personality disorder symptoms present. Narcissistic and borderline personality disorders predicted oxidative stress burden independently of potentially confounding factors.

Abnormal Cortical Thickness Is Associated With Deficits in Social Cognition in Patients With Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1.

Aim: To investigate the cortical thickness in myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) and its potential association with patients' genetic triplet expansion and social cognition deficits.Methods: Thirty patients with DM1 underwent the Social Cognition Battery Test and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning at 3 T. Twenty-five healthy subjects (HSs) were enrolled in the study to serve as a control group for structural MRI data. To assess changes in cortical thickness in DM1 patients, they were compared to HSs using a t-test model. Correlations were used to assess potential associations between genetic and clinical characteristics and social cognition performances in the patient group. Additionally, multiple regression models were used to explore associations between cortical thickness, CTG triplet expansion size, and scores obtained by DM1 patients on the Social Cognition Battery.Results: DM1 patients showed low performances in several subtests of the Social Cognition Battery. Specifically, they obtained pathological scores at Emotion Attribution Test (i.e., Sadness, Embarrassment, Happiness, and Anger) and at the Social Situations Test (i.e., recognition of normal situation, recognition of aberrant behavior). Significant negative correlations were found between CTG triplet expansion size and Embarrassment, and Severity of Aberrant Behavior. Similarly, a negative correlation was found between patients' MIRS scores and Sadness. DM1 patients compared to HSs showed reduced thickness in the right premotor cortex, angular gyrus, precuneus, and inferior parietal lobule. Significant associations were found between patients' CTG triplet expansion size and thickness in left postcentral gyrus and in the left primary somatosensory cortex, in the posterior cingulate cortex bilaterally, and in the right lingual gyrus. Finally, significant associations were found between cortical thickness and sadness in the superior temporal gyrus, the right precentral gyrus, the right angular gyrus, and the left medial frontal gyrus bilaterally. DM1 patients showed a negative correlation between cortical thickness in the bilateral precuneus and in the left lateral occipital cortex and performance at the Social Situations Test. Finally, DM1 patients showed a negative correlation between cortical thickness in the left precuneus and in the superior frontal gyrus and scores at the Moral Distinction Test.Discussion: The present study shows both cortical thickness changes in DM1 patients compared to controls and significant associations between cortical thickness and patients' social cognition performances. These data confirm the presence of widespread brain damages associated with cognitive impairment in DM1 patients.

Emotional attributes, social connectivity and quality of life associated with intermittent catheterization

AbstractIntermittent catheterization (IC) has benefits such as helping prevent urinary tract infections; however, there are physiological and psychological risk factors. To what extent this is a health burden is not well known and deserves investigation. The primary objective of this study was to explore emotional effects, social connectivity and quality of life (QoL) associated with IC. A search of peer reviewed literature finds adjustment to life after spinal cord injury impacted by emotional and behavioural changes. Some authors suggest that IC influences the emotional status of users. An IRB approved cross sectional survey, conducted through the United Spinal Association, investigated aspects of life, health and limitations associated with IC. Those surveyed (n = 393) were adults (≥18 years) performing IC as a primary method of bladder voiding. Potential respondents were sent email invitations explaining the study, rights and confidentiality and a non‐transferable link to the questionnaire. Opening the link and completing the questionnaire were considered consent to participate. Attributes of depression, anxiety, feeling bad about one's self, empowerment, independence and confidence associated with IC were investigated. The data suggests individuals with emotional distress are characterized by a lack of positive attributes rather than their ability to overcome negative attributes. The data indicates a positive correlation between social connectivity and QoL (r = 0.473, P &lt; .001). We found respondents performing IC are generally socially connected, but characterized by decreased positive attributes while not necessarily negative attributes, and some attributes potentially being influenced by caregiver assisted catheterization. Increased social interactivity is linked to increase quality of life. We suggest that clinicians reinforce positive attributes and the need for social connectivity as part of patient education.

Emotional factors and physical properties of ballpoint pens that affect user satisfaction: Implications for pen and stylus design

Many studies of ballpoint pens have been conducted. However, those studies have not considered the emotional factors that can enhance user experience. Styluses resemble ballpoint pens in many ways, which are widely available in a variety of styles. Therefore, in the present study, we explored the physical and emotional attributes that improve user satisfaction with typical ballpoint pens, with the goal of also understanding what factors might be important for stylus design. First, 14 emotional factors associated with the pens were derived. Second, 16 different types of ball-point pens were measured for six physical properties. Then, an experiment was performed to assess user satisfaction and emotional factors for pens. The House of Quality (HOQ) was used to obtain the chief physical properties. Results showed that to increase user satisfaction it is necessary to make pens be comfortable, fine, refined, deep, and natural. Also, we found that for high user satisfaction pens need to be heavier and longer, have thick and antislip grips and thin nibs, and their center of gravity should be located close to the nib to increase user satisfaction.

Implicit vs. Explicit Emotion Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Opinion on the Role of the Cerebellum

Implicit vs. Explicit Emotion Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Opinion on the Role of the Cerebellum

Diverse and emotional: Facebook content strategies by Spanish hotels

Social media communication has become a fundamental tool for hospitality companies, especially for marketing and customer engagement purposes. Facebook is the social network most used by hotels, both to interact and to establish relationships with their customers, and to provide them with relevant content and information, which may contribute to a positive travel experience and overall satisfaction. In general, content hotels post on Facebook either emphasizes hotels’ services (hotel-level or internal information) or aspects related to where the hotels are located (destination-level or external information) while conveying emotional attributes. Thus, this study aims to unveil the content strategy of these two types of content levels for hotels in the two most-visited cities in Spain, as well as to explore the emotional aspect of hotel Facebook posts. To do so, 4725 Facebook messages posted by 189 hotels in Barcelona and 1175 posted by 47 hotels in Madrid were analyzed using compositional data analysis, which accounts for the relative importance (shares) of different types of contents. Results show that hotels in Barcelona post more content related to hotel services and hotels in Madrid post more content related to the destination.

Chinese Companion Animal Caretakers’ Attachment Influences their Attribution of Emotions to their Animals

Abstract It is well-documented that in developed countries, companion animal caretakers often show strong attachments to their animals. However, very little research has incorporated caretakers’ attachment to companion animals in developing countries such as China. This research analyzed the correlation between the attachment level of Chinese dog and cat caretakers and their attribution of emotions to their animals. The results indicated a trend that respondents frequently attributed primary emotions to companion animals rather than secondary emotions. Respondents who had frequent and multiple interactions with their companion animals scored higher on the Pet Bonding Scale (PBS). The degree of attachment significantly influenced caretakers’ (particularly female caretakers’) attribution of responsive emotions to companion animals. This study is one of the first to investigate the role of attachment in emotion attribution in an under-researched population and can therefore act as a baseline for follow-up research.

Semi-Supervised Speech Emotion Recognition With Ladder Networks

Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems find applications in various fields such as healthcare, education, and security and defense. A major drawback of these systems is their lack of generalization across different conditions. For example, systems that show superior performance on certain databases show poor performance when tested on other corpora. This problem can be solved by training models on large amounts of labeled data from the target domain, which is expensive and time-consuming. Another approach is to increase the generalization of the models. An effective way to achieve this goal is by regularizing the models through multitask learning (MTL), where auxiliary tasks are learned along with the primary task. These methods often require the use of labeled data which is computationally expensive to collect for emotion recognition (gender, speaker identity, age or other emotional descriptors). This study proposes the use of ladder networks for emotion recognition, which utilizes an unsupervised auxiliary task. The primary task is a regression problem to predict emotional attributes. The auxiliary task is the reconstruction of intermediate feature representations using a denoising autoencoder. This auxiliary task does not require labels so it is possible to train the framework in a semi-supervised fashion with abundant unlabeled data from the target domain. This study shows that the proposed approach creates a powerful framework for SER, achieving superior performance than fully supervised single-task learning (STL) and MTL baselines. We implement the approach with sentence-level or frame-level features, demonstrating the flexibility of our approach. Additionally, the generalization of the ladder networks is evaluated in cross-corpus settings using sentence-level features, obtaining important improvements. Compared to the STL baselines, the proposed approach achieves relative gains in concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) between 3.0% and 3.5% for within corpus evaluations, and between 16.1% and 74.1% for cross corpus evaluations, highlighting the power of the architecture.

РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ АПРОБАЦИИ МЕТОДИЧЕСКОГО ПОДХОДА К ОЦЕНКЕ ПОТРЕБИТЕЛЬСКОЙ ЦЕННОСТИ МЕДИЦИНСКИХ УСЛУГ КОММЕРЧЕСКИХ МЕДИЦИНСКИХ ЦЕНТРОВ

The article presents the main results of applying a methodological approach (developed by the authors) to assessing the consumer value of services provided by commercial medical centers. The proposed research hypotheses were tested using ranked variation series, pair correlation analysis, single-factor analysis of variance, and Z-test. The study allowed testing the proposed hypotheses. The emotional attributes of consumer value in terms of benefits are not the most significant attributes for clients of commercial medical centers; such clients’ satisfaction with the provided medical service largely depends on the significance of the consumer value attributes of this service. No differences are revealed in the significance of consumer value attributes among consumers of different gender and different social status. No differences are revealed in the significance of the consumer value attributes of medical services for consumers of different ages with different number of children and different monthly spending on medical services.