Emotional Descriptors Research Articles

The COVID-19 vaccine on the short-video platform Kwai: A study of the emotions expressed in Brazilian content

In this article, we analysed the emotions expressed in response to COVID-19 vaccines on Kwai, a Chinese social-media platform launched in Brazil in 2019. Our corpus comprised 355 videos published between 2020 and 2022 and collected through a Python script. The emotions were identified and classified based on the emotion descriptors of the Human–Machine Interaction Network on Emotion for Emotion Annotation and Representation Language; an analysis of the levels of emotional valence and arousal was based on the core affect model. Considering the diversity of video content, we classified the posts according to their approach in order to identify those that expressed emotion, based on their predominant characteristic (personal, informative, infotainment, humorous or advertising). As a result, we observed that just over half of the emotions expressed in relation to the total set of data were positive. This positive attitude was emphasized when the vaccines were taken as the main topic mobilizing emotions. Expressions of contentment and trust stood out, especially among posts with a personal approach and advertising content. Among the negative emotions, disapproval and doubt stood out, mobilized by topics in relation to the vaccines and other contextual elements, especially in videos with a humorous, informative or infotainment approach.

Zoo Visitors' Most-Liked Aspects of Elephant Encounters and Related Perceptions of Animals' Emotions and Welfare States: A Pragmatic Approach.

Zoos strive to provide excellent welfare for resident animals, including those belonging to endangered species involved in captive breeding programs while addressing visitors' concerns regarding the ethics of captivity. Zoos also rely on income and support from visitors to provide exceptional care for their animal residents. It is essential, therefore, that zoos consider how visitors perceive their animals' well-being, including physical and psychological welfare. This pragmatic, qualitative research explores the aspects of training-focused enrichment activities provided for a resident herd of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) that visitors liked/disliked, and it assesses perceptions of the animals' emotions and welfare. Data were collected via surveys following live encounters at Zoo Tampa, Florida (USA). Reflexive Thematic Analysis generated key themes related to visitors' most/least-liked aspects of the encounters, including proximity, elephant-caregiver relationships (ECRs), educational content, and teaching/learning opportunities for the elephants themselves. Participants in the research perceived the elephants as happy, content, calm, comfortable, engaged, excited, good, playful, and safe (among other emotional descriptors) and as having excellent welfare. Expressions of dislike referred to visitors' inability to have contact with the elephants, such as via touching or feeding. While focused on one case-study zoo and a charismatic species, this study nonetheless provides zoos with insight into the impact that animal-caregiver interactions can have on visitors' perceptions, and it offers a model that could be applied to other species and at other zoological institutions. These visitor experiences and visitor perceptions of animal welfare drive future visitor actions, including support for zoos.

Emotional responses from families visiting the zoo: a study at Parque das Aves in Foz do Iguaçu

In this study, we aim to analyse human emotional responses towards animals, specifically birds, in the context of a visit to a zoo. The study was carried out with seven families in Parque das Aves. The visits were recorded using the point-of-view-camera method, and the data was analysed using qualitative software to identify emotion descriptors. The findings from our study reveal that the physical characteristics of birds, such as their patterns and colours, as well as their behaviours and abilities, triggered emotional responses that were associated with admiration for the species, concern for their well-being and awareness of conservation issues, enabling these families to construct meaning.

Gender Discrimination and Reporting Experiences among Academic Pediatric Faculty: A Qualitative, Single-institution Study.

Gender-harassment is well-described in academic medicine, including pediatrics. We explored academic pediatricians' qualitative descriptions of: 1) workplace gender-harassment; 2) its professional and emotional tolls; 3) barriers to and outcomes of reporting gender-harassment; and 4) tools to intervene. We conducted a cross-sectional, anonymous, survey-based study within a single, large pediatrics department. Surveys included demographic items, validated measures to assess prevalence of gender-harassment, and optional, free-text boxes to elaborate. Here, we present the directed content analyses of free-text responses. Two trained qualitative researchers coded participant comments to identify types of gender-harassment, its impact, and participants' experiences reporting it. Final agreement between coders was outstanding (Kappa>0.9). A secondary, inductive analysis illustrated the emotional burdens of and opportunities to interrupt gender-harassment. Of 524 total faculty, 290 (55%) completed the survey and 144 (27% of total, 50% of survey-respondents) provided text-responses. This sub-cohort was predominantly white women >5 years on-faculty. Compared to the full cohort, sub-cohort participants had more commonly witnessed/experienced workplace-harassment; 92% of sub-cohort women and 52% of men endorsed fear of reporting it. Respondents described harassment by institutional staff (24% of respondents), patients/families (35%), colleagues (50%), supervisors/leadership (50%), and the system (63%). Women used stronger emotional descriptors than men (ie, "humiliated" vs "uncomfortable"). Only 19% of women (and no men) had reported witnessed/experienced harassment; 24% of those described a negative consequence and 95% noted that no changes were made thereafter. This single-center study suggests gender-harassment in academic pediatrics is common. Faculty feel fear and futility reporting it.

Вербалізація емоції страху в дитини в художньому тексті

Emotion linguistics is a new trend in philology which develops rapidly. Language tools of revealing specific aspects of a child’s emotional world in literary tests are analyzed in the paper, in particular the specificity of experiencing a fear emotion. Linguists who study the ways of a language expression of emotions frequently refer to artistic texts. However, the specificity of emotion expression and its verbal denotation depending on the age peculiarities of man is not a sufficiently studied phenomenon. The materials for the research are the literary texts created by the Ukrainian writers at different times, in which children are the main characters (works of P. Myrnyi, M. Kotsiubynskyi, І. Franko, B. Lepkyi, М. Stelmakh, Ye. Hutsalo, М. Matios). The value of the literary texts consists in the fact that they have generally reliable information about a child’s psycho-emotional world since usually children’s images are autobiographical and the emotion description is in most cases the expression of psychical feelings of the authors of the texts. There are several ways to express a child’s fear emotions: a lexical nomination of emotion and emotion descriptors; a description of a non-verbal behavior of a child, a description of a body reaction to emotion.

Multi-label emotion classification based on adversarial multi-task learning

In this paper, we focus on the task of multi-label emotion classification and aim to tackle two problems of this task. First, few studies try to exploit the correlation among different emotions, which motivates us to introduce the task-specific information into the shared hidden layer. Second, the public multi-label emotion datasets for low-resource languages are limited. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel multi-task multi-label emotion classification. Our approach consists of three components: general representation module, emotion representation module and adversarial classifier. The model applies emotion descriptors to incorporate the correlation among different emotions, and then uses adversarial training to prevent too much emotion-relevant information from being injected into the shared layer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines across a variety of evaluation metrics, achieving macro-average F1 scores of 50.21%, 41.33% and 40.24% on the Chinese, English, and Indonesian datasets, respectively. In addition, an Indonesian dataset and an English one containing 4207 and 26,019 samples respectively, are constructed for the multi-label emotion classification task. The datasets will be publicly available and we believe this can support the future study of Indonesian multi-label emotion recognition resources, which are limited for the related research fields now. We make our codes and resources in this work publicly available on: https://github.com/GKLMIP/MLEC-AML.

Multidimensional sentiment recognition of film and television scene images

Identifying and analyzing the sentiment information of an image is a complicated task in content understanding with nondeterministic features. To establish an effective model for multidimensional emotion recognition of film and television scene images and explore the relationship between the inputs and prediction results, we chose eight feature selection schemes based on principal component analysis, least absolute shrinkage operator (Lasso) regression, Pearson correlation, and the importance of random forest (RF) to establish the input vectors and the relevant model of machining learning. After the test on the data set with fixed combination of dimension reduction of 19 emotional descriptors, the fuse of Lasso regression and the RF importance extraction were proved to have the best performance on accuracy with the regression models. The experimental results showed that our algorithm performed well on the regression task of multidimensional affective dataset, which was convenient and time-saving. The extracted features and relevant dimension reduction methods also achieved good results on the cross-dataset classification tasks.

Jointly Aligning and Predicting Continuous Emotion Annotations.

Time-continuous dimensional descriptions of emotions (e.g., arousal, valence) allow researchers to characterize short-time changes and to capture long-term trends in emotion expression. However, continuous emotion labels are generally not synchronized with the input speech signal due to delays caused by reaction-time, which is inherent in human evaluations. To deal with this challenge, we introduce a new convolutional neural network (multi-delay sinc network) that is able to simultaneously align and predict labels in an end-to-end manner. The proposed network is a stack of convolutional layers followed by an aligner network that aligns the speech signal and emotion labels. This network is implemented using a new convolutional layer that we introduce, the delayed sinc layer. It is a time-shifted low-pass (sinc) filter that uses a gradient-based algorithm to learn a single delay. Multiple delayed sinc layers can be used to compensate for a non-stationary delay that is a function of the acoustic space. We test the efficacy of this system on two common emotion datasets, RECOLA and SEWA, and show that this approach obtains state-of-the-art speech-only results by learning time-varying delays while predicting dimensional descriptors of emotions.

A Lightweight Algorithm for Procedural Generation of Emotionally Affected Behavior and Appearance

Displaying believable emotional reactions in virtual characters is required in applications ranging from virtual-reality trainers to video games. Manual scripting is the most frequently used method and enables an arbitrarily high fidelity of the emotions displayed. However, scripting is labour intense and greatly reduces the scope of emotions displayed and emotionally affected behavior in virtual characters. As a result, only a few virtual characters can display believable emotions and only in pre-scripted encounters. In this paper we implement and evaluate a lightweight algorithm for procedurally controlling both emotionally affected behavior and emotional appearance of a virtual character. The algorithm is based on two psychological models of emotions: conservation of resources and appraisal. The former component controls emotionally affected behavior of a virtual character whereas the latter generates explicit numeric descriptors of the character's emotions which can be used to drive the character's appearance. We implement the algorithm in a simple testbed and compare it to two baseline approaches via a user study. Human participants judged the emotions displayed by the algorithm to be more believable than those of the baselines.

Investigation of itch in Parkinson disease

Introduction: Sensory abnormalities (eg, pain) are common in Parkinson disease (PD) with a negative impact on quality of life. As itch is less studied in PD, and pain and itch partially share sensory pathways, we designed this study to identify the occurrence and pattern of spontaneous itch, and responsiveness to a surrogate itch model in PD. Methods: The study protocol was approved (N-20180079) and PD patients and their best matched controls were recruited. A questionnaire was used to collect general information on itch. Sensory alterations were determined by subjective ratings and mechanical sensitivity threshold before and after a standard histamine-dependent itch model on forearms. Itch and pain intensities were rated on visual and numerical rating scales, respectively. Dispersion of itch was drawn on arm charts. Presence and area of alloknesis and hyperknesis were determined. Group comparisons were performed in SPSS with a significant level of 0.05. Descriptive statistic was used for questionnaire’s analysis. Results: Patients (n=20; 68.10±7.91 y, F/M ratio: 8/12) and controls (n=20; 67.35±7.65 y, F/M ratio: 8/12) were examined. PD patients rated less physical and emotional descriptors, except for the stinging (P=0.028). No difference was found between the groups in histamine-provoked itch intensity (P=0.799) or the itchy area. A significantly larger area of hyperknesis was found in PD (P=0.011), but not for the area of alloknesis (P=0.221). Sex-related responses yielded only a tendency toward higher responses in female patients. Discussion: PD does not seem to influence perception of itch, neither spontaneous nor evoked itch, except for hyperknesis area, which was found significantly larger in PD patients following the application of histamine. This finding proposes a potential alteration in central processing of itch that needs further investigation and whether and how it is affected by, for example, PD pathogenesis.

Emotional characterisation of chairs by descriptors, neural network and verbalised analysis

In this article, we assess the emotional value of the chairs from the collections design, objects and furniture of the museum of modern and contemporary art in Saint-Etienne. The aim of this research is to study emotional responses to visual perception of chairs from declarative measurements based on: 1) emotional measurements made using the circumplex model which collects valence and arousal; 2) the evaluation of six appearance descriptors which describe aesthetics, safety and comfort. Using a mathematical model based on a neural network, an 'estimated valence' is then derived from the evaluation of these emotional descriptors. This 'estimated valence' is finally compared to the 'verbalised valence'. The results show that there is a significant correlation between verbalised and 'estimated valence'. These results attest that the evaluation of the six proposed descriptors could predict the emotional value of the chairs.

Emotional characterisation of chairs by descriptors, neural network and verbalised analysis

In this article, we assess the emotional value of the chairs from the collections design, objects and furniture of the museum of modern and contemporary art in Saint-Etienne. The aim of this research is to study emotional responses to visual perception of chairs from declarative measurements based on: 1) emotional measurements made using the circumplex model which collects valence and arousal; 2) the evaluation of six appearance descriptors which describe aesthetics, safety and comfort. Using a mathematical model based on a neural network, an 'estimated valence' is then derived from the evaluation of these emotional descriptors. This 'estimated valence' is finally compared to the 'verbalised valence'. The results show that there is a significant correlation between verbalised and 'estimated valence'. These results attest that the evaluation of the six proposed descriptors could predict the emotional value of the chairs.

Fans of Violent Music: The Role of Passion in Positive and Negative Emotional Experience

Extreme metal and rap music with violent themes are sometimes blamed for eliciting antisocial behaviours, but growing evidence suggests that music with violent themes can have positive emotional, cognitive, and social consequences for fans. We addressed this apparent paradox by comparing how fans of violent and non-violent music respond emotionally to music. We also characterised the psychosocial functions of music for fans of violent and non-violent music, and their passion for music. Fans of violent extreme metal ( n=46), violent rap ( n=49), and non-violent classical music ( n=50) responded to questionnaires evaluating the cognitive (self-reflection, self-regulation) and social (social bonding) functions of their preferred music and the nature of their passion for it. They then listened to four one-minute excerpts of music and rated ten emotional descriptors for each excerpt. The top five emotions reported by the three groups of fans were positive, with empowerment and joy the emotions rated highest. However, compared with classical music fans, fans of violent music assigned significantly lower ratings to positive emotions and higher ratings to negative emotions. Fans of violent music also utilised their preferred music for positive psychosocial functions to a similar or sometimes greater extent than classical fans. Harmonious passion for music predicted positive emotional outcomes for all three groups of fans, whereas obsessive passion predicted negative emotional outcomes. Those high in harmonious passion also tended to use music for cognitive and social functions. We propose that fans of violent music use their preferred music to induce an equal balance of positive and negative emotions.

Analysing Implicit Emotion and Unity in Propaganda Videos Posted in Social Network

In today’s world of technology involving the sophisticated use of the Internet, the political scene of a country evolves alongside the prolific rise of social media where it becomes a battlefield for political parties to win the hearts and minds of the people through videos, e.g. political discourse and radical videos – involving many issues such as politics, religious, social and economics, which have been posted through social media. These propaganda videos would be powerful vehicles for prejudice and public opinions that could affect national unity specifically among the people. Kansei, has been established as being well-suited to be applied for the purpose of understanding human emotion and psychology. Henceforth, this study aims to comprehend the sensitivity of the people towards various propaganda videos and also to determine whether a relationship exists between Kansei and the videos. In this sense, a Kansei evaluation approach is employed on 10 videos, using 30 Kansei Words, which are adopted from the PANAS-X emotional descriptors. From the results obtained, it is evident that the people do have political awareness, sensitivity and are able to respond to the videos that represent various political issues that could affect people’s unity. Besides, Kansei is able to verify the results, thus proving the existence of the concept of Kansei in propaganda videos. Eventually, the results are significant in providing an overture to people’s response towards political issues, especially through the medium of videos.

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.

A comparison of hedonic and emotional responses to common odors delivered by qPODs (Portable Olfactive Devices) and traditional sniff jars

qPODs (Portable Olfactive Devices, Curion) are novel olfactory delivery systems which allow for sampling of a wide variety of stimulus types. Participants evaluate odors by opening a port at the top of the qPOD and sampling a controlled air stream. Though they are often used in marketing studies, their potential use in empirical research has yet to be investigated. We asked participants to smell citral, citronellol, geraniol, PEA, nonalactone, and vanillin delivered via qPODs and by traditional sniff jars, and compared both hedonic and emotional responses. Across four sessions, 31 participants evaluated the pleasantness and intensity of each odor in qPODs and sniff jars. Their emotional reactions to the odors were captured with the PANAS (Positive And Negative Affect Schedule) at the beginning of each testing session, and then again after exposure to each odor. They also completed the newly developed Mood Signature Questionnaire, which asks participants to assign a mood to each odor, rather than reporting how it makes them feel. Though odors presented in the sniff jars were rated significantly more intense (p < 0.001), there were no differences between presentation types for perceived pleasantness, changes in positive or negative mood following odor exposure, or which emotional descriptors (Mood Signatures) participants assigned to the odors. Our results suggest that responses to odor stimuli presented using qPODs are comparable to traditional sniff jars, thus establishing the qPOD as a potential new tool for studies employing a range of olfactory stimuli.

Maternal Elaborative Language in Shared Emotion Talk with ODD Children: Relationship to Child Emotion Competencies.

While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability. The association for child emotion regulation was moderated by child's diagnostic status with a notable relationship for ODD mother-child dyads but not for the other group. The implications of the findings for the conceptualisation of mother-child talk and its relationship to the development of emotion competencies in children with disruptive behavioural problems are discussed.

A breath of fresh air: Validity and reliability of a Portuguese version of the Multidimensional Dyspnea Profile for patients with COPD.

AimTo provide a Portuguese version of the Multidimensional Dyspnea Profile (MDP), investigating its validity and reliability in Brazilian patients with COPD.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study for translation and linguist validation of the Portuguese MDP version for patients with COPD. The process occurred according to the protocol of Mapi Research Trust, Lyon, France. Three scores of MDP were used for the analysis: the immediate unpleasantness of dyspnea (A1); the “immediate perception domain” (S) (sum of A1 plus the sensory descriptors) and the “emotional response domain” (A2) (sum of the emotional descriptors). The questionnaires COPD assessment Test (CAT), Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS) and Medical Research Council scale (MRC) were used as anchors to investigate MDP’s validity. Internal consistency was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha. Test–retest reliability was assessed with intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and concurrent validity was assessed with Spearman correlation coefficients.ResultsThirty patients with moderate-severe COPD were studied for MDP’s validation analysis (43% male, 63±8years, body mass index [BMI] 27±6Kg/m2, forced expiratory volume in the first second [FEV1] 48±15%predicted, six-minute walking test [6MWT] 464±84m and 84±16%predicted), whereas 10 patients were excluded from the test-retest reliability analysis due to missing data, resulting in a sample of 20 subjects for this purpose (50% male, 62±8years, BMI 27±6Kg/m2, FEV1 48±15%predicted, 6MWT 452±93m and 82±19%predicted). Both samples were similar regarding general characteristics (P>0,05 for all variables). MDP presented strong correlations, i.e., ICC intra-rater: A1: 0.77 (0.48–0.90), S: 0.78 (0.52–0.91), and A2: 0.85 (0.66–0.94), with high internal consistency (Cronbach's α 0.86, 0.88 and 0.92 respectively); and ICC inter-rater: A1: 0.74 (0.46–0.89), S: 0.75 (0.48–0.89) and A2: 0.91 (0.78–0.96) with Cronbach's α 0.85, 0.86 and 0.95 respectively.ConclusionThe Portuguese version of the MDP is the first valid and reliable instrument to assess dyspnea multidimensionally in Portuguese-speaking patients with COPD.

Adolescents’ Implicit Theories of a Creative Person: A Longitudinal Investigation in Three Countries

Our research examined whether adolescents in the United States, China, and Japan differed in their conceptions of a creative person. Participants were American (n = 321), Chinese (n = 235), and Japanese (n = 393) adolescents in 7th and 8th grades who completed surveys at 3 time points. Using an open-ended questionnaire, adolescents were asked to list up to 10 attributes of a creative person. The responses were coded into 4 categories: action, emotion, characteristics, and self (vs. others). Results indicated that adolescents in the United States used more action and emotion descriptors (e.g., draws, happy) when conceptualizing a creative person, compared to Chinese and Japanese adolescents. In contrast, Chinese (vs. American and Japanese) adolescents were more likely to use descriptors about the characteristics of a person (e.g., hardworking, smart) in their conceptualizations of a creative person. Changes over time in adolescents’ conceptions of a creative person were evident, with the rates of such changes being uneven across countries. Findings provide evidence in support of the idea that adolescents’ implicit theories of creativity may be rooted in their cultural experiences.

Psychological traits of skin picking disorder and psychogenic itch

IntroductionDespite the intense discussion of psychiatric comorbidity in psychodermatology, research on psychological components of skin picking and psychogenic itch is limited, especially when it concerns patients’ representation of skin perception and their attitude towards disease.ObjectivesTo characterize psychological traits of skin picking and psychogenic itch disorder by comparing aspects of bodily experience.AimsTo reveal internal relations of different components of bodily experience in skin picking and psychogenic itch.MethodsThirty patients with skin picking disorder (L98.1) and 18 patients with psychogenic itch (F45.8) participated in the study. The psychosemantic method “Classification of sensations” was used to assess bodily experience. It includes estimation of 80 descriptors from 6 classes of bodily sensations: skin (ex. “itch”), inner body (ex. “sickness”), receptor (ex. “sticky”), emotional (ex. “anxiety”), dynamics (ex. “exhaustion”) and attitudinal descriptors (ex. “bad”). Cluster and factor analysis were performed.ResultsThe most significant aspect of bodily experience in skin picking was its dynamics as a transition from irritation to calmness connected with the sensation of itch opposed to all other sensations (there were opposite signs of factor loadings of these variables and they were included in the factor explaining 45% of total variance). In contrast, in psychogenic itch these relations are diffuse and consist of connections between skin sensations and inner bodily sensations and descriptors of emotions reflecting functional origin of disorder.ConclusionTraits of psychological components in skin picking disorder and psychogenic itch should be concerned in the complex (psychiatric, psychological and dermatological) treatment of these disorders.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.