Emotional Content Research Articles

Social bonding through shared experiences: the role of emotional intensity.

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects of this phenomenon remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronization of emotions in the group, and whether these effects generalize across positively valenced and negatively valenced emotional contexts. To address these questions, we measured subjective emotional experiences, physiological activity (cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal) and social attitudes in dyads of unacquainted individuals who watched videos in the presence of each other. We manipulated the emotional content of the videos and the type of shared attention between participants, to test for the contribution of interpersonal influence. The results revealed that intense emotions indexed by physiological arousal were associated with the emergence of reciprocal prosocial attitudes within dyads, and that this effect depended on joint attention. We did not observe the convergence and synchronization of emotions within dyads, which suggests that experiencing similar emotions was not necessary for social bonding. We discuss implications of this study for research on collective effervescence and the social consequences of shared experiences.

Эмотикон как пример развития графической эмотиологии в виртуальном пространстве

Emoticons are a vivid example of graphic emotionology in virtual communication. The interdisciplinary character of this research made it possible to combine linguistics with exact and natural sciences, including the young science of emotional artificial intelligence. Transmitting psycho-emotional experiences is important for effective virtual communication. Emotional pictography provides a more accurate understanding of the emotive content in a message. It relies on associative links between the image of a specific psycho-emotional state and its perception by a carrier of a specific linguistic culture. Basic emoticons are of universal nature, and internet users with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds tend to interpret them similarly. However, members of different ethno-linguistic communities sometimes decode the same emotions differently, which may lead to misunderstanding, as well as to serve as a marker on the friend – foe axis. Emoticons represent a clearly verified range of emotive states, which can be appealed to in virtual communication. The authors developed a classification of emoticons and proposed graphic emotionology as a new branch of linguistic semiotics. The metaphorical nature of the emoticon as a coded emotion with additional evaluative shades is revealed as a certain unified image or a complex of signs due to the accepted emotive norms of speech behavior. In addition, emoticons provide efficient compression during virtual communication. Intercultural virtual communication enriches the range of emoticons both linguistically and culturally, thus developing graphic emotionology internationally. Emoticons provide insight into the development of graphic emotionology.

The Role Mechanism of Social Preferences and Price Advantage in the Market Economy

In today's market economy environment, social preferences and price advantage, as two core driving forces, directly influence market operation and development trajectories. As consumer demand becomes increasingly diversified, social preferences intuitively reflect deep-seated cultural identity and value orientations, even guiding market trends. Price advantage, as the cornerstone of market competition, also impacts corporate production and development. These two elements intertwine: social preferences infuse emotional and cultural content into pricing strategies, while price advantage becomes an effective means to satisfy social preferences and achieve market penetration. A deep understanding and skillful application of these mechanisms are crucial for companies to navigate the complex and ever-changing market environment and achieve sustainable development.

Perceived prolonged stress leads to difficulties in recognizing sadness from voice cues in men but not women.

It has long been known that stress has detrimental effects on cognition (e.g., Alderson & Novack, 2002; Lupien & Lepage, 2001), most notably documented for memory functions (e.g., Schwabe & Wolf, 2013). Interestingly, less is known about the effects of stress on other cognitive functions including language processing. Here, we have examined the effects of self-reported prolonged stress on recognition of emotional language content with a particular emphasis on gender differences. We tested how well 399 participants with different perceived stress levels recognized emotional voice cues. Findings confirm previous results from the emotional prosody literature by demonstrating that women generally outperform men in the vocal emotion recognition task. Crucially, results also revealed that medium levels of perceived stress impair the ability to detect sadness from voice cues in men but not women. These findings were not modulated by task demands (e.g., speeded response) or better acoustic discrimination abilities in women. Results are in line with the idea that perceived stress has a different impact on men versus women and that women have a higher level of experience in voice sadness recognition, potentially due to their predominant role as primary caretakers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of stimulus format and presentation order on social working memory updating.

Emotional faces and words have been extensively employed to examine cognitive emotional processing including social working memory, which plays a pivotal role in social interactions. However, it remains unclear which exact role these two stimulus formats play in updating specific emotional content, such as positive or negative information. Therefore, the current study examined the differences in working memory updating (WMU) of negative, neutral, and positive faces (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2), using a classic two-back paradigm with an event-related potential technique. In both experiments, emotional stimuli were presented in the same or different-valence order to further determine whether presentation order can also influence the WMU of specific emotional content. Our results showed that both stimulus format and presentation order play a role: (a) while faces showed an affective bias [larger P2 and late positive potential (LPP) for negative and positive faces than for neutral faces], words showed a negativity bias (larger LPP for negative words than both neutral and positive words); (b) While faces showed better performance with same-valence order, words showed better performance with different-valence order. Taken together, our findings indicate that, even if faces and words can contain the same emotional information, they impact social WMU differently.

Supplemental Material for Differences in Emotional Content, Dream Awareness, and Dream Control Between Lucid Dreams and Out-of-Body Experiences: Report Analyses

Supplemental Material for Differences in Emotional Content, Dream Awareness, and Dream Control Between Lucid Dreams and Out-of-Body Experiences: Report Analyses

From Hands to Mind: How Gesture, Emotional Valence, and Individual Differences Impact Narrative Recall

Narrative recall and comprehension are important lifelong skills. While gesturing may improve recall by alleviating cognitive load, it may be differentially beneficial, depending on task and individual characteristics. While research on gesture’s effects on a variety of task modalities is burgeoning, effects on recall of narratives read aloud are under-examined. Further, emotional valence and individual differences in verbal memory may affect recall, through effects on task difficulty. If gesturing lightens cognitive load, it may be more beneficial for harder tasks, namely for narratives lacking emotional content and for individuals with poorer verbal memory. Across two studies, impacts of gesture production, emotional valence, and individual differences on narrative recall were evaluated. In Study 1, participants (N = 100) read aloud three emotive narratives (positive, negative, neutral) while either instructed to gesture or receiving no gesture instructions. Gesture production hindered recall, particularly for those with higher verbal memory. Emotion benefited recall, with enhanced recall of the negative narrative and impaired recall for the neutral narrative. In Study 2, following a measure of individual propensity to gesture, participants (N = 98) similarly read aloud three emotive narratives. Instructions to gesture hindered recall for participants with a lower propensity to gesture, and emotional narratives again saw enhanced recall relative to the neutral narrative. Propensity to gesture and verbal memory were positively associated with narrative comprehension. Results suggest instructions to produce gestures may for some individuals hinder recall for self-guided learners when studying written texts, while emotional content benefits recall.

The role of task relevance in saccadic responses to facial expressions.

Recent research on healthy individuals suggests that the valence of emotional stimuli influences behavioral reactions only when relevant to ongoing tasks, as they impact reaching arm movements and gait only when the emotional content cued the responses. However, it has been suggested that emotional expressions elicit automatic gaze shifting, indicating that oculomotor behavior might differ from that of the upper and lower limbs. To investigate, 40 participants underwent two Go/No-go tasks, an emotion discrimination task (EDT) and a gender discrimination task (GDT). In the EDT, participants had to perform a saccade to a peripheral target upon the presentation of angry or happy faces and refrain from moving with neutral ones. In the GDT, the same images were shown, but participants responded based on the posers' gender. Participants displayed two behavioral strategies: a single saccade to the target (92.7%) or two saccades (7.3%), with the first directed at a task-salient feature, that is, the mouth in the EDT and the nose-eyes regions in the GDT. In both cases, the valence of facial expression impacted the saccades only when relevant to the response. Such evidence indicates the same principles govern the interplay between emotional stimuli and motor reactions despite the effectors employed.

How does emotional content influence visual word recognition? A meta-analysis of valence effects

AbstractResearch on the interplay between language and emotion has shown evidence that the affective content of words influences their recognition. However, the direction of the effects is not clear, as there are mixed findings regarding the role of positive and, especially, negative valence. We conducted a Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis to examine the role of valence in visual word recognition, focusing on the lexical decision task. The results revealed a facilitative effect of positive valence on lexical decision times. That is, positive words led to faster responses than both negative and neutral words. In contrast, negative valence did not have any effect, although the analysis of several moderator variables suggested that there might be a facilitative effect in some cases, specifically, when negative words elicit very strong and intense emotions. These results shed light on the complexities of emotional word processing. They also point to the need for psycholinguistic models to take affective information into account, and thus provide a complete view of visual word recognition.

Investigation of Deficits in Auditory Emotional Content Recognition by Adult Cochlear Implant Users through the Study of Electroencephalographic Gamma and Alpha Asymmetry and Alexithymia Assessment.

Given the importance of emotion recognition for communication purposes, and the impairment for such skill in CI users despite impressive language performances, the aim of the present study was to investigate the neural correlates of emotion recognition skills, apart from language, in adult unilateral CI (UCI) users during a music in noise (happy/sad) recognition task. Furthermore, asymmetry was investigated through electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm, given the traditional concept of hemispheric lateralization for emotional processing, and the intrinsic asymmetry due to the clinical UCI condition. Twenty adult UCI users and eight normal hearing (NH) controls were recruited. EEG gamma and alpha band power was assessed as there is evidence of a relationship between gamma and emotional response and between alpha asymmetry and tendency to approach or withdraw from stimuli. The TAS-20 questionnaire (alexithymia) was completed by the participants. The results showed no effect of background noise, while supporting that gamma activity related to emotion processing shows alterations in the UCI group compared to the NH group, and that these alterations are also modulated by the etiology of deafness. In particular, relative higher gamma activity in the CI side corresponds to positive processes, correlated with higher emotion recognition abilities, whereas gamma activity in the non-CI side may be related to positive processes inversely correlated with alexithymia and also inversely correlated with age; a correlation between TAS-20 scores and age was found only in the NH group. EEG gamma activity appears to be fundamental to the processing of the emotional aspect of music and also to the psychocognitive emotion-related component in adults with CI.

The Development of Ambiguity Processing Is Explained by an Inverted U-Shaped Curve.

Understanding the developmental trajectories for recognizing facial expressions is important for a better understanding of development of psychiatric disorders. In this study, we examined the recognition of emotional and neutral facial expressions in 93 typically developing adolescents and adults. The Emotion Intensity Rating task required participants to rate the intensity of emotional expression in happy, neutral, and sad faces on a scale from 1 to 9. A score of '5' had to be assigned to neutral faces, scores between '6' (slightly happy) and '9' (very happy) to happy faces, and scores between '4' (slightly sad) and '1' (very sad) to sad faces. Mixed effects models were used to examine the effects of age and emotion on recognition accuracy, reaction time (RT), and emotional intensity. Participants tended to misjudge neutral faces as sad. Adolescents were less accurate than adults for neutral face recognition. There were significant quadratic effects of age on accuracy (negative quadratic effect) and RT (positive quadratic effect). The most accurate and fastest performance was observed in 25- to 35-year-old subjects. This trajectory may be associated with prefrontal cortex maturation, which provides top-down control over the heightened amygdala response to ambiguity that may be misinterpreted as emotional content.

Comparing emotions in ChatGPT answers and human answers to the coding questions on Stack Overflow.

Recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have led to the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, which have numerous practical applications. Notably, these models assist programmers with coding queries, debugging, solution suggestions, and providing guidance on software development tasks. Despite known issues with the accuracy of ChatGPT's responses, its comprehensive and articulate language continues to attract frequent use. This indicates potential for ChatGPT to support educators and serve as a virtual tutor for students. To explore this potential, we conducted a comprehensive analysis comparing the emotional content in responses from ChatGPT and human answers to 2000 questions sourced from Stack Overflow (SO). The emotional aspects of the answers were examined to understand how the emotional tone of AI responses compares to that of human responses. Our analysis revealed that ChatGPT's answers are generally more positive compared to human responses. In contrast, human answers often exhibit emotions such as anger and disgust. Significant differences were observed in emotional expressions between ChatGPT and human responses, particularly in the emotions of anger, disgust, and joy. Human responses displayed a broader emotional spectrum compared to ChatGPT, suggesting greater emotional variability among humans. The findings highlight a distinct emotional divergence between ChatGPT and human responses, with ChatGPT exhibiting a more uniformly positive tone and humans displaying a wider range of emotions. This variance underscores the need for further research into the role of emotional content in AI and human interactions, particularly in educational contexts where emotional nuances can impact learning and communication.

What kind of natural environment picturebooks are young children in China and Korea reading?

This study identified the number of natural environment picturebooks read by young children in Chinese and Korean picturebook libraries and analyzed their content from an ecocritical perspective. The findings indicate that, first, although the number of natural environment picturebooks read by children is higher in Korea than in China, in both countries, these books make up a small proportion of all books read. Second, the covers and endpapers of these picturebooks concisely represent the stories, stimulating children’s curiosity. Additionally, the analysis using the chronotope showed that natural environment picturebooks enabled children to experience changes in time while emotionally empathizing with the protagonists. This study reveals that natural environment picturebooks read by young children in China and Korea provide cognitive and emotional content but lack in actionable content. Therefore, parental, educational, and societal support is necessary to enhance children’s practices in environmental conservation.

Investigating Cerebello-Frontal Circuits Associated with Emotional Prosody: A Double-Blind tDCS and fNIRS study.

The emotional and cognitive cerebellum has been explored by several studies in the past years. Recent evidence suggested the possible contribution of the cerebellum in processing emotional prosody, namely the ability to comprehend the emotional content of a given vocal utterance, likely mediated by anatomical and functional cerebello-prefrontal connections. In the present study, the involvement of a functional cerebello-prefrontal network in recognising emotional prosody was assessed by combining non-invasive anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right or the left cerebellum and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy of the prefrontal cortex, in a double-blind within-subject experimental design on healthy participants. The results showed that right and, to a less extent, left cerebellar tDCS (as compared to sham stimulation) reduced neural activation in the prefrontal cortex while accuracy and reaction times at the vocal recognition task remained unchanged. These findings highlight functional properties of the cerebello-frontal connections and the psychophysiological effects of cerebellar brain stimulation, with possible clinical applications in psychiatric and neurological conditions.

Gender differences and the association between the phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical memories and psychopathic traits in a university student sample

ABSTRACT The study aimed to analyse the relationship between the dimensions of the triarchic model of psychopathy (meanness, boldness and disinhibition) and the phenomenological characteristics of Autobiographical Memory (AM) in a sample of university students, examining potential gender differences. Participants (N = 260; 55.4% women; aged 18-25) performed an AM task, followed by the Autobiographical Memory Characteristics Questionnaire and the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure. We found gender differences, with men scoring higher than women in meanness and disinhibition as well as in precision, accessibility, sharing and narrative coherence of AM. Correlations showed that boldness was negatively related to the valence and emotional intensity of the memory. Meanness was positively associated with precision, sensory details, accessibility, sharing, narrative coherence, distancing and preoccupation with emotions and negatively with recollection. Disinhibition was positively related to precision, sensory details and accessibility and negatively to intensity, distancing and preoccupation with emotions. Our results suggest that psychopathic traits could predict certain characteristics of AM, highlighting the predictive value of meanness, especially regarding memory quality characteristics (e.g., precision), as well as disinhibition, concerning the emotional content (e.g., preoccupation with emotions). Our results contribute to understanding psychopathy through an autobiographical perspective, showing how psychopathic traits may shape how people remember personal events.

Differences between overt, covert and natural attention shifts to emotional faces

In daily life, individuals pay attention to emotional facial expressions and dynamically choose how to shift their attention, i.e. either overtly (with eye-movements) or covertly (without eye-movements). However, research on attention to emotional faces has mostly been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, in which people were instructed where to look. The current preregistered study co-registered EEG and eye-tracking to investigate differences in emotion-driven attention between instructed and uninstructed natural attention shifts in 48 adults. While a central stimulus was presented to the participant, a face appeared in the periphery, showing either a happy, neutral or an angry expression. In three counterbalanced blocks participants were instructed to either move their eyes overtly to the peripheral face, keep fixating the center and therefore covertly shift their attention, or freely look wherever they would like to look. We found that emotional content had stronger effects on the amplitude of the Early Posterior Negativity when participants shifted attention naturally, and that natural shifts of attention differed from instructed shifts in both saccade behavior and neural mechanisms. In summary, our results emphasize the importance of investigating modulation of attention using paradigms that allow participants to allocate their attention naturally.

The EORTC QLQ breast modules and the FACT-B for assessing quality of life in breast cancer patients - an updated literature review.

Two commonly used quality of life questionnaires in breast cancer are EORTC QLQ-BR23, the FACT-B, and the extended FACT-B+4. More recently, the EORTC EORTC QLQ-BR42 was developed. This systematic review compares the various versions of the EORTC QLQ and FACT tools for breast cancer in terms of their content, validity, and psychometric properties. Thirty-six studies met the inclusion criteria. All questionnaires have been proven to be valid, reliable and responsive. The provisional EORTC QLQ-BR45 transitioned to the EORTC QLQ-BR42 in Phase IV of its development, which encompasses the side effects associated with the latest breast cancer treatments. Both the EORTC and FACT measures assess physical and mental dimensions of quality of life, with the EORTC measure placing relatively more emphasis on physical content and FACT placing relatively more emphasis on mental (social and emotional) content. The four additional items in the FACT-B+4 were developed to address arm lymphoedema following axillary surgery. The development and uptake of quality of life tools are essential in the evaluation of breast cancer treatments. The EORTC QLQ-BR42 and FACT-B are both valid, reliable, and responsive QoL questionnaires.

Emotion Recognition Through Analysis of Speech – A Review

The feature extraction is very important for emotion recognition through speech. There are several approaches when dealing with emotion recognition. In this paper, we present different feature extraction approaches as well as different models used to differentiate between a neutral speech versus an emotional speech sample. This research is instrumental for the digitization and preservation of cultural heritage, as it allows us to capture and analyze the emotional nuances in historical audio recordings, ensuring their accurate representation for future generations. We have selected two works consisting of a total of four different methods for emotion recognition. In the first paper by Jacob (2017), we look at Decision tree and Logistic Regression. Decision tree attains an 84.45% accuracy on the test class whereas logistic regression is able to achieve an accuracy of 66.85% after stepwise regression. These methods contribute to the digital archiving of cultural heritage by providing robust tools for analyzing and preserving the emotional content of spoken artifacts. In another paper by Bhatti et all. (2004), sequential forward selection (SFS) was used to create subsets from the given features and relevance of the subsets of features. General regression neural network was used to evaluate the accuracy which was found to be 80.69%. As a complementary purpose, modular neural network was performed with an accuracy of 83.31% with the same dataset. These techniques enhance our ability to maintain the integrity and emotional depth of cultural heritage recordings in digital archives.

Herding and investor sentiment after the cryptocurrency crash: evidence from Twitter and natural language processing

Although the 2022 cryptocurrency market crash prompted despair among investors, the rallying cry, “wagmi” (We’re all gonna make it.) emerged among cryptocurrency enthusiasts in the aftermath. Did cryptocurrency enthusiasts respond to this crash differently compared to traditional investors? Using natural language processing techniques applied to Twitter data, this study employed a difference-in-differences method to determine whether the cryptocurrency market crash had a differential effect on investor sentiment toward cryptocurrency enthusiasts relative to more traditional investors. The results indicate that the crash affected investor sentiment among cryptocurrency enthusiastic investors differently from traditional investors. In particular, cryptocurrency enthusiasts’ tweets became more neutral and, surprisingly, less negative. This result appears to be primarily driven by a deliberate, collectivist effort to promote positivity within the cryptocurrency community (“wagmi”). Considering the more nuanced emotional content of tweets, it appears that cryptocurrency enthusiasts expressed less joy and surprise in the aftermath of the cryptocurrency crash than traditional investors. Moreover, cryptocurrency enthusiasts tweeted more frequently after the cryptocurrency crash, with a relative increase in tweet frequency of approximately one tweet per day. An analysis of the specific textual content of tweets provides evidence of herding behavior among cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The Role of TikTok in Mental Health Support: Analyzing the Efficacy and Risks of Mental Health Content

This study investigated the effectiveness of mental health content on TikTok, focusing on engagement, algorithm-driven recommendations, and gender-based differences in content effectiveness. Utilizing a quantitative research design, the study analyzed data from 350 university students in Punjab, Pakistan. The research aimed to evaluate how engagement with TikTok's mental health content correlates with user satisfaction and perceived mental health improvements. Statistical analyses, including t-tests, correlation, and regression, revealed significant findings: higher engagement with mental health content was positively associated with self-reported mental health benefits (Pearson r = 0.65, p < 0.001), and TikTok’s algorithm-driven recommendations significantly enhanced user satisfaction (B = 0.55, β = 0.62, p < 0.001). Gender differences were notably observed, with females finding emotional support content more effective (M = 4.35, SD = 0.85) compared to males, who preferred practical solutions (M = 3.90, SD = 0.92), supported by a t-value of 4.45 (p < 0.001). These results underscore the importance of tailoring mental health content to gender-specific preferences and optimizing algorithm-driven recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of digital mental health resources on platforms like TikTok.