Emotional Meaning Research Articles

“Etiquette-Observing” Emotional Actions

Abstract The development of the Sociology of Emotions proves the potential correlation between emotion and reason. This study draws on the perspective of the Sociology of Emotions, follows the academic development of the symbolic interaction theory, and adopts the qualitative case study methodology to explore the elements and methods of emotional actions by Xiaomin, the pre-employment preschool teacher during her internship. Our analysis of data collected through observations, interviews, and artifacts finds that an emotional action involves six major elements, namely, emotional subject, emotional symbol, situational condition, emotional meaning, focus and entrainment (mutual focus and emotional entrainment) and emotional object. Based on this finding, this study distinguishes four types of emotional actions, namely, integrative emotional action, divergent emotional action, disintegrative emotional action, and convergent emotional action. Focusing on the composing elements, this study offers a new microscopic way of interpreting emotional actions different from the macroscopic approach that stresses institutional and cultural structures. It is also a useful application of the studies of emotions of the symbolic interaction theory.

Quantitative Evaluation of Vocabulary Emotional Color in Language Teaching.

Objective In real communication, the context is complex and changeable and the color and meaning of some words will wander in the context. The development and changes of words are more complex and multidimensional than before. Compared with the rational meaning of words, the color meaning of words can better reflect the psychological mode and way of thinking of the Han nationality but it is difficult for foreign learners to accurately grasp and misunderstandings often occur. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to summarize and explain the words whose color meanings are easily shifted, so as to help the students accurately grasp the color meanings of the words and better help Chinese learners to realize the communicative function of the language. Method This paper takes the scope of emotional words as the starting point and proposes that emotional words are words with emotional colors. The four aspects of whether words belong to emotional words define the concept of emotional words and introduce the specific methods of judging and extracting emotional words from the two aspects of dictionary definition and word collocation. This paper takes foreign students whose native language is English as the research object, through questionnaire survey and corpus analysis, to investigate the use of foreign students' emotional colors and to explore the influence of native language factors on emotional color acquisition. Based on the research of modern Chinese ontology and the existing research results in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, this paper takes the theory of interlanguage and transfer theory as the theoretical basis and mainly uses the methods of comparative analysis and error analysis to try to find out the relationship between emotional color teaching and acquisition. Results/Discussion. The basic pattern and quantity distribution of lexical emotion correction for beginners, intermediate, and advanced learners of Chinese as a second language were analyzed, and the restrictive factors and characteristics were explained. Similarities and differences and the rationale behind them were explored. In the process of international Chinese teaching, teachers mostly pay attention to the rational meaning of words, while ignoring the teaching of the emotional meaning of words. The lack of vocabulary emotion and meaning teaching is prone to errors in students' understanding and use. With the increase of the vocabulary of intermediate and advanced learners, many words with similar colors and meanings appear, which brings a lot of difficulties for students to distinguish between synonyms. If the use of words with emotional meanings is not accurate, it is easy to cause communication barriers.

Why eudemonia bring more happiness: The multiple mediating roles of meaning of life and emotions

Why eudemonia bring more happiness: The multiple mediating roles of meaning of life and emotions

Gender differences in emotional connotative meaning of words measured by Osgood\u2019s semantic differential techniques in young adults

Semantic differential techniques are a useful, well-validated tool to assess affective processing of stimuli and determine how that processing is impacted by various demographic factors, such as gender. In this paper, we explore differences in connotative word processing between men and women as measured by Osgood’s semantic differential and what those differences imply about affective processing in the two genders. We recruited 94 young participants (47 men, 47 women, ages 18–39) using an online survey and collected their affective ratings of 120 words on three rating tasks: Evaluation (E), Potency (P), and Activity (A). With these data, we explored the theoretical and mathematical overlap between Osgood’s affective meaning factor structure and other models of emotional processing commonly used in gender analyses. We then used Osgood’s three-dimensional structure to assess gender-related differences in three affective classes of words (words with connotation that is Positive, Neutral, or Negative for each task) and found that there was no significant difference between the genders when rating Positive words and Neutral words on each of the three rating tasks. However, young women consistently rated Negative words more negatively than young men did on all three of the independent dimensions. This confirms the importance of taking gender effects into account when measuring emotional processing. Our results further indicate there may be differences between Osgood’s structure and other models of affective processing that should be further explored.

Speech Emotion Recognition System Using Recurrent Neural Network in Deep Learning

Abstract: In today's world, machine learning and deep learning together are enabling around 80% of the human interactions through the sheer ubiquity of the solutions provided by this domain. But one of the problems with the existing world is most of the people are not able to understand the actual emotional meaning and occurrence behind a person's speech. For instance, people having problem like Catatonia, etc. are not able to express themselves clearly or some industries which are considering some marketing strategy according to the customer mood, etc. can use this method. So, to bridge this gap between the people, it is important to develop a system that can assist them and then predict their emotional speech. This paper reviews the different approaches adopted to reduce the barrier of emotional communication which are already in existence and what methodology they used while doing so. In this context, we also present an approach of using the Recurrent Neural Network which is a part of Deep learning algorithms. The whole process of automated systems which continuously learn, adapt, and improve without much instruction is really fascinating. Our primary goal is to create a robust communication system through technologies that enable machines to respond correctly and reliably to human voices and provide useful and valuable services accordingly. In this review, an extensive report is made on the various approaches available for speech emotion recognition that has been done till now. All the model's and accuracy aspects are taken into consideration and are relayed according to it. Keywords: Deep Learning, Recurrent Neural Networks, Emotion Recognition, Speech Recognition, SER, RNN, Catatonia.

Emoji use in China: popularity patterns and changes due to COVID-19.

Emojis are small pictograms that are frequently embedded within micro-texts to more directly express emotional meanings. To understand the changes in the emoji usage of internet users during the COVID-19 outbreak, we analysed a large dataset collected from Weibo, the most popular Twitter-like social media platform in China, from December 1, 2019, to March 20, 2020. The data contained 38,183,194 microblog posts published by 2,239,472 unique users in Wuhan. We calculated the basic statistics of users’ usage of emojis, topics, and sentiments and analysed the temporal patterns of emoji occurrence. After examining the emoji co-occurrence structure, we finally explored other factors that may affect individual emoji usage. We found that the COVID-19 outbreak greatly changed the pattern of emoji usage; i.e., both the proportion of posts containing emojis and the ratio of users using emojis declined substantially, while the number of posts remained the same. The daily proportion of Happy emojis significantly declined to approximately 32%, but the proportions of Sad- and Encouraging-related emojis rose to 24% and 34%, respectively. Despite a significant decrease in the number of nodes and edges in the emoji co-occurrence network, the average degree of the network increased from 34 to 39.8, indicating that the diversity of emoji usage increased. Most interestingly, we found that male users were more inclined towards using regular textual language with fewer emojis after the pandemic, suggesting that during public crises, male groups appeared to control their emotional display. In summary, the COVID-19 pandemic remarkably impacted individual sentiments, and the normal pattern of emoji usage tends to change significantly following a public emergency.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10489-022-03195-y.

Development of an emoji-based self-report measurement tool to measure emotions elicited by foods in preadolescents

Emoji evolved as an attractive instrument to measure emotions in preadolescents due to their potential to express a wide range of emotions. However, the emotional meaning of emoji can be ambiguous and is often not universal across age groups, which has not been considered when developing emoji questionnaires. Hence, this research aimed to develop an emoji-based self-report measurement tool to measure emotional responses to food products in preadolescents. In total, 5 studies were conducted, and 454 preadolescents (aged 9–13 years) participated to develop the tool. First, preadolescents selected food-related emoji (Study 1, n = 96), then they evaluated their dimensional emotional meaning using projective mapping (Study 2, n = 162). They then evaluated the linguistic semantic meaning by describing emoji with emotion words (Check-All-That-Apply) (Study 3, n = 92) and vice versa (Study 4, n = 85). Finally, one-on-one interviews using a modified version of the Repertory Grid Method were conducted to investigate emoji more in depth (Study 5, n = 19). The findings resulted in 17 emoji pairs associated with specific linguistic semantic and dimensional (valence, power, and arousal) meanings. Based on this, we developed an emoji-based self-report measurement tool to measure emotions in response to food products with two suggested response formats, the CATA Emoji Pair Questionnaire and the Emoji Pair Rating Scale. Future research will test the discriminative ability of this tool over a wide range of food products. The questionnaire will allow for a better understanding of preadolescents’ affective responses to food and could be used in food innovation targeted at preadolescents to promote healthier food behaviors.

The time course of emotional authenticity detection in nonverbal vocalizations

Previous research has documented perceptual and brain differences between spontaneous and volitional emotional vocalizations. However, the time course of emotional authenticity processing remains unclear. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to address this question, and we focused on the processing of laughter and crying. We additionally tested whether the neural encoding of authenticity is influenced by attention, by manipulating task focus (authenticity versus emotional category) and visual condition (with versus without visual deprivation). ERPs were recorded from 43 participants while they listened to vocalizations and evaluated their authenticity (volitional versus spontaneous) or emotional meaning (sad versus amused). Twenty-two of the participants were blindfolded and tested in a dark room, and 21 were tested in standard visual conditions. As compared to volitional vocalizations, spontaneous ones were associated with reduced N1 amplitude in the case of laughter, and increased P2 in the case of crying. At later cognitive processing stages, more positive amplitudes were observed for spontaneous (versus volitional) laughs and cries (1000–1400 msec), with earlier effects for laughs (700–1000 msec). Visual condition affected brain responses to emotional authenticity at early (P2 range) and late processing stages (middle and late LPP ranges). Task focus did not influence neural responses to authenticity. Our findings suggest that authenticity information is encoded early and automatically during vocal emotional processing. They also point to a potentially faster encoding of authenticity in laughter compared to crying.

An Empirical Study on the Evaluation of Emotional Complexity in Daily Life.

Emotional complexity means diversity, universality, and differentiation of individual emotions. This research consisted of two studies to demonstrate the constitution of the emotional complexity. In Study 1, the participants were asked to use 10 emotional words to record the variation of emotions over 30 days in daily life. In Study 2, the experimental materials were enriched. The participants were required to note the emotions with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule in a 3-day holiday—all the individuals in the two studies needed to record the most important emotional event. As a result, the youth experienced complex emotions every day. Emotional complexity indicators included covariation index (r), component index (Cpc and Cunshared), granularity index (Ge, Gp, and Gn), and variability index (Vp and Vn). A four-factor model reflected a good model fit, with 𝜒2/df = 0.33, CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.03, RMSEA = 0.000 (0.00, 0.20), SRMR = 0.003, including positive differentiation, covariation of positive affect and negative affect, negative differentiation, and emotional variation. These indicators may reflect the complex experiences in everyday life. The results shed light on the emotional experience that can change greatly within 1 day and on episodes of emotional disruption resulting from an important event coupled with excessive excitement or extreme tension.

Quality of experience in prosocial activity and intent to continue: An experience sampling study.

According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), older adults prefer activities that provide immediate experiential rewards-specifically, emotionally meaningful experiences-but research is needed to establish the posited association. We conducted an experience sampling study of older adults intensively serving formal prosocial programs, which can offer them meaningful social roles, N = 165; Mage (SD) = 71.13 (5.70), range = 60-88. Consistent with SST, intention to continue serving one's prosocial program in the future was positively associated with emotional meaning (EM) experienced within the prosocial-program activity. This association was not amplified by age within this older group. Instead, dispositional EM interacted negatively with age (stronger, positive relationship with future intentions among younger old). Our findings illuminate the possibility that socioemotional selection based on experiences during prosocial-program activity may contribute to the continuity of specific prosocial endeavors in late adulthood. Future research should assess the EM-prosocial endeavors relationship across a wider age range. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding the Value of Street Art for Artists, Consumers, and Brands

This study explores the contribution of street art to the communication of a brand. In-depth interviews were conducted with consumers, urban artists, and brand managers. Street art can contribute to the communication of a specific brand by (a) imprinting in one’s memory an image of originality and coolness on the brand, (b) promoting social connectedness and bonding with the community, and (c) engaging consumers in the spontaneous social spreading of artists and brands. Although all the segments share these three themes, differences exist. Urban artists and consumers tend to focus on affective benefits, recalling social connectedness and symbolic and emotional meanings; whereas brand managers focus on functional responses, such as visual memory and brand dissemination.

Metaphor and creativity in the act of making her heart flutter: Toward a cognitive-emotive perspective

This study analyzes Chinese liáo-mèi dialogues, in which the suitor attempts to make the heart of his target lover flutter. The language used in such dialogues tends to be highly metaphorical and creative in nature. This paper first reviews studies of metaphorical creativity, and then proposes a cognitive-emotive perspective from which this topic can be examined. Based on twenty liáo-mèi examples, this study shows that the act of causing a stir in one's heart is performed using multiple layers of meaning making: namely, cognitive mechanisms (e.g., image schemas, primary metaphors, and complex conceptual metaphors), connections between the utterances in the unfolding verbal interaction (i.e., co-text), emotive meaning (e.g., admiration, affection), and a sociocultural lens which assists in understanding and filtering out inappropriate speech and actions. The emotive meaning of metaphorical creativity in liáo-mèi dialogues is closely connected with the image-schematic and metaphorical dynamics of the discourse.

Longitudinal associations between domains of flourishing

The longitudinal interrelationships between domains of human well-being or flourishing remain understudied empirically. While different aspects of flourishing may be sought as their own end, it is also the case that well-being in one domain may influence well-being in other domains. Using longitudinal data form a sample of employees from a large national employer in the United States (N = 1209, mean age = 43.52 years, age range 20–74 years), this study examined the temporal associations between various domains of flourishing, based on a 40-item index that assessed six domains of flourishing. These domains include emotional health, physical health, meaning and purpose, character strengths, social connectedness, and financial security. A set of linear regression models were used to regress subsequent composite flourishing on flourishing domain-specific scores at baseline. The results indicated that all domains were each independently associated with greater composite flourishing subsequently. The strongest and most robust links were observed for meaning and purpose (β = 0.19, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.13, 0.25), social connectedness (β = 0.17, 95% CI 0.12, 0.22), and financial security (β = 0.32, 95% CI 0.28, 0.37). Further analyses that regressed subsequent composite flourishing on individual item indicators at baseline suggested that, out of all 40 items, one item under the character domain “I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations” and one item in the physical health domain (“Based on my past health, I expect to be healthy long into the future”) had the most robust association with subsequent composite flourishing. Implications of these results for understanding the constituents of a flourishing life and for refinement of the flourishing assessments are discussed.

Rapid Detection of Neutral Faces Associated With Emotional Value Among Older Adults.

Previous studies using visual search paradigms have provided inconsistent results regarding rapid detection of emotional faces among older adults. Furthermore, it is uncertain whether the emotional significance of the faces contributes to efficient searches for emotional faces due to the possible confounding effects of visual saliency. We addressed this issue by excluding the influence of visual factors and examined older adults' ability to detect faces with emotional meaning. We used an associative learning procedure in which neutral faces were paired with monetary reward or punishment, such that the neutral faces acquired positive or negative emotional value. Older participants completed the associative learning task and then engaged in a visual search task, in which previously learned neutral faces were presented as discrepant faces among newly presented neutral distractor faces. Data of young adults from a previous study that used identical experimental procedures were also analyzed. Older participants exhibited lower learning ability than young participants. However, older adults who were successful at learning were able to detect neutral faces associated with reward or punishment more rapidly than those without monetary outcomes, similar to the pattern observed for young adults. The results suggest that acquired emotional value promotes the detection of value-associated neutral faces among older adults who succeed at learning. It is therefore possible that the ability to detect faces that evoke emotions is preserved in older adults.

Children's decoding of emotional prosody in four languages.

It is well established that adults can interpret emotional speech prosody independent of word meaning comprehension, even for emotional speech prosody in an unfamiliar language. However, the acquisition of this ability remains unclear. This study examined the decoding of four emotions (happy, sad, surprise, angry) conveyed with speech prosody in four languages (English, Chinese, French, Spanish) by American and Chinese children at 3 to 5 years of age-an age range when the ability to decode emotional prosody in one's native language emerges but remains fragile. Chinese and American children could decode the emotional meaning of speech prosody in both familiar and unfamiliar languages as young as 3 years old. Performance did not differ across the four languages used-a finding observed in both American and Chinese children. Thus, the in-group advantage of emotional prosody decoding reported for adults may not be evident by 5 years of age. Furthermore, emotional prosody decoding skills improved with age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Reduced cross-modal affective priming in the L2 of late bilinguals depends on L2 exposure.

Processing of emotional meaning is crucial in many areas of psychology, including language and music processing. This issue takes on particular significance in bilinguals because it has been suggested that bilinguals process affective words differently in their first (L1) and second, later acquired languages (L2). We undertook a series of five experiments examining affective priming between emotionally valenced language and emotionally valenced music. Adult English monolinguals and two groups of proficient adult late bilinguals (German-English and Italian-English) with recent L2 exposure were examined. Priming effects were investigated using music to prime word targets and words to prime music targets. For both groups of bilinguals, music showed equivalent affective priming of L1 and L2 words, suggesting no difference in deliberate processing of affective meaning. Conversely, when words primed music, L2 words lacked the affective priming strength of L1 words for both late bilingual groups. Among various language background factors, only greater length of residence in the L2 context was positively related to the affective priming strength of L2 words. These results show strong activation of emotional meaning in the L1 of late bilinguals but reduced activation in the L2, where level of activation depends on the duration of everyday exposure to the L2. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Opportunities for Poetic Analysis in Qualitative Nursing Research.

The voices of people living with serious, life-limiting illnesses are often underrepresented in research. Furthermore, a biomedical bias toward treatment and stigma associated with illness prevents healthcare providers from engaging with topics critical for people living with serious illness, such as existential communication and inner strength. Poetry is an established method of analysis and dissemination in qualitative research but is underutilized by nursing researchers. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the inherent opportunities in using poetry in nursing research to highlight the voices and issues of people whose experiences are outside the assumed norms of the biomedical paradigm. We apply methods of poetic analysis to qualitative data sets that highlight the voice of people living with serious illness-in naturally occurring palliative care conversations and dyadic interviews of people with dementia and their care partners. Methods of poetic analysis include poetic transcription and voice poems. Methods of poetic analysis allowed us to engage with the data reflexively to intensify and evoke the deeper meaning of narratives. Poetic analysis served to center the participant's voices by using their own words to demonstrate themes. Poems are a uniquely accessible method of disseminating complex findings, as poems relay layered cognitive and emotional meaning resonant of universal human experiences in a concise and relatable format. Especially in circumstances where participant's voices are underrepresented, poetic analysis enables nurse researchers to challenge normative assumptions and reimagine a difference-centered society. Our findings offer opportunities to incorporate poetry into clinical and research nursing training to better meet the needs of the populations we serve.

The Perceptions and Self-management of Depressive Symptoms in Men: A Qualitative Study in a Province of Northeastern Thailand

Men and women may experience depression very differently. The previous studies found that women expressed emotional distress mean that they were more likely to be diagnosed with depression, while some men with depression tried to hide their emotions, so causing them to have delayed treatment. This qualitative research aimed to study the perception and management of depressive symptoms in Thai males before receiving treatment with psychiatric specialists. The participants who were diagnosed major depressive disorders and dysthymic disorders were 23 men by purposive sampling was used. Data were collected through in-depth interviews by a semi-structured interview, which was based on literature review and it was verified by advisor, the second author who experienced of qualitative study. Analyzed by content analysis based on the process of Colaizzi. The finding revealed that the perception and management of depressive symptoms were divided into 3 phases. Phrase 1 was the perception of abnormal symptoms affecting daily activities but an attempt to hide it and struggling for a normal life. Phrase 2 showed that Thai men’s perception of symptoms were thinking too much, ruminative thought causing suffering, and then trying to release the suffering and control ruminative thought. Phrase 3 was the perception of loneliness, hopelessness, suicidal thoughts, and then trying to seek help. Healthcare providers can use the findings as information for developing screening tools specific to Thai men. The information can also be used to develop psycho-education tools for close ones or family members to recognize and understand early symptoms so that care, assistance and access to treatment can be provided before severe depression is developed. The research was only carried out in 1 area, the results could not be generalized, besides that it could have multiple meanings or be biased if it was carried out in other areas with different cultures.
 HIGHLIGHTS
 
 Men and women may express symptoms of depression differently, women expressed emotional distress which meant that they were more likely to be diagnosed with depression, while some men with depression tried to hide their emotions
 The finding revealed that the perception and management of depressive symptoms were divided into 3 phases according to the duration and the perceived severity of the symptoms
 Phrase 1 was the perception of abnormal symptoms affecting daily activities but an attempt to hide it and struggling for a normal life. Phrase 2 showed that Thai men’s perception of symptoms were thinking too much, ruminative thought causing suffering, and then trying to release the suffering and control ruminative thought. Phrase 3 was the perception of loneliness, hopelessness, suicidal thoughts, and then trying to seek help

How accentuation influences the processing of emotional words in spoken language: An ERP study

Pitch accent marks information structure in utterances in many languages but little is known about the effects of accent on the perception of emotional word meaning. The present study explored the processing of accentuation and its influence on the semantic integration of emotional words during spoken sentence comprehension. Twenty-five participants were presented with sets of spoken Chinese sentences while accentuation and emotional meaning of the adjectives were orthogonally manipulated. An implicit task required the recognition of words contained in the sentences, whereas an explicit task required judging the presence of an accented or emotional word. In the ERPs to the adjectives, accentuation induced a long-lasting anterior negativity starting around 150–250 ms and a late posterior positivity. More importantly, emotionally negative words elicited larger negativities between 300 and 700 ms as compared to neutral words but only when they were accented. Interestingly, these negativities showed a parietal N400-typical distribution when accent was implicit but strongly overlapped with the accent-induced anterior negativity when accent was task-relevant. Hence, accentuation may enable the processing of emotional meaning by directing attention towards the accented words. When accent and emotion are explicit parts of the task, similar frontal attentional networks are activated by emotion as by accent alone. In contrast, when accent and emotion are implicit to the task, emotion appears to merely activate parietal networks, typical for semantic integration effects. Together, these results suggest that accentuation plays an important role in spoken sentence comprehension, deserving further study.

Presence and absence – some psychoanalytic semiotic pre-conditions for the psychoanalytic work

ABSTRACT Linking the contradictory terms of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ is from a clinical perspective a fundamental working condition for the psychoanalyst. Nothing in the psychoanalytic space can be exchanged without the presence-absence dialectics making its mark in the psychic material. Different psycho- semiotic approaches provide different understandings of how these phenomena are structured and can be conceptualized. The Lacanian understanding of the orders of language (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) is drawn into attention. Finally, three forms of “present-absence dynamics” will be presented. One form concerns oedipally linked representations of signs in which part of the emotional meaning of a conflict is repressed but still with symbolic connections to the spoken narratives. Another form concerns narcissistically linked representations of signifiers (not yet signified) where the dynamics of splitting leads to repetition without gaining a symbolic meaning unless the psychoanalyst links a not-yet-thought-of signifier to the speech of the analysand. The last form concerns pre-represented or un-represented memory-traces, not yet having any associative representation, or any psychic link and often only repeated by the psychosomatic body harbouring non-organised memory-traces.