Expression Of Affective States Research Articles

Vocal Expression of Affective States in Spontaneous Laughter reveals the Bright and the Dark Side of Laughter

It has been shown that the acoustical signal of posed laughter can convey affective information to the listener. However, because posed and spontaneous laughter differ in a number of significant aspects, it is unclear whether affective communication generalises to spontaneous laughter. To answer this question, we created a stimulus set of 381 spontaneous laughter audio recordings, produced by 51 different speakers, resembling different types of laughter. In Experiment 1, 159 participants were presented with these audio recordings without any further information about the situational context of the speakers and asked to classify the laughter sounds. Results showed that joyful, tickling, and schadenfreude laughter could be classified significantly above chance level. In Experiment 2, 209 participants were presented with a subset of 121 laughter recordings correctly classified in Experiment 1 and asked to rate the laughter according to four emotional dimensions, i.e., arousal, dominance, sender’s valence, and receiver-directed valence. Results showed that laughter types differed significantly in their ratings on all dimensions. Joyful laughter and tickling laughter both showed a positive sender’s valence and receiver-directed valence, whereby tickling laughter had a particularly high arousal. Schadenfreude had a negative receiver-directed valence and a high dominance, thus providing empirical evidence for the existence of a dark side in spontaneous laughter. The present results suggest that with the evolution of human social communication laughter diversified from the former play signal of non-human primates to a much more fine-grained signal that can serve a multitude of social functions in order to regulate group structure and hierarchy.

Artefatos Tangíveis e a Avaliação de Estados Afetivos por Crianças

Modern and ubiquitous computational systems increasingly demand more evaluations, which consider aspects beyond ergonomy, usability and accessibility to include means of understanding the affective states of those involved in the interaction. Nevertheless, whenever the involved parties are predominantly children, it becomes necessary to promote ludic and accessible means of involving people in the evaluation activities, because it is expected that the assessment tool used allows all stakeholders to express themselves according to their age and understanding. Existing studies have proposed abstract solutions that difficult the comprehension and participation of those involved in the expression of affective states. In this article, we developed and evaluated the TangiSAM environment, which includes sets of tridimensional concrete manikins that take advantage of tangible technologies, allowing the assessment of affective states in a ludic manner. We conducted an evaluation in a real-world educational setting, including both children and teachers, in order to understand whether the TangiSAM’s tangible artifacts favor a better self-evaluation experience. We found that TangiSAM was more frequently assigned as the most favorite by the participants in the comparison to other affective-state representation proposals.

What can kinematics tell us about the affective states of animals?

AbstractAn animal's welfare state is intrinsically linked to its affective state. Evidence suggests that sentient, conscious animals can experience a range of affective states, such as pain, fear or boredom as well as positive affects like joy, curiosity, satiation or lust. In the behavioural assessment of animal welfare, there is increasing recognition that it is not simply which behaviours an animal engages in but also the quality of its movement. Kinematics is an approach which is being more widely applied to the behavioural assessment of animal welfare. Kinematics is a field of mechanics that describes the movement of points on a body by defining these points in a coordinate system and precisely tracking how they change in terms of space and time. A major opportunity exists for using kinematic technology to inform our understanding of the emotional state of animals. This review argues that kinematics is a useful methodology for identifying and characterising movement indicative of an animal's affective state. It demonstrates that kinematics: i) appears useful in detecting subtleties in the expression of affective states; ii) could be used in conjunction with, and add extra information to, affective tests (for example, an approach/avoidance paradigm); and iii) could potentially, eventually, be developed into an automated affective state detection system for improving the welfare of animals used in research or production. Furthering our knowledge of animal affective states using kinematics requires engagement from many areas of science outside of animal welfare, such as sports science, computer science, engineering and psychology.

Mate Recognition and Expression of Affective State in Croop Calls of Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus eremita)

Northern Bald Ibis are socially monogamous and year-round colonial birds with a moderate repertoire of calls. Their ‘croop’, for example, is used during greeting of mates, but also during agonistic encounters, and provides an ideal case to study whether calls are revealing with respect to motivational states. We recorded croop calls in a semi-tame and free-roaming flock of Northern Bald Ibis in Austria, and analysed the vocal structure to identify parameters (e.g. call duration, fundamental frequency) potentially differing between social contexts, sexes and individuals. Additionally, we conducted playback experiments to test whether mated pairs would discriminate each other by their greeting croops. Acoustic features showed highly variable temporal and structural parameters. Almost all calls could be classified correctly and assigned to the different social contexts and sexes. Classification results of greeting croops were less clear for individuality. However, incubating individuals looked up more often and longer in response to playbacks of the greeting calls of their mate than to other colony members, indicating mate recognition. We show that acoustic parameters of agonistic and greeting croops contain features that may indicate the expression of affective states, and that greeting croops encode individual differences that are sufficient for individual recognition.

Affect and Social Processes in Online Communication--Experiments with an Affective Dialog System

This paper presents an integrated view on a series of experiments conducted with an affective dialog system, applied as a tool in studies of emotions and social processes in online communication. The different realizations of the system are evaluated in three experimental setups to verify effects of affective profiles, as well as of fine-grained communication scenarios on users' expressions of affective states, experienced emotional changes, and interaction patterns. Results demonstrate that the system applied in virtual reality settings matches a Wizard-of-Oz in terms of chatting enjoyment, dialog coherence, and realism. Variants of the system's affective profile significantly influence the rating of chatting enjoyment and an emotional connection. Self-reported emotional changes experienced by participants during an interaction with the system are in line with the type of applied profile. Analysis of interaction patterns, i.e., usage of particular dialog act classes, word categories, and textual expressions of affective states for different scenarios, demonstrates that a communication scenario for social sharing of emotions was successfully established. The experimental evidence provides valuable input for applications of affective dialog systems and strengthens them as valid tools for studying affect and social aspects in online communication.

Emotional and Informational Content of Commercials: Visual and Auditory Circumplex Spaces, Product Information and Their Effects on Audience Evaluation

The present pilot research determines commercials' visual and auditory circumplex space of affective states and the influence of both emotional and informative content and of their running time in an audience's evaluation of TV commercials. A key methodological factor takes into account, on the one hand, the measurement of emotional content as expression of affective states and, on the other, the distinctions made between the auditory and visual characteristics of commercials. Results show, visual and auditory emotional circumplex spaces of commercials which are rich, positive and active, and a conceptualization of visual emotional richness. On the other hand, results also show a positive influence of visual emotional richness in commercials evaluation as entertaining or exciting. Also, as previous research has shown, there is a positive influence of information content in commercial evaluation as informative.