Positive Emotional Expressions Research Articles

The positive energy of netizens: development and application of fine-grained sentiment lexicon and emotional intensity model.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to a global health crisis and caused huge emotional swings. However, the positive emotional expressions, like self-confidence, optimism, and praise, that appear in Chinese social networks are rarely explored by researchers. This study aims to analyze the characteristics of netizens' positive energy expressions and the impact of node events on public emotional expression during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, a total of 6,525,249 Chinese texts posted by Sina Weibo users were randomly selected through textual data cleaning and word segmentation for corpus construction. A fine-grained sentiment lexicon that contained POSITIVE ENERGY was built using Word2Vec technology; this lexicon was later used to conduct sentiment category analysis on original posts. Next, through manual labeling and multi-classification machine learning model construction, four mainstream machine learning algorithms were selected to train the emotional intensity model. Finally, the lexicon and optimized emotional intensity model were used to analyze the emotional expressions of Chinese netizens. The results show that POSITIVE ENERGY expression accounted for 40.97% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of time, POSITIVE ENERGY emotions were displayed at the highest levels and SURPRISES the lowest. The analysis results of the node events showed after the outbreak was confirmed officially, the expressions of POSITIVE ENERGY and FEAR increased simultaneously. After the initial victory in pandemic prevention and control, the expression of POSITIVE ENERGY and SAD reached a peak, while the increase of SAD was the most prominent. The fine-grained sentiment lexicon, which includes a POSITIVE ENERGY category, demonstrated reliable algorithm performance and can be used for sentiment classification of Chinese Internet context. We also found many POSITIVE ENERGY expressions in Chinese online social platforms which are proven to be significantly affected by nod events of different nature.

Investigating User-Generated Content in an Online Drug Recovery Forum: Lessons for Successful Computer-Mediated Communication of Social Support

Benefiting from social support in online health communities requires maintaining textual communication. Investigating the process and identifying successful patterns can guide devising interventions to help online support seekers. We propose new methods to investigate the relationship between support-seeking requests and response messages in an online drug recovery forum. We use LIWC2015 text analysis software to quantify the support-seeking messages and apply machine learning algorithms to code the amount of informational and emotional support in the responses. Our work has several findings regarding the language in request messages that would increase or decrease the chances of receiving more informational or emotional support in response. For example, expressions of positive emotions and self-reference in request messages were associated with receiving more emotional support, and messages that used words indicating close relationships received more informational support. These findings contribute to the current understanding of computer-mediated communication of social support in online health communities, identifying strategies to mobilize maximal social resources. Moreover, our proposed methods can be used in other studies to investigate the exchange of social support or similar topics on online platforms.

Empathy development from adolescence to adulthood and its consistency across targets.

This research was conducted with two main goals—to contribute to knowledge on the development of empathy from early adolescence to adulthood, including its contribution to decoding emotion expression, and to improve the understanding of the nature of empathy by simultaneously assessing empathy toward two different targets—humans and animals. It unfolded into two cross-sectional studies: One (S1) obtaining measures of empathy toward humans and animals as targets across five age groups (from pre-adolescents to adults); and another (S2) where a subset of the adolescents who participated in S1 were assessed in emotion expression decoding and subjective and physiological responses to emotional video clips. The results of S1 showed that empathy toward animals and most dimensions of empathy toward humans increase toward adulthood, with important gender differences in empathy to animals and humans, and empathy levels in girls starting off in the age trajectory at higher levels, A moderate correlation between empathy toward human and toward animal targets was also found. S2 showed that the expression of positive emotion is better recognized than that of negative emotion, surprise, or neutral expression, and that the measure of human-directed empathy predicts successful decoding of negative emotion, whereas skin conductance responses (SCRs) and subjective valence ratings predicted successful identification of positive emotion. Gender differences emerged but not across all age groups nor all subscales. Results yield keys to the developmental “pace” and trajectory of the various dimensions of empathy and to how empathy relates to emotion decoding.

Positive or Negative: Differences in Self–Other Representations Among Chinese Social Networking Users

Abstract This study explored differences (positive or negative) in self–other representations among Chinese social networking (Weibo) users with high or low popularity. Through the crawling program of Python software, 413 Weibo users (180 male, 43.58%) with their 5,823 microblog updates were selected as participants. The variables in this study (i.e., self-representation, other representation, relational self, and positive and negative representations) used the word frequency of the corresponding words in the microblog text as an indicator. Results indicated that for high-popularity users and low-popularity users, their expressions of self-representation and relational self were both associated with the expressions of positive emotions in general. Specifically, the association between self-representation and positive emotions was higher among low-popularity users than high-popularity users, whereas the association between relational self and positive emotions was higher in high-popularity users than low-popularity users. Practical implications and future directions of this study's findings are discussed.

Temporal trends in health worker social media communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, healthcare professionals are exposed to extreme hazards and workplace stressors. Social media postings by physicians and nurses related to COVID‐19 from January 21 to June 1, 2020 were obtained from the Reddit website. Topic modeling via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) using a machine‐learning approach was performed on 1723 documents, each posted in a unique Reddit discussion. We selected the optimal number of topics using a heuristic approach based on examination of the rate of perplexity change (RPC) across LDA models. A two‐step multiple linear regression was done to identify differences across time and between nurses versus physicians. Prevalent topics included excessive workload, positive emotional expression and collegial support, anger and frustration, testing positive for COVID‐19 and treatment, use of personal protective equipment, impacts on healthcare jobs, disruption of medical procedures, and general healthcare issues. Nurses' posts initially reflected concern about workload, personal danger, safety precautions, and emotional support to their colleagues. Physicians posted initially more often than nurses about technical aspects of the coronavirus disease, medical equipment, and treatment. Differences narrowed over time: nurses increasingly made technical posts, while physicians' posts increasingly were in the personal domain, suggesting a convergence of the professions over time.

The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants

Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants’ word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers’ and their infants’ matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants’ word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.

Predicting preschool children's self-regulation from positive emotion: The moderating role of parental positive emotion socialization

Guided by the broaden-and-build model, the role that both parent and child positivity play in supporting children's self-regulation was examined. Specifically, parental positive emotional expression and emotion coaching were predicted to moderate the association of children's positive emotions to their self-regulation. Parents rated preschool-aged children's (n = 156) high-intensity and low-intensity pleasure. Parents’ positive emotional expression and emotion coaching were coded in an emotion talk task where parents discussed an upsetting event with children. Children's regulation was measured through observed distraction in a frustration task and parental rating of effortful control. Children's high-intensity pleasure was negatively associated with effortful control, whereas low-intensity pleasure was positively related to effortful control. Parents’ positive emotional expression when discussing an upsetting event was positively associated with children's distraction and effortful control and moderated the relation of child low-intensity pleasure to distraction. Parents’ positive emotion coaching was negatively related to children's effortful control and moderated the relation of children's low-intensity pleasure to distraction. Findings support the idea that parents’ socialization of positive emotion is related to children's own low-intensity positive emotion and their self-regulation during early childhood, which is a foundational period for the development of children's self-regulation.

Leader-Follower Emotional Entrainment and Daily Interaction Quality: The Role of Follower Attachment

Followers’ high-quality interactions with their leader are a cornerstone of leadership research. Despite a growing understanding of leader emotions as static predictors of high-quality leader-follower relationships, research has yet to pay attention to the micro-level, dynamic interplay of leader and follower emotions for the emergence of daily interaction quality. We develop an episodic emotional entrainment perspective stating that leaders’ expressions of positive (joy, calmness) and negative emotions (fear, sadness) serve as affective events influencing corresponding follower emotions. Over the course of a day, this manifests in affective entrainment patterns (i.e., the leaders’ and followers’ affective states fluctuating in a common rhythm), which in turn predict followers’ perceived interaction quality with their leaders. The strength of the entrainment process, however, is influenced by the follower’s attachment style. We conducted a daily diary study across ten workdays with four measurements each day (N=72 employees; N=497 daily responses). Results of within-day multilevel latent growth models support an emotional entrainment process such that followers’ felt emotions oscillated with the observed leader emotional expression over the course of the day. Within-day changes in followers’ felt high-activated emotions (i.e., joy, fear) predicted perceived end-of-day interaction quality, whereas changes in low-activated emotions (i.e., calmness, sadness) did not. The relationship between leaders’ expressions of joy (fear) and corresponding follower felt emotions at the end of the day via emotional entrainment was weaker (stronger) for followers with high attachment avoidance (attachment anxiety), which in turn was positively (negatively) associated with end-of-day interaction quality.

Emotional labour demands and work engagement in Portuguese police officers

ABSTRACT Grounded in the Emotional Labour Theory, we aim to study the relationship between emotional demands (the expression of positive emotions and suppression of negative emotions) and work engagement in a sample of Portuguese police officers. We intend to explore the possible effects of these emotional demands on work engagement and ways of preventing and/or mitigating its impact. When analysing the studies conducted in the Portuguese police context, we found a gap regarding emotions and/or emotional regulation. Accordingly, a sample of 924 Portuguese police officers from the Public Security Police (PSP) answered the Emotion Work Requirements Scale and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale voluntarily. Through correlation and multiple linear regression, we found a relationship between these emotional demands toward different interpersonal interactions and work engagement. We discuss these results, providing suggestions for field intervention and clues for future research.

Relationship between emotional expressions and lifestyle changes among university students during COVID-19 lockdown in Lebanon.

Emotional expressivity plays an important role in terms of communication and interpersonal relationships in the context of society. Our research aims at assessing the perception of emotional expressivity and its association with lifestyle changes during COVID-19 lockdown among university students in Lebanon. A total of 742 participants completed an anonymous online questionnaire including socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle habits, and emotional expression evaluated through the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (BEQ). Participants also reported their perception of the relationship between emotional expressivity and lifestyle changes experienced during lockdown. The expression of positive emotions was decreased among students who have a weight loss from decreased eating during lockdown. Moreover, significantly lower negative emotions and increased positive emotions were found to be associated respectively with the increase in quality and quantity of distance learning, which emphasizes the psychological investment in education. In terms of extensive time spent on TV and social media, results point towards increased emotional expressivity, particularly positive emotions and impulse facets. Finally, changes in social interaction during this period impacted all facets of emotional expressivity. In the context of lockdown due to the pandemic, emotional aspects were associated by university students with lifestyle changes. Our research highlights the beneficial role of social networking, distance learning, physical activity, and well-balanced nutrition on emotional regulation in this particularly stressful situation, thus the importance of a global approach to emotional expressivity including the social aspects and biological ones.

Emotions in specialised genres: Power, manipulation and persuasion from the Affect Spectrum Theory

This paper seeks to examine professional genres from a novel perspective linking social constructivism and basic emotion theory, making the assumption that emotions are intrinsically social, and that social phenomena (such as professional communities) have an emotional nature (TenHouten, 2021). Thus, we aim to consider the constructive role of emotions in the creation and development of specialised texts (occasionally focusing specifically on the legal field), and, in turn, on the professional communities from which these texts emerge. Our work builds on the socio-evolutionary theory of emotions, or affect-spectrum theory (AST), which is developed in dissonance with other Cartesian and rational-choice models that set reason and emotion in opposition and assert that society only progresses to the extent that the former can control, suppress and triumph over the latter. Specifically, it is our underlying hypothesis that specialised and professional communication is articulated around emotions –and power, manipulation and persuasion, among other negative or positive emotional expressions. Thus, textual mechanisms or genres, as communicative instruments of specialised communities reveal the tensions that occur centripetally or centrifugally, i.e., inwards or outwards from that community. They do so from an agonistic relational model, in a centripetal tension that promotes agency through coercion and/or manipulation, or from a hedonistic relational model, in a centrifugal tension where interpersonal relationships of persuasion and dissemination are established in order to engage in communal relationships.

Psycholinguistic and Cultural Implications of German Stimulus Words Humor and Lachen in Association Test

The article is focused on the psycholinguistic and cultural study of individual associative responses to German stimulus words 'Humor' and 'Lachen'. The goal is to determine individual cognitive activity features in the target' culture of popular laughter' (Bakhtin, 1965). The research involved a free word association test aimed at examining the German learners' perception of the stimulus words. Sixty undergraduate students aged 20-22 of the educational programme "Language and Literature (German). Translation" at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University, Ukraine, participated in the word association test. Quantitative analysis of response words, typical and individual responses allowed building semantic gestalt and productive semantic zones that represent the linguistic culture identification features. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs represented productive associations. The analysis of associative fields allowed modelling the interaction of psycholinguistic and lingo-cultural factors for the emergence of responses to the stimulus words 'Lachen' and 'Humor'. The obtained response words determined communicative, pragmatic, and cognitive productive profiles. Nuclear zones in each associative field tended towards a unified expression of positive emotions. Respondents produced a wide range of semantic potential of stimulus words and frequency of reverse reactions. The expressive spectrum of productivity of individual associations by the respondents is interpretive and results from their cognition of the culture of popular laughter.

Positive emotion expression at age 11 is associated with multiple well-being outcomes 39 years later

Positive emotion expression at age 11 is associated with multiple well-being outcomes 39 years later

Sarcastic Meaning of the Slightly Smiling Face Emoji from Chinese Twitter Users: When A Smiling Face Does Not Show Friendliness

In most cultures, the Slightly Smiling Face (smiley) icon indicates friendliness and niceness. However, this SSF symbol in emoji may also indicate a negative meaning of sarcasm and irony to some Chinese social media users. This research analyses the sentiment reflected in the use of the SSF emoji as used by Chinese users on Twitter and applies quantitative methods to investigate the linguistic and social constraints of the SSF emoji's negative variable from 2016 to 2020. Results show that positive or negative emotional expression of SSF emoji is highly dependent on the content of the sentence and its context. Therefore, the SSF emoji has no semantic value as a word for expressing emotions but acts as an emotive anaphora or a modal particle. Simplified Chinese users from mainland China use the SSF emoji with a negative sense more than Traditional Chinese users from Taiwan. These differences may reflect the users’ media preference and cultural identification through the use of emoji, a global language for the digital age. Most Chinese users use a single SSF emoji, which can convey either emotion, at the end of the sentence, but when the SSF emoji is used in a repetitive manner, it is more likely to indicate a sarcastic emotion. Both variables, (single use / repetition) and Chinese types (Simplified / Traditional), significantly correlate with the use of the negative variant of the SSF emoji (p < 0.05). The change in the meaning of the SSF emoji from the expression of positive to negative sentiment demonstrates that emojis may change through time in ways similar to other forms of language.

Structural Relationship between Mothers’ Emotional Expressiveness, Young Children’s Self-Regulation, and Smart Device Overdependence Tendency

Objectives: This study analyzed the relationship between mothers’ emotional expressiveness, young children’s self-regulation ability, and smart device overdependence tendency. In addition, it examined the direct and indirect effects of mothers’ emotional expressiveness and young children’s selfregulation ability on the smart devices overdependence tendency through structural model analysis.Methods: Participants in this study consisted of 225 young children and their mothers living in G city. Data were analyzed using SPSS ver. 18.0 and AMOS ver. 18.0 to carry out descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and the structural equation model.Results: The findings reveal that self-regulation ability negatively correlates with smart devices overdependence tendency. Moreover, the mother’s positive and negative emotional expressiveness indirectly affected the young children’s smart devices overdependence tendency through selfregulation. In other words, it was found that the mother’s emotional expressiveness completely mediates the young children’s self-regulation ability and indirectly affects the smart device overdependence tendency.Conclusion: The significance of this study is that it revealed risk and protective factors that affect young children’s smart device overdependence in a social situation where the problem of young children’s smart device overdependence has become more serious. Essentially, the findings can be utilized to develop a smart device overdependence prevention program for young children.

Preschoolers' Sensitivity to Negative and Positive Emotional Facial Expressions: An ERP Study.

The study examined processing differences for facial expressions (happy, angry, or neutral) and their repetition with early (P1, N170) and late (P3) event-related potentials (ERPs) in young children (N = 33). EEG was recorded while children observed sequentially presented pairs of facial expressions, which were either the same (repeated trials) or differed in their emotion (novel trials). We also correlated ERP amplitude differences with parental and child measures of socio-emotional competence (emotion recognition, empathy). P1 amplitudes were increased for angry and happy as compared to neutral expressions. We also detected larger P3 amplitudes for angry expressions as compared to happy or neutral expressions. Repetition effects were evident at early and late processing stages marked by reduced P1 amplitudes for repeated vs. novel happy expressions, but enhanced P3 amplitudes for repeated vs. novel facial expressions. N170 amplitudes were neither modulated by facial expressions nor their repetition. None of the repetition effects were associated with measures of socio-emotional competence. Taken together, negative facial expressions led to increased neural activations in early and later processing stages, indicative of enhanced saliency to potential threating stimuli in young children. Processing of repeated facial expression seem to be differential for early and late neural stages: Reduced activation was detected at early neural processing stages particularly for happy faces, indicative of effective processing for an emotion, which is most familiar within this age range. Contrary to our hypothesis, enhanced activity for repeated vs. novel expression independent of a particular emotion were detected at later processing stages, which may be linked to the creation of new memory traces. Early and late repetition effects are discussed in light of developmental and perceptual differences as well as task-specific load.

Emotion Recognition in Preterm and Full-Term School-Age Children.

Children born preterm (<37 weeks’ gestation) show a specific vulnerability for socio-emotional difficulties, which may lead to an increased likelihood of developing behavioral and psychiatric problems in adolescence and adulthood. The accurate decoding of emotional signals from faces represents a fundamental prerequisite for early social interactions, allowing children to derive information about others’ feelings and intentions. The present study aims to explore possible differences between preterm and full-term children in the ability to detect emotional expressions, as well as possible relationships between this ability and socio-emotional skills and problem behaviors during everyday activities. We assessed 55 school-age children (n = 34 preterm and n = 21 full-term) with a cognitive battery that ensured comparable cognitive abilities between the two groups. Moreover, children were asked to identify emotional expressions from pictures of peers’ faces (Emotion Recognition Task). Finally, children’s emotional, social and behavioral outcomes were assessed with parent-reported questionnaires. The results revealed that preterm children were less accurate than full-term children in detecting positive emotional expressions and they showed poorer social and behavioral outcomes. Notably, correlational analyses showed a relationship between the ability to recognize emotional expressions and socio-emotional functioning. The present study highlights that early difficulties in decoding emotional signals from faces may be critically linked to emotional and behavioral regulation problems, with important implications for the development of social skills and effective interpersonal interactions.

Can an angry pedagogical agent enhance mental effort and learning performance in a multimedia learning environment?

PurposeThis study aims to examine if a pedagogical agent’s expressed anger, when framed as a feedback cue, can enhance mental effort and learning performance in a multimedia learning environment than expressed happiness.Design/methodology/approachA between-subjects experiment was conducted in which learners engaged with a multimedia learning material that taught programming algorithms, featuring a pedagogical agent who expressed anger or happiness as a feedback cue in response to the learners’ prior performance. Learners completed a self-reported scale and post-test for measuring mental effort and learning performance, respectively.FindingsFemale learners reported higher mental effort and had better learning performance when the pedagogical agent expressed anger than happiness. Male learners reported marginally lower mental effort when the pedagogical agent expressed anger than happiness.Originality/valueThis study focuses on a pedagogical agent’s expressed emotion as social information to learners. Extending from research advocating a pedagogical agent’s positive emotional expression, this study highlights the potential benefits of a pedagogical agent’s negative emotional expression, such as anger, as a cue for learners to enhance learning effort and performance in a multimedia learning environment.

Infant AFAR: Automated facial action recognition in infants

Automated detection of facial action units in infants is challenging. Infant faces have different proportions, less texture, fewer wrinkles and furrows, and unique facial actions relative to adults. For these and related reasons, action unit (AU) detectors that are trained on adult faces may generalize poorly to infant faces. To train and test AU detectors for infant faces, we trained convolutional neural networks (CNN) in adult video databases and fine-tuned these networks in two large, manually annotated, infant video databases that differ in context, head pose, illumination, video resolution, and infant age. AUs were those central to expression of positive and negative emotion. AU detectors trained in infants greatly outperformed ones trained previously in adults. Training AU detectors across infant databases afforded greater robustness to between-database differences than did training database specific AU detectors and outperformed previous state-of-the-art in infant AU detection. The resulting AU detection system, which we refer to as Infant AFAR (Automated Facial Action Recognition), is available to the research community for further testing and applications in infant emotion, social interaction, and related topics.

Strategies to Confront the Marital Adjustment Disturbance as Practiced by Saudi Wives

The study aimed to explore the strategies practiced by Saudi wives to confront the marital adjustment disturbance. The study applied a three-part questionnaire that includes the degree of the marital adjustment disturbance, its causes, ramifications and strategies to confront it. Using the personal interview, data were collected from 230 wives in Riyadh city within three months. The study used the descriptive and analytical approach to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that there was a high degree of disturbance in the relationship between the couples. This is because of the weakness of positive emotional expressions by the husband, which the most common effects are silence and marital silence, and its effect on the psychology and behavior of the children. The most common strategy by the wife was the strategy of positive thinking. The study recommended the following: Providing guidance and training programs by family-related organizations, training the wives to practice the positive strategies to confront family disturbances, as well as training the husbands on techniques of correct marital treatment.&#x0D; &#x0D; Received: 9 March 2022 / Accepted: 16 April 2022 / Published: 5 May 2022