Negative Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Examining Chinese Users' Feedback Comments on HIV Self-testing Kits From e-Commerce Platforms: Thematic and Content Analysis.

HIV self-testing is preferred by many Chinese people for its convenience and confidentiality. However, most studies on HIV self-testing (HIVST) uptake in China overfocused on men who have sex with men and overrelied on obtrusive methods such as surveys and interviews to collect data. We aimed to explore Chinese HIVST kit users' authentic experience via their feedback comments posted on e-commerce platforms using an unobtrusive approach. In total, 21,018 feedback comments about buying and using HIVST kits posted on Chinese e-commerce platforms (Tmall and Pinduoduo) were collected. An inductive thematic analysis based on a random sample of 367 comments yielded several thematic features. These thematic features were developed into coding categories for a quantitative content analysis of another random sample of 1857 comments. Four themes were identified in the first study, including the expression of positive and negative emotions after and before getting the test, respectively, calling for living a clean and moral life in the future, comments on the sellers and HIVST kits, and the reasons for buying HIVST kits. The results from the second study suggested that there were significant associations between different platforms and several thematic features. Nearly 50% of the comments were related to the product itself and the disclosures of HIV-negative test results. More than 25% of the comments showed users' feelings of gratefulness after receiving negative test results such as "thank heavens for sparing my life." The results suggested that Chinese users relied on HIVST kits to reduce and prevent HIV infection, while they also considered HIV infection a punishment related to moral violation such as being sexually promiscuous. The traditional Chinese health belief that health is influenced by one's morality still persists among some Chinese users. Many users also lacked appropriate knowledge about HIV transmission and self-testing kits.

White matter microstructure predicts individual differences in infant fear (But not anger and sadness).

We examine neural correlates of discrete expressions of negative emotionality in infants to determine whether the microstructure of white matter tracts at 1 month of age foreshadows the expression of specific negative emotions later in infancy. Infants (n=103) underwent neuroimaging at 1-month, and mothers reported on infant fear, sadness, and anger at 6, 12, and 18 months using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised. Levels and developmental change in fear, sadness, and anger were estimated from mother reports. Relations between MRI and infant emotion indicated that 1-month white matter microstructure was differentially associated with level and change in infant fear, but not anger or sadness, in the left stria terminalis (p<0.05, corrected), a tract that connects frontal and tempo-parietal regions and has been implicated in emerging psychopathology in adults. More relaxed constraints on significance (p<0.10, corrected) revealed that fear was associated with lower white matter microstructure bilaterally in the inferior portion of the stria terminalis and regions within the sagittal stratum. Results suggest the neurobehavioral uniqueness of fear as early as 1 month of age in regions that are associated with potential longer-term outcomes. This work highlights the early neural precursors of fearfulness, adding to literature explaining the psychobiological accounts of affective development. HIGHLIGHTS: Expressions of infant fear and anger, but not sadness, increase from 6 to 18 months of age. Early neural architecture in the stria terminalis is related to higher initial levels and increasing fear in infancy. After accounting for fear, anger and sadness do not appear to be associated with differences in early white matter microstructure. This work identifies early neural precursors of fearfulness as early as 1-month of age.

Do expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have different impacts on attracting donations? Evidence from a Chinese online charitable crowdfunding platform

PurposeExtant research shows mixed results on the impact of expressed negative emotions on donations in online charitable crowdfunding. This study solves the puzzle by examining how different types of negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety and fear) expressed in crowdfunding project descriptions affect donations.Design/methodology/approachData on 15,653 projects across four categories (medical assistance, education assistance, disaster assistance and poverty assistance) from September 2013 to May 2019 come from a leading online crowdfunding platform in China. Text analysis and regression models serve to test the hypotheses.FindingsIn the medical assistance category, the expression of sadness has an inverted U-shaped effect on donations, while the expression of anxiety has a negative effect. An appropriate number of sadness words is helpful but should not exceed five times. In the education assistance and disaster assistance categories, the expression of sadness has a positive effect on donations, but disclosure of anxiety and fear has no influence on donations. Expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have no impact on donations in the poverty assistance category.Research limitations/implicationsThis work has important implications for fundraisers on how to regulate the fundraisers' expressions of negative emotions in a project's description to attract donations. These insights are also relevant for online crowdfunding platforms.Originality/valueOnline crowdfunding research often studies negative emotions as a whole and does not differentiate project types. The current work contributes by empirically testing the impact of three types of negative emotions on donations across four major online crowdfunding categories.

The effect of different housing systems on the welfare and the parasitological conditions of laying hens

In Serbia, by 2020, conventional cages will no longer be permitted and hens will be housed in furnished cages. The study was conducted during the winter season on four rearing systems of Lohman Brown hens. For welfare assessment were used indicators from the Welfare quality assessment protocol for poultry. All fecal samples for parasites were qualitatively and quantitatively examined. The results showed that each housing system had positive and negative aspects but overall, hens in cage systems had the highest prevalence of poor plumage condition (47 % and 39%). Hens in conventional cages had more skin lesions (27%) than birds in other systems. Keel bone deformation was the most present in the aviary system (56%) while comb pecking wound in a conventional cage (33%) and free-range system (50%). Hens in the non cage had the highest prevalence of foot pad disorders (32% and 40%). In furnished cages, problems occurred in hens are the lowest. Parasitological examination diagnosed four groups of endoparasites: Coccidia, Trichostrongylidae and Heterakis spp, and Capillaria spp, with a total prevalence of 64% (64/100) only in free-range system. Laying hens in cage systems have a higher expression of negative emotions in relation to the aviary and free-range system. Evidence of negative hens’ emotional condition in cage systems and negative physical condition across all housing systems, suggests that the welfare of modern hens in Serbia is impaired.

The effects of self-viewing in video chat during interpersonal work conversations

Abstract With the growing use of video chat in daily life, it is critical to understand how visual communication channels affect interpersonal relationships. A potentially important feature that distinguishes video chats from face-to-face interactions is the communicators’ ability to see themselves during the interaction. Our purpose was to determine the effects of self-viewing on the process and outcome of a workplace confrontation. A dyadic experiment with two (self-viewing vs. no self-viewing) conditions was conducted using multi-instruments (self-report, physiological arousal, eye-tracking). Results showed that self-viewing reduced self-evaluation, which subsequently reduced solution satisfaction. Self-viewing also impaired one’s ability to assess their partner’s attitude and lowered partner evaluation. Although self-viewing decreased negative emotional expressions, the effect on conversation tone varied depending on the role an individual played. The overall negative impacts of self-viewing ability have significant implications for the appropriate implementation of a computer-mediated channel for enhancing one’s experience when having a difficult conversation.

Blunted superior temporal gyrus activity to negative emotional expression after mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for late-life depression.

Facial emotion recognition plays an important role in social functioning. Patients with late-life depression (LLD) often have abnormal facial emotion recognition. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is beneficial in treating depression. This study examined whether MBCT can act as an effective augmentation of antidepressants and improve facial emotion recognition in patients with LLD and its underlying neural mechanism. Patients with LLD were randomized into two groups (n = 30 per group). The MBCT group received an eight-week MBCT in conjunction with stable medication treatment. The other group was treated as usual (TAU group) with stable medication treatment. The positive affect (PA) scale, negative affect (NA) scale, and facial emotion recognition task with an fMRI scan were performed before and after the trial. After eight weeks of treatment, the repeated ANOVA showed that the PA score in the MBCT group significantly increased [F (1,54) = 13.31, p = 0.001], but did not change significantly [F (1,54) = 0.58, p = 0.449] in the TAU group. The NA scores decreased significantly in both the MBCT group [F (1,54) = 19.01, p < 0.001] and the TAU group [F (1,54) = 16.16, p < 0.001]. Patients showed an increase in recognition accuracy and speed of angry and sad faces after 8 weeks of MBCT. No improvement was detected in the TAU group after treatment. A significant interaction effect was found in the change of activation of the left superior temporal gyrus (L-STG) to negative emotional expression between time and groups. Furthermore, a decrease in activation of L-STG to negative emotional expression was positively correlated with the increase in PA score. The MBCT is beneficial for improving affect status and facial emotion recognition in patients with LLD, and the L-STG is involved in this process.

Promoting Preschoolers’ Social and Emotional Competencies Through Emotion-Focused Teaching

ABSTRACT Research Findings: This study examined associations between observed emotion-focused teaching practices and preschool children’s emotion expression, emotion-related behaviors, and learning behaviors. Four centers located in large midwestern and mid-Atlantic metropolitan areas participated in the study. Of these, one center was a Head Start program, one served families on a sliding scale fee, one was focused on providing services to low-income families, and one was a faith-based center with middle- and upper-income students. Structural equation modeling revealed that children displayed fewer negative emotion expressions, better emotion regulation, reduced maladaptive emotion-related behaviors, and increased learning behaviors at the end of the year when teachers engaged in greater emotion-focused teaching practices. Practice or Policy: Preschool teachers play an important role in socializing children to be emotionally competent. Our findings suggest the need for professional development to improve teachers’ emotion-focused teaching as an effective strategy to address children’s challenging behaviors and emotions in the classroom and to better prepare children to engage in learning.

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.

Distant Viewing of the Harry Potter Movies via Computer Vision

We present an exploratory study performing distant viewing via computer vision methods in the genre of fantasy movies. As a case study we use 10 modern fantasy movies of the Harry Potter franchise (also referred to as Wizarding World franchise). We apply methods and state-of-the-art models for color and brightness analysis, object detection, location classification as well as facial emotion recognition. We present descriptive results as well as inference statistics. Furthermore, we discuss the results and the quality of the methods for this unique use case and give examples. We were able to find significant differences in our statistical analysis in the results of the methods across the movies with the movies of the Harry Potter series getting darker and negative emotional expressions on faces becoming more frequent.

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.

The Role of Leader Negative Emotions in Mitigating Employee Disgust Towards Leader Surface Acting

Leading with emotional labor plays a vital role in the leadership process due to the functional social consequences of leaders’ emotional displays. In this research, we advance this stream of research by focusing on employees’ negative emotional response (i.e., disgust) to leader positive surface acting—displaying surface acting of positive emotions, and its downward implications for employee perceived leader effectiveness and leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. We also theorize that leaders’ expressions of negative emotions during the display of positive surface acting could mitigate employees’ negative affective and perceptual responses. The empirical results from an experience sampling study supported our hypothesized model, revealing that leader positive surface acting related less negatively to employee perceived leadership effectiveness and LMX quality via disgust when the leader expressed more (versus less) negative emotions. In addition, results from a vignette experiment replicated these findings and demonstrated perceived inauthenticity as a cognitive explanation for employees’ negative affective responses to leaders displaying positive surface acting. Our research highlights the crucial roles of leader and employee emotional states in understanding the effectiveness of leader emotional labor.

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.

Infants’ sensitivity to emotional expressions in actions: The contributions of parental expressivity and motor experience

Actions can convey information about the affective state of an actor. By the end of the first year, infants show sensitivity to such emotional information in actions. Here, we examined the mechanisms contributing to infants’ developing sensitivity to emotional action kinematics. We hypothesized that this sensitivity might rely on two factors: a stable motor representation of the observed action to be able to detect deviations from how it would typically be performed and experience with emotional expressions. The sensitivity of 12- to 13-month-old infants to happy and angry emotional cues in a manual transport action was examined using facial EMG. Infants’ own movements when performing an object transport task were assessed using optical motion capture. The infants’ caregivers’ emotional expressivity was measured using a questionnaire. Negative emotional expressivity of the primary caregiver was significantly related to infants’ sensitivity to observed angry actions. There was no evidence for such an association with infants’ own motor skill. Overall, our results show that infants’ experience with emotions, measured as caregivers’ emotional expressivity, may aid infants’ discrimination of others’ emotions expressed in action kinematics.

Emotional reactivity and expressivity in young children with sex chromosome trisomies: evidence from psychophysiological and observational data

ABSTRACT Although sex chromosomal trisomies (SCT) in children are highly prevalent and associated with an increased risk for neurodevelopmental difficulties including socio-emotional problems, little is known about underlying mechanisms that could drive this risk. Studying emotional reactivity and expressivity of young children with SCT in early childhood could identify deviations in early emotional development and potentially serve as risk markers to guide clinical care in developing interventions. Participants in the current study were 90 SCT children and 97 population-based controls, aged 1 to 7 years, who experienced a stress-inducing event in which physiological (heart rate) and observational data (expression of negative emotions) were collected. Results showed early disturbances in the emotion system of young children with SCT, in terms of blunted but prolonged emotional reactivity and a reduced emotional expressivity in response to stress. Further, the concordance between emotional reactivity (arousal response) and expressivity was significantly lower in SCT, compared to controls. Given the significant impact of emotions on adaptive day-to-day functioning, deviations in processing emotions could be an important underlying mechanism in explaining the heterogeneity and variability in developmental outcomes often described in individuals with SCT.

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.

The Fake One is the Real One: Finstas, Authenticity, and Context Collapse in Teen Friend Groups

Abstract Research has shown that as individuals—particularly teenagers—navigate social media, they value authenticity, typically understood as congruence between their online and offline identities. Portraying oneself in an authentic manner, however, is complicated by the phenomenon of context collapse, where multiple audiences (e.g., friends, teachers, parents) become homogenized and boundaries become blurred. Drawing on focus group data with 20 teenagers aged 13–17, we examined how teens use Finstas (“fake Instagram” accounts) to navigate tensions between context collapse and authenticity. Our participants see themselves as quite skilled at creating idealized identities on their Rinstas (“real Instagram” accounts) but turn to Finstas because they find such performances unsatisfying, using these secondary accounts for active resistance to norms of mainstream Instagram, often through negative emotional expression and self-description. Our study adds to the literature on teen social media use by illuminating strategies teens use to navigate context collapse as they seek authenticity.

Hosted Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm with Stacked Autoencoder-Enabled Sarcasm Detection in Online Social Networks

Sarcasm detection has received considerable interest in online social media networks due to the dramatic expansion in Internet usage. Sarcasm is a linguistic expression of dislikes or negative emotions by using overstated language constructs. Recently, detecting sarcastic posts on social networking platforms has gained popularity, especially since sarcastic comments in the form of tweets typically involve positive words that describe undesirable or negative characteristics. Simultaneously, the emergence of machine learning (ML) algorithms has made it easier to design efficacious sarcasm detection techniques. This study introduces a new Hosted Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm with Stacked Autoencoder-Enabled Sarcasm Detection and Classification (HCOA-SACDC) model. The presented HCOA-SACDC model predominantly focuses on the detection and classification of sarcasm in the OSN environment. To achieve this, the HCOA-SACDC model pre-processes input data to make them compatible for further processing. Furthermore, the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) model is employed for the useful extraction of features. Moreover, the stacked autoencoder (SAE) model is utilized for the recognition and categorization of sarcasm. Since the parameters related to the SAE model considerably affect the overall classification performance, the HCO algorithm is exploited to fine-tune the parameters involved in the SAE, showing the novelty of the work. A comprehensive experimental analysis of a benchmark dataset is performed to highlight the superior outcomes of the HCOA-SACDC model. The simulation results indicate that the HCOA-SACDC model accomplished enhanced performance over other techniques.

Using Neurofeedback from Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials to Target Affect-Biased Attention in Augmented Reality.

Biases in attention to emotional stimuli (i.e., affect-biased attention) contribute to the development and mainte-nance of depression and anxiety and may be a promising target for intervention. Past attempts to therapeutically modify affect-biased attention have been unsatisfactory due to issues with reliability and precision. Electroencephalogram (EEG)-derived steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPS) provide a temporally-sensitive biological index of attention to competing visual stimuli at the level of neuronal populations in the visual cortex. SSVEPS can potentially be used to quantify whether affective distractors vs. task-relevant stimuli have "won" the competition for attention at a trial-by-trial level during neuro-feedback sessions. This study piloted a protocol for a SSVEP-based neurofeedback training to modify affect-biased attention using a portable augmented-reality (AR) EEG interface. During neurofeedback sessions with five healthy participants, signifi-cantly greater attention was given to the task-relevant stimulus (a Gabor patch) than to affective distractors (negative emotional expressions) across SSVEP indices (p<0.000l). SSVEP indices exhibited excellent internal consistency as evidenced by a maximum Guttman split-half coefficient of 0.97 when comparing even to odd trials. Further testing is required, but findings suggest several SSVEP neurofeedback calculation methods most deserving of additional investigation and support ongoing efforts to develop and implement a SSVEP-guided AR-based neurofeedback training to modify affect-biased attention in adolescent girls at high risk for depression.

Development of the Japanese Version of the Beliefs about Emotions Scale1

AbstractPeople have beliefs about the unacceptability of the expression and experience of negative emotions. These beliefs affect psychological health and can have a negative effect on the treatment and symptoms of people with mental disorders and medically unexplained symptoms. This study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the Beliefs about Emotions Scale (BES‐J) and evaluate its reliability and validity. In an online survey, participants with fibromyalgia (n = 226) and healthy controls (n = 184) completed the BES‐J and questionnaires concerning perfectionism, dysfunctional attitudes, depression, anxiety, pain, disability, well‐being, interdependent happiness, and loneliness. The results of the principal component analysis showed that the BES‐J comprised a one‐factor structure, identical to the original. The BES‐J had good internal consistency (.89) and showed a significant correlation with the questionnaires. The BES‐J showed good internal reliability, concurrent validity, and test–retest reliability. The present study suggests that the Japanese version of the BES is appropriate for use with Japanese speakers.

LEXICAL AND STYLISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS IN MODERN INTERNET COMMUNICATION

The objective of the article is to find out the specifics of using multilevel means of communication to indicate the emotional states of users in English-language social networks. Methods. The main scientific results were obtained using a set of general scientific and special research methods, namely: analysis, generalization and systematization of scientific and educational literature on literary studies, psychology, and linguistics; theoretical generalization, analysis and synthesis, as well as comparative, descriptive and analytical. Results. The authors note that the features of virtual communication are: dialogic, emotional, special authorial nature, the ratio of categories reader-author or speaker-listener, removal of restrictions in time and space, the status of participants is usually equal, the general picture of the world, unlimited choice of language. Emotionality is a linguistic characteristic of the text that can cause an emotional effect. It is the result of the transmission of human emotions through language. Accordingly, any verbal means of expression either convey neutral emotions, or positively or negatively colored. The study found that emotions could be expressed at any level of language. If the sentence has a neutral emotional tone, it can be enhanced by the use of lexical items with a positive meaning. The best indicator of positive emotions in statements is the words. Investigated that common language means of expressing positive emotions are tokens. Among the vocabulary that expresses positive emotions, a special place is occupied by exclamations. The study of utterances found that all exclamations were used in sentences with a positive emotional tone. Positive emotions are also reflected using vocabulary, the meaning of which has a pleasant effect on the audience. At the stylistic level, the authors of Internet texts used anaphora, epiphora, antithesis, gradation, alliteration, etc. Grammatical and syntactic means such as adverbs, exclamatory sentences are often used to express positive emotions in Internet discourse. Speaking of the negative tone of emotionality, it should be noted that the linguistic means of expression of negative emotions are often lexical items. The most common indicator is obscene language, which helps to express the feelings of the speaker. The syntactic level is important for expressing negative emotions. Authors often use the second or third type of conditional sentences to convey feelings of sadness, emphasizing the unreality of the situation and the inability to change circumstances.