Spontaneous Emotional Reactions Research Articles

Acoustic Methods in Identifying Symptoms of Emotional States

The study investigates the use of speech signal to recognise speakers’ emotional states. The introduction includes the definition and categorization of emotions, including facial expressions, speech and physiological signals. For the purpose of this work, a proprietary resource of emotionally-marked speech recordings was created. The collected recordings come from the media, including live journalistic broadcasts, which show spontaneous emotional reactions to real-time stimuli. For the purpose of signal speech analysis, a specific script was written in Python. Its algorithm includes the parameterization of speech recordings and determination of features correlated with emotional content in speech. After the parametrization process, data clustering was performed to allows for the grouping of feature vectors for speakers into greater collections which imitate specific emotional states. Using the t-Student test for dependent samples, some descriptors were distinguished, which identified significant differences in the values of features between emotional states. Some potential applications for this research were proposed, as well as other development directions for future studies of the topic.

Motive-Specific Affective Contingencies and Their Relevance for Personality and Motivated Behavior

Individuals differ in the tendency to derive pleasure out of motive-specific incentives, such as being socially included or attaining power. Multiple theoretical approaches have proposed that such motive-specific positive affective contingencies (PACs) are central building blocks of motive dispositions and personality more broadly. In the current research, we put this claim to test and investigated individual differences with regard to motive-specific PACs in the affiliation and power domains. We measured PACs via spontaneous emotional reactions to motive-specific cues, as assessed by affect ratings and electromyographic (EMG) recordings of smile responses. Both of these PAC operationalizations were highly internally consistent and moderately to highly stable across time. Furthermore, motive-specific PACs were linked in a manner consistent with theory to measures of motive dispositions and to personality traits with motivational underpinnings (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, and narcissism). Finally, in the affiliation domain, motive-specific PACs were linked to objectively assessed, key motivational outcomes (i.e., attentional orientation, behavior in daily life, and in the laboratory). Taken together, the findings underscore the relevance of affective contingencies for the understanding of personality and motivated behavior.

Think of What Really Matters: Structured Analysis of Personal Criteria can Save Lives

Helping decisions are susceptible to many biases—partly due to the helpers’ spontaneous emotional reactions to the appeal diverting their attention from the need to maximize the impact of their help. Attempts to overcome these biases by prompting deliberative thinking—namely, by asking participants to think deeply—have often been unsuccessful. Here, we propose a way of directing people’s attention to the most important aspects of their decisions, by asking them to rate the extent to which such attributes should be considered. In two experiments involving real-world crises, participants who underwent such structured analysis of their personal criteria were more likely to make decisions that maximized the number of lives saved. Moreover, their decisions were more in line with their personal values. We conclude that this method is a simple, efficient way of improving the quality of helping decisions in life-and-death situations.

Read My Face: Automatic Facial Coding Versus Psychophysiological Indicators of Emotional Valence and Arousal.

Facial expressions provide insight into a person’s emotional experience. To automatically decode these expressions has been made possible by tremendous progress in the field of computer vision. Researchers are now able to decode emotional facial expressions with impressive accuracy in standardized images of prototypical basic emotions. We tested the sensitivity of a well-established automatic facial coding software program to detect spontaneous emotional reactions in individuals responding to emotional pictures. We compared automatically generated scores for valence and arousal of the Facereader (FR; Noldus Information Technology) with the current psychophysiological gold standard of measuring emotional valence (Facial Electromyography, EMG) and arousal (Skin Conductance, SC). We recorded physiological and behavioral measurements of 43 healthy participants while they looked at pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral scenes. When viewing pleasant pictures, FR Valence and EMG were both comparably sensitive. However, for unpleasant pictures, FR Valence showed an expected negative shift, but the signal differentiated not well between responses to neutral and unpleasant stimuli, that were distinguishable with EMG. Furthermore, FR Arousal values had a stronger correlation with self-reported valence than with arousal while SC was sensitive and specifically associated with self-reported arousal. This is the first study to systematically compare FR measurement of spontaneous emotional reactions to standardized emotional images with established psychophysiological measurement tools. This novel technology has yet to make strides to surpass the sensitivity of established psychophysiological measures. However, it provides a promising new measurement technique for non-contact assessment of emotional responses.

How do implicit/explicit attitudes and emotional reactions to sustainable logo relate? A neurophysiological study

Food package labels can be used to influence consumers’ evaluation and purchasing behaviour, fostering sustainable consumption. Therefore, it is important to understand consumers’ emotional reaction to food package labels that convey sustainable information. The aim of the present research is to get a better understanding of the relation between consumers’ attitudes and emotional reactions often used to measure the effectiveness of a communication. Particularly, we focused on recyclability, assessing participants’ prior explicit and implicit attitudes towards recyclability and their emotional reaction to food packages featuring logos of (non-)recyclability. The emotional reaction was measured both at an explicit and at an implicit level, using direct (self-reported) and indirect (eye movement, facial expressions and pupil dilation) techniques respectively. Results showed that explicit attitudes predicted self-reported emotions, while implicit attitudes predicted the spontaneous emotional reactions, highlighting the importance to assess both explicit and implicit attitudes. Moreover, results showed that the relation between the time that people looked at the logo and the spontaneous emotional reaction was contingent upon the participant’s implicit attitudes. Finally, a follow-up analysis revealed that people with positive implicit attitudes towards recyclability were faster in detecting the recyclable logo and spent more time on processing the logo which on its turn resulted in better emotional reactions. Thus, the results suggest that implicit attitudes influence both visual attention and emotional reactions. Overall, the research contributes to a better understanding of the relation between prior attitudes and emotional reactions to food packaging, and supports the use of an approach that comprises both direct and indirect measures of attitudes and emotions.

FAMOS: a framework for investigating the use of face features to identify spontaneous emotions

Emotion-based analysis has raised a lot of interest, particularly in areas such as forensics, medicine, music, psychology, and human-machine interface. Following this trend, the use of facial analysis (either automatic or human-based) is the most common subject to be investigated once this type of data can easily be collected and is well accepted in the literature as a metric for inference of emotional states. Despite this popularity, due to several constraints found in real world scenarios (e.g. lightning, complex backgrounds, facial hair and so on), automatically obtaining affective information from face accurately is a very challenging accomplishment. This work presents a framework which aims to analyse emotional experiences through naturally generated facial expressions. Our main contribution is a new 4-dimensional model to describe emotional experiences in terms of appraisal, facial expressions, mood, and subjective experiences. In addition, we present an experiment using a new protocol proposed to obtain spontaneous emotional reactions. The results have suggested that the initial emotional state described by the participants of the experiment was different from that described after the exposure to the eliciting stimulus, thus showing that the used stimuli were capable of inducing the expected emotional states in most individuals. Moreover, our results pointed out that spontaneous facial reactions to emotions are very different from those in prototypic expressions due to the lack of expressiveness in the latter.

Emotional practices: how masking negative emotions impacts the post‐acquisition integration process

Research Summary: We conducted a real‐time field study of a post‐acquisition integration process. We identified two practices that contributed to integration failure. First, the practice of masking negative emotions caused members of both firms to perceive that the partner firm's members were satisfied with the integration process, even though they were not. These false perceptions of satisfaction resulted in minimal corrective actions, the escalation of the situation, and ultimately, integration failure. Second, efficiency‐driven communication practices used in inter‐firm communication exacerbated the effect of masking negative emotions on false perceptions of satisfaction by shielding both firms’ members from the other firm's members’ spontaneous emotional reactions. Our research invites scholars to consider more deeply the emotional consequences of various common organizational practices.Managerial Summary: Do you disagree with your employee, manager, or business partner? Does this disagreement make you annoyed or even angry? Yet, you decide to mask your negative emotions and discuss the disagreement with a neutral or happy face. Wrong. We find that masking negative emotions in the work environment can prevent corrective actions, escalate disagreement, and make people to develop long‐lasting negative sentiments toward the counterpart that ultimately result in dysfunctional behaviors. Our findings further reveal that commonly used organizational practices such as communicating via email may contribute to the deliberate masking of negative emotions. We suggest that managers should carefully review if and how their organization's practices prevent or enable people to share their emotions authentically to ensure timely corrective actions and proactive development of business operations.

It’s a two-way street: Automatic and controlled processes in children’s emotional responses to moral transgressions

This study examined children’s automatic, spontaneous emotional reactions to everyday moral transgressions and their relations with self-reported emotions, which are more complex and infused with controlled cognition. We presented children ​(N=242 4−, 8−, and 12-year-olds) with six everyday moral transgression scenarios in an experimental setting, and both their spontaneous facial emotional reactions and self-reported emotions in the role of the transgressor were recorded. We found that across age self-reported guilt was positively associated with spontaneous fear, and self-reported anger was positively related to spontaneous sadness. In addition, we found a developmental increase in spontaneous sadness and decrease in spontaneous happiness. These results support the importance of automatic and controlled processes in evoking children’s emotional responses to everyday moral transgressions. We conclude by providing potential explanations for how automatic and controlled processes function in children’s everyday moral experiences and how these processes may change with age.

Jointed Journey of Knowing Thyself

Introduction Narcissistic pathology and its presentation has been a part of our cultural heritage since times immemorial. Aside from the myth of Narcissus, the narcissistic bipolar self and its constant pain which arises from disharmony of mental representations of actual and the ideal self can be found in folk tales, written literature, films and even definitions of the present society. Shiva, Dr. Jekyll &Mr. Hide, Kent Clark& Superman are just a few examples of the above mentioned dichotomy of impotence and power, of fragile and grandiose self. Sometimes the sense of entitlement and unrealistic goals results in failure and uncontrollable aggresion, which often includes rebellious and manipulative suicidal behaviour. Objectives Exploring the types of defence mechanisms used by therapists dealing with narcissistic patients and their agressive behaviour. Aims Presenting the diversity of possible clinicians' emotional responses and in parallel raising awareness of deficient literature and lack of quantitative studies on that matter Methods Case presentation of a 40-year-old narcissistic patient with manipulative behaviour and suicidal threats, including a range of personal responses of the involved members of our team in addition to integrative psychopharmacological and psychodynamic approach. Result Several clinician-focused researches and our own experience indicate the provocation of various emotions and defense mechanisms, which consequently may alter the treatment efficacy. Conclusion The awareness of one’s spontaneous emotional reactions to a patient may be useful in understanding the patient’s intrapsychic dynamics, thereby considered as an important factor in therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome.

Recognition of facial expressions and measurement of levels of interest from video

This paper presents a spatio-temporal approach in recognizing six universal facial expressions from visual data and using them to compute levels of interest. The classification approach relies on a two-step strategy on the top of projected facial motion vectors obtained from video sequences of facial expressions. First a linear classification bank was applied on projected optical flow vectors and decisions made by the linear classifiers were coalesced to produce a characteristic signature for each universal facial expression. The signatures thus computed from the training data set were used to train discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) to learn the underlying model for each facial expression. The performances of the proposed facial expressions recognition were computed using five fold cross-validation on Cohn-Kanade facial expressions database consisting of 488 video sequences that includes 97 subjects. The proposed approach achieved an average recognition rate of 90.9% on Cohn-Kanade facial expressions database. Recognized facial expressions were mapped to levels of interest using the affect space and the intensity of motion around apex frame. Computed level of interest was subjectively analyzed and was found to be consistent with "ground truth" information in most of the cases. To further illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, and also to better understand the effects of a number of factors that are detrimental to the facial expression recognition, a number of experiments were conducted. The first empirical analysis was conducted on a database consisting of 108 facial expressions collected from TV broadcasts and labeled by human coders for subsequent analysis. The second experiment (emotion elicitation) was conducted on facial expressions obtained from 21 subjects by showing the subjects six different movies clips chosen in a manner to arouse spontaneous emotional reactions that would produce natural facial expressions.

Knowledge of American sign language and the ability of hearing individuals to decode facial expressions of emotion

The relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and the ability to decode facial expressions of emotion was explored in this study. Subjects were 60 college students, half of whom were intermediate level students of ASL and half of whom had no exposure to a signed language. Subjects viewed and judged silent video segments of stimulus persons experiencing spontaneous emotional reactions representing either happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, or fear/surprise. Results indicated that hearing subjects knowledgeable in ASL were generally better than hearing non-signers at identifying facial expressions of emotion, although there were variations in decoding accuracy regarding the specific emotion being judged. In addition, females were more successful decoders than males. Results have implications for better understanding the nature of nonverbal communication in deaf and hearing individuals.

Young children's appraisals of others' spontaneous emotional reactions.

Preschoolers were interviewed regarding their understanding of others' spontaneous emotional reactions. From 62 preschoolers in 3 age groups (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds), 601 emotional reactions and 490 appraisals were obtained. The accuracy of children's appraisals (e.g., correspondence with adults' appraisals) varied with age and the type and intensity of emotion. Although children were most accurate in identifying others' positive emotions, they were least accurate in identifying their causes. Moreover, although children's appraisals tended to be biased toward external events, recognition of internal factors was found to vary with age, emotion, and type of internal factor. It was suggested that young children's use of naturally occurring information regarding others' emotions depends on the emotion and the relative salience of the cues

Young children's appraisals of others' spontaneous emotional reactions.

Young children's appraisals of others' spontaneous emotional reactions.