Understanding Of Emotions Research Articles

The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag

Reviewed by: The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag Erin H. Davis (bio) the blue sky Galsan Tschinag Milkweed https://milkweed.org/book/the-blue-sky 224 pages; Print, $16.00 "Love is the key to life, and the cause of suffering." -Katharina Rout on Galsan Tschinag Bareboned yet graceful, Galsan Tschinag's The Blue Sky, initially published in 2007 by Milkweed Editions, is now republished and revamped by Milkweed's imprint, Seedbank. Tschinag's novel, in keeping with the goals of Seedbank, strives to understand the cross-cultural understanding of human instinct and emotion. Seedbank states that the series "gathers works of literature from around the world that foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world—exposing readers to new, endangered, and forgotten ways of seeing the world." The preservation of culture and place within the vastness of the High Altai mountains is central to Tschinag's work. It is through the emotional and physical maze of sheep herding and familial bonds that Tschinag navigates, told through the eyes of a young Tuvan boy, Dshurukawaa. Originally published in German and translated by Katharina Rout, the novel transcends borders and date lines. [End Page 75] Politics and environment clash in The Blue Sky, for although Tschinag depicts a culture traditionally "isolated," the novel's twentieth century setting brings with it the influence of hard-fisted Russian socialism and the takeover of Kazakh culture. Tschinag knows the struggles of the Tuvan peoples firsthand. He is a man both indigenous to the High Altai mountains and a global traveler. He is currently chieftain of his native tribe, as well as tribal healer. Translator Katharina Rout, upon visiting Tschinag at his home, reflects on her experiences: "As a shaman, [Tschinag] mediates between his community and the spirit world; as a chieftain, he connects Tuvans with each other; as a writer, he forges links between the oral tradition and epics of his people and the literate world outside; as a politician, he negotiates a future for his minority Tuvans among a sometimes hostile majority of Kazakhs and Mongolians; as a translator and teacher, he crosses, and enables other to cross, the linguistic borders of Tuvan, Kazakh, Mongolian, Russian, and German." Tschinag has experienced a wide range of this world and writes with an unmistakable authority. The author was taught under the traumatic rigor of re-education schools where he was forced to assimilate to dominant culture—a common mode of deculturalization utilized by the strongest powers around the globe. As a young adult, Tschinag traveled west to pursue higher education. In his words, he "alternate[s] between living in the indigenous culture of the post-Socialist Tuvans, the rising tribal capitalism of Mongolia, and the enlightened state monopoly of Western Europe." He currently divides his time between Ulaan-Bataar where he writes, the High Altai where he lives and serves as chieftain and shaman, and Germany where he works and tours. The Blue Sky is, at its core, Tschinag's first volume of a three-part autobiographical journey, followed by The Gray Earth and The White Mountain, each of which delve into a different phase of Tschinag's life. His first novel begins at the author's birth and progresses through his fraught childhood. Surrounded by those whom he loves most—his grandmother, his dog, Arsylang, and his siblings—Tschinag explores the universality of trauma and loss, of changing political tides that so easily and carelessly sweep entire cultures from the map. Tschinag, putting the customs and beliefs of his people into words, solidifies Tuvan culture in history. He writes of religion, of Gök-Deeri, the [End Page 76] father in the great blue sky. It is this relation to the blue sky that influences the entire novel. He explores the way that the beneficence of Gök-Deeri dictates abundance and poverty. A blessing of father sky, Dshurukawaa's intimate relationship with the hendshe (baby lambs herded by children) gives his life purpose, a desire to wake up in the mornings after all has been taken from him. Tschinag's prose plays with the idea of Gök-Deeri's relationship to the political. No longer does...

Development of emotional responsiveness of primary schoolchildren with disabilities through theatrical activities

Introduction. Today, the education system makes high demands on the quality of mental development of junior schoolchildren with mental retardation (hereinafter referred to as PD), for whom it is the emotional sphere that remains the main correctional and developmental basis, and age characteristics remain an effective basis for correcting the manifestation of delayed development. In this regard, the scientific and pedagogical community is in constant search of effective approaches and forms of development of the emotional sphere of children with mental retardation, which constitute the foundation of correctional and compensatory influence. Aim of the study: substantiation of the effectiveness of the development of emotional responsiveness, as the main indicator of the emotional sphere of children with disabilities in the process of organized theatrical activities. Research methodology and techniques. The study examined the manifestations of emotions and feelings of feelings arising as a result of an emotional response and understanding of perceived, emotionally colored information. 59 students of compensatory orientation of the third year of study took part in the experiment, a total of 59 people with mental retardation: the experimental group (EG) in the amount of 30 people (n = 30) and the control group (CG) in the amount of 29 people (n = 29). To study the cognitive, emotional-motivational, behavioral component of emotional responsiveness, the following techniques were used: "Conversation about a story" (A.A. Melik-Pashaev), "Conversation on a work of fiction" (S.V. Kutyavina), expressive reading of a poem. Results. In the course of the experimental work, significant differences were revealed in the formation of the general level of emotional responsiveness among students with CRD, so as a result of the control experiment, positive changes were recorded in the EG (Uemp.3 ** = 288; р≤0.05). In the CG, such changes were absent, there are no grounds for stating the general group positive dynamics (Uemp.4 = 364.5; Ucrit. = 326). Conclusion. The results obtained allow us to confirm the hypothesis that as a result of specially organized correctional and developmental work, through the development and implementation of the methodological aspect of theatrical activity in the educational process, there is an effective development of the emotional responsiveness of junior schoolchildren with mental retardation, as the main indicator of the emotional sphere.

Early Preventive Intervention for Young Children With Sex Chromosome Trisomies (XXX, XXY, XYY): Supporting Social Cognitive Development Using a Neurocognitive Training Program Targeting Facial Emotion Understanding.

BackgroundSex Chromosome Trisomies (SCTs; XXX, XXY, XYY) are genetic conditions that are associated with increased risk for neurodevelopmental problems and psychopathology. There is a great need for early preventive intervention programs to optimize outcome, especially considering the increase in prenatal diagnoses due to recent advances in non-invasive prenatal screening. This study is the first to evaluate efficacy of a neurocognitive training in children with SCT. As social behavioral problems have been identified as among the key areas of vulnerability, it was targeted at improving a core aspect of social cognition, the understanding of social cues from facial expressions.MethodsParticipants were 24 children with SCT and 18 typically developing children, aged 4–8 years old. Children with SCT were assigned to a training (n = 13) or waiting list (no-training) group (n = 11). Children in the training group completed a neurocognitive training program (The Transporters), aimed to increase understanding of facial emotions. Participants were tested before and after the training on facial emotion recognition and Theory of Mind abilities (NEPSY-II), and on social orienting (eyetracking paradigm). The SCT no-training group and typically developing control group were also assessed twice with the same time interval without any training. Feasibility of the training was evaluated with the Social Validity Questionnaire filled out by the parents and by children's ratings on a Visual Analog Scale.ResultsThe SCT training group improved significantly more than the SCT no-training and TD no-training group on facial emotion recognition (large effect size; = 0.28), performing comparable to typical controls after completing the training program. There were no training effects on ToM abilities and social orienting. Both children and parents expressed satisfaction with the feasibility of the training.ConclusionsThe significant improvement in facial emotion recognition, with large effect sizes, suggests that there are opportunities for positively supporting the development of social cognition in children with an extra X- or Y-chromosome, already at a very young age. This evidence based support is of great importance given the need for preventive and early training programs in children with SCT, aimed to minimize neurodevelopmental impact.

Users opinion and emotion understanding in social media regarding COVID-19 vaccine

Online social platforms or social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become popular platforms for a public discussion about social topics. Recent studies show that there is a growing tendency for people to talk about COVID-19 pandemic in these online channels. The rapid growth of the infected cases by COVID-19 pandemic makes a lots of anxiety and fear among people. With the recent released of Pfizer vaccine, people start posting a lot of rumors regarding the safety concerns of the vaccine, especially among the elderly people. The aim of this study is to bring out the fact that tweets containing all pertinent details about the COVID-19 vaccine and provides an analysis and understanding of users emotions regarding the recent release of COVID-19 vaccine. This study starts with the collection of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccine and then cleaning the dataset from redundant tweets. In this study, we use Twitter API and Web Scraping techniques to obtain a sample of 50,000 tweets talking about COVID-19 vaccine.Further, The analysis of users emotions is achieved by manually labeling and classifying the tweets to either positive or negative. Then, a deep learning based model is used to train the data and classify the people opinion about COVID-19 vaccine. The experimental results illustrate that high percentage of people have shown a positive attitude towards COVID1-19 vaccine. The proposed method is validated over Twitter datasets and the results also demonstrate that use of deep learning classifier can successfully improve the accuracy of people emotions analysis with an accuracy up to 98% for training set and the accuracy for testing set is 73%.

Of Heroes and Heartbreak

This article uses a psychoanalytic framework informed by Fantasy theory to investigate how the Japanese Role-Playing Fantasy video game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch offers a depiction of, and engagement with, emotional issues via its deployment of literalised metaphors of affect. In doing so, it considers the overlaps between Fantasy and video games, coining the term ‘Digital Fantasy’ to describe video games which evoke Fantasy worlds and use the imagery of Fantasy as a means of communicating emotion. The close reading provided uses the work of Fantasy theorists such as Rosemary Jackson and Kathryn Hume, combined with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to explore how Digital Fantasies use varying degrees of Fantasy and mimesis to offer interactive representations of affective processes such as mourning and melancholia. The analysis demonstrates the continued influence of psychoanalytic imagery as a means of understanding emotion, whilst posing that its deployment within Digital Fantasy situates the form as one of exploring and understanding the emotional challenges of everyday life.

The Influence of Family Socioeconomic Status on Primary School Students' Emotional Intelligence: The Mediating Effect of Parenting Styles and Regional Differences.

Select 180 primary school students from a city primary school in Shanghai, a developed area in eastern China, and 146 primary school students from a rural primary school in Jingzhou, a centrally underdeveloped area, as subjects. The method of scale is used to explore the influence of family socioeconomic status on the emotional intelligence of primary school students, and the mediating role of parenting styles in this influence and the difference in this effect in the two regions. The results show that: (1) The socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence of primary school students in Jingzhou are significantly lower than those of primary school students in Shanghai. In terms of parenting style, the emotional warmth and understanding of the fathers and mothers of Jingzhou’s primary school students are both significantly lower than those of Shanghai’s primary school students; (2) the socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence of the primary school students in Jingzhou are significantly and positively correlated with the parents’ emotional warmth and understanding parenting styles, while the socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence of the primary school students in Shanghai are only significantly positively correlated with the father’s emotional warmth and understanding parenting style; and (3) parenting style has a mediating effect between family socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence, but this effect has regional differences. The specific performance is as follows: The parents’ emotional warmth and understanding parenting styles of the primary school students in Jingzhou play a partial mediating effect between the family socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence, while the Shanghai primary school students’ fathers’ emotional warmth and understanding parenting style plays a complete mediating effect in family socioeconomic status and emotional intelligence.

CH’I ET L’EXPRESSION DES ÉMOTIONS EN CHINOIS

By conducting a linguistic study on the notion of ch'i in the expression of emotions in Chinese, we examine the influence of this specific notion in the understanding, conceptualisation and expression of emotion in Chinese, thus proving, to a certain extent, way that it is important to take into consideration the socio-cultural features of different ethnic groups in researching emotion.

Identifying Types of Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Guilt, Eco-Grief, and Eco-Coping in a Climate-Sensitive Population: A Qualitative Study.

Background: Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century and it can affect mental health either directly through the experience of environmental traumas or indirectly through the experience of emotional distress and anxiety about the future. However, it is not clear what possible subtypes of the emerging “psychoterratic” syndromes such as eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and eco-grief exist, how much distress they may cause, and to what extent they facilitate ecofriendly behavior. Methods: We analyzed semi-structured interviews (N = 17) focusing on the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors related to climate change by using a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative methods. Results and conclusions: The interviews revealed six eco-anxiety components, eight types of eco-guilt, and two types of eco-grief that help to understand the multifactorial nature of these phenomena. The six categories of coping strategies are in line with traditional coping models, and they are linked in various ways to pro-environmental behavior and the management of negative emotions. The results can help practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of emotions related to climate change and how to cope with them, and researchers to develop comprehensive measurement tools to assess these emotions.

Coping Strategies and Psychological Maladjustment/Adjustment: A Meta-Analytic Approach with Children and Adolescents Exposed to Natural Disasters

BackgroundFollowing disasters, children and adolescents can use coping strategies to feel better. A growing body of studies investigated the relation between them and maladjustment/adjustment, i.e., negative symptomatology/positive indicators of development. Yet, these constructs are studied separately.ObjectiveWe conducted two meta-analyses to examine the mean correlation between disaster-related coping strategies and indicators of maladjustment/adjustment following natural disasters in children and adolescents, considering the role of some moderators.MethodsWe used PsycINFO, PubMed, Eric, and Scopus databases to identify articles on natural disasters (filters: participants ≤ 18 years at the disaster, peer-review, English language). Inclusion required investigating the relation between at least one coping strategy and at least one indicator of maladjustment (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder, depression) and/or adjustment (e.g., self-efficacy, emotion understanding), for a total of 26 studies (k = 64, n = 9692, for maladjustment; k = 37, n = 3504, for adjustment).ResultsThere were global positive significant correlations between coping strategies and negative symptomatology (rpooled = .23) for maladjustment, and positive indicators (rpooled = .17) for adjustment. Negative symptomatology positively correlated with escape (r = .19), social isolation (r = .15), submission (r = .64), and opposition (r = .16); positive indicators positively correlated with problem solving (r = .31), social support (r = .22), and submission (r = .30). We found a moderating role of age, disaster type, and continent for maladjustment.ConclusionsThe study presented an analysis of the coping strategies that can be effective for children and adolescents dealing with natural disasters.

Positive, negative, neutral-or unknown? The perceived valence of emotions expressed by young autistic children in a novel context suited to autism.

Starting early in life, autistics are characterized as having atypical facial expressions, as well as decreased positive and increased negative affect. The literature on autistic facial expressions remains small, however, with disparate methods and results suggesting limited understanding of common autistic emotions. Furthermore, unlike non-autistics’ emotions, autistics’ emotions have been assessed without considering this population’s characteristics. In this study, the valence of young children’s facial expressions was thus rated as positive, negative, neutral, or “unknown”—a term for perceived emotions observers do not understand. Facial expressions were assessed using the Montreal Stimulating Play Situation, a context incorporating potential autistic interests. Comparing 37 autistic and 39 typical young (27–56 months) age-matched children, we found no group differences in expressed positive, negative, and neutral emotions. We did find differences in unknown emotions, which were unique to the autistic group. Preliminary data also showed that autistic children’s repetitive behaviors co-occurred with positive, neutral, and unknown emotions, but not with negative emotions. In a novel context that considers their characteristics, we did not find decreased positive or increased negative emotions in young autistic children. Instead, they uniquely expressed emotions perceived as unknown, showing the need to improve our understanding of their full emotional repertoire.Lay abstractAutistic people are believed to have emotions that are too negative and not positive enough, starting early in life. Their facial expressions are also persistently judged to be unusual, as reflected in criteria used to identify autism. But it is possible that common autistic facial expressions are poorly understood by observers, as suggested by a range of findings from research. Another issue is that autistic emotions have always been assessed in contexts suited to non-autistics. In our study, the facial expressions of young autistic and typical children were rated as positive, negative, neutral, or “unknown”—a category we created for emotions that observers notice but do not understand. These emotions were assessed using a context suited to autistic children, including objects of potential interest to them. We found that in this context, autistic and typical children did not differ in positive, negative, or neutral facial emotions. They did differ in unknown emotions, which were found only in autistic children. We also found that repetitive behaviors in autistic children co-occurred with positive, neutral, and unknown emotions, but not with negative emotions. In a context which suits their characteristics, autistic children do not show emotions that are too negative or not positive enough. They do show emotions perceived as unknown, which means we need to improve our understanding of their full emotional repertoire.

Efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy on aggressive behavior in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and emotion dysregulation: study protocol of a randomized controlled trial

BackgroundAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is frequently associated with emotional dysregulation (ED). ED is characterized by excessive and inappropriate emotional reactions compared to social norms, uncontrolled and rapid shifts in emotion, and attention focused on emotional stimuli. Few studies have evaluated non-pharmacological interventions to improve ED in children with ADHD. The current randomized controlled trial assesses the efficacy of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention compared with a theater-based intervention (TBI) in children with ADHD and ED.MethodsSixty-eight 7- to 13-year-old children with ADHD and ED will be recruited and randomly assigned to the CBT or TBI group. CBT aims to reduce ED by teaching anger management strategies. TBI seeks to reduce ED by improving emotion understanding and expression through mimics and movement. In both groups, children participate in 15 1-h sessions, and parents participate in 8 sessions of a parent management program. The primary outcome measure is the change in the “Aggression” sub-score of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Secondary outcome measures include overall impairment (Children’s Global Assessment Scale, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire), personality profile (Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children), executive function (Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function), quality of life (Kidscreen-27), parental stress (Parenting Stress Index, 4th edition), parental depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II), and impact of child disorders on the quality of the family life (Parental Quality of Life and Developmental Disorder).DiscussionChildren with ADHD and ED are at risk of functional impairment and poor outcomes and have specific therapeutic needs. This randomized controlled trial wants to assess non-pharmacological treatment options for this population.Trial registrationClinicaltrials.gov. NCT03176108. Registered on June 5, 2017.

Ubiquitous Affective Computing: A Review

This review investigated research works on affective computing by using electrocardiogram (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA). The 27 related research papers, including 23 from IEEE Journals and 4 from other Q1 Journals in the last five years, were studied. The main goals have been to summarize common trends in this field in recent years as well as provide discussions and a big picture of how future research should be done. The content of this review covers the fundamental pipeline of affective computing research consisting of stimuli, intelligent affective computing, and sensor design and data processing. Additionally, we discuss future research directions and potential applications, including stress monitoring, music cognition, and robotics, where ECG and EDA will play a significant role with wearable devices. Therefore, this review serves as an information summary for everyone who is interested in affective computing and improving AI’s understanding of human emotion.

Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood.

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t(34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t(34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Positive Psychotherapy as a Means of Research and Development of Emotional Intelligence in the Course of Individual’s Life Fulfillment

The purpose of this article is to present a psychological hermeneutic triangulation model of emotional intelligence in the course of individual’s life fulfillment. In this context, the methodological framework and psychotechnical tools of positive psychotherapy contribute to the explication of the axiological potential of the emotional intelligence in three modes of realization: internal, external and integrative through the bodily sensation and emotional competence and understanding, interpretation and hermeneutic circle mechanisms. Application of positive psychotherapy at the empirical stage of the study has resulted in a training program for the development of emotional intelligence in the areas of individual’s life fulfillment relevant for the participants, as well as through individual consultations. The article presents evidence of the effectiveness of a prolonged formative experiment on the development of emotional intelligence by means of positive psychotherapy, which helped verify the author’s theoretical model. Keywords: emotional intelligence, positive psychotherapy, training, bodily sensation, emotional competence, mode of individual’s life fulfillment

Promoting racial literacy in early childhood: Storybooks and conversations with young black children

AbstractRacial literacy as defined by Stevenson (2014) is an important cultural resistance strategy (e.g., positive coping strategy) for Black children and youth because it gives them the skills needed to survive in a racist society. Stevenson’s work, along with the work of several of his colleagues, focuses on adolescents and those in middle childhood, yet it has inspired us to postulate how racial literacy might be fostered in young children (ages 3–8). In this article, we propose a theoretical model for how racial literary can be fostered within shared‐reading contexts using racially affirming storybooks coupled with conversations grounded in the principles of ethnic‐racial socialization. We also propose that these conversations result in both a direct influence on racial literacy and an indirect influence via positive ethnic‐racial identity and emotion regulation and understanding.

The use of ball pits and playpens in laboratory Lister Hooded male rats induces ultrasonic vocalisations indicating a more positive affective state and can reduce the welfare impacts of aversive procedures.

The advancement and quality of science rely on research that is robust and unbiased in its experimental design, execution, analysis, and reproducibility. In preclinical research, a better understanding of animal emotions and refinement of their husbandry, housing, and handling are important goals in providing good animal welfare in a laboratory setting which underpins rigorous research quality. Induction of positive emotional state in animals is a key component of their well-being, and one approach is to increase their environmental complexity using, for example, ball pits or playpens in rats. In this study, we recorded 50 kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) during animals’ exposure to the ball pit and playpen. We have previously shown that 50 kHz USVs provide a graded and quantifiable measure of an animal’s emotional state, and here find that access to the ball pit and playpen increases 50 kHz USVs, indicative of a more positive affective state. Using our affective bias test (ABT) we next quantified the animals’ emotional response to an aversive intervention and whether this could be attenuated by access to a playpen. The playpen exposure completely mitigated the negative affective state induced by an anxiogenic drug when compared with animals who experienced the drug in the home cage. Together, these findings suggest ball pits and playpens provide a simple and effective method to improve the welfare of laboratory rats and reduce the cumulative suffering they experience from their housing conditions and minor, aversive procedures.

Voice emotion recognition by Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant users in Taiwan.

ObjectivesTo explore the effects of obligatory lexical tone learning on speech emotion recognition and the cross‐culture differences between United States and Taiwan for speech emotion understanding in children with cochlear implant.MethodsThis cohort study enrolled 60 cochlear‐implanted (cCI) Mandarin‐speaking, school‐aged children who underwent cochlear implantation before 5 years of age and 53 normal‐hearing children (cNH) in Taiwan. The emotion recognition and the sensitivity of fundamental frequency (F0) changes for those school‐aged cNH and cCI (6–17 years old) were examined in a tertiary referred center.ResultsThe mean emotion recognition score of the cNH group was significantly better than the cCI. Female speakers' vocal emotions are more easily to be recognized than male speakers' emotion. There was a significant effect of age at test on voice recognition performance. The average score of cCI with full‐spectrum speech was close to the average score of cNH with eight‐channel narrowband vocoder speech. The average performance of voice emotion recognition across speakers for cCI could be predicted by their sensitivity to changes in F0.ConclusionsBetter pitch discrimination ability comes with better voice emotion recognition for Mandarin‐speaking cCI. Besides the F0 cues, cCI are likely to adapt their voice emotion recognition by relying more on secondary cues such as intensity and duration. Although cross‐culture differences exist for the acoustic features of voice emotion, Mandarin‐speaking cCI and their English‐speaking cCI peer expressed a positive effect for age at test on emotion recognition, suggesting the learning effect and brain plasticity. Therefore, further device/processor development to improve presentation of pitch information and more rehabilitative efforts are needed to improve the transmission and perception of voice emotion in Mandarin.Level of evidence3.

Culture shapes preschoolers’ emotion recognition but not emotion comprehension: a cross-cultural study in Germany and Singapore

AbstractContemporary approaches suggest that emotions are shaped by culture. Children growing up in different cultures experience culture-specific emotion socialization practices. As a result, children growing up in Western societies (e.g., US or UK) rely on explicit, semantic information, whereas children from East Asian cultures (e.g., China or Japan) are more sensitive towards implicit, contextual cues when confronted with others’ emotions. The aim of the present study was to investigate two aspects of preschoolers’ emotion understanding (emotion recognition and emotion comprehension) in a cross-cultural setting. To this end, Singaporean and German preschoolers were tested with an emotion recognition task employing European-American and East Asian child’s faces and the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004). In total, 129 German and Singaporean preschoolers (mean age 5.34 years) participated. Results indicate that preschoolers were able to recognize emotions of child’s faces above chance level. In line with previous findings, Singaporean preschoolers were more accurate in recognizing emotions from facial stimuli compared to German preschoolers. Accordingly, Singaporean preschoolers outperformed German preschoolers in the Recognition component of the TEC. The overall performance in TEC did not differ between the two samples. Findings of this study provide further evidence that emotion understanding is culturally shaped in accordance with culture-specific emotion socialization practices.

Emotional intelligence: a comparison between patients after first episode mania and those suffering from chronic bipolar disorder type I.

Deficits in emotional intelligence (EI) were detected in patients with bipolar disorder (BD), but little is known about whether these deficits are already present in patients after presenting a first episode mania (FEM). We sought (i) to compare EI in patients after a FEM, chronic BD and healthy controls (HC); (ii) to examine the effect exerted on EI by socio-demographic, clinical and neurocognitive variables in FEM patients. The Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EIQ) was calculated with the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). Performance on MSCEIT was compared among the three groups using generalized linear models. In patients after a FEM, the influence of socio-demographic, clinical and neurocognitive variables on the EIQ was examined using a linear regression model. In total, 184 subjects were included (FEM n = 48, euthymic chronic BD type I n = 75, HC n = 61). BD patients performed significantly worse than HC on the EIQ [mean difference (MD) = 10.09, standard error (s.e.) = 3.14, p = 0.004] and on the understanding emotions branch (MD = 7.46, s.e. = 2.53, p = 0.010). FEM patients did not differ from HC and BD on other measures of MSCEIT. In patients after a FEM, EIQ was positively associated with female sex (β = -0.293, p = 0.034) and verbal memory performance (β = 0.374, p = 0.008). FEM patients performed worse than HC but better than BD on few neurocognitive domains. Patients after a FEM showed preserved EI, while patients in later stages of BD presented lower EIQ, suggesting that impairments in EI might result from the burden of disease and neurocognitive decline, associated with the chronicity of the illness.

A multiturn complementary generative framework for conversational emotion recognition

Conversational emotion recognition (CER) is a significant task due to its application in human–computer interaction. Existing work treats CER as an utterance-level classification task without considering that empathic response also reflects contextual emotion understanding. Previous work has proven that accurate recognition of emotions in the dialogue history is helpful to generate high-fit responses. In this paper, we investigate whether this conclusion is a sufficient and necessary condition. Specifically, we define an auxiliary empathic multiturn dialogue generation (MDG) task to enhance emotion understanding. Correspondingly, we present a Sequence-to-Sequence oriented framework that combines CER and MDG in a multitask learning manner to verify the complementarity between the two tasks. First, we use alternate recurrent neural networks to encode the content of historical utterances and represent the states of multiparty emotions, which are used for emotion classification. Second, since most MDG methods ignore the emotional coherence of the dialogue context itself, we use affine transformation to fuse hidden states of content and emotions to initialize the decoder. Finally, at each step of generation, an attention mechanism is used to fuse information from the dialogue history to ensure emotional coherence. The CER results of our models outperform the state-of-the-art on three prevalent emotional dialogue data sets. Further analysis demonstrates the mutual promotion and empathy interpretability between MDG and CER. Furthermore, our framework is scalable for different coding strategies and multimodal fusion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore CER from the perspective of empathy through multitask learning with dialogue generation.