More Like this

1. Capturing Laughter and Smiles under Genuine Amusement vs. Negative Emotion

   https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComWorkshops48775.2020.9156102  

   Forman, Cleo; Thiel, Pablo; Ptucha, Raymond; Dominguez, Miguel; Alm, Cecilia O. (March 2020, 2020 Workshop on Human-Centered Computational Sensing - IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops))

   Smiling and laughter are typically associated with amusement. If they occur under negative emotions, systems responding naively may confuse an uncomfortable smile or laugh with an amused state. We present a passive text and video elicitation task and collect spontaneous laughter and smiles in reaction to amusing and negative experiences, using standard, ubiquitous sensors (webcam and microphone), along with participant self-ratings. While we rely on a state-of-the-art smile recognizer, for laughter recognition our transfer learning architecture enhanced on modest data outperforms other models with up to 85% accuracy (F1 = 0.86), suggesting this technique as promising for improving affect models. Subsequently, we analyze and automatically predict laughter as amused vs. negative. However, contrasting with prior findings for acted data, for this spontaneously elicited dataset classifying laughter by emotional valence is not satisfactory. 

   more » « less
2. SMILE Winter Campaign

   https://doi.org/10.1093/rasti/rzae038  

   Walach, M_-T; Soobiah, Y.; Carter, J_A; Whiter, D_K; Kavanagh, A_J; Hartinger, M_D; Oksavik, K.; Salzano, M_L; Archer, M_O (August 2024, RAS Techniques and Instruments)

   ABSTRACT This white paper is highly topical as it relates to the upcoming solar wind magnetosphere ionosphere link explorer (SMILE) mission: SMILE is a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and it aims to build a more complete understanding of the Sun–Earth connection by measuring the solar wind and its dynamic interaction with the magnetosphere. It is a fully funded mission with a projected launch in 2025. This paper outlines a plan for action for SMILE’s first Northern hemisphere winter campaign using ground-based instruments. We outline open questions and which data and techniques can be employed to answer them. The science themes we discuss are: (i) Earth’s magnetosheath, magnetopause, and magnetic cusp impact on the ionospheric cusp region; (ii) defining the relationship between auroral processes, solar wind, and magnetospheric drivers; (iii) understanding the interhemispheric properties of the Earth’s magnetosphere–ionosphere system. We discuss open questions (different to the mission goals) which may be answered using existing ground-based instrumentation together with SMILE data to leverage the maximum scientific return of the mission during the first winter after launch. This paper acts as a resource for planning, and a call to collaborative action for the scientific community. 

   more » « less
3. Surprise as an Emotion: A Response to Ortony

   https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221132789  

   Neta, Maital; Kim, M_Justin (November 2022, Perspectives on Psychological Science)

   We write in response to an article published in this journal by Andrew Ortony titled “Are All ‘Basic Emotions’ Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct.” The author claimed that “for all its elevated status as a basic emotion, surprise fails to satisfy the minimal requirements that [he] proposed for something to be an emotion, and if it is not an emotion, it cannot possibly be a basic emotion.” Although we acknowledge the concerns brought forth by Ortony, we respectfully disagree with his conclusion about surprise. To make a case against the assertion that surprise is valence-free, we summarize an extensive body of work showing that surprise is indeed valenced—in a specific manner (i.e., ambiguously valenced)—and that it meets all of Ortony’s criteria for an emotion. In other words, rather than being described as neither positive nor negative, this emotion is either positive or negative. We consider the data with respect to surprise as a basic emotion, and we dispute the definitions of basic emotions as “widely divergent.” Future work is needed to continue defining an emotion, and a basic emotion, but we believe this is a worthy effort toward shaping a still evolving field. 

   more » « less
4. Quantifying Emotional Similarity in Speech

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2021.3127390  

   Harvill, John; Leem, Seong-Gyun; AbdelWahab, Mohammed; Lotfian, Reza; Busso, Carlos (April 2023, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing)

   NA (Ed.)

   This study proposes the novel formulation of measuring emotional similarity between speech recordings. This formulation explores the ordinal nature of emotions by comparing emotional similarities instead of predicting an emotional attribute, or recognizing an emotional category. The proposed task determines which of two alternative samples has the most similar emotional content to the emotion of a given anchor. This task raises some interesting questions. Which is the emotional descriptor that provide the most suitable space to assess emotional similarities? Can deep neural networks (DNNs) learn representations to robustly quantify emotional similarities? We address these questions by exploring alternative emotional spaces created with attribute-based descriptors and categorical emotions. We create the representation using a DNN trained with the triplet loss function, which relies on triplets formed with an anchor, a positive example, and a negative example. We select a positive sample that has similar emotion content to the anchor, and a negative sample that has dissimilar emotion to the anchor. The task of our DNN is to identify the positive sample. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that we can learn a meaningful embedding to assess emotional similarities, achieving higher performance than human evaluators asked to complete the same task. 

   more » « less
5. Cultural variation in neural responses to social but not monetary reward outcomes

   https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsad068  

   Blevins, Elizabeth; Ko, Michael; Park, BoKyung; Qu, Yang; Knutson, Brian; Tsai, Jeanne L. (November 2023, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience)

   Abstract European Americans view high-intensity, open-mouthed ‘excited’ smiles more positively than Chinese because they value excitement and other high arousal positive states more. This difference is supported by reward-related neural activity, with European Americans showing greater Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc) activity to excited (vs calm) smiles than Chinese. But do these cultural differences generalize to all rewards, and are they related to real-world social behavior? European American (N = 26) and Chinese (N = 27) participants completed social and monetary incentive delay tasks that distinguished between the anticipation and receipt (outcome) of social and monetary rewards while undergoing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). The groups did not differ in NAcc activity when anticipating social or monetary rewards. However, as predicted, European Americans showed greater NAcc activity than Chinese when viewing excited smiles during outcome (the receipt of social reward). No cultural differences emerged when participants received monetary outcomes. Individuals who showed increased NAcc activity to excited smiles during outcome had friends with more intense smiles on social media. These findings suggest that culture plays a specific role in modulating reward-related neural responses to excited smiles during outcome, which are associated with real-world relationships. 

   more » « less