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1. Emotional valence and arousal induced by auditory stimuli among individuals with visual impairment

   https://doi.org/10.1177/02646196211042257  

   Kim, Hyung Nam ; Sutharson, Sam Jotham ( January 2021 , British Journal of Visual Impairment)

   null (Ed.)

   Despite significant vision loss, humans can still recognize various emotional stimuli via a sense of hearing and express diverse emotional responses, which can be sorted into two dimensions, arousal and valence. Yet, many research studies have been focusing on sighted people, leading to lack of knowledge about emotion perception mechanisms of people with visual impairment. This study aims at advancing knowledge of the degree to which people with visual impairment perceive various emotions – high/low arousal and positive/negative emotions. A total of 30 individuals with visual impairment participated in interviews where they listened to stories of people who became visually impaired, encountered and overcame various challenges, and they were instructed to share their emotions. Participants perceived different kinds and intensities of emotions, depending on their demographic variables such as living alone, loneliness, onset of visual impairment, visual acuity, race/ethnicity, and employment status. The advanced knowledge of emotion perceptions in people with visual impairment is anticipated to contribute toward better designing social supports that can adequately accommodate those with visual impairment. 

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2. Understanding Avatar Identification through Visual Similarity for Richer Story Creation

   Park, Hannah ; Brown, Sarah ; Chu, Sharon Lynn ( January 2019 , Communications in computer and information science)

   This paper explores avatar identification in creative story- telling applications where users create their own story and environment. We present a study that investigated the effects of avatar facial similarity to the user on the quality of the story product they create. The children told a story using a digital puppet-based storytelling system by inter- acting with a physical puppet box that was augmented with a real-time video feed of the puppet enactment. We used a facial morphing technique to manipulate avatar facial similarity to the user. The resulting morphed image was applied to each participants puppet character, thus creating a custom avatar for each child to use in story creation. We hypothesized that the more familiar avatars appeared to participants, the stronger the sense of character identification would be, resulting in higher story quality. The proposed rationale is that visual familiarity may lead participants to draw richer story details from their past real-life experiences. Qualitative analysis of the stories supported our hypothesis. Our results contribute to avatar design in children's creative storytelling applications. 

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3. Supporting Interactive Storytelling with Block-Based Narrative Programming

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_41  

   Smith, A. ; Boulden, D. ; Mott, B. ; Hubbard-Cheuoua, A. ; Minogue, J. ; Oliver, K. ; Ringstaff, C. ( December 2021 , Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling)

   Recent years have seen growing interest in utilizing digital storytelling, where students create short narratives around a topic, as a means of creating motivating problem-solving activities in K-12 education. At the same time, there is increasing awareness of the need to engage students as young as elementary school in complex topics such as physical science and computational thinking. Building on previous research investigating block-based programming activities for storytelling, we present an approach to block-based programming for interactive digital storytelling to engage upper elementary students (ages 9 to 10) in computational thinking and narrative skill development. We describe both the learning environment that combines block-based narrative programming with a rich, interactive visualization engine designed to produce animations of student generated stories, as well as an analysis of students using the system to create narratives. Student generated stories are evaluated from both a story quality perspective as well as from their ability to communicate and demonstrate computational thinking and physical science concepts and practices. We also explore student behaviors during the story creation process and discuss potential improvements for future interventions. 

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4. A Computational View of the Emotional Regulation of Disgust using Multimodal Sensors

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FG47880.2020.00145  

   Kota, Vidhathri ; Gali, Geeta Madhav ; Nwogu, Ifeoma ( November 2020 , 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   Emotion regulation can be characterized by different activities that attempt to alter an emotional response, whether behavioral, physiological or neurological. The two most widely adopted strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are explored in this study, specifically in the context of disgust. Study participants (N = 21) experienced disgust via video exposure, and were instructed to either regulate their emotions or express them freely. If regulating, they were required to either cognitively reappraise or suppress their emotional experiences while viewing the videos. Video recordings of the participants' faces were taken during the experiment and electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), and galvanic skin response (GSR) readings were also collected for further analysis. We compared the participants behavioral (facial musculature movements) and physiological (GSR and heart rate) responses as they aimed to alter their emotional responses and computationally determined that when responding to disgust stimuli, the signals recorded during suppression and free expression were very similar, whereas those recorded during cognitive reappraisal were significantly different. Thus, in the context of this study, from a signal analysis perspective, we conclude that emotion regulation via cognitive reappraisal significantly alters participants' physiological responses to disgust, unlike regulation via suppression. 

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5. Altered Neural Correlates of Emotion Associated Pain Processing in Persistent Somatoform Pain Disorder: An fMRI Study

   https://doi.org/10.1111/papr.12358  

   Luo, Yanli ; Yan, Chao ; Huang, Tianming ; Fan, Mingxia ; Liu, Liang ; Zhao, Zhiyong ; Ni, Kaiji ; Jiang, Hong ; Huang, Xiao ; Lu, Zheng ; et al ( September 2016 , Pain Practice)

   Patients with persistent somatoform pain disorder (PSPD) suffer from long‐term pain and emotional conflicts. Recently, accumulating evidence indicated that emotion has a significant role in pain perception of somatoform pain disorder. To further understand the association between emotion and pain‐related brain activities, functional activities of patients with PSPD fulfilling ICD‐10 criteria and healthy controls were assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, while participants viewed a series of positive, neutral, or negative pictures with or without pinprick pain stimulation. Results showed that patients with PSPD had altered brain activities in the parietal gyrus, temporal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, and parahippocampus in response to pinprick pain stimuli during different emotions compared with the healthy control group. Moreover, patients with PSPD consistently showed hyperactivities in the prefrontal, the fusiform gyrus and the insula in response to negative stimuli under pinprick pain vs. non‐pain condition. The current findings provide some insights into the underlying relationship between emotion and pain‐related brain activity in patients with PSPD, which is of both theoretical and clinical importance.

    

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