Cognició i emoció: Sobre les relacions entre memòria i emoció i la congruència del record amb l'estat afectiu

El següent treball tracta sobre les principals relacions existents entre la memòria i les emocions. Una vegada revisats els dos conceptes de manera separada, el nostre objectiu serà vincular els dos conceptes, per tal de saber com influeixen les emocions en el processos mnèmics com són la codificació, la consolidació i el record. Per assolir aquest objectiu, també realitzarem una part empírica en la qual prendrem com a referent la teoria de la Memòria Dependent de l'Estat d'Ànim proposada per Bower (1981). En la línia d'aquesta teoria, la hipòtesi general que ens plantegem a la part empírica és que si induïm a un subjecte a un estat d'ànim determinat i li fem aprendre un llistat de paraules amb diferent valència emocional, recordarà millor les paraules que coincideixin amb l'estat afectiu del subjecte en el moment de l'aprenentatge. Per a resoldre aquesta hipòtesi prendrem com a referent el disseny experimental de Meilan, Carro, Guerrero, Carpi, Gómez & Palmero (2012). Els nostres resultats recolzen les hipòtesis basades en la teoria de congruència afectiva de Bower (1981) i, parcialment el disseny d'investigació de Meilan et. al (2012).

A propòsit d'una cançó popular recollida per Jacint Verdaguer i enviada al seu amic Marià Aguiló

«Comiat de Vic» forma part del recull de cançons populars que Jacint Verdaguer va enviar al seu amic i erudit mallorquí Marià Aguiló. La lletra de la cançó traça un itinerari a través de la ciutat que va fent menció dels edificis religiosos que es troben durant el trajecte. L’emoció acumulada i el dolor de la partença indiquen que probablement es tracta del comiat definitiu d’un condemnat a mort.

Knowledge misallocation and growth

We develop a growth model where knowledge is embodied in individuals and diffused across sectors through labor mobility. The existence of labor mobility costs constrains mobility and, thus, generates labor misallocation. Different levels of labor misallocation imply different levels of exploitation of available knowledge and, therefore, different total factor productivity across countries. We derive a positive relationship between growth and labor mobility, which is consistent with the empirical evidence, by assuming aggregate constant returns to capital. We also analyze the short and long run effects of labor mobility costs in the case of decreasing returns to capital. It turns out that changes in mobility costs have larger economic effects when different types of worker have small rather than large complementarities. Finally, we show that different labor income taxes or labor market tightness imply different rates of labor mobility and, therefore, can explain differences in Gross Domestic Product across countries.

Towards a lightweight adaptative multicomponential affective recognition system

As part of the Affective Computing research field, the development of automatic affective recognition systems can enhance human-computer interactions by allowing the creation of interfaces that react to the user's emotional state. To that end, this Master Thesis brings affect recognition to nowadays most used human computer interface, mobile devices, by developing a facial expression recognition system able to perform detection under the difficult conditions of viewing angle and illumination that entails the interaction with a mobile device. Moreover, this Master Thesis proposes to combine emotional features detected from expression with contextual information of the current situation, to infer a complex and extensive emotional state of the user. Thus, a cognitive computational model of emotion is defined that provides a multicomponential affective state of the user through the integration of the detected emotional features into appraisal processes. In order to account for individual differences in the emotional experience, these processes can be adapted to the culture and personality of the user.

El rol de la marca en la comunicación del espacio turístico

El turismo es a menudo el aspecto promocional más visible en el proceso de creación y proyección de una determinada imagen territorial. Esto es debido a que la actividad turística acumula un amplio bagaje en aspectos vinculados a la comercialización de espacios geográficos, y esta circunstancia incide, por ejemplo, en la presencia de numerosa literatura relacionada con la promoción, el marketing y el branding de espacios turísticos. A nivel metodológico, se ha optado por un análisis de fuentes documentales, que ha servido para fijar los cimientos de la evolución de la comunicación de los espacios turísticos mediante el uso de marcas. Se concluye que el registro de la comunicación turística ha experimentado una clara mutación en base a una doble dualidad: de la información a la persuasión y de la promoción a la emoción. Asi mismo, el trabajo en cuestión muestra de qué forma la estrategia comunicativa transcurre nuevamente entorno a las necesidades emociona les del potencial turista y/o visitante en detrimento de las necesidades de información subyacentes al propio destino turístico.

The communicative dimension of landscape. A theoretical and applied proposal

The fusion of knowledge, the interrelationship of disciplines and, finally, the interaction of learning fields, provides new challenges for an auto denominated global society. The contemporary value of landscape, linked to the patent commodification of culture, the commercial construction of identities, the triumph of inauthenticity, of the induced representation or the economy of symbolism, open up great prospects for studying the symbolic value of landscape. The rapprochement of geographical praxis to the study of space intangibles, linked to the discovery of emotional geographies, besides the growing interest of communicational sciences on the territorial discourse, allow us to envisage a communicative study of landscape based on a fusion of geographical and communicational knowledge. The balancing of the variables: geography, landscape, emotion and communication, enables the progress towards analysing the emotionalisation of space to discern its intangible value, which emerges from the application of different communication techniques.

Children's understanding of pretend emotions

This preliminary study aims to investigate children’s ability to understand that the emotional expressions that occur in pretend play do not necessarily coincide with the emotions people feel inside. Previous research has found that children aged 4 and 6 have difficulty to distinguish between the external and the internal emotion of a character who pretends an emotion. In the present work, thirteen 4-year-olds and eight 6-year-olds were administered stories in which a character simulated an emotion. Differently from previous research, the questions addressed to the children did not focus on the distinction external/internal emotion but on the distinction between real/pretend emotion. Furthermore, since previous research has suggested that children may understand better selfpretence than pretence of others, the participants in our study were engaged in a pretence situation where they had to pretend to be happy. The results obtained showed that, contrary to previous research, most 4- and 6-year-olds realize that pretend emotions may not be real, and this was true both for self-pretence and for the pretence of others

Individual Differences in Music Reward Experiences

Music is one of the most pleasant human experiences, even though it has no direct biological advantage. However little is known about individual differences in how people experience reward in music-related activities. The goal of the present study was to describe the main facets of music experience that could explain the variance observed in how people experience reward associated with music. To this end we developed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), which was administrated to three large samples. Our results showed that the musical reward experience can be decomposed into five reliable factors: Musical Seeking, Emotion Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, and Sensory-Motor. These factors were correlated with socio-demographic factors and measures of general sensitivity to reward and hedonic experience. We propose that the five-factor structure of musical reward experience might be very relevant in the study of psychological and neural bases of emotion and pleasure associated to music.