Emotion recognition from dynamic emotional displays following anterior cingulotomy and anterior capsulotomy for chronic depression

Four patients that had received an anterior cingulotomy (ACING) and five patients that had received both an ACING and an anterior capsulotomy (ACAPS) as an intervention for chronic, treatment refractory depression were presented with a series of dynamic emotional stimuli and invited to identify the emotion portrayed. Their performance was compared with that of a group of non-surgically treated patients with major depression (n = 17) and with a group of matched, never-depressed controls (n = 22). At the time of testing, four of the nine neurosurgery patients had recovered from their depressive episode, whereas five remained depressed. Analysis of emotion recognition accuracy revealed no significant differences between depressed and non-depressed neurosurgically treated patients. Similarly, no significant differences were observed between the patients treated with ACING alone and those treated with both ACING and ACAPS. Comparison of the emotion recognition accuracy of the neurosurgically treated patients and the depressed and healthy control groups revealed that the surgically treated patients exhibited a general impairment in their recognition accuracy compared to healthy controls. Regression analysis revealed that participants' emotion recognition accuracy was predicted by the number of errors they made on the Stroop colour-naming task. It is plausible that the observed deficit in emotion recognition accuracy was a consequence of impaired attentional control, which may have been a result of the surgical lesions to the anterior cingulate cortex. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotion recognition and alexithymia in females with non-clinical disordered eating

Objectives: The aims were to determine if emotion recognition deficits observed in eating disorders generalise to non-clinical disordered eating and to establish if other psychopathological and personality factors contributed to, or accounted for, these deficits. Design: Females with high (n=23) and low (n=22) scores on the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) were assessed on their ability to recognise emotion from videotaped social interactions. Participants also completed a face memory task, a Stroop task, and self-report measures of alexithymia, depression and anxiety. Results: Relative to the low EDI group, high EDI participants exhibited a general deficit in recognition of emotion, which was related to their scores on the alexithymia measure and the bulimia subscale of the EDI. They also exhibited a specific deficit in the recognition of anger, which was related to their scores on the body dissatisfaction subscale of the EDI. Conclusions: In line with clinical eating disorders, non-clinical disordered eating is associated with emotion recognition deficits. However, the nature of these deficits appears to be dependent upon the type of eating psychopathology and the degree of co-morbid alexithymia.

A rule-based approach to implicit emotion detection in text

Most research in the area of emotion detection in written text focused on detecting explicit expressions of emotions in text. In this paper, we present a rule-based pipeline approach for detecting implicit emotions in written text without emotion-bearing words based on the OCC Model. We have evaluated our approach on three different datasets with five emotion categories. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms the lexicon matching method consistently across all the three datasets by a large margin of 17–30% in F-measure and gives competitive performance compared to a supervised classifier. In particular, when dealing with formal text which follows grammatical rules strictly, our approach gives an average F-measure of 82.7% on “Happy”, “Angry-Disgust” and “Sad”, even outperforming the supervised baseline by nearly 17% in F-measure. Our preliminary results show the feasibility of the approach for the task of implicit emotion detection in written text.

Racialized sexualities within the romance tour industry: The influence of affect and emotion upon transnational hierarchies of desire

Online international introduction sites that offer romance tours to American men in search of a foreign bride are an important and rapidly growing component of the internet dating industry; the number of these agencies in the U.S. tripled from two hundred to six hundred in the past 10 years. Previous scholars have examined the so-called `mail order bride' industry in order to demonstrate that the women involved are agents and not victims. Many scholars have also highlighted the importance of race in shaping American men's desires in one particular region or country. My dissertation provides an important addition to the literature surrounding romance tourism by including participants from all three major regions associated with romance tourism: Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. I collected the data for the dissertation by becoming a participant observer of a romance tour in Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines. I argue that romance tourism is an important example of the global intimate, and the ways in which globalized processes are created and sustained through everyday intimate emotions and interactions. By examining the ways in which the emotions of desire, disgust, and anxiety influence individual romance tour participant's constructions of racialized hierarchies, the links between individual emotions and global systems are revealed. The concept of the global intimate challenges the hierarchy of scale that places the body, the home, and the intimate on a much lower level than the scale of the global or the national, and at the same time challenges the binary that divides the individual from the global. Through highlighting the different emotional negotiations that are constantly occurring in the romance tour industry, I highlight the important ways in which individual emotions and affects influence global processes on a large scale and vice versa.^

The role of emotion regulation on social participation following stroke

© 2014 The British Psychological Society.

The role of emotion regulation on social participation following stroke

© 2014 The British Psychological Society.

Effects of a positive emotion-based adjuvant psychological therapy in colorectal cancer patients: a pilot study

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of an “Enhancing Positive Emotions Procedure” (EPEP) based on positive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy in relieving distress at the time of adjuvant chemotherapy treatment in colorectal cancer patients (CRC). It is expected that EPEP will increase quality of life and positive affect in CRC patients during chemotherapy treatment intervention and at 1 month follow-up.Method: A group of 24 CRC patients received the EPEP procedure (intervention group), whereas another group of 20 CRC patients did not receive the EPEP (control group). Quality of life (EORTC-QLQC30), and mood (PANAS) were assessed in three moments: prior to enter the study (T1), at the end of the time required to apply the EPEP (T2, 6 weeks after T1), and, at follow-up (T3, one-month after T2). Patient’s assessments of the EPEP (improving in mood states, and significance of the attention received) were assessed with Lickert scales.Results: Insomnia was reduced in the intervention group. Treatment group had better scores on positive affect although there were no significantly differences between groups and over time. There was a trend to better scores at T2 and T3 for the intervention group on global health status, physical, role, and social functioning scales. Patients stated that positive mood was enhanced and that EPEP was an important resource.Conclusions: CRC patients receiving EPEP during chemotherapy believed that this intervention was important. Furthermore, EPEP seems to improve positive affect and quality of life. EPEP has potential benefits, and its implementation to CRC patients should be considered.

The Narrative Value of Dance Communication: "habitus", musicality and emotion

The richness of dance comes from the need to work with an individual body. Still, the body of the dancer belongs to plural context, crossed by artistic and social traditions, which locate the artists in a given field. We claim that role conflict is an essential component of the structure of collective artistic creativity. We address the production of discourse in a British dance company, with data that spawns from the ethnography ‘Dance and Cognition’, directed by David Kirsh at the University of California, together with WayneMcGregor-Random Dance. Our Critical Discourse Analysis is based on multiple interviews to the dancers and choreographer. Our findings show how creativity in dance seems to be empirically observable, and thus embodied and distributed shaped by the dance habitus of the particular social context.

Do Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation Mediate the Relationship Between Mental Toughness and Symptoms of Depression?

Mental Toughness (MT) provides crucial psychological capacities for achievement in sports,
education, and work settings. Previous research examined the role of MT in the domain of
mental health and showed that MT is negatively associated with and predictive of fewer
depressive symptoms in non-clinical populations. The present study aimed at 1) investigating
to what extent mentally tough individuals use two emotion regulation strategies: cognitive
reappraisal and expressive suppression; 2) exploring whether individual differences in
emotion regulation strategy use mediate the relationship between MT and depressive
symptoms. Three hundred sixty-four participants (M = 24.31 years, SD = 9.16) provided
self-reports of their levels of MT, depressive symptoms, and their habitual use of cognitive
reappraisal and expressive suppression. The results showed a statistically significant
correlation between MT and two commonly used measures of depressive symptoms. A small
statistically significant positive correlation between MT and the habitual use of cognitive
reappraisal was also observed. The correlation between MT and the habitual use of
expressive suppression was statistically significant, but the size of the effect was small. A
statistical mediation model indicated that individual differences in the habitual use of
expressive suppression mediate the relationship between MT and depressive symptoms. No
such effect was found for the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal. Implications of these
findings and possible avenues for future research are discussed.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids are Related to Abnormal Emotion Processing in Adolescent Boys with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Background In addition to the core symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with poor emotion regulation. There is some evidence that children and young adults with ADHD have lower omega-3 levels and that supplementation with omega-3 can improve both ADHD and affective symptoms. We therefore investigated differences between ADHD and non-ADHD children in omega-3/6 fatty acid plasma levels and the relationship between those indices and emotion-elicited event-related potentials (ERPs). Methods Children/adolescents with (n=31) and without ADHD (n=32) were compared in their plasma omega-3/6 indices and corresponding ERPs during an emotion processing task. Results Children with ADHD had lower mean omega-3/6 and ERP abnormalities in emotion processing, independent of emotional valence relative to control children. ERP abnormalities were significantly associated with lower omega-3 levels in the ADHD group. Conclusions The findings reveal for the first time that lower omega-3 fatty acids are associated with impaired emotion processing in ADHD children.