The influence of emotion clarity on emotional prosody identification in paranoid schizophrenia

Identification of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody (i.e. speech melody) is often impaired in schizophrenia. For facial emotion identification, a recent study suggested that the relative deficit in schizophrenia is enhanced when the presented emotion is easier to recognize. It is unclear whether this effect is specific to face processing or part of a more general emotion recognition deficit.

Judaism and Emotion - Texts, Performance, Experience

Judaism and Emotion breaks with stereotypes that, until recently, branded Judaism as a rigid religion of laws and prohibitions. Instead, authors from different fields of research discuss the subject of Judaism and emotion from various scholarly perspectives; they present an understanding of Judaism that does not exclude spirituality and emotions from Jewish thought. In doing so, the contributions account for the relation between the representation of emotion and the actual emotions that living and breathing human beings feel in their everyday lives. While scholars of rabbinic studies and theology take a historical-critical and socio-historical approach to the subject, musicologists and scholars of religious studies focus on the overall research question of how the literary representations of emotion in Judaism are related to ritual and musical performances within Jewish worship. They describe in a more holistic fashion how Judaism serves to integrate various aspects of social life. In doing so, they examine the dynamic interrelationship between Judaism, cognition, and culture.

Motivation und Emotion. Allgemeine Psychologie für Bachelor

Ziellos und gefühllos – so wäre unser Leben ohne Motivation und Emotion! Ziele geben unserem Leben Sinn und Struktur, sie treiben uns zu großen Anstrengungen und erstaunlichen Leistungen an. Sie richten unser Verhalten auf die Dinge aus, die uns wichtig sind. – Und was uns wichtig ist, wofür sich die ganze Anstrengung lohnt, das sagen uns unsere Emotionen. Die „Module“ Motivation und Emotion gehören somit zu den spannendsten Fächern der Psychologie und stellen wichtige Grundlageninformationen für die psychologischen Anwendungsfächer zur Verfügung. Dieses Lehrbuch beantwortet die wichtigsten Fragen der Motivations- und Emotionspsychologie kompakt und verständlich.

Emotion recognition: The role of featural and configural face information

Several studies investigated the role of featural and configural information when processing facial identity. A lot less is known about their contribution to emotion recognition. In this study, we addressed this issue by inducing either a featural or a configural processing strategy (Experiment 1) and by investigating the attentional strategies in response to emotional expressions (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants identified emotional expressions in faces that were presented in three different versions (intact, blurred, and scrambled) and in two orientations (upright and inverted). Blurred faces contain mainly configural information, and scrambled faces contain mainly featural information. Inversion is known to selectively hinder configural processing. Analyses of the discriminability measure (A′) and response times (RTs) revealed that configural processing plays a more prominent role in expression recognition than featural processing, but their relative contribution varies depending on the emotion. In Experiment 2, we qualified these differences between emotions by investigating the relative importance of specific features by means of eye movements. Participants had to match intact expressions with the emotional cues that preceded the stimulus. The analysis of eye movements confirmed that the recognition of different emotions rely on different types of information. While the mouth is important for the detection of happiness and fear, the eyes are more relevant for anger, fear, and sadness.

Changes in emotion recognition relate to hypertension status

Background: Emotional processing in essential hypertension beyond self-report questionnaire has hardly been investigated. The aim of this study is to examine associations between hypertension status and recognition of facial affect. Methods: 25 healthy, non-smoking, medication-free men including 13 hypertensive subjects aged between 20 and 65 years completed a computer-based task in order to examine sensitivity of recognition of facial affect. Neutral faces gradually changed to a specific emotion in a pseudo-continuous manner. Slides of the six basic emotions (fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, anger, surprise) were chosen from the „NimStim Set“. Pictures of three female and three male faces were electronically morphed in 1% steps of intensity from 0% to 100% (36 sets of faces with 100 pictures each). Each picture of a set was presented for one second, ranging from 0% to 100% of intensity. Participants were instructed to press a stop button as soon as they recognized the expression of the face. After stopping a forced choice between the six basic emotions was required. As dependent variables, we recorded the emotion intensity at which the presentation was stopped and the number of errors (error rate). Recognition sensitivity was calculated as emotion intensity of correctly identified emotions. Results: Mean arterial pressure was associated with a significantly increased recognition sensitivity of facial affect for the emotion anger (ß = - .43, p = 0.03*, Δ R2= .110). There was no association with the emotions fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise (p’s > .0.41). Mean arterial pressure did not relate to the mean number of errors for any of the facial emotions. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that an increased blood pressure is associated with increased recognition sensitivity of facial affect for the emotion anger, if a face shows anger. Hypertensives perceive facial anger expression faster than normotensives, if anger is shown.

The FORA Framework - A Fuzzy Grassroots Ontology for Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management deals with monitoring and influencing the online record of a person, an organization or a product. The Social Web offers increasingly simple ways to publish and disseminate personal or opinionated information, which can rapidly have a disastrous influence on the online reputation of some of the entities. The author focuses on the Social Web and possibilities of its integration with the Semantic Web as resource for a semi-automated tracking of online reputations using imprecise natural language terms. The inherent structure of natural language supports humans not only in communication but also in the perception of the world. Thereby fuzziness is a promising tool for transforming those human perceptions into computer artifacts. Through fuzzy grassroots ontologies, the Social Semantic Web becomes more naturally and thus can streamline online reputation management. For readers interested in the cross-over field of computer science, information systems, and social sciences, this book is an ideal source for becoming acquainted with the evolving field of fuzzy online reputation management in the Social Semantic Web area. ​