Embodied Autonomy in Digital Ecosystems: From Bio-Inspired Agents to Cognitive Systems

This paper proposes to promote autonomy in digital ecosystems so that it provides agents with information to improve the behavior of the digital ecosystem in terms of stability. This work proposes that, in digital ecosystems, autonomous agents can provide fundamental services and information. The final goal is to run the ecosystem, generate novel conditions and let agents exploit them. A set of evaluation measures must be defined as well. We want to provide an outline of some global indicators, such as heterogeneity and diversity, and establish relationships between agent behavior and these global indicators to fully understand interactions between agents, and to understand the dependence and autonomy relations that emerge between the interacting agents. Individual variations, interaction dependencies, and environmental factors are determinants of autonomy that would be considered. The paper concludes with a discussion of situations when autonomy is a milestone

Recognition of static and dynamic facial expressions: Influences of sex, type and intensity of emotion

Ecological validity of static and intense facial expressions in emotional recognition has been questioned. Recent studies have recommended the use of facial stimuli more compatible to the natural conditions of social interaction, which involves motion and variations in emotional intensity. In this study, we compared the recognition of static and dynamic facial expressions of happiness, fear, anger and sadness, presented in four emotional intensities (25 %, 50 %, 75 % and 100 %). Twenty volunteers (9 women and 11 men), aged between 19 and 31 years, took part in the study. The experiment consisted of two sessions in which participants had to identify the emotion of static (photographs) and dynamic (videos) displays of facial expressions on the computer screen. The mean accuracy was submitted to an Anova for repeated measures of model: 2 sexes x [2 conditions x 4 expressions x 4 intensities]. We observed an advantage for the recognition of dynamic expressions of happiness and fear compared to the static stimuli (p < .05). Analysis of interactions showed that expressions with intensity of 25 % were better recognized in the dynamic condition (p < .05). The addition of motion contributes to improve recognition especially in male participants (p < .05). We concluded that the effect of the motion varies as a function of the type of emotion, intensity of the expression and sex of the participant. These results support the hypothesis that dynamic stimuli have more ecological validity and are more appropriate to the research with emotions.

Emotion and relationships.

Forma parte de una serie que estudia la relación entre el arte y temas, situaciones, sentimientos e ideas que han alcanzado gran relevancia universal a lo largo de diferentes épocas y culturas y que se ha plasmado en manifestaciones como la fotografía, la pintura, la escultura, los textiles y el cine. Ayuda a saber interpretar las obras y estilos artísticos y entender el momento histórico en que fueron creados. Este volumen se centra en las emociones, sueños, pesadillas y fantasías vividos por los hombres de todos los tiempos y de todos los países, sus relaciones familiares, entre los amantes, o entre los individuos, y el mundo que les rodea y que han inspirado a muchos artistas.

Beliefs about the effects of social sharing of emotion in alexithymia

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Factor structure and measurement invariance of the Difficulties Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) in Spanish adolescents

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Enhancing emotion-based learning in decision-making under uncertainty

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Emotion recognition in multiple sclerosis

The effect of multiple sclerosis (MS) on the ability to identify emotional expressions in faces was investigated, and possible associations with patients’ characteristics were explored. 56 non-demented MS patients and 56 healthy subjects (HS) with similar demographic characteristics performed an emotion recognition task (ERT), the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT), and answered the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Additionally, MS patients underwent a neurological examination and a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. The ERT consisted of 42 pictures of faces (depicting anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral expressions) from the NimStim set. An iViewX high-speed eye tracker was used to record eye movements during ERT. The fixation times were calculated for two regions of interest (i.e., eyes and rest of the face). No significant differences were found between MS and HC on ERT’s behavioral and oculomotor measures. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses revealed significant associations between ERT’s behavioral performance and demographic, clinical, psychopathological, and cognitive measures.

Emotion perception in pre-kindergarten school children at Central Institute for the Deaf

This paper studies the ability of pre-kindergarten students with both normal hearing and impaired hearing to identify emotions in speech through audition only. In addition, the study assesses whether a listener's familiarity with a speaker's voice has an effect on his/her ability to identify the emotion of the speaker.

Emotion perception in speech: Discrimination, identification, and the effects of talker and sentence variability

The primary goal of this project is to study the ability of adult cochlear implant users to perceive emotion through speech alone. A secondary goal of this project is to study the development of emotion perception in normal hearing children to serve as a baseline for comparing emotion perception abilities in similarly-aged children with impaired hearing.

Recognizing emotion in illustrations and photographs: Comparing responses of children who are deaf or hard of hearing with those of children with normal hearing

Recognizing emotions are something children do everyday, whether it is identifying that mom is sad because she lost her job or that a character in a story is mad because no one will listen to him. The purpose of this study is to find out if recognizing emotions is easier to do with realistic photographs or illustrations.

Memory-based Embodied Cognition: a computational architecture

At its most fundamental, cognition as displayed by biological agents (such as humans) may be said to consist of the manipulation and utilisation of memory. Recent discussions in the field of cognitive robotics have emphasised the role of embodiment and the necessity of a value or motivation for autonomous behaviour. This work proposes a computational architecture – the Memory-Based Cognitive (MBC) architecture – based upon these considerations for the autonomous development of control of a simple mobile robot. This novel architecture will permit the exploration of theoretical issues in cognitive robotics and animal cognition. Furthermore, the biological inspiration of the architecture is anticipated to result in a mobile robot controller which displays adaptive behaviour in unknown environments.

Embodied social capital and geographic perspectives: performing the habitus

This paper reopens debates of geographic theorizations and conceptualizations of social capital. I argue that human geographers have tended to underplay the analytic value of social capital, by equating the concept with dominant policy interpretations. It is contended that geographers could more explicitly contribute to pervasive critical social science accounts. With this in mind, an embodied perspective of social capital is constructed. This synthesizes Bourdieu's capitals and performative theorizations of identity, to progress the concept of social capital in four key ways. First, this theorization more fully reconnects embodied differences to broader socioeconomic processes. Second, an exploration of how embodied social differences can emerge directly from the political-economy and/or via broader operations of power is facilitated. Third, a path is charted through the endurance of embodied inequalities and the potential for social transformation. Finally, embodied social capital can advance social science conceptualizations of the spatiality of social capital, by illuminating the importance of broader sociospatial contexts and relations to the embodiment of social capital within individuals.