scholarly journals Dogs can infer implicit information from human emotional expressions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Daniel S. Mills ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Briseida Resende

AbstractThe ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
V.A. Barabanschikov ◽  
E.V. Suvorova

The article is devoted to the results of approbation of the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT), a Swiss method for assessing dynamic emotional states, on Russian sample. Identification accuracy and the categorical fields’ structure of emotional expressions of a “living” face are analysed. Similarities and differences in the perception of affective groups of dynamic emotions in the Russian and Swiss samples are considered. A number of patterns of recognition of multi-modal expressions with changes in valence and arousal of emotions are described. Differences in the perception of dynamics and statics of emotional expressions are revealed. GERT method confirmed it’s high potential for solving a wide range of academic and applied problems.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Schweitzer ◽  
Tamas Krivachy ◽  
David Garcia

We provide an agent-based model to explain the emergence of collective opinions not based on feedback between different opinions, but based on emotional interactions between agents. The driving variable is the emotional state of agents, characterized by their valence, quantifying the emotion from unpleasant to pleasant, and their arousal, quantifying the degree of activity associated with the emotion. Both determine their emotional expression, from which collective emotional information is generated. This information feeds back on the dynamics of emotional states and of individual opinions in a non-linear manner. We derive the critical conditions for emotional interactions to obtain either consensus or polarization of opinions. Stochastic agent-based simulations and formal analyses of the model explain our results. Possible ways to validate the model are discussed.


2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franck Zenasni ◽  
Todd I. Lubart

The present study shows that the impact of emotional states on creativity depends on individual emotional characteristics as well as the type of task used. The results found during the last 30 years diverge concerning relationships between emotion and creative cognition. For this reason, we conducted a study to explore whether the impact of emotional states on creative potential is moderated by individuals’ emotional traits. Using a multivariate approach, we measured (1) emotional valence and arousal level of participants after an emotional induction, (2) emotional traits (e.g., alexithymia, emotional expressivity, affective intensity, emotional idiosyncrasy), and (3) quantity, originality, and valence of generated ideas in two distinct divergent thinking tasks. Participants were 107 undergraduate university students. Regression analyses confirm our hypothesis showing that the impact of emotional states on creative performance is not uniform, but depends on participants’ emotional state and emotion-related traits. For example, we observed that the more individuals had difficulty with emotional information and the higher their level of arousal, the less they generated pleasant ideas. Several processes such as arousal regulation may explain the observed results.


Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Schweitzer ◽  
Tamas Krivachy ◽  
David Garcia

We provide an agent-based model to explain the emergence of collective opinions not based on feedback between different opinions, but based on emotional interactions between agents. The driving variable is the emotional state of agents, characterized by their valence, quantifying the emotion from unpleasant to pleasant, and their arousal, quantifying the degree of activity associated with the emotion. Both determine their emotional expression, from which collective emotional information is generated. This information feeds back on the dynamics of emotional states and individual opinions in a nonlinear manner. We derive the critical conditions for emotional interactions to obtain either consensus or polarization of opinions. Stochastic agent-based simulations and formal analyses of the model explain our results. Possible ways to validate the model are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Maire ◽  
Renaud Brochard ◽  
Jean-Luc Kop ◽  
Vivien Dioux ◽  
Daniel Zagar

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.


Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitash Ojha ◽  
Charles Forceville ◽  
Bipin Indurkhya

Abstract Both mainstream and art comics often use various flourishes surrounding characters’ heads. These so-called “pictorial runes” (also called “emanata”) help convey the emotional states of the characters. In this paper, using (manipulated) panels from Western and Indian comic albums as well as neutral emoticons and basic shapes in different colors, we focus on the following two issues: (a) whether runes increase the awareness in comics readers about the emotional state of the character; and (b) whether a correspondence can be found between the types of runes (twirls, spirals, droplets, and spikes) and specific emotions. Our results show that runes help communicate emotion. Although no one-to-one correspondence was found between the tested runes and specific emotions, it was found that droplets and spikes indicate generic emotions, spirals indicate negative emotions, and twirls indicate confusion and dizziness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Victoria Johansen

Emotions constitute an integrated part of crime trials, but the evaluation of these emotions is dependent on broader cultural norms rarely addressed by legal practitioners. Previous research on emotions in the judiciary has also tended to underemphasize this cultural dimension of judges’ assessment of defendants’ emotional expressions. This article presents an ethnographic study of Danish judges’ considerations when they encounter defendants in court and get an impression of their behaviour, emotional state and physical appearance. Combining theories about emotions with intersectionality approaches, the article highlights the processes in which social categories are dynamically shaped through emotions. Judges’ assessments of emotions are mediated through their own cultural understandings, and what counts as ‘appropriate’ emotion is dependent on how the defendant is culturally and systemically situated.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 20150883 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Carine Savalli ◽  
Emma Otta ◽  
...  

The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e0258089
Author(s):  
Amelie M. Hübner ◽  
Ima Trempler ◽  
Corinna Gietmann ◽  
Ricarda I. Schubotz

Emotional sensations and inferring another’s emotional states have been suggested to depend on predictive models of the causes of bodily sensations, so-called interoceptive inferences. In this framework, higher sensibility for interoceptive changes (IS) reflects higher precision of interoceptive signals. The present study examined the link between IS and emotion recognition, testing whether individuals with higher IS recognize others’ emotions more easily and are more sensitive to learn from biased probabilities of emotional expressions. We recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) from forty-six healthy volunteers performing a speeded-response task, which required them to indicate whether a neutral facial expression dynamically turned into a happy or fearful expression. Moreover, varying probabilities of emotional expressions by their block-wise base rate aimed to generate a bias for the more frequently encountered emotion. As a result, we found that individuals with higher IS showed lower thresholds for emotion recognition, reflected in decreased reaction times for emotional expressions especially of high intensity. Moreover, individuals with increased IS benefited more from a biased probability of an emotion, reflected in decreased reaction times for expected emotions. Lastly, weak evidence supporting a differential modulation of SCR by IS as a function of varying probabilities was found. Our results indicate that higher interoceptive sensibility facilitates the recognition of emotional changes and is accompanied by a more precise adaptation to emotion probabilities.


2022 ◽  
pp. 164-167
Author(s):  
N. A. Ofitserova

The article considers the restaurant business from the point of view of not only the entrepreneurial aspect, but also the service aspect, which is fundamental. The reasons why people visit restaurants have been revealed. In addition to physical need, restaurants are an element of cognition and a way of experiencing positive emotions. The importance of the restaurant business in shaping people’s positive emotional state has been formulated. Two forms of emotional labor of an employee and the influence of emotional states on work performance have been highlighted. The role of emotional intelligence and communicative competence in customer satisfaction with a restaurant visit has been determined. The importance of developing emotional intelligence has been concluded. Recommendations for its development has been formulated. 


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