Supporting Personalized Health Care With Social Media Analytics: An Application to Hypothyroidism

Social media analytics can considerably contribute to understanding health conditions beyond clinical practice, by capturing patients’ discussions and feelings about their quality of life in relation to disease treatments. In this article, we propose a methodology to support a detailed analysis of the therapeutic experience in patients affected by a specific disease, as it emerges from health forums. As a use case to test the proposed methodology, we analyze the experience of patients affected by hypothyroidism and their reactions to standard therapies. Our approach is based on a data extraction and filtering pipeline, a novel topic detection model named Generative Text Compression with Agglomerative Clustering Summarization ( GTCACS ), and an in-depth data analytic process. We advance the state of the art on automated detection of adverse drug reactions ( ADRs ) since, rather than simply detecting and classifying positive or negative reactions to a therapy, we are capable of providing a fine characterization of patients along different dimensions, such as co-morbidities, symptoms, and emotional states.

Value Orientations in Education System: Approach, Interpretation, and Formation

The implemented theoretical study has revealed various scientific positions aimed at: interpreting the concepts of value and value orientation; finding controversial positions and affinities in the use of “value” and “value orientation” concepts; identifyingambiguous positions on structural elements of value orientation and value formation mechanism. The purpose of undertakenresearch was theoretical, experimental and methodological in nature, outlining formation of value orientations in adolescence and youth ages.The developed definitions and determined structural components of value orientations allowed initiation of an experimental investigation of value orientations in adolescents and young people through which interrelation between the constitutive components of value orientation was confirmed, the specifics of values in adolescents and young people was emphasized. Outlining the specifics of value orientation structure led to identification of criteria, indicators and descriptors and to development and validation of a Questionnaire for Value Orientation Assessment. The results of experimental study laid the basis for development and recognition of a Pedagogical Model for formation of value orientations in adolescents and young people. The previously identified mechanism for formation of values and functioning of value orientations was transposed into the nucleus of the Pedagogical Model, which included the following components: behaviour, emotional states, attitudes, convictions, and values. In order to identify the methodology for forming value orientations in the formal, informal and non-formal educational environment, the principles of humanistic, constructivist and cognitivist education, strategies, conditions were highlighted, which ensure a dynamic progress in general development of the personality, implicitly of value orientations, and which is taken into account in framework ofa formative experiment.The data obtained from the validation of the developed Pedagogical Model confirmed its effectiveness and proved that it was a multidimensional one, which could be of great benefit to specialists in the field of Education Sciences and teachers from schools and higher educationalinstitutions.

Blue Eyes Technology

The Blue Eyes technology aims at creating computational machines that have perceptual and sensory ability like those of human beings. It uses non-obtrusive sensing method, employing most modern video cameras and microphones to identify the user’s actions through the use of imparted sensory abilities. The machine can understand what a user wants, where he is looking at, and even realize his physical or emotional states. The Blue Eyes Technology developed is intended to be a complex solution for monitoring and recording the operator’s conscious brain involvement as well as his/her physiological condition. This shows yet another development in the field of Brain Computer Interface. The basic idea behind this technology is to give the computer the human power. We all have some perceptual abilities. That is we can understand each other’s feelings. For example we can understand one’s emotional state by analysing his facial expression. If we add these perceptual abilities of human to computers would enable computers to work together with human beings as intimate partners. The “BLUE EYES” technology aims at creating computational machines that have perceptual and sensory ability like those of human beings. This paper discusses the concept of blue eyes technology.

Taking care of a real self - description of the psychotherapeutic process of a patient with narcissistic personality disorders in the field of dance/movement psychotherapy

Introduction: Dance/movement psychotherapy (DMT) is a psychotherapeutic trend that belongs to the approaches that involve working with the body. Thinking about a wider perspective, DMT belongs to the group of action-oriented psychotherapies. It assumes that the person, while moving, can show his/her emotional states. Additionally, it can lead to development and personal integration. The goal is to deepen awareness. Psychotherapy with dance and movement is practiced among psychotic patients, patients suffering from neurotic or personality disorders, and as a method of personal development. The aim of the work is to describe the psychotherapeutic process of an individual client in the field of dance/movement psychotherapy as a method in which dance leads to development and personal integration. Material and method: Working with a client, Beata, took place in a strictly defined setting. Meetings took place once a week in the same office during 55 minutes. They were of an individual nature. First, Beata was diagnosed according to the DSM-5 [1] and ICD-10 [2] classification, which was supplemented with the PDM-2 diagnosis [3]. During the therapeutic work, the phenomena of transference and countertransference were taken into account, the patient’s behavior was interpreted according to John Bowlby’s attachment theory and mentalization. During practicing DMT it is important to take care of Authentic Movement method, observation of movement using the Laban Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS) method and the Kastenberg Movement Profile (KMP). Results: The changes that DMT psychotherapy started to bring were observed both in the client’s movement and in the verbal layer. The client has acquired the ability to observe her feelings and needs. This influenced her perception of announcement heard from different people and the decisions she made. The DMT therapy with Beata is not over yet, which makes it possible to take a deeper look at topics related to therapeutic goals. Conclusions: Dance/movement psychotherapy has proved to be an effective method of working with patients with personality disorders psychopathology of the narcissistic type. This method makes it possible to build a sense of the patient’s boundaries and needs, and to strengthen self-esteem. Sessions seem to be very helpful in integrating inner life, feelings and experience. In addition, it helps in dealing with the internal tension of patients and gives the opportunity to expand ranges of movement. In the verbal part, it is possible to discuss the problems that the client carries within himself, which cause him fear, anxiety and other unpleasant emotions.

Feel to Heal: Negative Emotion Differentiation Promotes Medication Adherence in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that results in lower quality of life. Medication adherence is important for reducing relapse, disease progression, and MS-related symptoms, particularly during the early stages of MS. However, adherence may be impacted by negative emotional states. Therefore, it is important to identify protective factors. Past research suggests that the ability to discriminate between negative emotional states, also known as negative emotion differentiation (NED), may be protective against enactment of maladaptive risk-related behaviors. However, less is known as to how NED may promote adaptive health behaviors such as medication adherence. Utilizing weekly diaries, we investigated whether NED moderates the association between negative affect and medication adherence rates across 58 weeks among patients (n = 27) newly diagnosed with MS (following McDonald criteria). Results revealed that NED significantly moderated the relationship between negative affect and medication adherence. Specifically, greater negative affect was associated with lower adherence only for individuals reporting low NED. However, this link disappeared for those reporting moderate to high NED. Building upon past research, our findings suggest that NED may promote adaptive health behaviors and have important clinical implications for the treatment and management of chronic illness.

The role of emotional service in the restaurant business

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.

‘Focusing and Unfocusing’—Cognitive, Evaluative, and Emotional Dynamics in the Relationship with Human Embryos among ART Beneficiaries

This article uses data gathered from a study conducted in Portugal to examine the (plural and composite) conceptions that doctors, embryologists, and beneficiaries of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have of the in vitro human embryo. Taking the sociology of engagements, developed by Thévenot, as its theoretical lens, the article draws on a total of 69 interviews with ART patients to analyse the plurality of fluid meanings produced about this biological entity, whose status is neither static nor universal. ART beneficiaries are likely to produce plural conceptions of the lab-generated embryo within the framework of different regimes of engagement, understood as cognitive and evaluative formats. These various pragmatic regimes, in turn, entail distinct emotional investments. When speaking about their relationship with embryos, beneficiaries therefore express plural emotional experiences, which are articulated using terms such as affection, love, detachment, loss, frustration, hope, mourning, and anguish. Using the theoretical framework of the sociology of engagements, we propose an approach that enables us to produce a detailed record of the connections between the cognitive, evaluative, and emotional dimensions in beneficiaries’ relationship with—and decision-making processes about—the embryos, accounting for the plasticity of emotional states linked to the (re)configuration of attributed meanings.

Data Augmentation for Audio–Visual Emotion Recognition with an Efficient Multimodal Conditional GAN

Audio–visual emotion recognition is the research of identifying human emotional states by combining the audio modality and the visual modality simultaneously, which plays an important role in intelligent human–machine interactions. With the help of deep learning, previous works have made great progress for audio–visual emotion recognition. However, these deep learning methods often require a large amount of data for training. In reality, data acquisition is difficult and expensive, especially for the multimodal data with different modalities. As a result, the training data may be in the low-data regime, which cannot be effectively used for deep learning. In addition, class imbalance may occur in the emotional data, which can further degrade the performance of audio–visual emotion recognition. To address these problems, we propose an efficient data augmentation framework by designing a multimodal conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) for audio–visual emotion recognition. Specifically, we design generators and discriminators for audio and visual modalities. The category information is used as their shared input to make sure our GAN can generate fake data of different categories. In addition, the high dependence between the audio modality and the visual modality in the generated multimodal data is modeled based on Hirschfeld–Gebelein–Re´nyi (HGR) maximal correlation. In this way, we relate different modalities in the generated data to approximate the real data. Then, the generated data are used to augment our data manifold. We further apply our approach to deal with the problem of class imbalance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a data augmentation strategy with a multimodal conditional GAN for audio–visual emotion recognition. We conduct a series of experiments on three public multimodal datasets, including eNTERFACE’05, RAVDESS, and CMEW. The results indicate that our multimodal conditional GAN has high effectiveness for data augmentation of audio–visual emotion recognition.

How Do People with Late Bedtimes use Social Media?

Background: The use of social media before bedtime usually results in late bedtimes, which is a prevalent cause of insufficient sleep among the general population of most countries. However, it is still unclear how people with late bedtimes use social media, which is crucial for adopting targeted behavior interventions to prevent insufficient sleep. Methods: In this study, we randomly selected 100000 users from Sina Weibo and collected all their posting through web crawling. The posting time was proposed as a proxy to identify nights on which a user stays up late. A text classifier and topic model were developed to identify the emotional states and themes of their posts. We also analyzed their posting/reposting activity, time-use patterns, and geographical distribution. Results: Our analyses show that habitually late sleepers express fewer emotions and use social media more for entertainment and getting information. People who rarely stay up late feel worse when staying up late, and they use social media more for emotional expression. People with late bedtimes mainly live in developed areas and use smartphones more when staying up late. Conclusion: This study depicts the online behavior of people with late bedtimes, which helps understand them and thereby adopt appropriately targeted interventions to avoid insufficient sleep.

Mindful Eating

The chapter is an attempt by authors to highlight the scope of mindful eating as an adjunct therapeutic tool. There is a close link between emotional states and eating, specifically intense emotional states and unhealthy eating practices. Mediating factors such as an individual's perception of food-related cues, changes in cognitive control, and eating as an emotional coping strategy influence the relationship between emotion and eating behavior. Mindful eating can be utilized as an adjunct in therapy by helping clients to practice cognitive control and by breaking the cycle of unhealthy coping strategies like emotional eating. Similar to other mindfulness techniques, mindful eating involves paying attention to the food intentionally, in the moment and without judgment. The chapter covers various approaches to mindfulness eating. Authors have compiled guidelines for therapists on how to introduce mindful eating as an adjunct in therapy settings for clients who have unhealthy eating patterns along with anxiety and depressive symptoms as well as for those suffering from eating disorders.