Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text

Chat-based counselling has become increasingly popular in the era of telecommunication. The need for accessible therapy has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its text-based nature, chat-based counselling provides an opportunity for machine-based analysis. It even has the potential to provide machine-based counselling services. However, the informational resources for machine-based analysis and interaction are rather scarce especially in a Japanese-language context. We created a Japanese dictionary for sentiment analysis, using a technique via machine-based text analysis, tailored for counselling related text. It includes 2389 words that were frequently used in chat-based counselling corpora. The following attributes were included for each word: (1) valence rating by the general public, (2) valence rating by clinical psychologists, (3) emotionality, and (4) body-relatedness.

Influence of acute pain on valence rating of words

Numerous studies showed the effect of negative affective and pain-related semantic primes enhancing the perceived intensity of successive painful stimuli. It remains unclear whether and how painful primes are able to influence semantic stimuli in a similar way. Therefore, we investigated the effects of noxious primes on the perception of the valence of subsequent semantic stimuli. In two experiments, 48 healthy subjects were asked to give their valence ratings regarding different semantic stimuli (pain-related, negative, positive, and neutral adjectives) after they were primed with noxious electrical stimuli of moderate intensity. Experiment 1 focused on the existence of the effect, experiment 2 focused on the length of the effect. Valence ratings of pain-related, negative, and positive words (not neutral words) became more negative after a painful electrical prime was applied in contrast to no prime. This effect was more pronounced for pain-related words compared to negative, pain-unrelated words. Furthermore, the priming effect continued to affect the valence ratings even some minutes after the painful priming had stopped. So, painful primes are influencing the perception of semantic stimuli as well as semantic primes are influencing the perception of painful stimuli.

Upward Action Promotes Selective Attention to Negative Words

Space-valence metaphor (e.g., bad is down) is embedded within cognitive and emotional processing (e.g., negative stimuli at a lower space capture visual attention more than those at upper space). Previous studies have revealed that motor action to vertical direction affects the emotional valence rating of stimuli with a valence corresponding to the metaphor, such as downward manual action that increases the negative rating of the stimuli. Previous studies also showed that motor action affects the valence rating only when introduced after the stimuli presentation. However, motor action before the stimuli presentation may affect visual selective attention. In the present study, we replicated the previous result; vertical or horizontal manual action introduced before the stimuli presentation does not affect the valence rating (Experiment 1). Moreover, we employed a modified version of the dot-probe task as a measure of visual selective attention to emotional stimuli (Experiment 2), where participants’ vertical or horizontal manual action triggered a pair of emotional words. Results revealed that an upward, not downward manual action promoted the selective attention to negative words, which was incongruent with the space-valence metaphorical correspondence. These results suggest that even though manual action does not affect the evaluative process of emotional stimuli prospectively, upward manual action introduced before stimuli presentation can promote visual attention to the subsequent negative stimuli in a way that is incongruent with the space-valence metaphor. Mechanisms underlying the metaphor incongruent effect and its directional anisotropy (i.e., no effect of downward action) have been discussed in the present study.

Moods alter audiovisual integration

Multisensory integration depends on the temporal proximity of events in different modalities. Recent studies have shown that multisensory temporal binding may be related to individual traits (Foss-Feig et al., 2010; Stevenson et al., 2012). Here we show that positive moods in observers enhance the temporal binding of audiovisual multisensory integration. Twenty-five healthy participants observed two identical visual disks moving toward each other, coinciding, and moving away. The two disks were perceived as either streaming through or bouncing off each other (stream/bounce display), and a belief sound around the visual coincidence facilitated bouncing perception (Sekuler et al., 1997; Watanabe and Shimojo, 2001). We asked the participants to report whether the two disks appeared to stream through or bounce off while listening to either exhilarating music of their own choice or a neutral pink noise. The results showed that the participants listening to exhilarating music reported bouncing percept more frequently. The proportion of bouncing percepts was correlated with the valence rating rather than the arousal rating during the experiment. These results suggest that positive moods enhance the temporal binding process in audiovisual integration.

The Primacy of Beauty in Judging the Aesthetics of Objects

The conceptual structure of the aesthetics of objects was investigated. To this end, associative namings for the word “aesthetics” were collected from 311 nonartist German college students in a timed verbal association task. 590 different adjectives were produced, depicting diversification of the concept. The adjective “beautiful” was given by more than 90% of the participants. The adjective “ugly” was the second most frequent naming, used by almost half of the students. All other namings were markedly less frequently produced. It is argues that the beautiful–ugly dimension represents the primary concept in the aesthetics of objects, so that performing aesthetic judgments of the beauty of objects comes naturally to individuals. In other words, the most prototypical aesthetic judgments are those of beauty. Furthermore, the majority of generated words had a positive valence as measured by an additional valence-rating study including 41 participants. This result contrasts with comparable studies of emotion terms, as such studies typically show a negativity bias. Frequency in general language use and valence of the adjectives did not account for the results.