Webcams and Social Interaction During Online Classes: Identity Work, Presentation of Self, and Well-Being

The well-being of children and young people has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to online education disrupted daily rhythms, transformed learning opportunities, and redefined social connections with peers and teachers. We here present a qualitative content analysis of responses to open-ended questions in a large-scale survey of teachers and students in Romania. We explore how their well-being has been impacted by online education through (1) overflow effects of the sudden move to online classes; (2) identity work at the individual and group levels; and (3) Students’ and teachers’ presentations of self in the online environment, with a focus on problematic aspects of webcam use. The results indicate that both students and teachers experienced ambivalence and diverse changes in well-being, generated by the flexibility, burdens, and disruptions of school-from-home. The identities associated with the roles of teacher and student have been challenged and opened for re-negotiation. Novel patterns have emerged in teachers’ and Students’ identity work. Failure or success at the presentation of self in online situations is relevant for the emotional valence of learning encounters, impacting well-being. Online classes have brought about new ways to control one’s presentation of self while also eliminating previous tactics and resources. The controversy regarding webcams has captured this duality: for some, the home remained a backstage that could not be safely exposed; for others, the home became a convenient front stage for school. Well-being was affected by the success of individual and collective performances, and by student-teacher asymmetries. Overall, our study of online learning indicates powerful yet variable influences on subjective well-being, which are related to overflow effects, identity work, and presentation of self.

Gamma Band Oscillations Reflect Sensory and Affective Dimensions of Pain

Pain is a multidimensional process, which can be modulated by emotions; however, the mechanisms underlying this modulation are unknown. We used pictures with different emotional valence (negative, positive, and neutral) as primes and applied electrical painful stimuli as targets to healthy participants. We assessed pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings and recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs). We found that pain unpleasantness and not pain intensity ratings were modulated by emotion, with increased ratings for negative and decreased ratings for positive pictures. We also found two consecutive gamma band oscillations (GBOs) related to pain processing from time frequency analyses of the EEG signals. The early GBO had a cortical distribution contralateral to the painful stimulus and its amplitude was positively correlated with intensity and unpleasantness ratings, but not with prime valence. The late GBO had a centroparietal distribution and its amplitude was larger for negative compared to neutral and positive pictures. The emotional modulation effect (negative vs. positive) of the late GBO amplitude was positively correlated with pain unpleasantness. The early GBO might reflect the overall pain perception, possibly involving the thalamocortical circuit, while the late GBO might be related to the affective dimension of pain and top-down-related processes.

Working memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders

Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.

‘The province…But, indeed, that is Russia!’

“The Imagined Province” investigates the shifts in what the “idea of the province” in the period of world war and the Russian revolution and civil war. I argue that the mental and emotional valence of Russia’s map changed markedly over these nine years as regionalist and provincial pride came into literary culture, urging a fresh view of central Russia outside the capital cities. This change of perspective emerges in essays, stories, and poetry throughout Central Russia, though this article focuses mainly on the Volga Region. Authors of many different political stripes contributed to this shift—among them, regionalists like Evgenii Chirikov and Nikolai Kliuev, pro-revolutionary socialists such as Maksim Gor’kii and Matvei Dudorov, and Bolsheviks like Aleksei Dorogoichenko and Fedor Bogorodskii. As the Bolsheviks regathered Russia, these provincial voices were overpowered by more prominent voices from the center. Nonetheless, they established a “usable history” that remains a substrate of Russian culture even today, challenging the simplistic binary juxtaposing “capital” and “province.”

If You're Happy, I'm Happy

An increasing body of research has addressed what a tourism experience is and how it should best be measured and managed. One conclusion has been to recommend observational methods such as facial expression analysis. The chapter uses facial expression analysis to determine whether the emotions of employees in the tourism industry affect the emotions of their customers, following a pattern of emotional contagion. The findings show that emotional valence and arousal are both contagious. Furthermore, the findings show that arousal is less contagious at a higher likelihood to recommend, likely due to higher employee arousal during approximately the middle third of their conversation. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that emotion measurement is now possible at reasonable convenience for the tourism industry and gives a unique insight into tourists' actual experiences that is more precise and valid than self-report alone, though with certain costs and stringent methodological limitations.

Localized Task-Invariant Emotional Valence Encoding Revealed by Intracranial Recordings

The ability to distinguish between negative, positive and neutral valence is a key part of emotion perception. Emotional valence has conceptual meaning that supersedes any particular type of stimulus, although it is typically captured experimentally in association with particular tasks. We sought to identify neural encoding for task-invariant emotional valence. We evaluated whether high gamma responses (HGRs) to visually displayed words conveying emotions could be used to decode emotional valence from HGRs to facial expressions. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) was recorded from fourteen individuals while they participated in two tasks, one involving reading words with positive, negative, and neutral valence, and the other involving viewing faces with positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions. Quadratic discriminant analysis was used to identify information in the HGR that differentiates the three emotion conditions. A classifier was trained on the emotional valence labels from one task and was cross-validated on data from the same task (within-task classifier) as well as the other task (between-task classifier). Emotional valence could be decoded in the left medial orbitofrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus, both using within-task classifiers as well as between-task classifiers. These observations suggest the presence of task-independent emotional valence information in the signals from these regions.

Emotionality vs. Other Biobehavioural Traits: A Look at Neurochemical Biomarkers for Their Differentiation

This review highlights the differential contributions of multiple neurochemical systems to temperament traits related and those that are unrelated to emotionality, even though these systems have a significant overlap. The difference in neurochemical biomarkers of these traits is analysed from the perspective of the neurochemical model, Functional Ensemble of Temperament (FET) that uses multi-marker and constructivism principles. Special attention is given to a differential contribution of hypothalamic–pituitary hormones and opioid neuropeptides implicated in both emotional and non-emotional regulation. The review highlights the role of the mu-opioid receptor system in dispositional emotional valence and the role of the kappa-opioid system in dispositional perceptual and behavioural alertness. These opioid receptor (OR) systems, microbiota and cytokines are produced in three neuroanatomically distinct complexes in the brain and the body, which all together integrate dispositional emotionality. In contrast, hormones could be seen as neurochemical biomarkers of non-emotional aspects of behavioural regulation related to the construction of behaviour in fast-changing and current situations. As examples of the role of hormones, the review summarised their contribution to temperament traits of Sensation Seeking (SS) and Empathy (EMP), which FET considers as non-emotionality traits related to behavioural orientation. SS is presented here as based on (higher) testosterone (fluctuating), adrenaline and (low) cortisol systems, and EMP, as based on (higher) oxytocin, reciprocally coupled with vasopressin and (lower) testosterone. Due to the involvement of gonadal hormones, there are sex and age differences in these traits that could be explained by evolutionary theory. There are, therefore, specific neurochemical biomarkers differentiating (OR-based) dispositional emotionality and (hormones-based) body’s regulation in fast-changing events. Here we propose to consider dispositional emotionality associated with OR systems as emotionality in a true sense, whereas to consider hormonal ensembles regulating SS and EMP as systems of behavioural orientation and not emotionality.