Detection of acute stress caused by cognitive tasks based on physiological signals

We report on the development of an automated detector of acute stress based on physiological signals. Our detector discriminates between high and low levels of acute stress accumulated by students when performing cognitive tasks on a computer. The proposed detector builds on well-known physiological signal processing principles combined with the state-of-art support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The novelty aspects here come from the design and implementation of the signal pre-processing and the feature extraction stages, which were purposely designed and fine-tuned for the specific needs of acute stress detection and from applying existing algorithms to a new problem. The proposed acute stress detector was evaluated in person-specific and person-independent experimental setups using the publicly available CLAS dataset. Each setup involved three cognitive tasks with a dissimilar crux of the matter and different complexity. The experimental results indicated a very high detection accuracy when discriminating between acute stress conditions due to significant cognitive load and conditions elicited by two typical emotion elicitation tasks. Such a functionality would also contribute towards obtaining a multi-faceted analysis on the dependence of work efficiency from personal treats, cognitive load and acute stress level.

Customer emotion research in hospitality and tourism: conceptualization, measurements, antecedents and consequences

Purpose To clarify inconsistencies in the emotion elicitation process and to suggest avenues for advancing emotion research, this study aims to conduct a systematic review of emotion research in the subject area of hospitality and tourism management. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes 178 emotion-related articles published in 37 journals from 2004–2019 in the context of hospitality and tourism, providing a systematic synthesis of publication outlets and trajectories, research settings, the conceptualization of emotion, emotion measurement, classifications of antecedents and consequences. Findings Regarding the elicitation of emotions, many studies ignore the developments in emotion research in the mainstream discipline and still consider external stimuli as the direct causes of emotion. Numerous studies conceptualize customer emotion as positive or negative, which overlooks the nuances between discrete emotions with the same valence. Additionally, emotion scales are largely borrowed from psychology without considering the specific characteristics of the hospitality and tourism context. Methodologically, most studies take a single-measure lens with either a self-report, physiological or expression behavior measure. Research limitations/implications The analysis of the literature highlights three main areas for future emotion studies in the hospitality and tourism context. Originality/value Previous reviews are narrative and only address specific areas of interest, rendering them incapable of explaining how a systematic literature identification process was conducted. The present systematic review is among the first to provide an overview of emotion studies in hospitality and tourism over a 15-year period. By drawing insights from appraisal theories of emotions, this review addresses common misunderstandings concerning the emotion elicitation process in the current hospitality and tourism literature.

Remotely Perceived: Investigating the Influence of Valence on Self-Perception and Social Experience for Dyadic Video-Conferencing With Personalized Avatars

Avatar use on video-conference platforms has found dual purpose in recent times as a potential method for ensuring privacy and improving subjective engagement with remote meeting, provided one can also ensure a minimal loss in the quality of social interaction and sense of personal presence. This work focuses on interactions of this sort through real-time motion captured 3D personalized virtual avatars in a 2D video-conferencing context. Our experiments were designed with the intention of exploring previously defined perceptual illusions that occur with avatar-use in Virtual and Augmented Reality settings, outside of the immersive technological domains where they are normally measured. The research described here was aimed at empirically evaluating three separate dimensions of human-avatar interaction. The first was humans-as-avatars, with experimental conditions that were designed to measure changes to subjective perceptions of self-face ownership and self-concept. The second focus was other-perception, with the unique design of the studies outlined below among the first to measure social presence in a video-call between two human-driven avatars. The third emphasis was on the experiential content involved in avatar use, as there were measurements for emotion induction, fatigue and behavior change included in the data collection. The results describe some evidence for face and body ownership, while participants also reported high levels of social presence with the other avatar, indicating that avatar cameras could be a favorable alternative to non-camera feeds in video conferencing. There were also some useful insights gained regarding emotion elicitation in non-video vs. avatar conditions, as well as avatar-induced behavior change.

Functional dynamics of brain networks associated with carry-over effects of negative events on subsequent resting state.

Distributed brain areas are engaged both during and following the elicitation of emotional experiences. Previous studies suggest that transient emotions may cause a prolonged impact (or inertia) on brain states, with corresponding changes in subjective affect and mood. To investigate the functional dynamics and reciprocal interactions among brain networks underlying these effects, we quantified co-activation patterns (CAPs) by recording functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during sad movies and subsequent resting periods. CAPs overlapping with the visual (VIS), default mode (DMN), central executive (CEN), and frontoparietal control (FPCN) networks showed not only distinctive effects of negative emotion on their spatiotemporal expression in both movie and rest periods, but also different reciprocal relationships among them in transitions from movie to rest. While FPCN and DMN expression increased during and after negative movies, respectively, FPCN occurrences during the movie predicted lower DMN and higher CEN expression during subsequent rest after neutral movies, but this relationship was reversed after negative movies. Changes in FPCN and DMN activity correlated with more negative subjective affect. These findings provide new insights into the functional dynamics and interactions of intrinsic brain networks, highlighting a major role of FPCN in emotion elicitation processes with prolonged impact on DMN activity in subsequent rest, presumably involved in emotion regulation and restoration of homeostatic balance after negative events.