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.

Open biological negative image set

Scientists conducting affective research often use visual, emotional images, to examine the mechanisms of defensive responses to threatening and dangerous events and objects. Many studies use the rich emotional images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) to facilitate affective research. While IAPS images can be classified into emotional categories such as fear or disgust, the number of images per discrete emotional category is limited. We developed the Open Biological Negative Image Set (OBNIS) consisting of 200 colour and greyscale creature images categorized as disgusting, fearful or neither. Participants in Experiment 1 ( N = 210) evaluated the images' valence and arousal and classified them as disgusting , fearful or neither. In Experiment 2, other participants ( N = 423) rated the disgust and fear levels of the images. As a result, the OBNIS provides valence, arousal, disgust and fear ratings and ‘disgusting,’ 'fearful' and ‘neither’ emotional categories for each image. These images are available to download on the Internet ( https://osf.io/pfrx4/?view_only=911b1be722074ad4aab87791cb8a72f5 ).

Music Listening and Homeostatic Regulation: Surviving and Flourishing in a Sonic World

This paper argues for a biological conception of music listening as an evolutionary achievement that is related to a long history of cognitive and affective-emotional functions, which are grounded in basic homeostatic regulation. Starting from the three levels of description, the acoustic description of sounds, the neurological level of processing, and the psychological correlates of neural stimulation, it conceives of listeners as open systems that are in continuous interaction with the sonic world. By monitoring and altering their current state, they can try to stay within the limits of operating set points in the pursuit of a controlled state of dynamic equilibrium, which is fueled by interoceptive and exteroceptive sources of information. Listening, in this homeostatic view, can be adaptive and goal-directed with the aim of maintaining the internal physiology and directing behavior towards conditions that make it possible to thrive by seeking out stimuli that are valued as beneficial and worthy, or by attempting to avoid those that are annoying and harmful. This calls forth the mechanisms of pleasure and reward, the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment, the twin notions of valence and arousal, the affect-related consequences of music listening, the role of affective regulation and visceral reactions to the sounds, and the distinction between adaptive and maladaptive listening.

Comparing supervised and unsupervised approaches to multimodal emotion recognition

We investigated emotion classification from brief video recordings from the GEMEP database wherein actors portrayed 18 emotions. Vocal features consisted of acoustic parameters related to frequency, intensity, spectral distribution, and durations. Facial features consisted of facial action units. We first performed a series of person-independent supervised classification experiments. Best performance (AUC = 0.88) was obtained by merging the output from the best unimodal vocal (Elastic Net, AUC = 0.82) and facial (Random Forest, AUC = 0.80) classifiers using a late fusion approach and the product rule method. All 18 emotions were recognized with above-chance recall, although recognition rates varied widely across emotions (e.g., high for amusement, anger, and disgust; and low for shame). Multimodal feature patterns for each emotion are described in terms of the vocal and facial features that contributed most to classifier performance. Next, a series of exploratory unsupervised classification experiments were performed to gain more insight into how emotion expressions are organized. Solutions from traditional clustering techniques were interpreted using decision trees in order to explore which features underlie clustering. Another approach utilized various dimensionality reduction techniques paired with inspection of data visualizations. Unsupervised methods did not cluster stimuli in terms of emotion categories, but several explanatory patterns were observed. Some could be interpreted in terms of valence and arousal, but actor and gender specific aspects also contributed to clustering. Identifying explanatory patterns holds great potential as a meta-heuristic when unsupervised methods are used in complex classification tasks.

Mapping the mental space of emotional concepts through kinematic measures of decision uncertainty

Emotional concepts and their mental representations have been extensively studied. Yet, some ecologically relevant aspects, such as how emotional concepts are processed in ambiguous contexts, are incompletely known. We employed a similarity judgment of emotional concepts and manipulated the contextual congruency along the two main affective dimensions of hedonic valence and physiological activation, respectively. Behavioral and kinematics (mouse-tracking) measures were combined to gather a novel ‘similarity index’ between concepts, to derive topographical maps of their mental representations. Self-report (interoceptive sensibility, positive-negative affectivity, depression) and physiological measures (heart rate variability) have been tested to shape the emotional maps. Results indicate that low arousal concepts profit by contextual congruency, with faster responses and reduced uncertainty when contextual ambiguity decreases. The emotional maps exhibit two almost orthogonal axes of valence and arousal, and the similarity measure captures the smooth boundaries between emotions. The emotional map of individuals with low positive affectivity reveals a narrower conceptual distribution, with variations on positive emotions and on emotions with reduced arousal (as individuals with reduced heart rate variability). In sum, our work introduces a novel methodology for delve conceptual representations, bringing the dynamics of decision-making processes and choice uncertainty into the affective domain.

The role of implicit learning and cue ambiguity on the subjective experience of affective predictions: a follow-up behavioral investigation.

People use their previous experience to predict present affective events. Since we live in ever-changing environments, affective predictions must generalize from past contexts (from which they are implicitly learned) to new, potentially ambiguous contexts. This study investigated how past (un)certain relationships influence subjective experience following new ambiguous cues, and whether past relationships can be learned implicitly. Two S1-S2 paradigms were employed as learning and test phases in two experiments. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative or neutral affective pictures. Participants (N = 121, 116) were assigned to the certain (CG) or uncertain group (UG), and they were presented with 100% (CG) or 50% (UG) S1-S2 congruency during an uninstructed (Experiment 1) or implicit (Experiment 2) learning phase. During the test phase both groups were presented with a new 75% S1-S2 paradigm, and ambiguous (Experiment 1) or unambiguous (Experiment 2) S1s. Participants were asked to rate the expected valence of upcoming S2s (expectancy ratings), or their experienced valence and arousal (valence and arousal ratings). In Experiment 1 ambiguous cues elicited less negative expectancy ratings, and less unpleasant valence ratings, independently from prior experience. In Experiment 2, participants in the CG reported more negative expectancy ratings after the S1s previously paired with negative stimuli. Overall, we found that in the presence of ambiguous cues subjective affective experience is dampened, and we confirmed that people are able to infer probabilistic relationships from the environment (and to use them later) at an implicit level.

French adaptation of a film music stimulus set: Normative emotional ratings of valence and arousal prompted by music excerpts

The aim of this study was to obtain French affective norms for the film music stimulus set (FMSS). This data set consists of a relatively homogeneous series of musical stimuli made up of film music excerpts, known to trigger strong emotion. The 97 musical excerpts were judged by 194 native French participants using a simplified normative procedure in order to assess valence and arousal judgments. This normalization will (1) provide researchers with standardized rated affective music to be used with a French population, (2) enable the investigation of individual listeners’ differing emotional judgments, and (3) explore how cultural differences affect the ratings of musical stimuli. Our results, in line with those obtained in Finland and Spain, demonstrated the FMSS to be robust and interculturally valid within Western Europe. Age, sex, education, and musical training were not found to have any effects on emotional judgments. In conclusion, this study provides the scientific community with a standardized-stimulus set of musical excerpts whose emotional valence and arousal have been validated by a sampling of the French population.

The Influence of Negative Orthographic Neighborhood in the Lexical Decision Task: Valence and Arousal Contributions

This study investigated whether the visual recognition of neutral words might be influenced by the emotional dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal) of orthographically similar lexical representations, and whether this might also depend on emotional-related traits of participants (i.e., alexithymia). To this end, 108 participants performed a lexical decision task with 80 neutral words with a higher frequency orthographic neighbor that varied in valence (from neutral to negative) and arousal (from low to high). The main finding was the expected interaction effect between the valence and arousal of the neighbor on the lexical decision times of neutral stimulus words. Longer reaction times were found when the valence score of the neighbor decreased from neutral to negative for words with a low-arousal orthographic neighbor while this emotional neighbor effect was reversed for words with a high-arousal negative neighbor. This combined influence of the valence and arousal of the neighbor was interpreted in terms of increased lexical competition processes and direct influence of the affective system on the participant’s response. Moreover, this interaction effect was smaller when the level of alexithymia of the participants increased, suggesting that people with a higher level of alexithymia are less sensitive to the emotional content of the neighbor. The results are discussed within an interactive activation model of visual word recognition incorporating an affective system with valence and arousal dimensions, with regard to the role of the alexithymia level of participants.

Emotion norms for 6000 Polish word meanings with a direct mapping to the Polish wordnet

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings dataset, a novel dataset of 6000 Polish word meanings. The word meanings are derived from the Polish wordnet (plWordNet), a large semantic network interlinking words by means of lexical and conceptual relations. The word meanings were manually rated for valence and arousal, along with a variety of basic emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, happiness, surprise, and trust). The annotations were found to be highly reliable, as demonstrated by the similarity between data collected in two independent samples: unsupervised (n = 21,317) and supervised (n = 561). Although we found the annotations to be relatively stable for female, male, younger, and older participants, we share both summary data and individual data to enable emotion research on different demographically specific subgroups. The word meanings are further accompanied by the relevant metadata, derived from open-source linguistic resources. Direct mapping to Princeton WordNet makes the dataset suitable for research on multiple languages. Altogether, this dataset provides a versatile resource that can be employed for emotion research in psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.

Shakespeare sonnet reading: An empirical study of emotional responses

The present study combines literary theory and cognitive psychology to empirically explore some cognitive and emotional facets of poetry reading, exemplified by the reading of three Shakespeare sonnets. Specifically, predictions generated combining quantitative textual analysis according to the Neurocognitive Poetics model with qualitative textual analysis based on the Foregrounding assessment Matrix of sonnets no. 27, 60 and 66 are empirically tested by analyzing 45 subjects’ ratings of the three sonnets. Reflecting the differences in foregrounding potential of the three sonnets found in the textual analysis, we expected to find different reader responses, accordingly. Our dependent variables are well-established categories of emotional evaluation (e.g. valence and arousal) and cognitive, affective and aesthetic aspects of readers’ responses (e.g. liking and understanding) as well as less common ones (e.g. wonder, delight and mental images). The statistical analyses suggest that the type of foregrounding is more important than the number of foregrounded elements. This finding motivated further qualitative exploration of reader responses to open questions regarding mental images and perceived feelings. Comparing the free recall data about the feelings perceived in the sonnets with the ratings data about Valence and Arousal indicated that only the former one reflects a clear distinction between all three sonnets, whereas the readers’ overall evaluations did not sustain this variety of feelings. Multi-method, interdisciplinary research of this kind contributes to improving our understanding of the potentially unique mechanisms involved in poetry reception, and to forming more precise hypotheses for future experimental studies using, for example, eye tracking.