Neurophysiological Assessment of Affective Experience

In the field of Affective Computing the affective experience (AX) of the user during the interaction with computers is of great interest. The automatic recognition of the affective state, or emotion, of the user is one of the big challenges. In this proposal I focus on the affect recognition via physiological and neurophysiological signals. Long‐standing evidence from psychophysiological research and more recently from research in affective neuroscience suggests that both, body and brain physiology, are able to indicate the current affective state of a subject. However, regarding the classification of AX several questions are still unanswered. The principal possibility of AX classification was repeatedly shown, but its generalisation over different task contexts, elicitating stimuli modalities, subjects or time is seldom addressed. In this proposal I will discuss a possible agenda for the further exploration of physiological and neurophysiological correlates of AX over different elicitation modalities and task contexts

Affective Videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me

In this paper we describe the fundamentals of affective gaming from a physiological point of view, covering some of the origins of the genre, how affective videogames operate and current conceptual and technological capabilities. We ground this overview of the ongoing research by taking an in-depth look at one of our own early biofeedback-based affective games. Based on our analysis of existing videogames and our own experience with affective videogames, we propose a new approach to game design based on several high-level design heuristics: assist me, challenge me and emote me (ACE), a series of gameplay "tweaks" made possible through affective videogames

Gratitude as an Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Strategy

Reviews the book, The Spectrum of Gratitude Experience by John Elfers and Patty Hlava. Elfers and Hlava articulate the gratitude experience from a scientific perspective. They present key features of the lived gratitude experience in separate chapters but nicely scaffold their argument. These authors effectively unravel the complexity of this affective experience and explain its utility. The authors weave the role of gratitude in interpersonal relationships throughout the book. Principally, they define gratitude as a positive emotional experience derived from being given a benefit, typically (although not exclusively) in caring relationships. The authors present the evolutionary origin of gratitude, define types of gratitude, and discuss its development in one’s identity. Perhaps the most compelling information is on the effects of experiencing gratitude. This book is most relevant for affective scientists. The authors delicately bridge various theories of emotion (e.g., basic, cognitive, action tendencies) to provide a framework for the multifaceted nature of gratitude. You do not need to have a background in psychology to appreciate this book. It would interest anyone who is curious about the human condition

Further problems with projectivism

From David Hume onwards, many philosophers have argued that moral thinking is characterized by a tendency to “project” our own mental states onto the world. This metaphor of projection may be understood as involving two empirical claims: the claim that humans experience morality as a realm of objective facts (the experiential hypothesis), and the claim that this moral experience is immediately caused by affective attitudes (the causal hypothesis). Elsewhere I argued in detail against one form of the experiential hypothesis. My main aim in this paper is to show that, considering recent psychological studies about folk metaethics and the relation between moral judgements and emotions, the causal hypothesis must be considered problematic too. First, the most common argument in favor of the causal hypothesis is based on an implausible premise and a dubious assumption. Second, ordinary people’s moral experience is influenced by a non-affective factor, namely their openness to divergent moral views. And third, projectivism in general and its causal hypothesis in particular might not even hold true for affective moral judgements. This negative assessment of projectivism is significant both for our understanding of moral cognition as an empirical phenomenon and for metaethics

Macaque cardiac physiology is sensitive to the valence of passively viewed sensory stimuli.

Autonomic nervous system activity is an important component of affective experience. We demonstrate in the rhesus monkey that both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system respond differentially to the affective valence of passively viewed video stimuli. We recorded cardiac impedance and an electrocardiogram while adult macaques watched a series of 300 30-second videos that varied in their affective content. We found that sympathetic activity (as measured by cardiac pre-ejection period) increased and parasympathetic activity (as measured by respiratory sinus arrhythmia) decreased as video content changes from positive to negative. These findings parallel the relationship between autonomic nervous system responsivity and valence of stimuli in humans. Given the relationship between human cardiac physiology and affective processing, these findings suggest that macaque cardiac physiology may be an index of affect in nonverbal animals

Come, see and experience affective interactive art

The progress in the field of affective computing enables the realization of affective consumer products, affective games, and affective art. This paper describes the affective interactive art system Mood Swings, which interprets and visualizes affect expressed by a person. Mood Swings is founded on the integration of a framework for affective movements and a color model. This enables Mood Swings to recognize affective movement characteristics as expressed by a person and display a color that matches the expressed emotion. With that, a unique interactive system is introduced, which can be considered as art, a game, or a combination of both

Affective incoherence: when affective concepts and embodied reactions clash.

In five studies, the authors examined the effects on cognitive performance of coherence and incoherence between conceptual and experiential sources of affective information. The studies crossed the priming of happy and sad concepts with affective experiences. In different experiments, these included approach or avoidance actions, happy or sad feelings, and happy or sad expressive behaviors. In all studies, coherence between affective concepts and affective experiences led to better recall of a story than did affective incoherence. The authors suggest that the experience of such experiential affective cues serves as evidence of the appropriateness of affective concepts that come to mind. The results suggest that affective coherence has epistemic benefits and that incoherence is costly in terms of cognitive performance

Commentary: Prestimulus theta oscillations and connectivity modulate pain perception

Pain experience includes the fine-grain integration of both attentive and automatic (bottom-up; Legrain et al., 2012), as well as affective and intentional (top-down; Buschman and Miller, 2007) processes. While the neural underpinnings of post-stimulus pain processing have been deeply explored (Hauck et al., 2008), the oscillatory brain activity preceding pain processing is less far investigated

The moment of microaggression: The experience of acts of oppression, dehumanization and exploitation

After a brief introduction and review of recent literature on microaggressions, a theoretical typology of three sources of social injustice (oppression, dehumanization, and exploitation) contributes to the theorization of the sources of microaggressions. A selected compendium of words and affective phrases generated in classroom exercises illustrates the nature of the experience of the moment of microaggression. Future research on microaggressions as well as evaluation of practice should examine the experience of microaggression, including being subjected to microaggression, initiating such acts, and observing such acts