A fuzzy-based approach for classifying students' emotional states in online collaborative work

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Emotion awareness is becoming a key aspect in collaborative work at academia, enterprises and organizations that use collaborative group work in their activity. Due to pervasiveness of ICT's, most of collaboration can be performed through communication media channels such as discussion forums, social networks, etc. The emotive state of the users while they carry out their activity such as collaborative learning at Universities or project work at enterprises and organizations influences very much their performance and can actually determine the final learning or project outcome. Therefore, monitoring the users' emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. To this end, automated analysis over data collected from communication channels is a useful source. In this paper, we propose an approach to process such collected data in order to classify and assess emotional states of involved users and provide them feedback accordingly to their emotive states. In order to achieve this, a fuzzy approach is used to build the emotive classification system, which is fed with data from ANEW dictionary, whose words are bound to emotional weights and these, in turn, are used to map Fuzzy sets in our proposal. The proposed fuzzy-based system has been evaluated using real data from collaborative learning courses in an academic context.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Eyes don\u27t lie: understanding users\u27 first impressions on website design using eye tracking

Websites are becoming more prevalent these days. They need to create a favorable first impression on the users during initial exposure. After allocating their attention to stimuli, users form a cognitive representation of the visual information leading to first impression. Hence, first impression is important to evaluate the effectiveness of a website. This research tries to examine the amount of exposure time needed to form first impression; identify the web design factors that influence the formation of users\u27 first impression; study the emotional responses of users on website design; and finally understand the relationship between first impression and eye movement. Eye movements on displays indicate spatial focus of attention. Eye tracking can provide fixation points where users focus their attention on stimuli. In this study eye tracking has been used to study users\u27 first impression on website design. The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, participants were presented with the stimuli of twenty five university websites\u27 screen shots of home pages on the eye tracker with no time restrain and asked to move on to the next stimuli when they feel that they have formed their initial impression of the website. On viewing each homepage, participants were asked to rate the page on their first impressions and emotional response. In the second phase, users were shown their gaze plots from the eye tracker device for the previous stimuli viewed, followed by a short interview. Twenty students from a mid west university were recruited to participate in the experiment. Quantitative analysis was performed on the various fixation data extracted from the eye tracker as well as on the data collected from survey. Open coding was performed on the qualitative data obtained from the interview. The results show that first impressions are formed within 180ms after allocating their attention to stimuli. The qualitative analysis identified various issues with the website design and also revealed a number of ways in which the website design can be improved that affects impression --Abstract, page iii

The effect of Visual Design Quality on Player Experience Components in Tablet Games

Research in the field of Human Computer Interaction Design indicates that there is a need to develop further methods, tools, and frameworks for the design and evaluation of digital game interfaces. This thesis aims to design, develop, and evaluate two different types of tablet games with varying visual design quality interfaces to examine users’ perceptions of hedonic quality, visual design, emotions, and game enjoyment in different channels of experience. The design-oriented approach was adopted to combine both creative practice and scientific inquiry in the game design process and empirical evaluation. Hypotheses were formulated to explore the significance of visual design quality in relation to the components of player experience. The study entailed two phases. In the first phase, participatory design methods were employed to design and develop the tablet games encompassing mind-mapping techniques, focus groups, iterative prototyping with multiple cycles of usability testing of user interfaces. In the second phase, survey instruments were applied to collect and analyze data from 111 participants using tablet games as stimuli in a controlled experimental condition. The main contribution of this research is creation of a player experience model, validated in the domain of tablet gaming, to serve as a new theory. This research will allow for game researchers and practitioners to obtain a deeper understanding of the significance of the player experience framework components to create optimal player experience in tablet games. The finding shows that highly attractive game user interfaces were perceived to have higher utility and ease of use. Participants exhibited higher levels of arousal and valence in the high visual design quality interfaces mediated by hedonic quality. Participants who were highly sensitive to visual design did not necessarily derive the highest level of game enjoyment. Participants derived a heightened level of engagement in the arousal channel of experience and the highest level of enjoyment in the flow state. The use of 2.5D graphics and analogous color schemes created a spatial illusion that captivated users' attention. Practitioners are encouraged to design game artifacts with feature sets and mechanics capable of transporting players into the state of flow, as this is the stage where they experience game control, excitement and relaxation in addition to game immersion in the state of arousal

A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos

Self-reported use and perception of the L1 and L2 among maximally proficient bi- and multilinguals: a quantitative and qualitative investigation

This study investigates language preferences and perceptions in the use of the native language (L1) and second language (L2) by 386 bi- and multilingual adults. Participants declared that they were maximally proficient in L1 and L2 and used both constantly. A quantitative analysis revealed that despite their maximal proficiency in the L1 and L2, participants preferred to use the L1 for communicating feelings or anger, swearing, addressing their children, performing mental calculations, and using inner speech. They also perceived their L1 to be emotionally stronger than their L2 and reported lower levels of communicative anxiety in their L1. An analysis of interview data from 20 participants confirmed these findings while adding nuance. Indeed, differences in the use of the L1 and L2 and perceptions of both are often subtle and context-specific. Participants confirmed the finding that the L1 is usually felt to be more powerful than the L2, but this did not automatically translate into a preference for the L1. Longer stretches of time in the L2 culture are linked to a gradual shift in linguistic practices and perceptions. Participants reported that their multilingualism and multiculturalism gave them a sense of empowerment and a feeling of freedom

Affective colormap design for accurate visual comprehension in industrial tomography

The design of colormaps can help tomography operators obtain accurate visual compre-hension, thereby assisting safety-critical decisions. The research presented here is about deploying colormaps that promote the best affective responses for industrial microwave tomography (MWT). To answer the two research questions related to our study, we firstly conducted a quantitative analysis of 11 frequently-used colormaps on a segmentation task. Secondly, we presented the same colormaps within a crowdsourced study comprising two parts to verify the quantitative outcomes. The first part encoded affective responses from participants into a prevailing four-quadrant valence–arousal grid; the second part recorded participant ratings towards the accuracy of each colormap on MWT segmentation. We concluded that three colormaps are the best suited in the context of MWT tasks. We also found that the colormaps triggering emotions in the positive–exciting quadrant can facilitate more accurate visual comprehension than other affect-related quadrants. A synthetic colormap design guideline was consequently proposed

Colour emotion effects in creating product preference in advertisements: Predicting purchase intent of blue and yellow colors, in advertisements of low-involvement products

The purpose of the present study was to investigate factors influencing colour preference and product preference. The HSL colour system was used to pick out varying degrees of saturation for a typical blue and a typical yellow at medium lightness. A black and white -coloured advertisement was predominantly coloured to one of these 6 hue-saturation combinations. In the carried out online survey, the advertisements were rated by participants on a 7-point scale in dimensions of preference, arousal, sadness, and their purchase intent. A quantitative analysis and discussion was carried out for the combined preference scale, combined arousal scale, sadness, and purchase intent. The results suggest that blueness is more important than yellowness for making an advertisement sadder, as well as that sadness is important in influencing purchase intent. No clear relationships were found between the other cross-compared variables