Feeling Racial Pride in the Mode of Frederick Douglass

Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s arguments about racial pride, I develop and defend an account of feeling racial pride that centers on resisting racialized oppression. Such pride is racially ecumenical in that it does not imply partiality towards one’s own racial group. I argue that it can both accurately represent its intentional object and be intrinsically and extrinsically valuable to experience. It follows, I argue, that there is, under certain conditions, a morally unproblematic, and plausibly valuable, kind of racial pride available to white people, though one that could hardly differ more from what is generally meant by “white pride.

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

Visualising Emotional Landmarks in Cities

Different people and cultures associate different emotional states to different parts and spaces of cities. These vary according to individuals, their cultures and also to the time of day, day of week, season, special occasions and more. Recurring patterns may occur in correspondence of the places in which people work, study, entertain themselves, consume, relate, wait or just take a break. What can we learn from these patterns? Trying to find possible answers to this question passes through the possibility to visualize and represent the configurations of emotional expressions in urban spaces, across time, geography, theme, cultures and other dimensions. We have developed ways in which it is possible to harvest people's geo-located (or geo-locatable) emotional expressions from major social networks and to visualize them according to a variety of different modalities. In this paper we will present a series of these types of visualizations, and the ways in which they can be used to gain better understandings of these emotional patterns as they arise, from points of view which derive from anthropology, urbanism, sociology, politics and also arts and poetics. The paper will focus on the ways in which the data is harvested from different social networks, then categorized and annotated with meta-data describing the emotional states, the languages in which people express themselves, the geographic locations, the themes expressed. A methodology for representing this information across a variety of domains (time, space, emotion, theme) will then be presented in detail. A reflection on possible usage cases for anthropology, urbanism, policy-making, arts and design will end the contribution, as well as the description of series of open issues and the indication of possible next-steps for research.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, IV2014 Conference Proceeding

An Affect-Rich Neural Conversational Model with Biased Attention and Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss

Affect conveys important implicit information in human communication. Having the capability to correctly express affect during human-machine conversations is one of the major milestones in artificial intelligence. In recent years, extensive research on open-domain neural conversational models has been conducted. However, embedding affect into such models is still under explored. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end affect-rich open-domain neural conversational model that produces responses not only appropriate in syntax and semantics, but also with rich affect. Our model extends the Seq2Seq model and adopts VAD (Valence, Arousal and Dominance) affective notations to embed each word with affects. In addition, our model considers the effect of negators and intensifiers via a novel affective attention mechanism, which biases attention towards affect-rich words in input sentences. Lastly, we train our model with an affect-incorporated objective function to encourage the generation of affect-rich words in the output responses. Evaluations based on both perplexity and human evaluations show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline model of comparable size in producing natural and affect-rich responses.Comment: AAAI-1

The role of anterior cingulate cortex in the affective evaluation of conflict

An influential theory of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) function argues that this brain region plays a crucial role in the affective evaluation of performance monitoring and control demands. Specifically, control-demanding processes such as response conflict are thought to be registered as aversive signals by ACC, which in turn triggers processing adjustments to support avoidance learning. In support of conflict being treated as an aversive event, recent behavioral studies demonstrated that incongruent (i.e., conflict inducing), relative to congruent, stimuli can speed up subsequent negative, relative to positive, affective picture processing. Here, we used fMRI to investigate directly whether ACC activity in response to negative versus positive pictures is modulated by preceding control demands, consisting of conflict and task-switching conditions. The results show that negative, relative to positive, pictures elicited higher ACC activation after congruent, relative to incongruent, trials, suggesting that ACC's response to negative (positive) pictures was indeed affectively primed by incongruent (congruent) trials. Interestingly, this pattern of results was observed on task repetitions but disappeared on task alternations. This study supports the proposal that conflict induces negative affect and is the first to show that this affective signal is reflected in ACC activation

Effects in the affect misattribution procedure are modulated by feature-specific attention allocation

We examined whether automatic stimulus evaluation as measured by the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is moderated by the degree to which attention is assigned to the evaluative stimulus dimension (i.e., feature-specific attention allocation, FSAA). In two experiments, one group of participants completed a standard AMP while attending to evaluative stimulus information. A second group of participants completed the AMP while attending to non-evaluative stimulus information. In line with earlier work, larger AMP effects were observed when participants were encouraged to attend to evaluative stimulus information than when they were not. These observations support the idea that the impact of FSAA on measures of automatic stimulus evaluation results from a genuine change in the degree of automatic stimulus evaluation rather than a change in the degree to which automatic stimulus evaluation is picked up by these measures

Discovering Gender Differences in Facial Emotion Recognition via Implicit Behavioral Cues

We examine the utility of implicit behavioral cues in the form of EEG brain signals and eye movements for gender recognition (GR) and emotion recognition (ER). Specifically, the examined cues are acquired via low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors. We asked 28 viewers (14 female) to recognize emotions from unoccluded (no mask) as well as partially occluded (eye and mouth masked) emotive faces. Obtained experimental results reveal that (a) reliable GR and ER is achievable with EEG and eye features, (b) differential cognitive processing especially for negative emotions is observed for males and females and (c) some of these cognitive differences manifest under partial face occlusion, as typified by the eye and mouth mask conditions.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of Seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction.201

More than a Feeling: Emotion and the First Amendment

First Amendment law has generally been leery of government attempts to change the marketplace of emotions—except when it has not been. Scientific evidence indicates that emotion and rationality are not opposed, as the law often presumes, but rather inextricably linked. There is no judgment, whether moral or otherwise, without emotions to guide our choices. Judicial failure to grapple with this reality has produced some puzzles in the law. Part I of this Symposium contribution examines the intersection of private law, the First Amendment, and attempts to manipulate and control emotions. Only false factual statements can defame, not mere derogatory opinions. Yet trademark law allows exactly the kind of control over nonfactual, emotional appeals that modern defamation law precludes. These two bodies of law thus stand in contrast, one constrained by the First Amendment to cover only facts and the other allowed to reach much further into the dark heart of emotional manipulation. Part II turns to compelled speech, and again finds two contrasting regulations united by their emotional mechanisms, but divided by their constitutional fates. Courts have struck down mandatory smoking warnings in visual form, but have approved mandatory abortion disclosures and ultrasound requirements that operate in the same emotional register. Regardless of whether the regulation involves a direct government mandate or private parties claiming competing rights to influence the audience’s emotional state, then, current First Amendment law doesn’t have a consistent account of the proper role of emotion in speech regulation. Part III suggests that the contradictions of current doctrine could be ameliorated by less distrust of emotion and more acceptance that where information is being conveyed, emotion will regularly follow. Our focus then should not be on whether deployment of emotion is “manipulative,” but whether it is part of a discriminatory or factually misleading regulation. When the government can otherwise constitutionally mandate disclosure, the fact that these disclosures have emotional resonance is not an independent constitutional barrier