973 research outputs found

    Prediction of Stress Level from Speech – from Database to Regressor

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    The term stress can designate a number of situations and affective reactions. This work focuses on the immediate stress reaction caused by, for example, threat, danger, fear, or great concern. Could measuring stress from speech be a viable fast and non-invasive method? The article describes the development of a system predicting stress from voice – from the creation of the database, and preparation of the training data to the design and tests of the regressor. StressDat, an acted database of speech under stress in Slovak, was designed. After publishing the methodology during its development in [1], this work describes the final form, annotation, and basic acoustic analyses of the data. The utterances presenting various stress-inducing scenarios were acted at three intended stress levels. The annotators used a "stress thermometer" to rate the perceived stress in the utterance on a scale from 0 to 100. Thus, data with a resolution suitable for training the regressor was obtained. Several regressors were trained, tested and compared. On the test-set, the stress estimation works well (R square = 0.72, Concordance Correlation Coefficient = 0.83) but practical application will require much larger volumes of specific training data. StressDat was made publicly available

    Have media texts become more humorous?

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    As a research topic, humour has drawn much attention from multiple disciplines including linguistics. Based on Engelthaler & Hills’ (2018) humour scale, this study developed a measure named Humour Index (HMI) to quantify the degree of humour of texts. This measure was applied to examine the diachronic changes in the degree of humour of American newspapers and magazines across a time span of 118 years (1900-2017) with the use of texts from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Besides, the study also discussed the contributions of different types of words to the degree of humour in the two genres. The results show significant uptrends in the degree of humour of both newspapers and magazines in the examined period. Moreover, derogatory and offensive words are found to be less frequently used than other categories of words in both genres. This study provides both theoretical and methodological implications for humour studies and claims or hypotheses of previous research, such as infotainment and linguistic positivity bias

    Essays in Leadership Communication

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    This work centers around leadership communication: how our (dis)information-rich and uncertain global environment has posed challenges to and offered opportunities for this key leadership behavior, and how leaders engage in difficult communications with their stakeholders. I focus on leader-stakeholder two-way dynamics to investigate leader communication in critical moments when they deliver undesirable information to their stakeholders and respond to tough questions from their stakeholders. Essay I reviews research on leader communication and discusses those challenges and opportunities. Essay II uses 107 million Twitter posts to examine stakeholder responses to political leaders’ COVID-19 communications and illustrates the evolving leader-stakeholder relationship throughout different phases of the global pandemic. Essay III explores organizational leaders’ response strategies when facing difficult questions from stakeholders in high-stakes corporate environments. In conclusion, I aim to highlight leaders’ indispensable responsibilities to communicate effectively, benevolently, and responsibly, enhancing the field’s current understanding of crisis leadership, followership, and strategic leadership

    Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference

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    The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years

    Language-Specific Representation of Emotion-Concept Knowledge Causally Supports Emotion Inference

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    Understanding how language supports emotion inference remains a topic of debate in emotion science. The present study investigated whether language-derived emotion-concept knowledge would causally support emotion inference by manipulating the language-specific knowledge representations in large language models. Using the prompt technique, 14 attributes of emotion concepts were found to be represented by distinct artificial neuron populations. By manipulating these attribute-related neurons, the majority of the emotion inference tasks showed performance deterioration compared to random manipulations. The attribute-specific performance deterioration was related to the importance of different attributes in human mental space. Our findings provide causal evidence in support of a language-based mechanism for emotion inference and highlight the contributions of emotion-concept knowledge.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables, fix formatting error

    Flooded with terror: Identifying existential threat in water crisis communication and exploring gender bias in the depths of water management

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    The purpose of this dissertation was to advance understanding of gender inequity in water management and the ways in which threatening water communication may contribute to that inequity. Water crises are increasing with climate change and the communication of potentially fatal outcomes are ever-present via media and ongoing catastrophic climate events. While climate scholars have demonstrated that diverse decision-making groups lead to improved environmental and ethical outcomes – outcomes that include effective solutions to water crises – top-level water management in the Global North remains largely homogenously male. I explored this disconnect through the lens of Terror Management Theory (TMT) to identify how life-threatening water crisis communication may influence environmental attitudes and intergroup relations within water decision-making contexts. Terror Management Theory empirically tests the influence of mortality reminders on human behaviour and has identified predictable and replicable ways in which we respond to reminders of our eventual demise (Chapter One). Climate change has been established as a mortality reminder within Terror Management Theory research, as it evokes existential anxieties in those who consider experiencing climate change or its consequences. Water, however, had not previously been tested as a mortality reminder. The research within this dissertation was guided by three interconnected objectives: (1) to determine if threatening water messages evoke mortality salience similarly to typical TMT mortality reminders; (2) to identify how pro-environmental worldviews or identities are influenced by mortality salience and/or life-threatening water reminders; and (3) building on prior objectives, to determine whether judgments about same or different gendered water decision-makers are influenced by mortality salience from a typical and/or water-related mortality reminder. This dissertation followed social psychology methods as developed and applied within Terror Management Theory to identify the psychosocial responses to threatening water reminders (Chapters Two and Three) and the influence of these responses on gender dynamics within water crisis decision-making (Chapter Four). Findings provided confirmation that some framings of water crises evoked mortality anxieties in American and Canadian populations (Chapter Two) and delivered evidence of environmental identity reinforcement following a typical mortality or life-threatening water reminder (Chapter Three). Findings also illustrated that mortality salience influenced appraisal of male and female water managers, and that these appraisals were also influenced by underlying levels of sexism and, potentially, connected gender role stereotypes. In addition to academic contributions from this research, outcomes from this dissertation inform water communication campaigns (e.g., when threatening communications might be motivating for pro-environmental change and when might it not) and for guidance regarding equity efforts, particularly among leadership contexts that are presently male-dominated. Understanding how to develop and implement water crisis solutions is necessary in our changing climate. These solutions require recognizing how to best create and foster diverse, equitable decision-making groups that retain and respect that diversity so all can be meaningfully included

    The neural basis of semantic processing across comprehension contexts

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    Current neurobiological models of semantic cognition have been predominately derived from studies of single-words or sentences which may provide an impoverished estimate of how semantic processing occurs in real-world contexts. Studies that make use of more ecologically valid stimuli such as natural language or narratives suggest that, counter to the hub-and-spoke framework in which the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) serves as a graded hub integrating information from proximal sensorimotor spokes, the semantic system displays voxel-wise category specialization tiled across a large, distributed network. A complicating factor in reconciling these seemingly conflicting claims is the over-reliance on concrete conceptual knowledge in describing the organization of the semantic system. A recent theoretical account argues that social knowledge, like other types of semantic knowledge, is processed within the ventrolateral ATL, but this claim has not been tested using naturalistic stimuli, which better sample abstract social knowledge, including pragmatic inference. This thesis investigates the organization of the semantic system across multiple scales, from isolated words to multimodal narratives, and across multiple types of semantic conceptual knowledge, from concrete to abstract. Using comprehension of concrete words as a starting point, the first study describes a critical examination of specialization within the semantic system for taxonomic (dog – bear) and thematic (dog – leash) relations using intracranial EEG recordings from an array of depth electrodes within ATL, inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and two regions within the semantic control network, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Moving across the context and conceptual scale to build upon this work, the second study investigated how the concrete and abstract lexical and semantic properties of single-words, akin to those that informed the hub-and-spoke model, are processed in a complex, complete narrative presented to participants during fMRI scanning. In doing so, this study enabled comparisons between prior studies of isolated words and naturalistic work, thus moving toward an integrated cross-scale account of semantic cognition. Using the same neuroimaging data, the third study extended this work to investigate how context contributes to the construction of meaning by studying how the semantic and social cognitive systems are engaged by social and pragmatic sentence-level content. This enabled a direct, naturalistic test of the claim that social knowledge is housed within the semantic system. The fourth study investigated shared processing between social and semantic systems using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing, which captures the multimodal environment in which social knowledge is exchanged. The results of these studies collectively demonstrate that the semantic and social systems are differentially engaged across the scales investigated here. Concrete conceptual relations engage one (or more) specialized hubs within the semantic system, whereas processing of naturalistic verbal and event content co-varies with activation in large brain networks. There is evidence of functional gradations within ATL that are differentially sensitive to the demands of narrative comprehension – the anterior superior temporal gyrus (i.e., dorsolateral subregion) and anterior fusiform (i.e., ventral subregion) appear to be particularly sensitive to the quantity and informativeness of external input whereas the anterior middle and inferior temporal gyri (i.e., ventrolateral subregion) appear to be engaged by internal, or endogenous, semantic processing during narrative comprehension. Engagement of this same ventrolateral subregion is observed in response to social word and sentence content, providing support for the claim that social processing is subsumed within the semantic system. Taken together, the results suggest an extension to the current neurobiological model of semantic cognition that accommodates comprehension contexts. The studies undertaken as part of this thesis build upon the existing concept-level frameworks towards a narrative-level framework of semantic cognition

    Complexity Science in Human Change

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    This reprint encompasses fourteen contributions that offer avenues towards a better understanding of complex systems in human behavior. The phenomena studied here are generally pattern formation processes that originate in social interaction and psychotherapy. Several accounts are also given of the coordination in body movements and in physiological, neuronal and linguistic processes. A common denominator of such pattern formation is that complexity and entropy of the respective systems become reduced spontaneously, which is the hallmark of self-organization. The various methodological approaches of how to model such processes are presented in some detail. Results from the various methods are systematically compared and discussed. Among these approaches are algorithms for the quantification of synchrony by cross-correlational statistics, surrogate control procedures, recurrence mapping and network models.This volume offers an informative and sophisticated resource for scholars of human change, and as well for students at advanced levels, from graduate to post-doctoral. The reprint is multidisciplinary in nature, binding together the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and neuroscience
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