Automatic Facial Expression Analysis in Diagnosis and Treatment of Schizophrenia

PhD ThesisPatients with schizophrenia often display impairments in the expression of emotion and speech and those are observed in their facial behaviour. Such impairments present valuable information for the psychiatrists, as they can be used for diagnosis. However, behaviour analysis is subjective in clinical settings and time-consuming in research settings. In this thesis, our aim is to develop fully-automatic methodologies for a) quantifying patient’s facial behaviour, b) estimating symptom severity in schizophrenia, and c) determining whether the symptoms have improved or not by a given treatment. In the analysis, videos of professional-patient interviews of symptom assessment, that were recorded in realistic conditions, are used. This helps in moving from controlled contexts used in the literature to similar-to-real clinical settings. Firstly, an architecture is proposed for automatic facial expression analysis. The proposed architecture address the data imbalance and threshold selection problems in multilabel classification, and is trained using several datasets recorded in controlled environments. Then, the expression analysis is moved from the controlled environments to the recent in-the-wild settings, where VGG-16 networks are trained using 4 recent datasets captured in the wild. In-the-wild analysis helps in analyzing more patients and leads to better results in symptom estimation. Secondly, a deep learning approach is proposed for estimating expression-related symptoms of schizophrenia in two different assessment interviews, namely PANSS and CAINS. The proposed approach consists of Gaussian Mixture Model and Fisher Vector layers for extracting compact statistical features over the whole video interview. Experiments show promising results both on statistical analysis and symptom estimation. Finally, two methods are proposed for addressing directly the problem of treatment outcome estimation in schizophrenia – more specifically, are aimed at determining whether specific symptoms have improved or not by analysing jointly two videos of the same patient, one before and one after the treatment

Frogs and ogres: transformation, reuse and creativity in meme culture

Memes have been the zeitgeist of social media participation for the last three decades, but their creative, comedic, playful and transformative complexities are under-emphasised by current digital media scholarship. The purpose of this thesis is to bring light to the inner social, technological and formal logics of meme culture and to describe complex meaning in an otherwise difficult to grasp cultural environment. Additionally, this thesis aims to construct new models of understanding memes with the help of a diverse range of methodologies and disciplines including genre theory, parody theory, humour studies, play theory, communication studies and copyright law. Through this approach, the thesis cuts ties with the prominent, but ineffective guiding framework of Dawkinsian memetics. Instead, it offers an alternative to prior definitions of memes, and looks at them as an emergent, vernacular genre of the web 2.0 social media landscape. This is done through both theoretical discussion and mixed methods media analysis. As such, discussed ideas (such as 'hypertextuality', 'parody', 're-entextualisation' and 'resemiotisation') are put into the practice of textual, intertextual and contextual analysis. Findings of this thesis indicate that the frameworks of rhetorical genre theory, remediation as well as social laughter and social play prove particularly effective for the genre understanding of memes. Further, two key case studies - the 'Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life' and 'Pepe the Frog' memes - prove successful examples for the adaptation of parodic and paralinguistic lenses onto a media studies understanding of meme culture. Additional learnings suggest that the transformativeness of memes could face challenges but could also earn recognition under recent EU, UK and US understandings of parody as copyright exception; and that the methodology of context-sensitive qualitative analysis can re-position prior understandings of everyday reuse into a more complex but also more accurate framework. Overall, the findings of this thesis emphasise and demystify online cultural transformation as it happens, in both grand and subtle ways, through everyday meme participation

Watership Down

Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978) is as controversial as it is beloved. Whether due to the tear-jerking hit song 'Bright Eyes' or its notorious representation of violence inflicted by and upon animated rabbits, the film retains the ability to move and shock audiences of all ages, remaining an important cultural touchstone decades after its original release. This open access collection unites scholars and practitioners from a diversity of perspectives to consider the ongoing legacy of this landmark of British cinema and animation history. The authors provide nuanced discussions of Watership Down’s infamous animated depictions of violence, death and its contentious relationship with child audiences, as well as examinations of understudied aspects of the film including its musical score, use of language, its increasingly relevant political and environmental themes and its difficult journey to the screen, complete with behind-the-scenes photographs, documents and production artwork. As the first substantial work on Watership Down, this book is a valuable companion on the film for scholars, students and fans alike. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Factors moderating the risk of PTSD, emotional and behavioral problems amongst children in war zones and refugees escaping from warfare

Children who grow up in war zones are typically exposed to multiple stressors including physical harm, intimidation or other forms of psychological trauma. This can also lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. On the other hand, resilient children show no psychiatric distress even when they are exposed to severe traumatic stress. Additionally, the number of refugee children due to warfare reasons is increasing. Past empirical studies have recognized that the process of migration and living life as a refugee is detrimental to the psychological health of young refugees. In this symposium we will examine the prevalence and determinants of resiliency among refugee children and children living in conditions of war and violence. The first study investigated the psychological, social and somatic effects of chronic traumatic experience on Palestinian children over six years (2000-2006). The sample consisted of 1,137 children who completed: Checklist of Traumatic Experiences, Symptoms of PTSD Scale, Network of Psycho-Social Support and Personality Assessment Questionnaire. It was found that 41% of the participants suffered from PTSD. From these 25% suffered from cognitive symptoms; 22% suffered from emotional symptoms; 22% suffered from social behavioral problems; 17% suffered from academic and 14% suffered from somatic symptoms. The support of family, friends, relatives and teachers, and positive personality traits were found to be strong protective factors aiding recovery from trauma and PTSD. The second study evaluated the relation of exposure to war traumas, and violence in the family, community, and school, to PTSD symptoms, emotional and behavioral problems amongst 330 Palestinian children. Results highlight the additive effects of exposure to war traumas and violence in different settings. In addition, it was found that psychosocial support reduced the effects of environmental factors in developing PTSD and behavioral problems. The third study included data from two refugee charity organizations in the UK. There were 200 refugee children coming from war zones and 210 control children (non-refugees). The study aimed to look at a range of factors to assess the differences between the above groups with regards to their well-being and peer and sibling relationships. Results showed that refugee children were significantly more likely to be in the clinical range for total difficulties and to have higher health and physical problems, negative friendship quality and low self esteem compared to the control group. Refugees who were bullied at home and at school were also more likely to develop PTSD symptoms. Protective factors are also discussed in this study. The above studies emphasize the fact that interventionists should consider the full range of sources of environmental risk for PTSD and emotional and behavioral problems and should strengthen the psychosocial support for children in or coming from war zones

Mirror Affect: Interpersonal Spectatorship in Installation Art since the 1960s

This dissertation traces the genealogy of interpersonal spectatorship in contemporary installations that encourage viewers to affectively relate to one another by watching themselves seeing and acting individually or as a group. By incorporating reflective surfaces, live video feedback, or sensors in their works, contemporary artists around the world have been challenging what had come to be a binary relation between the beholder and the art object, thereby, heightening viewers' awareness of the social and spatial contexts of aesthetic experience. Starting with the 1960s there has been not only an increasingly sharp departure from the autonomy of the art object on the part of artists, but also a rejection of prevailing self-focused and private modes of art spectatorship on the part of viewers of art. Situated between theories of relational aesthetics and new media theories of interactivity, my dissertation examines the social, cultural, and technological factors that have contributed to the production of installations that act as affective interfaces between multiple viewers. I argue that contemporary artworks with mirroring properties have triggered a shift towards increasingly public and interpersonal forms of art spectatorship that are consonant with the emergence of new modes of perception and sociability shaped by enhanced surveillance, unavoidable multitasking, and online networking

Faceting: Rereading Feminism and Postmodernism

This project offers a feminist reconsideration of the postmodern aesthetic across a set of American fictions since 1945. From our current perspective, postmodernism is both overdetermined and undervalued; we limit our readings by equating its sheen and sparkle with irony, paranoia, and superficiality. I present an alternative to two longstanding default modes of interpreting the postmodern: the excavatory, hermeneutic model inaugurated by Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and the poststructuralist model, which celebrates a seemingly infinite profusion of references and surfaces. My project’s impact is threefold: I demonstrate how feminism refashions the postmodern aesthetic, I reanimate a quintessentially postmodern language of surface and depth in terms of our current crisis of reading, and I show how feminism is uniquely equipped to supersede, though not erase, that binary. Drawing together new debates in feminist, postcritical, and film theory, I present another approach to novels by Sylvia Plath, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as several films and the television series Mad Men.Feminist theory has a vexed relationship with postmodernism, both as an aesthetic category and in relation to its two major interpretive frameworks. For Jameson, the postmodern resists interpretation because of its baroque excesses, which he alternately compares to “heaps of fragments” and to “the distorting and fragmenting reflections of one enormous glass surface.” Jameson’s imagery emphasizes postmodernism’s illegibility, whether by profusion or impenetrability; while poststructuralist readings distinguish themselves by ennobling and elaborating upon these assumptions, they do not fundamentally unseat them. I argue that postmodernism’s aesthetic, supremely fragmented but also flatly reflective, actually invites the reader to make sense of the text in a pleasurable act of construction. This calls for a method of reading I term faceting, from the Latin facere, “to make or do,” a word that connotes reflection, refraction, and repositioning. To constellate meanings in a postmodern text is to negotiate a plural but limited set of interrelations from its vast networks of data and its myriad surfaces. The reader fastens shifting, tessellated planes into a provisional, dimensional, if hollow, narrative whole. If, in Rita Felski’s terms, intersectional feminism is always a “reworking,” an essentially “purposeful and hopeful” project of improvement, its history brings much to bear on the recent disciplinary turn to the postcritical, which is rooted in feminist and queer theory and eudaimonic in its aims. The pleasures of postmodernism, I maintain, lie precisely at its jagged seams and shifting juxtapositions, which the reader herself is constantly in the process of remaking. Rather than a readerly pose of ironic detachment or paranoid suspicion, faceting entails attachment, effort, and desire.Faceting seizes specifically on metonymy as an alternative, feminist form of figuration that is both prominent in and amenable to the aims of postmodernism. Unlike metaphor, which encourages a binary reading, whereby the reader searches for significance behind a surface, metonymy enables the reader to perceive the postmodern aesthetic as a severalty of surfaces – as, in a word, multifaceted. In each chapter, I analyze a seemingly binary mode of representation that faceting transforms into a limited plurality. I begin by using The Bell Jar and A Single Man to counter Jameson’s claims in Postmodernism, as figures that appear to be dual yield greater complexity when viewed via faceting. I go on to trace the implications of narrative eversion – the process by which a shape is pulled inside out – in The Crying of Lot 49 and Ada, or Ardor. I consider how projections into the past and future in The Woman Warrior disrupt narrative teleology, building on those observations in an analysis of the later Almanac of the Dead and Mason & Dixon. The project is bracketed by analyses of film and television, which offer insight into the visual aspects of faceting, evident in its relationship to terms like face and façade. The introduction reviews the literature that contributed to faceting as a concept, as well as the hollow pleasures of two mid-century films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Imitation of Life; the epilogue addresses the contemporary nostalgia for the postmodern in the tension between photographic and moving images in Mad Men

Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture

In the pre-digital age of cinema, animated and live-action film shared a technological basis in photography and they continue to share a basis in digital technology. This fact limits the capacity for technological inquiries to explain the persistent distinction between animated and live-action film, especially when many scholars in film and media studies agree that all moving image media are instances of animation. Understanding the distinction in aesthetic terms, however, illuminates how animation reflexively addresses aesthetic experience and its function within contexts of technological, environmental, and socio-cultural change. “Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture” argues that the aesthetics that perpetuate the idea of animation as a distinct mode in a digital media environment are particularly evident in the films produced by Pixar Animation Studios. As the first studio to produce a fully computer-generated animated film, Pixar has had a large and lasting influence on the standardization of computer animation. Rather than relegate animation to the domain of children’s entertainment or obfuscate its distinction from live action film, this critical study of Pixar demonstrates how its films build on an aesthetic tradition that interrogates nature, challenges epistemological stability, and explores the effects of technological change. This study includes investigations into the uncanny integrity of digital commodities in the Toy Story films, the technological sublime in Monsters, Inc., the exceptionality of the fantastic in The Incredibles, and sensorial disruption in Ratatouille. Each chapter explores aesthetic experience and how it operates as a contested domain in which norms and values are challenged, reconfigured, but also reproduced. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how popular animated media can engage contemporary philosophical questions about how we know the world, how we understand technology and our environment, and, finally, how aesthetics are fundamental to humanistic inquiry and critical thought

Body of glass: cybernetic bodies and the mirrored self

This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism