Stay Awhile and Listen: User Interactions in a Crowdsourced Platform Offering Emotional Support

Internet and online-based social systems are rising as the dominant mode of communication in society. However, the public or semi-private environment under which most online communications operate under do not make them suitable channels for speaking with others about personal or emotional problems. This has led to the emergence of online platforms for emotional support offering free, anonymous, and confidential conversations with live listeners. Yet very little is known about the way these platforms are utilized, and if their features and design foster strong user engagement. This paper explores the utilization and the interaction features of hundreds of thousands of users on 7 Cups of Tea, a leading online platform offering online emotional support. It dissects the level of activity of hundreds of thousands of users, the patterns by which they engage in conversation with each other, and uses machine learning methods to find factors promoting engagement. The study may be the first to measure activities and interactions in a large-scale online social system that fosters peer-to-peer emotional support

Theory of mind and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions: A preliminary study

Theory of mind ability has been associated with performance in interpersonal interactions and has been found to influence aspects such as emotion recognition, social competence, and social anxiety. Being able to attribute mental states to others requires attention to subtle communication cues such as facial emotional expressions. Decoding and interpreting emotions expressed by the face, especially those with negative valence, are essential skills to successful social interaction. The current study explored the association between theory of mind skills and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions. According to the study hypothesis, individuals with poor theory of mind skills showed preferential attention to negative faces over both non-negative faces and neutral objects. Tentative explanations for the findings are offered emphasizing the potential adaptive role of vigilance for threat as a way of allocating a limited capacity to interpret others’ mental states to obtain as much information as possible about potential danger in the social environment

A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions

Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment

International audienceWorks on artificial social agents, and especially embodied conversational agents, have endowed them with social-emotional capabilities. They are being given the abilities to take into account more and more modalities to express their thoughts, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc. However, the sense of touch, although particularly interesting for social and emotional communication, is still a modality widely missing from interactions between humans and agents. We believe that integrating touch into those modalities of interaction between humans and agents would help enhancing their channels of empathic communication. In order to verify this idea, we present in this paper a system allowing tactile communication through haptic feedback on the hand and the arm of a human user. We then present a preliminary evaluation of the credibility of social touch in human-agent interaction in an immersive environment. The first results are promising and bring new leads to improve the way humans can interact through touch with virtual social agents

Emotions and Digital Well-being. The rationalistic bias of social media design in online deliberations

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations

Emotional Intelligence and Values in Digital World through Emoticons among Indian Students and Faculty

This study aims to striking differences between emotions in the real world, and emoticons of the digital world are the key focus areas as emotions play a crucial role in communication. It is undeniable that the emoticons of the digital world have changed altogether the way language is being perceived. This study also insists that while teaching time management and soft skills to students, it is vital to teaching digital communication (expressions via online). Therefore, it may need to be stressed in the curriculum. Conversation analysis or 'talk-in-interaction, a communication strategy, insists that everyday conversations have significance on the initiator—the method using the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) to get the analysis done. The results confirm a significant relationship between emotional intelligence (particularly on the clusters of self-management, social awareness, and relationship management) and communication skills

Effect of parasympathetic stimulation on brain activity during appraisal of fearful expressions

Autonomic nervous system activity is an important component of human emotion. Mental processes influence bodily physiology, which in turn feeds back to influence thoughts and feelings. Afferent cardiovascular signals from arterial baroreceptors in the carotid sinuses are processed within the brain and contribute to this two-way communication with the body. These carotid baroreceptors can be stimulated non-invasively by externally applying focal negative pressure bilaterally to the neck. In an experiment combining functional neuroimaging (fMRI) with carotid stimulation in healthy participants, we tested the hypothesis that manipulating afferent cardiovascular signals alters the central processing of emotional information (fearful and neutral facial expressions). Carotid stimulation, compared with sham stimulation, broadly attenuated activity across cortical and brainstem regions. Modulation of emotional processing was apparent as a significant expression-by-stimulation interaction within left amygdala, where responses during appraisal of fearful faces were selectively reduced by carotid stimulation. Moreover, activity reductions within insula, amygdala, and hippocampus correlated with the degree of stimulation-evoked change in the explicit emotional ratings of fearful faces. Across participants, individual differences in autonomic state (heart rate variability, a proxy measure of autonomic balance toward parasympathetic activity) predicted the extent to which carotid stimulation influenced neural (amygdala) responses during appraisal and subjective rating of fearful faces. Together our results provide mechanistic insight into the visceral component of emotion by identifying the neural substrates mediating cardiovascular influences on the processing of fear signals, potentially implicating central baroreflex mechanisms for anxiolytic treatment targets

Designing internet of tangible things for children with hearing impairment

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are a new, non-traditional way to interact with digital information using a physical environment. Therefore, TUIs connect a physical set of objects that can be explored and manipulated. TUI can be interconnected over the Internet, using Internet of Things (IoT) technology to monitor a child''s activities in real-time. Internet of Tangible Things (IoTT) is defined as a tangible interaction applied to IoT. This article describes four case studies that apply IoTT to children with cochlear implants and children whose communication is sign language. For each case study, a discussion is presented, discussing how IoTT can help the child development in skills such as: social, emotional, psychomotor, cognitive, and visual. It was found that IoTT works best when it includes the social component in children with hearing impairment, because it helps them to communicate with each other and build social-emotional skills

An Experimental Study to Determine the Effects of Dissimilar Emotional Inducements and Communication Skill Levels on the Meanings Given Communicated Messages.

The purpose of the study was to determine experimentally what effects, if any, two key within-receiver characteristics would have on the meanings communicated messages had for the respondents. The within-receiver characteristics were the emotional states of mind and communication skill levels of the test subjects. The study hypothesized that: 1. The meanings given communicated messages by subjects receiving dissimilar emotional inducements would vary significantly. 2. The meanings given communicated messages by subjects with different communication skill levels would vary significantly. 3. There would be a significant interaction effect of the dissimilar emotional inducements and communication skill levels of the subjects on the meanings given communicated messages. The study used a modified after-only with control group experimental design. The independent variables were the emotional inducements and communication skill levels of the subjects. The dependent variable was the meaning given five one-word concepts as measured by the Semantic Differential. The sample was made up of 221 undergraduate business students enrolled in ten different classes at nine different universities in Texas and Louisiana. The research procedure consisted of two entries into each of the selected classrooms. At the first entry the investigator delivered a cover story, measured the students\u27 communication skill levels, and established the expectation of a return visit. Prior to the second visit the classroom instructor gave a regularly scheduled exam. On the day of the investigator\u27s return visit the classroom instructor, at the beginning of the class period, implemented either a positive, negative, or neutral emotional inducement. These inducements were tied to the return of the exam. Near the end of this same class period the investigator entered and administered the Semantic Differential. Only afterwards were the students told they had participated in an experiment. The subjects\u27 communication skill levels were measured by a standardized test, the Employee Aptitude Survey— Test 1, Verbal Comprehension. The scores from this test formed the basis for ranking all subjects into a high, medium, or low communication skill level category. The subjects then received a positive, negative, or neutral emotional inducement. The after measurement was the meaning given five one-word concepts by subjects who were characterized by a high, low, or medium communication skill level and who had received a positive, negative, or neutral emotional inducement. From the Semantic Differential the study derived twelve dependent variable measures. Five of these came from the evaluative scale designations of the five one-word concepts. Five others came from the potency scale designations of the same concepts. In addition, two composite scores were derived by averaging the evaluative (and potency) scale designations of all five concepts for each subject. The principal analytical technique was the two-way analysis of variance. Each dependent variable measure was tested to see if differences in meaning between test groups were attributable to the types of emotional inducements, to the communication skill levels, or to an interaction effect between these factors. All statistical tests were operated at an alpha level of .05. The study obtained statistically significant findings in five of the twelve tests run. There was a significant interaction effect with the concept Sword, using potency scale designations. There was one instance of significant difference in meaning attributable to different communication skill levels. This occurred with the evaluative scale designations for the concept Symphony. Statistically significant differences between groups attributable to dissimilar emotional inducements occurred with the evaluative composite score, the potency-Patriot score, the evaluative-Symphony score, and the evaluativc-Cop score. The study concluded that, based on th ese findings, there was reason to believe that emotions affect the meanings given incoming stimuli