Look out captain, I hear an ambiguous alien! A study of interpretation bias and anxiety in young children

There is convincing evidence that anxious children and adolescents are biased to interpret ambiguity in a negative way (Stuijfzand, Creswell, Field, Pearcey, & Dodd, 2017). However, little research examines interpretation bias in children under eight years. This is due to existing measures of interpretation bias being inappropriate for young children. Consequently, we aimed to develop a new interpretation bias task for young children using tones. Children learnt to associate high tones with a ‘happy alien’ and low tones with an ‘angry alien’. They were then asked to classify tones from the middle of the frequency range (ambiguous tones) as ‘happy’ or ‘angry’. Corrugator muscle activity was recorded alongside behavioural responses. A community sample of 110 children aged 4 to 8 years, split into high and low anxious groups, completed the task. High anxious children were more likely to interpret the ambiguous tones as negative but this effect was small and only apparent after controlling for developmental factors. Corrugator activity aligned with behavioural responses for trained but not ambiguous tones. This is the first study to assess interpretation bias in young children using behavioural and physiological measures. Results indicate the task is developmentally appropriate and has potential utility for future research

What do we actually measure as music-induced emotions?

The paper presents the results of a systematic review of 61 empirical studies in which emotions in response to music were measured. The analysis of each study was focused on the measurement of emotion components and the conceptualization of emotion both in hypothesis and discussion. The review does not support the claim that music evokes the same emotional reactions as life events do, especially modal emotions. Notably, neither a high intensity of feelings, nor intentionality were confirmed in relation to musical experiences, the emergence of specific action tendencies, or specific physiological changes. Based on the obtained results, it is recommended to use the terms “affect” or “music emotions” with reference to emotions experienced in reaction to music and to abandon the term “emotions” as misleading

Psychophysiological measurements in programming task:guidelines for conducting EMG research

Abstract. Programming languages have been studied and developed throughout history of programming. There are lots of different programming languages that are being used in software development, but only core languages are taught in Universities. Programming languages usually have their own syntax, which may differ greatly from each other. Using different programming languages for same task may provoke different emotions in programmers, depending their knowledge on the language. Research on programming and programming languages have generally focused on technical and exterior aspects. More recently, there has been some research on the programmers and their emotions during the programming tasks. This master’s thesis focuses on latter and aims to provide new information of programmers experienced emotions during the programming tasks by using EMG-recordings. This master thesis’ main study focus is in psychophysiology, which combines psychology to physiological research, by finding correlation between physiological activity and emotional phenomenon. This study assessed university students experienced emotions when conducting programming tasks with C and Python programming languages. EMG measurement device was used on the test participants to record signal data from facial based muscles for smiling and frowning activity, which are linked to positive and negative emotions. This study’s results showed small differences with emotional experiences during the programming tasks, but the overall results were not statistically significant. Therefore, more research on this topic is needed for more consistent results. Additionally, this research has provided guidelines on how EMG studies are conducted on laboratory setting and suggestions for future studies

Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli. Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus, Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This book integrates proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer people's intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems. The design of this kind of systems combines knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as physiological data measurement and processing, with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing

Anxiety in young children: cognitive biases, development and assessment

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent disorders to affect children. To understand how anxiety develops and what factors cause and/or maintain anxiety it is important to study anxiety in young children. Currently, there is a relative lack of studies focusing on anxiety and cognitive biases in children below 8 years old, in part due to a lack of methods for assessing anxiety subtypes and cognitive biases at this age. The primary aim of this thesis is to examine the associations between anxiety and cognitive biases in children aged between 4 and 8 years. A secondary aim is to develop a brief measure of early signs of social anxiety in young children. These aims are realised across four papers. In Paper 1 a meta-analysis of the current literature on anxiety-related interpretation bias in children and adolescents is presented. A robust relationship was found, that was moderated by age. The study highlighted the need for more studies with younger children. Following this, a novel measure of interpretation bias using ambiguous tones was used in Paper 2 to assess the presence of an anxiety related interpretation bias in children aged 4 to 8. Anxiety differences in interpretation bias were only seen once developmental confounds were accounted for. Paper 3 used eye-tracking to assess the presence of an anxiety related attention bias in 4 to 8 year olds. Evidence of nuanced patterns of attention bias between anxiety groups were found. In Paper 4 a measure of social worries was adapted and validated for children ages 4 to 8. Together, the studies provide new methods for the study of cognitive biases and anxiety in young children and new insights into their association. The work leads directly to several suggestions for future research including longitudinal work that tracks biases, anxiety and developmental factors over time