Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

Daily Stress Recognition from Mobile Phone Data, Weather Conditions and Individual Traits

Research has proven that stress reduces quality of life and causes many diseases. For this reason, several researchers devised stress detection systems based on physiological parameters. However, these systems require that obtrusive sensors are continuously carried by the user. In our paper, we propose an alternative approach providing evidence that daily stress can be reliably recognized based on behavioral metrics, derived from the user's mobile phone activity and from additional indicators, such as the weather conditions (data pertaining to transitory properties of the environment) and the personality traits (data concerning permanent dispositions of individuals). Our multifactorial statistical model, which is person-independent, obtains the accuracy score of 72.28% for a 2-class daily stress recognition problem. The model is efficient to implement for most of multimedia applications due to highly reduced low-dimensional feature space (32d). Moreover, we identify and discuss the indicators which have strong predictive power.Comment: ACM Multimedia 2014, November 3-7, 2014, Orlando, Florida, US

Consumerism and well-being in early adolescence

It has been suggested that consumerism is negatively related to well-being in children and adolescents, as well as adults. Few studies have explored whether certain aspects of consumerism have stronger associations with well-being than others, or between-group differences in associations. This article uses data from a sample of early adolescents to examine: levels of consumerism; relationships between different aspects of consumerism and well-being; and differences according to gender, school year group and family affluence. Data were obtained in 2010 via secondary school pupil surveys (N=2934). Consumerism measures comprised number of ‘standard’ and ‘premium’ possessions and four dimensions of consumer involvement; well-being measures comprised self-esteem, psychological distress and anger. There was evidence of high penetration of consumerist values. There were positive associations between number of possessions and anger, and between ‘dissatisfaction’ and poorer well-being, regardless of how measured. ‘Brand awareness’ was associated with positive male well-being, but negative female well-being. Many relationships between consumerism and well-being were stronger than those between family affluence and well-being. These results suggest only certain aspects of consumerism are associated with poorer adolescent well-being. Although, for some sub-groups, other aspects might be associated with better well-being, there was no evidence that modern consumer goods promote happiness

Key pedagogic thinkers: Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, France, in 1929, and completed his undergraduate work at the Sorbonne, taking a degree in German. Upon graduation, he taught high school. In the early 1960s, he began graduate studies at the University of Paris, Nanterre, earning his doctorate in sociology in 1966. Baudrillard published 30 books in which he examined various facets of modern society: gender, race, consumerism, politics, the media, and so forth. His focus was semiological—how objects and signs reflect the current human condition. Although Baudrillard did not write about education, his work is nevertheless relevant if we recognize that our educational system is a reflection of society. A Baudrillardian perspective raises the following question: What effect has consumerism had on education? To address this question, we offer some background information related to Baudrillard’s philosophical inquiries. This is followed by our brief analysis of how Baudrillard’s work may provide some potential answers to the above question and of how it can help us interpret the changes that have occurred in education during the modern period. We give special emphasis to The Consumer Society and Simulacra and Simulation

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the player’s emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence