Extracting moods from songs and BBC programs based on emotional context

The increasing amounts of media becoming available in converged digital broadcast and mobile broadband networks will require intelligent interfaces capable of personalizing the selection of content. Aiming to capture the mood in the content, we construct a semantic space based on tags, frequently used to describe emotions associated with music in the last.fm social network. Implementing latent semantic analysis (LSA), we model the affective context of songs based on their lyrics, and apply a similar approach to extract moods from BBC synopsis descriptions of TV episodes using TV-Anytime atmosphere terms. Based on our early results, we propose that LSA could be implemented as machinelearning method to extract emotional context and model affective user preferences

Building an Ethical Small Group (Chapter 9 of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership)

This chapter examines ethical leadership in the small-group context. To help create groups that brighten rather than darken the lives of participants, leaders must foster individual ethical accountability among group members, ensure ethical group interaction, avoid moral pitfalls, and establish ethical relationships with other groups. In his metaphor of the leader\u27s light or shadow, Parker Palmer emphasizes that leaders shape the settings or contexts around them. According to Palmer, leaders are people who have an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being, conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 1 In this final section of the text, I\u27ll describe some of the ways we can create conditions that illuminate the lives of followers in small-group, organizational, global, and crisis settings. Shedding light means both resisting and exerting influence. We must fend off pressures to engage in unethical behavior while actively seeking to create healthier moral environments

Studying soap operas

This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries

A Test and Extension of Lane and Terry's (2000) Conceptual Model of Mood-Performance Relationships Using a Large Internet Sample.

The present study tested and extended Lane and Terry (2000) conceptual model of mood-performance relationships using a large dataset from an online experiment. Methodological and theoretical advances included testing a more balanced model of pleasant and unpleasant emotions, and evaluating relationships among emotion regulation traits, states and beliefs, psychological skills use, perceptions of performance, mental preparation, and effort exerted during competition. Participants (N = 73,588) completed measures of trait emotion regulation, emotion regulation beliefs, regulation efficacy, use of psychological skills, and rated their anger, anxiety, dejection, excitement, energy, and happiness before completing a competitive concentration task. Post-competition, participants completed measures of effort exerted, beliefs about the quality of mental preparation, and subjective performance. Results showed that dejection associated with worse performance with the no-dejection group performing 3.2% better. Dejection associated with higher anxiety and anger scores and lower energy, excitement, and happiness scores. The proposed moderating effect of dejection was supported for the anxiety-performance relationship but not the anger-performance relationship. In the no-dejection group, participants who reported moderate or high anxiety outperformed those reporting low anxiety by about 1.6%. Overall, results showed partial support for Lane and Terry's model. In terms of extending the model, results showed dejection associated with greater use of suppression, less frequent use of re-appraisal and psychological skills, lower emotion regulation beliefs, and lower emotion regulation efficacy. Further, dejection associated with greater effort during performance, beliefs that pre-competition emotions did not assist goal achievement, and low subjective performance. Future research is required to investigate the role of intense emotions in emotion regulation and performance

Group Modeling : selecting a sequence of television items to suit a group of viewers

Peer reviewedPostprin

Antecedents and consequences of chronic impulsive buying: Can impulsive buying be understood as dysfunctional self-regulation?

Researchers reach different conclusions about the functional or dysfunctional nature of impulsive buying behavior. While many note the use of impulsive buying as a form of mood regulation, there is disagreement about whether this is functional or dysfunctional and the extent to which it causes financial harm. This paper draws on data from a U.K. national survey sample (N = 109,472) to contribute to these debates. Study results suggest that impulsive buying is more common for those who have most need to regulate mood and who have the least effective emotion regulation strategies. This suggests that impulsive buying may be understood as a failure of self-regulation in relation to long-term goals and as a strategy for mood regulation. Contrary to some prior claims in the retail management and marketing research literature, the study shows higher levels of impulsive buying to be associated with more adverse financial outcomes (which are not confined to the most extreme manifestations of the trait). While ineffective emotion regulation is associated with higher propensity to buy impulsively, the findings also suggest that effective emotion regulation may to some extent mitigate the adverse consequences of the propensity to buy impulsively. The implications for ethical management, research, and policy are considered