Emotional Storyteller for Vision Impaired and Hearing-Impaired Children

Tellie is an innovative mobile app designed to offer an immersive and emotionally enriched storytelling experience for children who are visually and hearing impaired. It achieves this through four main objectives: Text extraction utilizes the CRAFT model and a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to accurately extract and recognize text from images in storybooks. Recognition of Emotions in Sentences employs BERT to detect and distinguish emotions at the sentence level including happiness, anger, sadness, and surprise. Conversion of Text to Human Natural Audio with Emotion transforms text into emotionally expressive audio using Tacotron2 and Wave Glow, enhancing the synthesized speech with emotional styles to create engaging audio narratives. Conversion of Text to Sign Language: To cater to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, Tellie translates text into sign language using CNNs, ensuring alignment with real sign language expressions. These objectives combine to create Tellie, a groundbreaking app that empowers visually and hearing-impaired children with access to captivating storytelling experiences, promoting accessibility and inclusivity through the harmonious integration of language, creativity, and technology. This research demonstrates the potential of advanced technologies in fostering inclusive and emotionally engaging storytelling for all children

How slow can you go? : the joint effects of action preparation and emotion on the perception of time

People are often found to temporally overestimate the duration of emotionally salient stimuli relative to neutral stimuli. To date there has been noinvestigation into the behavioural consequences of such an effect or whether such an effect can be enhanced. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 investigated whether a behavioural advantage to temporally overestimating the duration of emotive stimuli exists. Reaction time facilitation was found following the display of an emotive stimulus which was more frequently temporally overestimated than a neutral stimulus. This provides support for the notion that temporal overestimation due to threat prepares one to act. However, such effects were not found in Experiment 1. Experiments 4 and 5 used multiple experimental manipulations to induce an enhanced temporal overestimation effect. Neither experiment provided evidence that one’s perception of time can be distorted to a greater amount than has been previously demonstrated. This is explained by the operation of an internal clock, such as scalar expectancy theory (SET) (Gibbon, Church, & Meck, 1984), operating at some maximum level. Finally Experiment 6 used electroencephalography to investigate the N1P2 complex in spider phobic and non-phobic individuals. The peak amplitude of the N1P2 complex was not modulated by the spider stimuli, however, the latency of the N1 component was found to be earlier when a spider stimulus was presented. It is suggested that the reaction time facilitation reported in Experiments 2 and 3 of this thesis may not be attributable to temporal overestimation per se, but instead is the result of a general cognitive speeding effect which also leads to temporal overestimation

Interpreting ‘grief’ in Senegal: language, emotions and cross-cultural translation in a francophone African context

AbstractThis article reflects on the profound complexities of translating and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through language, including the process of translation, in its broadest sense, between multiple languages (Wolof, French, English). Our experiences demonstrate the crucial importance of involving interpreters and field researchers throughout the research process, to gain fundamental insight into the cultural nuances of indigenous languages and how these are translated and potentially re-framed in the process. We reflect on our iterative process of discussing emerging interpretations with participants in follow-up workshops and with our interpreter. This approach helped shed light on language use surrounding ‘grief’ and how this is bound up with wider socio-cultural norms which make particular emotions surrounding death and experiences/meanings of death and bereavement possible and ‘speak-able’. Our research calls for greater recognition in death and bereavement studies of the cultural specificity of conceptual frameworks developed in minority European socio-linguistic contexts and demonstrates the need for greater engagement with theoretical, empirical and methodological insights gained in diverse cultural contexts in the Majority world. RésuméCet article reflète les complexités profondes de la traduction et de l’interprétation du ‘chagrin’, des émotions et des réponses face à un décès d’une manière générale, dans des contextes multilingues et interculturels. En nous appuyant sur une recherche qualitative menée dans le Sénégal urbain, Afrique de l’Ouest, nous discutons des échanges de significations qui entourent le chagrin et la mort à travers la langue, incluant le processus de traduction, dans son sens plus large, entre différentes langues (wolof, français, anglais). Nos expériences démontrent l’importance cruciale d’impliquer les interprètes et les chercheurs sur le terrain dans tout le processus de recherche, d’avoir une connaissance approfondie des nuances culturelles des langues autochtones et de comprendre comment celles-ci sont traduites et potentiellement reformulées dans le processus. Nous réfléchissons sur notre processus itératif de discussion des interprétations émergentes avec notre interprète et avec les participants lors des ateliers de suivi. Cette approche nous a permis de mettre en lumière l’usage de la langue relative au ‘chagrin’ et de voir comment celui-ci est lié à des normes socioculturelles plus larges qui rendent possibles et ‘exprimables’ les émotions particulières entourant un décès, et les expériences/significations de la mort et du deuil. Notre recherche appelle à une plus grande reconnaissance, dans les études sur la mort, de la spécificité culturelle des cadres conceptuels développés dans les contextes sociolinguistiques de la minorité européenne et démontre le besoin d’un plus grand rapprochement avec les connaissances théoriques, empiriques et méthodologiques acquis dans le Monde majoritaire. TeunkMbide mi day wané diafe diafe you khoote yi am si tekki ak wakh li nek si «Nakhar», si yeug yeug ak tontou yi waar si Dée sokay khayma, si waal you bari si ay lakk ak thiossane ak ada. Sougnou soukandiko si guestou bougnou def si deukou takh yi si sénégal, Afric sowou diante, gnou ngi wakhtane si wethienete teki ay baat si li eumbe Nakhar ak Dee diaraleko si ay lakk (Wolof, nassarane, ak angalais).sou gnouy diangate wane nagnou solo bi am si bolee si tekki kat ak ay guestou kat si waar bi si liguey bi yeup. Am kham kham bou deugueur si woutee si am si doundine ak lakk yi si deuk yi ak kham boubakh naka lagnou lene di tekkee bou lere si guestou bi yeup. Gnou ngi khalate si sougnou diakhalanete bi si tekki kalamayi ak sougnou tekkikate ak gni bok si wakhtane yi. Yone wowou dimbalinagnou si leral yi gnouy dieufeundiko lakk bi dieum si nakhar ak guis naka la lakk bi andee ak doundinou askan wi li lak mo meuneu am tey wane yeuk yeuk yi nite di am sou dee ammee ak li dee ak nakharlou di tekki. Sougnou guestou daf ay dieumelee si nangou guestou yi gnou def si dee , ada yi am si doundine lakk yi li gueuneu touti si nassarane yi te day wane sokhla bi am si diegue kham kham yi yag yi, you teew yi ak si walou dokhaline bi gnou nango si gni eup si adouna bi

The Neuropsychology of Religion

Consider religion to be a community's (1) costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual world of supernatural agents (3) who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception. This intellectual framework guides a research program that aims to foster scientific dialogue between cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology regarding a set of phenomena vital to most human life and all societies (Atran 2002). The present chapter mainly concerns the third criterion of religion (3), and its implications for neuropsychology. Previous neurobiological studies of religion have focused on tracking participant's neurophysiological responses during episodes of religious experience and recording individual patterns of trance, vision, revelation and the like. This has favored comparison of religious experience with temporal-lobe brain-wave patterns during epileptic seizures and acute schizophrenic episodes. Cognitive structures of the human mind/brain in general, and cognitions of agency in particular, are usually represented in these studies in simple-minded terms (e.g., binary oppositions, holistic vs. analytical tensions, hierarchical organization, etc.) that have little input from, or pertinence to, recent findings of cognitive and developmental psychology. Perhaps more telling is recent work on the role of the prefrontal cortices in processing concepts of agency and self and in cognitive mediation of relevant emotions originating in (what was once called) “the limbic system.” Still, for those religious believers who never have an emotionally intense encounter with the Divine – including the overwhelming majority of persons in our society – the neurophysiological bases of faith remain a complete mystery

Mood, Emotive Content, and Reasoning

Mood, Emotive Content, and Reasoning - Daniel Zahra Theories of how individuals reason, and how they experience emotion abound in the psychological literature; yet, despite the common lay-theories of how emotions might affect a person’s reasoning, very little empirical work has been conducted on this relationship. The current thesis addresses this knowledge-gap by first distilling from the literature two classes of emotion theory; Information, and Load; and then systematically testing the explanatory power of these theories. A dual-process framework is employed in order to define low (Type One) and high effort (Type Two) strategies. Information theories predict that negative emotion cues more analytic processing relative to positive emotion, whereas load theories predict both positive and negative emotion to suppress use of high-effort strategies. Thus the two theories are compared by varying incidental and integral emotion across syllogistic reasoning, conditional reasoning, and the ratio-bias task, and assessing the engagement of Type One and Type Two processes across positive emotion, negative emotion, and control conditions. The findings suggest that emotion effects in syllogistic reasoning do not consistently support either Load or Information theories (Experiments 1-4). Emotion effects are found to be typically larger for integral than incidental emotion (Experiment 5), and most frequently serve as Information in verbal (Experiments 6 and 7) and visual conditional reasoning tasks (Experiment 8). Furthermore, these effects are to a large extent dependent on task properties such as the number of alternative antecedents (Experiments 9 and 10), and are greater on more difficult tasks (Experiments 11 and 12). These findings suggest that emotion has a greater impact on Type Two than Type One processes. A range of methodological and theoretical implications which will inform future work in this area are also discussed in the closing chapter.ESR

Emotion-aware voice interfaces based on speech signal processing

Voice interfaces (VIs) will become increasingly widespread in current daily lives as AI techniques progress. VIs can be incorporated into smart devices like smartphones, as well as integrated into autos, home automation systems, computer operating systems, and home appliances, among other things. Current speech interfaces, however, are unaware of users’ emotional states and hence cannot support real communication. To overcome these limitations, it is necessary to implement emotional awareness in future VIs. This thesis focuses on how speech signal processing (SSP) and speech emotion recognition (SER) can enable VIs to gain emotional awareness. Following an explanation of what emotion is and how neural networks are implemented, this thesis presents the results of several user studies and surveys. Emotions are complicated, and they are typically characterized using category and dimensional models. They can be expressed verbally or nonverbally. Although existing voice interfaces are unaware of users’ emotional states and cannot support natural conversations, it is possible to perceive users’ emotions by speech based on SSP in future VIs. One section of this thesis, based on SSP, investigates mental restorative effects on humans and their measures from speech signals. SSP is less intrusive and more accessible than traditional measures such as attention scales or response tests, and it can provide a reliable assessment for attention and mental restoration. SSP can be implemented into future VIs and utilized in future HCI user research. The thesis then moves on to present a novel attention neural network based on sparse correlation features. The detection accuracy of emotions in the continuous speech was demonstrated in a user study utilizing recordings from a real classroom. In this section, a promising result will be shown. In SER research, it is unknown if existing emotion detection methods detect acted emotions or the genuine emotion of the speaker. Another section of this thesis is concerned with humans’ ability to act on their emotions. In a user study, participants were instructed to imitate five fundamental emotions. The results revealed that they struggled with this task; nevertheless, certain emotions were easier to replicate than others. A further study concern is how VIs should respond to users’ emotions if SER techniques are implemented in VIs and can recognize users’ emotions. The thesis includes research on ways for dealing with the emotions of users. In a user study, users were instructed to make sad, angry, and terrified VI avatars happy and were asked if they would like to be treated the same way if the situation were reversed. According to the results, the majority of participants tended to respond to these unpleasant emotions with neutral emotion, but there is a difference among genders in emotion selection. For a human-centered design approach, it is important to understand what the users’ preferences for future VIs are. In three distinct cultures, a questionnaire-based survey on users’ attitudes and preferences for emotion-aware VIs was conducted. It was discovered that there are almost no gender differences. Cluster analysis found that there are three fundamental user types that exist in all cultures: Enthusiasts, Pragmatists, and Sceptics. As a result, future VI development should consider diverse sorts of consumers. In conclusion, future VIs systems should be designed for various sorts of users as well as be able to detect the users’ disguised or actual emotions using SER and SSP technologies. Furthermore, many other applications, such as restorative effects assessments, can be included in the VIs system

Active Symbols

Visual representations of religious symbols continue to puzzle judges. Lacking empirical data on how images communicate, courts routinely dismiss visual religious symbols as “passive.” This Article challenges the notion that symbols are passive, introducing insights from cognitive neuroscience research to Establishment Clause theory and doctrine. It argues that visual symbolic messages can be at least as active as textual messages. Therefore, religious messages should be assessed in a medium-neutral manner in terms of their communicative impact, that is, irrespective of their textual or visual form. Providing a new conceptual framework for assessing religious symbolic messages, this Article reconceptualizes coercion and endorsement—the dominant competing approaches to symbolic messages in Establishment Clause theory—as matters of degree on a spectrum of communicative impact. This focus on communicative impact reconciles the approaches to symbolic speech in the Free Speech and Establishment Clause contexts and allows Establishment Clause theory to more accurately account for underlying normative concerns

You\u27re in the Right Place at the Right Time : Double Consciousness, Cultural Memory, and Cultural Representation in College Gospel Choirs

Gospel music exists within a rich cultural and historical space—at one level, it is part of an important Black musical tradition and at another, it is part of mainstream American history. College gospel choirs, then, mediate the divide of being part of the Black diasporic, religious music aesthetic while co-existing in the academic setting within a largely White-European western art music arena. Moreover, they provide space for students to commune socially, express faith, and gain cultural knowledge. I argue that through the theoretical lenses of double consciousness, cultural memory, and cultural representation, one can clearly understand the position of gospel choirs on university and college campuses in how they facilitate community, express and define “Blackness,” and interact with the greater academic community. Furthermore, such investigation provides opportunity to understand the perpetuation of gospel choirs in the academic setting today. This ethnographic survey and fieldwork-based research project was undertaken during the academic years of 2010-2012. Outlining my project, I first introduce the concept of African American sacred traditions by visiting the existent scholastic work on gospel music. I then summarize the history of college gospel choirs and explore the provided frameworks, thereby accessing the role of college gospel choirs in academia. Employing my own fieldwork experiences, I apply the theoretical ideas of double consciousness, cultural memory, and cultural representation to my observations. I share my findings about how gospel music on college and university campuses provides opportunity to understand diversity and foster community. This thesis concludes with suggestions for continued study in African diasporic music and gospel music, as well as a reminder that African American musics must be experienced to be fully understood

Feeling American : spatialising emotion, embodiment and affective atmospheres in the emergence of everyday national identities

PhD ThesisStudies on nationalism have recently seen a critical engagement with the flesh, the emotional and the affective. This more-than-representational approach has shifted thought towards real, lived experiences within the everyday, conceptualising national identities as processual and emergent through encounters and performances. This thesis develops ideas of emotional nationalisms and affective atmospheres, whilst showing how young people's bodies negotiate national identities. It pulls together work on young people's geopolitics, with wider discourses on belonging to the nation, and calls for more embodied understandings of national identities. This thesis draws on 11 months of ethnographic research in Bellingham, WA, USA. During this time I volunteered at a church youth group in the area. The research draws from 21 interviews and 2 small group discussions with students, aged 16-18, alongside auto-ethnographic research diary excerpts made during the research process. There are three ways that this thesis contributes to this emerging body of work on the more-than-representational nation. Firstly, it considers the emotionally subjective nature of national identities, thinking carefully about how feelings of belonging and connection are developed and shift as bodies grow, move and embody space. Secondly, I argue that national identities are fleshy and come into being through their embodiment and performance as bodies take-on, re-shape and make-tangible their feelings of belonging and connection to nations. I disrupt normative and taken-forgranted notions of national identities by demonstrating the ways in which national identities can be interrupted and re-shaped by bodies and through atmospheres. Finally I consider the spatiality of national identities, thinking through how scales intersect and work together to shape one another, affecting how national identities are felt and come into being. This thesis shows how messy, diffuse and intimate national identities are, pointing to the need to think more carefully about their emotionally subjective nature and their emergence within and through affective atmosphere

Affective Computing

This book provides an overview of state of the art research in Affective Computing. It presents new ideas, original results and practical experiences in this increasingly important research field. The book consists of 23 chapters categorized into four sections. Since one of the most important means of human communication is facial expression, the first section of this book (Chapters 1 to 7) presents a research on synthesis and recognition of facial expressions. Given that we not only use the face but also body movements to express ourselves, in the second section (Chapters 8 to 11) we present a research on perception and generation of emotional expressions by using full-body motions. The third section of the book (Chapters 12 to 16) presents computational models on emotion, as well as findings from neuroscience research. In the last section of the book (Chapters 17 to 22) we present applications related to affective computing