Social relation recognition in egocentric photostreams

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper proposes an approach to automatically categorize the social interactions of a user wearing a photo-camera (2fpm), by relying solely on what the camera is seeing. The problem is challenging due to the overwhelming complexity of social life and the extreme intra-class variability of social interactions captured under unconstrained conditions. We adopt the formalization proposed in Bugental’s social theory, that groups human relations into five social domains with related categories. Our method is a new deep learning architecture that exploits the hierarchical structure of the label space and relies on a set of social attributes estimated at frame level to provide a semantic representation of social interactions. Experimental results on the new EgoSocialRelation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Extending Honneth’s Shift in Focus for Critical Theory

Axel Honneth has called for a change of focus in Critical Theory "from the self-generated independence of systems to the damage and distortion of social relations of recognition." I argue that Honneth does not shift his methodological focus sufficiently to succeed in his goal of illuminating the social relations of recognition. Despite Honneth's shift to relations of recognition, he considers these relations in terms of the macrosocial Hegelian triad of social spheres of recognition. A deeper analysis of recognition behaviors shows they cannot be mapped exactly to these spheres. I conclude that the Hegelian triad of social spheres is an insufficient basis for an exploration of misrecognition behaviors. To understand misrecognition, we need to seek a picture of misrecognition that reflects the complex diversity of individuals' lived experiences and practices, gives sufficient attention to interpersonal recognition and misrecognition, and offers potential reasons for why individuals might engage in misrecognition behaviors

Stability, Specialization and Social Recognition

Yang s theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale (Yang 2001) is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor.In this theory specialization and, thus, the social division of labor is firmly embedded within a system of perfectly competitive markets.This leaves unresolved whether and how such development processes are possible in economies based on more primitive, nonmarket organizations.In this paper we introduce a general relational model of economic interaction.Within this non-market environment we discuss the emergence of economic specialization and ultimately of economic trade and a social division of labor.We base our approach on three stages in organizational development: the presence of a stable relational structure; the presence of relational trust and subjective specialization; and, finally, the emergence of objective specialization through the social recognition of subjectively defined economic rolesnetworks;stability;social division of labor;specialization

Autistic trait interactions underlie sex-dependent facial recognition abilities in the normal population

Autistic face processing difficulties are either uniquely social or due to a piecemeal cognitive "style". Co-morbidity of social deficits and piecemeal cognition in autism makes teasing apart these accounts difficult. These traits vary normally, and are more separable in the general population, suggesting another way to compare accounts. Participants completed the Autism Quotient survey of autistic traits, and one of three face recognition tests: full-face, eyes-only, or mouth-only. Social traits predicted performance in the full-face condition in both sexes. Eyes-only males’ performance was predicted by a social × cognitive trait interaction: attention to detail boosted face recognition in males with few social traits, but hindered performance in those reporting many social traits. This suggests social/non-social Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) trait interactions at the behavioral level. In the presence of few ASC-like difficulties in social reciprocity, an ASC-like attention to detail may confer advantages on typical males’ face recognition skills. On the other hand, when attention to detail co-occurs with difficulties in social reciprocity, a detailed focus may exacerbate such already present social difficulties, as is thought to occur in autism

Differential effects of MDMA and methylphenidate on social cognition

Social cognition is important in everyday-life social interactions. The social cognitive effects of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'ecstasy') and methylphenidate (both used for neuroenhancement and as party drugs) are largely unknown. We investigated the acute effects of MDMA (75 mg), methylphenidate (40 mg) and placebo using the Facial Emotion Recognition Task, Multifaceted Empathy Test, Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, Social Value Orientation Test and the Moral Judgment Task in a cross-over study in 30 healthy subjects. Additionally, subjective, autonomic, pharmacokinetic, endocrine and adverse drug effects were measured. MDMA enhanced emotional empathy for positive emotionally charged situations in the MET and tended to reduce the recognition of sad faces in the Facial Emotion Recognition Task. MDMA had no effects on cognitive empathy in the Multifaceted Empathy Test or social cognitive inferences in the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition. MDMA produced subjective 'empathogenic' effects, such as drug liking, closeness to others, openness and trust. In contrast, methylphenidate lacked such subjective effects and did not alter emotional processing, empathy or mental perspective-taking. MDMA but not methylphenidate increased the plasma levels of oxytocin and prolactin. None of the drugs influenced moral judgment. Effects on emotion recognition and emotional empathy were evident at a low dose of MDMA and likely contribute to the popularity of the drug

Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.

Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well

Social Relation Recognition in Egocentric Photostreams

This paper proposes an approach to automatically categorize the social interactions of a user wearing a photo-camera 2fpm, by relying solely on what the camera is seeing. The problem is challenging due to the overwhelming complexity of social life and the extreme intra-class variability of social interactions captured under unconstrained conditions. We adopt the formalization proposed in Bugental's social theory, that groups human relations into five social domains with related categories. Our method is a new deep learning architecture that exploits the hierarchical structure of the label space and relies on a set of social attributes estimated at frame level to provide a semantic representation of social interactions. Experimental results on the new EgoSocialRelation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.Comment: Accepted at ICIP 201

Understanding the link between emotional recognition and awareness, therapy, and training : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Therapy is an emotionally laden event, both for individuals seeking therapeutic intervention and the therapists who provide it. While the recognition of emotions in the general population has been a popular topic of research, very little research has been conducted into the emotional competencies, or more specifically, emotion recognition and awareness of therapists. In addition, there are few studies on the effectiveness of emotion recognition training for therapists’ emotional competencies, which is surprising given the innately emotional moments that clients and therapists experience during therapeutic work. This study aimed to address these gaps by investigating the association between emotional recognition, awareness, practice, and training. Fifty five therapists made up of clinical psychologists, counsellors, and a psychotherapist completed an online task that involved completion of a social-emotional orientated questionnaire and an emotion recognition task. Of these 55 participants, 26 completed an emotion recognition training before completing the same task again, two weeks later, while the remainder 29 participants were instructed to participate in no emotion recognition training. The results revealed that, compared to the no treatment condition, those who received emotion recognition training were more accurate in their recognition of emotions and also reported higher use of therapeutic emotional practice. Unexpectedly, participants who completed emotion recognition training reported less emotional awareness than the control group. Related to this, an inverse relationship was found between emotion recognition ability and self-reported emotional awareness, as well as the finding for some support for an inverse relationship between emotion recognition ability and self-reported use of emotional practice. There are two implications of this research; first, emotion recognition training increases therapists’ accuracy in emotion recognition, and second, therapists may need to be provided emotional practice feedback by an alternative form rather than through supervision or client outcome. This is due to an inverse relationship being found between participants’ actual and perceived emotional awareness. Therefore, future research into social-emotional practices and client outcomes will be advised to be considered. The limitations of the study and areas for future research are also discussed