On the resistance of the instrument

I examine the role that the musical instrument plays in shaping a performer's expressive activity and emotional state. I argue that the historical development of the musical instrument has fluctuated between two key values: that of sharing with other musicians, and that of creatively exploring new possibilities. I introduce 'the mood organ'- a sensor-based computer instrument that automatically turns signals of the wearer's emotional state into expressive music

A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions

Social interactions, emotion and sleep: a systematic review and research agenda

Sleep and emotion are closely linked, however the effects of sleep on socio-emotional task performance have only recently been investigated. Sleep loss and insomnia have been found to affect emotional reactivity and social functioning, although results, taken together, are somewhat contradictory. Here we review this advancing literature, aiming to 1) systematically review the relevant literature on sleep and socio-emotional functioning, with reference to the extant literature on emotion and social interactions, 2) summarize results and outline ways in which emotion, social interactions, and sleep may interact, and 3) suggest key limitations and future directions for this field. From the reviewed literature, sleep deprivation is associated with diminished emotional expressivity and impaired emotion recognition, and this has particular relevance for social interactions. Sleep deprivation also increases emotional reactivity; results which are most apparent with neuro-imaging studies investigating amygdala activity and its prefrontal regulation. Evidence of emotional dysregulation in insomnia and poor sleep has also been reported. In general, limitations of this literature include how performance measures are linked to self-reports, and how results are linked to socio-emotional functioning. We conclude by suggesting some possible future directions for this field

Fear in horses

Fear is generally considered to be an undesirable emotional state that may reduce welfare, growth and reproductive performance in animals. Fear in horses is additionally problematic, because fear reactions can cause serious injury to both horse and human. Horses are primarily used for sports and leisure for a large number of children and young women. Unfortunately, horse riding ranks as one of the most dangerous sports in terms of the number and seriousness of accidents, and the ability of a horse to habituate to a range of otherwise frightening stimuli greatly increases safety in the horse-human relationship. However, there is a lack of research on fear reactions and no published research on basic habituation processes in horses. This licentiate project aimed to investigate the types of fear responses horses show towards novel stimuli acting on different senses, and to study how horses learn to be confident with an otherwise frightening stimulus using classical learning theory techniques. The experiments were conducted on two different groups of naïve stallions (n=24 and n=27). The first experiment showed that horses responded differently towards an olfactory stimulus compared to auditory and visual stimuli. The heart rate responses correlated between tests and probably reflected a non-differentiated activation of the sympathetic nervous system, while the behavioural responses were linked to the type of stimulus. The second experiment showed that gradual habituation was the most effective training method for horses to learn to react calmly to an otherwise frightening stimulus, compared to classic habituation and associative learning. Heart rate data revealed that horses may show physiological responses even when their behavioural response towards the stimulus has ceased. Choice of training method is likely to be especially important for the most fearful horses

Hospital staff experiences of their relationships with adults who self-harm: a meta-synthesis

Purpose This review aimed to synthesize qualitative literature exploring inpatient hospital staff experiences of their relationships with people who self-harm. Methods Nine studies were identified from a systematic search of five research databases. Papers included the experiences of physical health and mental health staff working in inpatient settings. The studies employed various qualitative research methods and were appraised using an adapted quality assessment tool (Tong, Sainsbury, & Craig, 2007). A meta-synthesis was conducted using traditional qualitative analysis methods including coding and categorizing data into themes. Results Three main themes derived from the data. ‘The impact of the system’ influenced the extent to which staff were ‘Fearing the harm from self-harm’, or were ‘Working alongside the whole person’. A fear-based relationship occurred across mental health and physical health settings despite differences in training; however, ‘Working alongside the whole person’ primarily emerged from mental health staff experiences. Systemic factors provided either an inhibitory or facilitative influence on the relational process. Conclusions Staff experiences of their relationship with people who self-harm were highlighted to have an important impact on the delivery and outcome of care. Increasing support for staff with a focus on distress tolerance, managing relational issues, and developing self-awareness within the relationship may lead to a more mutually beneficial experience of care. Equally, structure, clarity, and support within inpatient systems may empower staff to feel more confident in utilizing their existing skills. Practitioner points •Working with people who self-harm can be emotionally challenging and how staff cope with this can significantly impact on the engagement of staff and patients. •Increasing the skills of staff in managing relational issues and tolerating distress, as well as providing support and reflective practice groups may be useful in managing emotional responses to working with people who self-harm. •Refining the supportive, procedural, and environmental structures surrounding the caregiving relationship may help enable better integration of physical and mental health care

An affect-based video retrieval system with open vocabulary querying

Content-based video retrieval systems (CBVR) are creating new search and browse capabilities using metadata describing significant features of the data. An often overlooked aspect of human interpretation of multimedia data is the affective dimension. Incorporating affective information into multimedia metadata can potentially enable search using this alternative interpretation of multimedia content. Recent work has described methods to automatically assign affective labels to multimedia data using various approaches. However, the subjective and imprecise nature of affective labels makes it difficult to bridge the semantic gap between system-detected labels and user expression of information requirements in multimedia retrieval. We present a novel affect-based video retrieval system incorporating an open-vocabulary query stage based on WordNet enabling search using an unrestricted query vocabulary. The system performs automatic annotation of video data with labels of well defined affective terms. In retrieval annotated documents are ranked using the standard Okapi retrieval model based on open-vocabulary text queries. We present experimental results examining the behaviour of the system for retrieval of a collection of automatically annotated feature films of different genres. Our results indicate that affective annotation can potentially provide useful augmentation to more traditional objective content description in multimedia retrieval