Affect and strategy use in independent language learning

Affect is about emotions and feelings, moods and attitudes, anxiety, tolerance of ambiguity and motivation. For some it is also connected with dispositions and preferences (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996). It is generally accepted that the affective domain encompasses a wide range of elements which reflect the human side of being, and play a part in conditioning behaviour and influencing learning. We are becoming more knowledgeable about the importance of attention to affective factors, but there is still a huge gap in terms of our knowledge of the affective strategies that students use or could use to promote more effective language learning. Moreover, the research that has been carried out into affect over several years has largely concentrated on language learning in the classroom (Arnold, 1999; Ehrman, 1996; MacIntyre, 1999; Young, 1999) with very few studies devoted to independent learning settings. Independent language learners, whether learning through self-access, distance or other modes, are a fast-growing group, and we need to know more about them, in particular the ways in which their affective needs differ from those of classroom learners (Harris, 2003; Hurd, 2002; White, 2003). This chapter investigates affect and strategy use in independent settings. It looks first at the concept of affect and its interrelationships with other domains, continues with an exploration of strategy definitions and classification schemes in relation to affect, and concludes with a study carried out with a small group of distance language learners using think-aloud verbal protocols

Word Affect Intensities

Words often convey affect -- emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Lexicons of word-affect association have applications in automatic emotion analysis and natural language generation. However, existing lexicons indicate only coarse categories of affect association. Here, for the first time, we create an affect intensity lexicon with real-valued scores of association. We use a technique called best-worst scaling that improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores. The lexicon includes terms common from both general English and terms specific to social media communications. It has close to 6,000 entries for four basic emotions. We will be adding entries for other affect dimensions shortly

The Affect Misattribution Procedure.

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) has been forwarded as one of the most promising alternatives to the Implicit Association Test and the evaluative-priming task for measuring attitudes such as prejudice indirectly. We investigated whether the AMP is indeed able to detect an evaluative out-group bias. In contrast to recent conclusions about the robustness of AMP effects, six out of seven pilot studies indicated that participants did not show any prejudice effects in the AMP. Yet, these pilot studies were not fully conclusive with regard to our research question because they investigated different domains of prejudice, used small sample sizes, and employed a modified AMP version. In a preregistered, high-powered AMP study, we therefore examined whether the standard AMP does reveal prejudice against Turks, the biggest minority in Germany, and found a significant, albeit very small prejudice effect. We discuss possible reasons for the AMP's weak sensitivity to evaluations in socially sensitive domains

Does Autoenrollment Affect Employer Contributions?

Summarizes research on how automatically enrolling employees in 401(k) plans in order to raise participation rates increases costs for employers and affects their matching contribution rates and, in turn, the retirement security of eligible employees

Affect and Fairness

We investigate the role of affect and deliberation on social preferences. In our laboratory experiment subjects decide on a series of mini Dictator games while they are under varying degrees of cognitive load. The cognitive load is intended to decrease deliberation and therefore enhance the influence of affect on behavior. In each game subjects have two options: they can decide between a fair or an unfair allocation. We find that subjects in a high-load condition are more generous - they more often choose the fair allocation than subjects in a low-load condition. The series of mini Dictator games also allows us to investigate how subjects react to the gamesÕ varying levels of advantageous inequality. Low-load subjects react considerably more to the degree of advantageous inequality. Our results therefore underscore the importance of affect for basic altruistic behavior and deliberation in adjusting decisions to a given situation.social preferences, cognitive load, affect and emotion, lab experiment

On Affect: Function and Phenomenology

This paper explores the nature of emotions by considering what appear to be two differing, perhaps even conflicting, approaches to affectivity—an evolutionary functional account, on the one hand, and a phenomenological view, on the other. The paper argues for the centrality of the notion of function in both approaches, articulates key differences between them, and attempts to understand how such differences can be overcome

Does drying affect gel networks?

The properties of low molecular weight gels are determined by the underlying, self-assembled network. To access information on the network, it is common for techniques to be used that require the gel to be dried, such as transmission electron microscopy or scanning electron microscopy. The implicit assumption is that this drying has no bearing on the data collected. Here, we discuss the validity of this assumption

Group Affect Prediction Using Multimodal Distributions

We describe our approach towards building an efficient predictive model to detect emotions for a group of people in an image. We have proposed that training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model on the emotion heatmaps extracted from the image, outperforms a CNN model trained entirely on the raw images. The comparison of the models have been done on a recently published dataset of Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge, 2017. The proposed method achieved validation accuracy of 55.23% which is 2.44% above the baseline accuracy, provided by the EmotiW organizers.Comment: This research paper has been accepted at Workshop on Computer Vision for Active and Assisted Living, WACV 201

The influence of affect on attitude

Priests of the medieval Catholic Church understood something about the relationship between affect and attitude. To instill the proper attitude in parishioners, priests dramatized the power of liturgy to save them from Hell in a service in which the experience of darkness and fear gave way to light and familiar liturgy. These ceremonies “were written and performed so as to first arouse and then allay anxieties and fears ” (Scott, 2003, p. 227): The service usually began in the dark of night with the gothic cathedral’s nave filled with worship-pers cast into total darkness. Terrifying noises, wailing, shrieks, screams, and clanging of metal mimicked the chaos of hell, giving frightened witnesses a taste of what they could expect if they were tempted to stray. After a prolonged period of this imitation of hell, the cathedral’s interior gradually became filled with the blaze of a thousand lights. As the gloom diminished, cacophony was supplanted by the measured tones of Gregorian chants and polyphony. Light and divine order replaced darkness and chaos (R. Scott, personal correspondence, March 15, 2004). This ceremony was designed to buttress beliefs by experience and to transfigure abstractions into attitudes. In place of merely hearing about “the chaos and perdition of hell that regular performances of liturgy were designed to hold in check ” (Scott, 2003), parishioners shoul