The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch

Research into emotional communication to date has largely focused on facial and vocal expressions. In contrast, recent studies by Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) and Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, and Keltner (2009) exploring nonverbal communication of emotion discovered that people could identify anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness and sympathy from the experience of being touched on either the arm or body by a stranger, without seeing the touch. The study showed that strangers were unable to communicate the self-focused emotions embarrassment, envy and pride, or the universal emotion surprise. Literature relating to touch indicates that the interpretation of a tactile experience is significantly influenced by the relationship between the touchers (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). The present study compared the ability of romantic couples and strangers to communicate emotions solely via touch. Results showed that both strangers and romantic couples were able to communicate universal and prosocial emotions, whereas only romantic couples were able to communicate the self-focused emotions envy and pride

Inversion improves the recognition of facial expression in thatcherized images

The Thatcher illusion provides a compelling example of the face inversion effect. However, the marked effect of inversion in the Thatcher illusion contrasts to other studies that report only a small effect of inversion on the recognition of facial expressions. To address this discrepancy, we compared the effects of inversion and thatcherization on the recognition of facial expressions. We found that inversion of normal faces caused only a small reduction in the recognition of facial expressions. In contrast, local inversion of facial features in upright thatcherized faces resulted in a much larger reduction in the recognition of facial expressions. Paradoxically, inversion of thatcherized faces caused a relative increase in the recognition of facial expressions. Together, these results suggest that different processes explain the effects of inversion on the recognition of facial expressions and on the perception of the Thatcher illusion. The grotesque perception of thatcherized images is based on a more orientation-sensitive representation of the face. In contrast, the recognition of facial expression is dependent on a more orientation-insensitive representation. A similar pattern of results was evident when only the mouth or eye region was visible. These findings demonstrate that a key component of the Thatcher illusion is to be found in orientation-specific encoding of the features of the face

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker's voice, regardless of an individual's culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances ("nonsense speech") produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language ("in-group advantage"). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables

Face the Music and Glance: How Nonverbal Behaviour Aids Human Robot Relationships Based in Music

It is our hypothesis that improvised musical interaction will be able to provide the extended engagement often failing others during long term Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials. Our previous work found that simply framing sessions with their drumming robot Mortimer as social interactions increased both social presence and engagement, two factors we feel are crucial to developing and maintaining a positive and meaningful relationship between human and robot. For this study we investigate the inclusion of the additional social modalities, namely head pose and facial expression, as nonverbal behaviour has been shown to be an important conveyor of information in both social and musical contexts. Following a 6 week experimental study using automatic behavioural metrics, results demonstrate those subjected to nonverbal behaviours not only spent more time voluntarily with the robot, but actually increased the time they spent as the trial progressed. Further, that they interrupted the robot less during social interactions and played for longer uninterrupted. Conversely, they also looked at the robot less in both musical and social contexts. We take these results as support for open ended musical activity providing a solid grounding for human robot relationships and the improvement of this by the inclusion of appropriate nonverbal behaviours

Differential expression of Axl and Gas6 in renal cell carcinoma reflecting tumor advancement and survival

PURPOSE: Overexpression of the receptor tyrosine kinase Axl is implicated in several cancers. Therefore, we conducted this study to determine the expression of Axl and its ligand Gas6 in various renal cell carcinoma (RCC) types and in oncocytoma. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Real-time quantitative reverse transcription-PCR was used to quantify tumor mRNA levels for Axl and Gas6 in a cohort (n = 221) of RCC patients. Serum levels of soluble sAxl and Gas6 proteins were measured using specific ELISA assays (n = 282). The presence of Axl protein in tumor tissue was evaluated by immunohistochemistry (n = 294). Results were correlated to tumor-associated variables, clinical biochemical tests, and patient survival. RESULTS: Tumor Axl mRNA levels correlated independently to survival when assessed against tumor stage and grade. In the study group, the median cancer-specific survival of all RCC patients during 307 months of follow-up was 55 months (confidence interval, +/-40.4). The 25% of patients with lowest tumor Axl mRNA levels had significantly better survival than the rest (P = 0.0005), with 70% of the patients still alive at the end of follow-up. In contrast, in patients with medium-high Axl mRNA, only 25% were alive at the end of follow-up. Tumor Gas6 mRNA levels correlated to survival, tumor-associated variables, and disease severity as did serum levels of soluble sAxl and Gas6 protein. However, no correlation between Axl protein in tumor tissue and survival was found. CONCLUSIONS: Axl and Gas6 expression in RCC are associated with tumor advancement and patient survival. In particular, low tumor Axl mRNA levels independently correlated with improved survival

Plasma concentrations of Gas6 and sAxl correlate with disease activity in systemic lupus erythematosus

Objectives. SLE is a systemic autoimmune disease with an annual incidence of 3.8 per 100 000. Several pathogenic mechanisms are believed to be operating in SLE, including an impaired clearance of apoptotic cells, activation of the type I IFN pathway and generation of autoimmune leucocytes. Growth arrest-specific protein 6 (Gas6) and its receptor Axl are known to regulate inflammation and may be implicated in lupus pathogenesis. We have recently developed immunological methods to quantify the vitamin-K-dependent protein Gas6 and its soluble receptor sAxl in human plasma, which we have used to investigate the role of Gas6 and soluble Axl in SLE

Global emissions of terpenoid VOCs from terrestrial vegetation in the last millennium

Peer reviewe

Attentional bias towards threatening and neutral facial expressions in high trait anxious children.

Research suggests anxious children display increased attentional biases for threat-related stimuli. However, findings based upon spatial domain research are equivocal. Moreover, few studies allow for the independent analysis of trials containing neutral (i.e., potentially ambiguous) faces. Here, we report two temporal attentional blink experiments with high trait anxious (HTA) and low trait anxious (LTA) children. In an emotive experiment, we manipulated the valence of the second target (T2: threatening/positive/neutral). Results revealed that HTA, relative to LTA, children demonstrated better performance on neutral trials. Additionally, HTA children demonstrated a threat-superiority effect whereas LTA children demonstrated an emotion-superiority effect. In a non-emotive control, no differences between HTA and LTA children were observed. Results suggest trait anxiety is associated with an attentional bias for threat in children. Additionally, the neutral face finding suggests HTA children bias attention towards ambiguity. These findings could have important implications for current anxiety disorder research and treatments

Towards a Human-Centered Approach for VRET Systems: Case Study for Acrophobia

This paper presents a human-centered methodology for designing and developing Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) systems. By following the steps proposed by the methodology – Users analysis, Domain Analysis, Task Analysis and Representational Analysis, we developed a system for acrophobia therapy composed of 9 functional, interrelated modules which are responsible for patients, scenes, audio and graphics management, as well as with physiological monitoring and event triggering. The therapist visualizes in real time the patient’s biophysical signals and adapts the exposure scenario accordingly, as. he can lower or increase the level of exposure. There are 3 scenes in the game, depicting a ride by cable car, one by ski lift and a walk by foot in a mountain landscape. A reward system is implemented and emotion dimension ratings are collected at predefined points in the scenario. They will be stored and later used for constructing an automatic machine learning emotion recognition and exposure adaptation modul