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

Seasonal variation of aerosol water uptake and its impact on the direct radiative effect at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard

© Author(s) 2014. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 LicenseIn this study we investigated the impact of water uptake by aerosol particles in ambient atmosphere on their optical properties and their direct radiative effect (ADRE, W m-2) in the Arctic at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, during 2008. To achieve this, we combined three models, a hygroscopic growth model, a Mie model and a radiative transfer model, with an extensive set of observational data. We found that the seasonal variation of dry aerosol scattering coefficients showed minimum values during the summer season and the beginning of fall (July-August-September), when small particles (< 100 nm in diameter) dominate the aerosol number size distribution. The maximum scattering by dry particles was observed during the Arctic haze period (March-April-May) when the average size of the particles was larger. Considering the hygroscopic growth of aerosol particles in the ambient atmosphere had a significant impact on the aerosol scattering coefficients: the aerosol scattering coefficients were enhanced by on average a factor of 4.30 ± 2.26 (mean ± standard deviation), with lower values during the haze period (March-April-May) as compared to summer and fall. Hygroscopic growth of aerosol particles was found to cause 1.6 to 3.7 times more negative ADRE at the surface, with the smallest effect during the haze period (March-April-May) and the highest during late summer and beginning of fall (July-August-September).Peer reviewe

Pathogen disgust sensitivity changes according to the perceived harshness of the environment

Much research has explored behaviours that are linked with disgust sensitivity. Few studies, however, have been devoted to understanding how fixed or variable disgust sensitivity is. We therefore aimed to examine whether disgust sensitivity can change with the environment by repeatedly testing students whose environment was not changing as well as student cadets undergoing intensive training at an army camp. We found that an increase in the perceived harshness of the environment was associated with a decrease in pathogen disgust sensitivity. Our results support the idea that disgust sensitivity is malleable depending on the environment. More specifically, we propose that in a harsh environment, where survival may be more difficult, pathogen disgust sensitivity may decrease to allow the consumption of available resources.PostprintPeer reviewe

Discontinuities in the endothelium of epiphyseal cartilage canals and relevance to joint disease in foals

Cartilage canals have been shown to contain discontinuous blood vessels that enable circulating bacteria to bind to cartilage matrix, leading to vascular occlusion and associated pathological changes in pigs and chickens. It is also inconsistently reported that cartilage canals are surrounded by a cellular or acellular wall that may influence whether bacterial binding can occur. It is not known whether equine cartilage canals contain discontinuous endothelium or are surrounded by a wall. This study aimed to examine whether there were discontinuities in the endothelium of cartilage canal vessels, and whether canals had a cellular or acellular wall, in the epiphyseal growth cartilage of foals. Epiphyseal growth cartilage from the proximal third of the medial trochlear ridge of the distal femur from six healthy foals that were 1, 24, 35, 47, 118 and 122 days old and of different breeds and sexes was examined by light microscopy (LM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and immunohistochemistry. The majority of patent cartilage canals contained blood vessels that were lined by a thin layer of continuous endothelium. Fenestrations were found in two locations in one venule in a patent cartilage canal located deep in the growth cartilage and close to the ossification front in the 118-day-old foal. Chondrifying cartilage canals in all TEM-examined foals contained degenerated endothelial cells that were detached from the basement membrane, resulting in gap formation. Thirty-three percent of all canals were surrounded by a hypercellular rim that was interpreted as contribution of chondrocytes to growth cartilage. On LM, 69% of all cartilage canals were surrounded by a ring of matrix that stained intensely eosinophilic and consisted of collagen fibres on TEM that were confirmed to be collagen type I by immunohistochemistry. In summary, two types of discontinuity were observed in the endothelium of equine epiphyseal cartilage canal vessels: fenestrations were observed in a patent cartilage canal in the 118-day-old foal; and gaps were observed in chondrifying cartilage canals in all TEM-examined foals. Canals were not surrounded by any cellular wall, but a large proportion was surrounded by an acellular wall consisting of collagen type I. Bacterial binding can therefore probably occur in horses by mechanisms that are similar to those previously demonstrated in pigs and chickens

Recognising facial expressions in video sequences

We introduce a system that processes a sequence of images of a front-facing human face and recognises a set of facial expressions. We use an efficient appearance-based face tracker to locate the face in the image sequence and estimate the deformation of its non-rigid components. The tracker works in real-time. It is robust to strong illumination changes and factors out changes in appearance caused by illumination from changes due to face deformation. We adopt a model-based approach for facial expression recognition. In our model, an image of a face is represented by a point in a deformation space. The variability of the classes of images associated to facial expressions are represented by a set of samples which model a low-dimensional manifold in the space of deformations. We introduce a probabilistic procedure based on a nearest-neighbour approach to combine the information provided by the incoming image sequence with the prior information stored in the expression manifold in order to compute a posterior probability associated to a facial expression. In the experiments conducted we show that this system is able to work in an unconstrained environment with strong changes in illumination and face location. It achieves an 89\% recognition rate in a set of 333 sequences from the Cohn-Kanade data base

Efficient computation of partial elements in the full-wave surface-peec method

The partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method provides an electromagnetic model of interconnections and packaging structures in terms of standard circuit elements. The surface-based PEEC (S-PEEC) formulation can reduce the number of unknowns compared to the standard volume-based PEEC (V-PEEC) method. This reduction is of particular use in the case of high-speed circuits and high-switching power electronics, where the bandwidth extends from low frequencies to the GHz range. In this article, the S-PEEC formulation is revised and cast in a matrix form. The main novelty is that the interaction integrals involving the curl of the magnetic and electric vector potentials are computed through the Taylor series expansion of the full-wave Green’s function, leading to analytical forms that are rigorously derived. Therefore, the numerical integration is avoided, with a consequent reduction of the computation time. The proposed formulas are studied in terms of the frequency, size of the mesh, and distance between the basis function domains. Three examples are presented, confirming the accuracy of the proposed method compared to the V-PEEC method and surface-based numerical methods from literature

Speaker-independent emotion recognition exploiting a psychologically-inspired binary cascade classification schema

In this paper, a psychologically-inspired binary cascade classification schema is proposed for speech emotion recognition. Performance is enhanced because commonly confused pairs of emotions are distinguishable from one another. Extracted features are related to statistics of pitch, formants, and energy contours, as well as spectrum, cepstrum, perceptual and temporal features, autocorrelation, MPEG-7 descriptors, Fujisakis model parameters, voice quality, jitter, and shimmer. Selected features are fed as input to K nearest neighborhood classifier and to support vector machines. Two kernels are tested for the latter: Linear and Gaussian radial basis function. The recently proposed speaker-independent experimental protocol is tested on the Berlin emotional speech database for each gender separately. The best emotion recognition accuracy, achieved by support vector machines with linear kernel, equals 87.7%, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches. Statistical analysis is first carried out with respect to the classifiers error rates and then to evaluate the information expressed by the classifiers confusion matrices. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

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

Peer reviewe

Reading faces: differential lateral gaze bias in processing canine and human facial expressions in dogs and 4-year-old children

Sensitivity to the emotions of others provides clear biological advantages. However, in the case of heterospecific relationships, such as that existing between dogs and humans, there are additional challenges since some elements of the expression of emotions are species-specific. Given that faces provide important visual cues for communicating emotional state in both humans and dogs, and that processing of emotions is subject to brain lateralisation, we investigated lateral gaze bias in adult dogs when presented with pictures of expressive human and dog faces. Our analysis revealed clear differences in laterality of eye movements in dogs towards conspecific faces according to the emotional valence of the expressions. Differences were also found towards human faces, but to a lesser extent. For comparative purpose, a similar experiment was also run with 4-year-old children and it was observed that they showed differential processing of facial expressions compared to dogs, suggesting a species-dependent engagement of the right or left hemisphere in processing emotions