Call Center Stress Recognition with Person-Specific Models

Nine call center employees wore a skin conductance sensor on the wrist for a week at work and reported stress levels of each call. Although everyone had the same job profile, we found large differences in how individuals reported stress levels, with similarity from day to day within the same participant, but large differences across the participants. We examined two ways to address the individual differences to automat- ically recognize classes of stressful/non-stressful calls, namely modifying the loss function of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to adapt to the varying priors, and giving more importance to training samples from the most similar people in terms of their skin conductance lability. We tested the methods on 1500 calls and achieved an accuracy across participants of 78.03% when trained and tested on different days from the same per- son, and of 73.41% when trained and tested on different people using the proposed adaptations to SVMs

Distal and proximal parenting as alternative parenting strategies during infants' early months of life: A cross-cultural study

Keller H, Borke J, Staufenbiel T, et al. Distal and proximal parenting as alternative parenting strategies during infants' early months of life: A cross-cultural study. International Journal of Behavioral Development. 2009;33(5):412-420.Cultures differ with respect to parenting strategies already during infancy. Distal parenting, i.e., face-to-face context and object stimulation, is prevalent in urban educated middle-class families of Western cultures; proximal parenting, i.e., body contact and body stimulation, is prevalent in rural, low-educated farmer families. Parents from urban educated families in cultures with a more interdependent history use both strategies. Besides these cultural preferences, little is known about the relations between these styles as well as the behavioural systems constituting them. In this study therefore, the relations between the styles and the constituting behaviours were analysed in samples that differ with respect to their preferences of distal and proximal parenting. The hypothesized differences between the samples and the negative relationship between distal and proximal parenting, as well as between the respective behavioural systems can clearly be demonstrated. Furthermore, the impact of the sociodemographic variables with respect to the parenting strategies can be shown. Results were discussed as supporting two alternative parenting strategies that serve different socialization goals