What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the player’s emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence

Conversations in a Crowded Room: An Assessment of the Contribution of Historical Research to Criminology

The relationship between history and social science generally, as well as history and criminology specifically, has long been considered problematic. But, since the likes of Burke (1992) and King (1999) spoke of a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, crime history has rapidly expanded and, more latterly, historical criminology has begun to emerge. This article reappraises the relationship of the subject areas by considering the impact that historical research has had on criminology. Although the impact is found to be somewhat patchy, the article identifies positive signs within the two fields that might point towards a more mutually‐enriching future

The N-Terminal Region of the VP1 Protein of Swine Vesicular Disease Virus Contains a Neutralization Site That Arises upon Cell Attachment and Is Involved in Viral Entry

The N-terminal region of VP1 of swine vesicular disease virus (SVDV) is highly antigenic in swine, despite its internal location in the capsid. Here we show that antibodies to this region can block infection and that allowing the virus to attach to cells increases this blockage significantly. The results indicate that upon binding to the cell, SVDV capsid undergoes a conformational change that is temperature independent and that exposes the N terminus of VP1. This process makes this region accessible to antibodies which block virus entry