A Review on the Role of Affective Stimuli in Event-Related Frontal Alpha Asymmetry

Frontal alpha asymmetry refers to the difference between the right and left alpha activity over the frontal brain region. Increased activity in the left hemisphere has been linked to approach motivation and increased activity in the right hemisphere has been linked to avoidance or withdrawal. However, research on alpha asymmetry is diverse and...

A usability study of physiological measurement in school using wearable sensors

Measuring psychophysiological signals of adolescents using unobtrusive wearable sensors may contribute to understanding the development of emotional disorders. This study investigated the feasibility of measuring high quality physiological data and examined the validity of signal processing in a school setting. Among 86 adolescents, a total of...

Context in Human Emotion Perception for Automatic Affect Detection: A Survey of Audiovisual Databases

An important aspect of human emotion perception is the use of contextual information to understand others' feelings even in situations where their behavior is not very expressive or has an emotionally ambiguous meaning. For technology to successfully detect affect, it must mimic this human ability when analyzing audiovisual input. Databases upon...

A digital coach that provides affective and social learning support to low-literate learners

In this study, we investigate if a digital coach for low-literate learners that provides cognitive learning support based on scaffolding can be improved by adding affective learning support based on motivational interviewing, and social learning support based on small talk. Several knowledge gaps are identified: motivational interviewing and...

Monitoring mental state during real life office work

Monitoring an individual’s mental state using unobtrusively measured signals is regarded as an essential element in symbiotic human-machine systems. However, it is not straightforward to model the relation between mental state and such signals in real life, without resorting to (unnatural) emotion induction. We recorded heart rate, facial...

Improving real-life estimates of emotion based on heart rate: A perspective on taking metabolic heart rate into account

Extracting information about emotion from heart rate in real life is challenged by the concurrent effect of physical activity on heart rate caused by metabolic need. “Nonmetabolic heart rate,” which refers to the heart rate that is caused by factors other than physical activity, may be a more sensitive and more universally applicable correlate...

A warm touch of affect?

One of the research areas within affective Computer Mediated Communication currently under investigation is that of mediated social touch. A social touch is a complex composition of different physical parameters that can be simulated by haptic technologies. In this article we argue why we think it makes sense to incorporate warmth - and in...

Using neurophysiological signals that reflect cognitive or affective state: Six recommendations to avoid common pitfalls

Estimating cognitive or affective state from neurophysiological signals and designing applications that make use of this information requires expertise in many disciplines such as neurophysiology, machine learning, experimental psychology, and human factors. This makes it difficult to perform research that is strong in all its aspects as well as...

Physiological signals distinguish between reading emotional and non-emotional sections in a novel

We are interested in monitoring an individual’s emotions during the reading of a novel. While physiological responses to experimentally induced emotions are often small and inconsistent, being engaged in a novel may elicit relatively strong responses. We analyzed EEG, ECG, skin conductance and respiration of 57 readers reading a complete, yet to...

Real-time Classification of Gorilla Video Segments in Affective Categories Using Crowd-Sourced Annotations

In this contribution we present a method to classify segments of gorilla videos1 in different affective categories. The classification method is trained by crowd sourcing affective annotation. The trained classification then uses video features (computed from the video segments) to classify a new video segment into one of different affective...

Automatic feedback on cognitive load and emotional state of traffic controllers

Workload research in command, information and process-control centers, resulted in a modular and formal Cognitive Load and Emotional State (CLES) model with transparent and easy-to-modify classification and assessment techniques. The model distinguishes three representation and analysis layers with an increasing level of abstraction, focusing on...

Affective computing: A reverence for a century of research

To bring affective computing a leap forward, it is best to start with a step back. A century of research has been conducted on topics, which are crucial for affective computing. Understanding this vast amount of research will accelerate progress on affective computing. Therefore, this article provides an overview of the history of affective...

Exploring social and temporal dimensions of emotion induction using an adaptive affective mirror

This paper investigates if and how a digital, interactive affective mirror induces positive emotions in participants. We study whether the induced affect is repeatable after a fixed interval (Study 1) and how the social presence affects the emotion induction (Study 2). Results show that participants systematically feel more positive after an...