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Both pictures and films are widely used elicitors in experimental approach to emotions. However, there is no consensus regarding their relative impact. I describe conceptual underpinning of these methods, their theoretical comparison, and related methods. In a study of 124 students I assess and compare the impact of pictures and films on experiential, behavioural and physiological reactions. There were stronger reactions in response to positive film than to positive pictures. Negative film and pictures were similar in strength yet different in kind of reactions they yielded. The difference can be explained by different temporal characteristics of both methods. Present study is the second study dealing with this topic, and the only study that engaged multiple reaction levels. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

THE EMOTION-PARADOX 1 Abstract The emotion-paradox in schizophrenia describes a dissociation between the grossly impaired perception of emotion and relatively preserved experience thereof. Most posit that the emotion-paradox arises from a generalized emotion perception impairment. Others counter that it represents an artefact of methodological restrictions or a separate dissociation between explicit and implicit emotion. This thesis aimed to explain the emotion-paradox in schizophrenia and resolve the competing interpretations of its root. Two studies were conducted to this end. The studies drew from the same sample, including 45 persons with schizophrenia of various symptomatology, and 45 controls with no psychiatric anamnesis or familial history of schizophrenia. The groups did not differ in age, gender, education or music education. In Study 1, the participants listened to musical stimuli and rated their perception and experience of the valence and arousal that these stimuli relayed. In Study 2, the participants completed a newly developed emotional Stroop task, in which they identified the colour of a series of neutral and negative descriptors of positive, negative, or no symptoms of schizophrenia. Findings of Study 1 indicated: a) that persons with schizophrenia recognize musical emotions as accurately...

Die Kombination von Eyetracking und fMRI in den Neurowissenschaften ist eine relativ neue Methode, die einerseits eine technische Herauforderung darstellt, andererseits neue Möglichkeiten des Zugangs zu neuronalen Prozessen darbietet. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurden durch Kombination beider Methoden Prozesse der neuronalen und visuellen Verarbeitung von Emotionen untersucht. Zunächst wurde die Rolle von verschiedenen Gehirnregionen innerhalb des emotionalen Netzwerks sowie die Frage nach der Lateralität der emotionalen Verarbeitung untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass die neuronale Antwort in den unterschiedlichen Regionen in erster Linie die Anforderungen an die jeweilige funktionelle Einheit spiegelt. Im Rahmen der Untersuchungen von visueller Verarbeitung wurden die einzelnen spezifischen Blickbewegungsmuster für Emotionen Angst, Ekel und Freude erstmals charakterisiert. Es wurden auch Habituationseffekte auf die beschriebenen Blickbewegungsmuster untersucht. Die gemeinsame Analyse beider Datensätze zeigte, dass zwischen visuellen und neuronalen Prozessen eine enge qualitative Interaktion besteht. Es wurde ein Zusammenhang zwischen der Betrachtungsdauer und der tiefe der Verarbeitung nachgewiesen.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Human Nutrition / Koushik Adhikari / Coffee is the most consumed beverage after water and the second widely traded commodity after crude oil. In the past decade or so the market for coffee has exploded. It is no longer competitive for the coffee industry to offer consumers just a ‘good’ cup of coffee. Coffee is mainly consumed for enjoyment and offers consumers the desirable emotional experience. Currently not much work has been done to capture the emotion experiences elicited by coffee drinking, which led to our objective: to identify and assess the feelings that are stimulated by the coffee drinking experience through the development of an emotion lexicon. In the first part of the study, focus groups were utilized to generate and fine-tune a list of emotions that occur during the coffee drinking experience. The list of terms was further refined by check-all-that-apply method, resulting in 86 emotions, which included 39 terms from a recently published emotion lexicon for food. In the second part of the study, this lexicon of 86 emotions was used to evaluate six coffee samples of various origins and degrees of roasting with 94 consumers. The emotion intensities before and during drinking were assessed. Consumers were clustered into six clusters based on the acceptability scores, and the appropriate emotions for distinguishing the coffee samples were determined by Stepwise Regression Analysis, which resulted in 44 emotions. Emotion maps for each consumer cluster constructed using Principal Components Analysis revealed that each sample generated distinctive emotional responses, which varied across each cluster. The last part focused on identifying the sensory drivers of emotions to understand the consumer’s perceptions because emotional and sensory experiences determine acceptability and consumption of coffee. Two separate highly-trained panels (a general panel and a coffee panel) performed descriptive analysis of the six coffee samples. After comparing the two panels, the coffee-specific panel data was used to identify the sensory attributes that might be responsible for eliciting certain emotions in the consumers. For instance, darker roasts seem to elicit positive-high energy emotions. Overall, this study is a stepping stone for more in-depth product-specific emotion studies in future.

Efficient navigation of our social world depends on the generation, interpretation and combination of social signals within different sensory systems. However, the influence of adult aging on cross-modal integration of emotional stimuli remains poorly understood. Therefore, the aim of this PhD thesis is to understand the integration of visual and auditory cues in social situations and how this is associated with other factors important for successful social interaction such as recognising emotions or understanding the mental states of others. A series of eight experiments were designed to compare the performance of younger and older adults on tasks related to multisensory integration and social cognition. Results suggest that older adults are significantly less accurate at correctly identifying emotions from one modality (faces or voices alone) but perform as well as younger adults on tasks where congruent auditory and visual emotional information are presented concurrently. Therefore, older adults appear to benefit from congruent multisensory information. In contrast, older adults are poorer than younger adults at detecting incongruency from different sensory modalities involved in decoding cues to deception, sarcasm or masking of emotions. It was also found that age differences in the processing of relevant and irrelevant visual and auditory social information might be related to changes in gaze behaviour. A further study demonstrated that the changes in behaviour and social interaction often reported in patients post-stroke might relate to problems in integrating the cross-modal social information. The pattern of findings is discussed in relation to social, emotional, neuropsychological and cognitive theories.

This work outlines a programme of research tasked with the exploration of representing psychologically grounded theories of emotion through fuzzy logic systems. It presents an introduction to the specific goals of the project, followed by an overview of the wider, multi-disciplinary field of emotion representation. Two emotion theories are explored in detail. One, rooted in behaviourism, proposed by J. R. Millenson in 1967; the other, the Geneva Emotion Wheel proposed by K. R. Scherer in 2005. Each of these theories is independently abstracted mathematically, and represented in terms of both type-1 and type-2 fuzzy logic systems. Six potential implementations of these systems are presented. Of these, five are tested within this report. The results of these tests are analysed and discussed in the context of both computational behaviour and psychological analogue. There follows a critical review where the effectiveness of the different implementations and models is considered, informed by both testing results and the psychology upon which they are based. A prototype of one implementation applied to govern the behaviour of an agent in a predator-prey scenario is included. Discussion of this prototype includes examples of how the implementation was practically applied to the environment, and an assessment of the behaviours of the agent in testing. The work concludes with an overview of the thesis, including discussion of the results of the project and future avenues of research related to the completed work. The contributions of the thesis are explicitly outlined: the research of pre-existing, psychologically grounded models of emotional state suitable for computational representation; construction of mathematical representations of two models of emotion, using both type-1 and type-2 fuzzy logic; and, the presentation of five computational implementations of those representations, of which four are explicitly tested, compared and critically reviewed.