This study examined the association of the experience of emotion and somatic changes. The study compared reported somatic changes generally experienced when anxious with the actual association of the experience of emotion and somatic changes as measured during a specific event. Emotions were measured as both general negative emotion as well as specific emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness and shame. Participants were volunteers from a Victorian university who agreed to watch a video depicting the dramatisation of child abuse. Throughout the video, participants indicated their experience of emotion. Measures were also taken throughout the procedure of facial expression and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR). In order to examine emotional-congruence, subjects were divided into three groups. These groups were divided according to the congruence of subjects’ experienced emotion with autonomic changes and facial expressivity. Groups were divided separately for each of the emotion types. Where there was little difference between the reported experience of emotion and that, which would have been expected from the observed somatic changes, the subject was deemed to be in the Congruent Group. Subjects whose reported experience of emotion was greater or less than would be expected from observed somatic changes were allocated to the Over-reporter and Under-Reporter Groups respectively. This data was then compared to participants’ reports of the number of somatic symptoms usually experienced when anxious. It was found that participants who under-report the experience of general negative-emotion compared with their observed somatic changes (both GSR and facial expressivity) had lower trait-somatic-anxiety (reported fewer somatic symptoms usually experienced when anxious). There was no significant difference between the Congruent Group and Over-Reporter Group. The Under-Reporter Groups had significantly lower trait-somatic-anxiety than the Congruent Group when emotional-congruence was defined by fear and GSR, anger and GSR and sadness and facial expressivity. The actual association of shame and disgust with either somatic change, sadness with autonomic change and anger and fear with facial expressivity was unrelated to the number of somatic symptoms reported to be usually experienced when anxious. The results supported the idea that subjective reports of the number of somatic symptoms reported to be usually experienced when anxious reflect the actual association of somatic change and experience, but with limitations. The actual association of experience of fear with autonomic change seems to reflect the number of somatic symptoms reported to be usually experienced when anxious more than other emotions. Further for those for whom the experience of anger and negative-emotion has a greater association with somatic change, there was a greater number of somatic symptoms reported to be usually experienced when anxious. This would suggest that some people have a greater association of some experiences of emotion and somatic change. Furthermore, while there is an association between reported somatic changes generally experienced when anxious with the actual association of the experience of emotion and somatic changes as measured during a specific event, this was dependant on the association of the emotion types rather than being generalised for all emotions.

Simulation-based training has gained widespread attention recently as a response to drawbacks associated with traditional training approaches, such as high training costs (instructors, equipment, etc.), high risks (e.g. pilot training), and ethical issues (e.g. medical training), as well as a lack of availability of certain training environments (e.g. space exploration). Apart from their target training domains, many of aspects of simulations differ, such as their degree of physical realism (fidelity), scenarios (e.g. story), and pedagogical aspects (e.g. after-action reviews and collaborative learning). Among those aspects, designers have mostly focused on developing high-fidelity simulations with the expectation of increasing the effectiveness of training. However, some authors suggest that the above belief is a myth as researchers have failed to identify a linear relationship between the (physical) fidelity and training effectiveness of simulations.  Most researchers have therefore evaluated the correspondence between the behaviours of trainees in both real world and simulated contexts, however, the existing methods of simulation validation using behavioural measures have a number of drawbacks, such as the fact that they do not address certain complex phenomena of skills acquisition. Bridging the above knowledge gap, this research reports on empirical investigations using an improved methodology for validating training simulations. This research includes an investigation of the user experience of trainees, with respect to the acceptance of virtual scenarios provoking a similar psychophysiological response as in real world scenarios, and the training potential of simulations with respect to the positive transfer of training from a simulator to real world operational contexts. The most prominent features of the proposed methodology include the use of psychophysiological measures in addition to traditional behavioural measures and the use of natural (quasi-) experiments. Moreover, its conceptual framework was influenced by contemporary theories in cognitive science (e.g. constructivism and embodied cognition). The results of this research have several important theoretical and methodological implications, involving, for example, the dependency of the effectiveness of simulations on the perceived realism of trainees, which is more embodied than has been predicted by previous researchers, and the requirement of several different types/levels of adaptive training experience, depending on the type of trainee. / Träning i simulatorer har på senare år fått ökad uppmärksamhet som en respons på problem och svårigheter förknippade med traditionella träningsansatser, såsom höga kostnader (instruktörer och utrustning, etc.), hög risk (t.ex. träning av piloter), och etiska aspekter (t.ex. träning av kirurger), likaväl som avsaknaden av träningsmöjligheter och miljöer (t.ex. forskning om rymden). Bortsett från vad som specifikt tränas så skiljer sig simuleringar åt i ett flertal olika aspekter såsom fysisk realism (eng. fidelity), scenarier (handling) och pedagogiska aspekter (t.ex. genomgång efter övning och kollaborativt lärande).  Bland dessa aspekter så har designers ofta fokuserat att utveckla simuleringar med hög realism med förväntningen att detta ska göra träningen mer effektiv. Litteraturen antyder dock att denna föreställning inte stämmer och att de flesta simuleringar med hög realism inte har lyckats uppnå denna målsättning. En slutsats är därför att det finns ett behov av metoder som kan validera potentialen hos simuleringar avsedda att stödja träning – redan innan dessa används. Enligt litteraturen så är utbildningspotentialen hos en simulering starkt kopplad till hur väl den psykologiska effekten en simulering har, stämmer överens med en verklig upplevelse. Forskning har emellertid identifierat ett flertal svagheter hos existerande ansatser för att validera simuleringar; de är oftast baserade på prestations- och/eller subjektiva mätningar; de har fokuserat en eller ett fåtal psykologiska aspekter; och de bygger på traditionella teorier. Baserat på resultat från studier av en kör-simulator presenteras och föreslås i denna avhandling ett förbättrat ramverk för utvärdering. De mest centrala egenskaperna hos det föreslagna ramverket inbegriper användandet av psyko-fysiologiska mått tillsammans med mer traditionella mått; det konceptuella ramverket bygger på samtida teoretiska ansatser (tex konstruktivism och kroppslig kognition); samt användandet av fält (kvasi-) experiment. Utöver uppnåendet av uppsatta mål för forskningen så har resultaten ett flertal teoretiska och metodologiska implikationer. Bland dessa återfinns beroendet mellan effektiviteten hos en simulering och den upplevelse av realitet som de tränade har, vilken är mer grundläggande än vad som rapporterats i tidigare forskning, samt kravet på flera och olika typer av anpassning av träningsupplevelse för den tränade för att förhöja potentialen hos träningssimulatorer. / SIDA Funded National e-Learning Centre Project at the University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka

Physiological signals, which are controlled by the autonomic nervous system (ANS), could be used to detect the affective state of computer users and therefore find applications in medicine and engineering. The Pupil Diameter (PD) seems to provide a strong indication of the affective state, as found by previous research, but it has not been investigated fully yet. In this study, new approaches based on monitoring and processing the PD signal for off-line and on-line affective assessment (“relaxation” vs. “stress”) are proposed. Wavelet denoising and Kalman filtering methods are first used to remove abrupt changes in the raw Pupil Diameter (PD) signal. Then three features (PDmean, PDmax and PDWalsh) are extracted from the preprocessed PD signal for the affective state classification. In order to select more relevant and reliable physiological data for further analysis, two types of data selection methods are applied, which are based on the paired t-test and subject self-evaluation, respectively. In addition, five different kinds of the classifiers are implemented on the selected data, which achieve average accuracies up to 86.43% and 87.20%, respectively. Finally, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is utilized to investigate the discriminating potential of each individual feature by evaluation of the area under the ROC curve, which reaches values above 0.90. For the on-line affective assessment, a hard threshold is implemented first in order to remove the eye blinks from the PD signal and then a moving average window is utilized to obtain the representative value PDr for every one-second time interval of PD. There are three main steps for the on-line affective assessment algorithm, which are preparation, feature-based decision voting and affective determination. The final results show that the accuracies are 72.30% and 73.55% for the data subsets, which were respectively chosen using two types of data selection methods (paired t-test and subject self-evaluation). In order to further analyze the efficiency of affective recognition through the PD signal, the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) was also monitored and processed. The highest affective assessment classification rate obtained from GSR processing is only 63.57% (based on the off-line processing algorithm). The overall results confirm that the PD signal should be considered as one of the most powerful physiological signals to involve in future automated real-time affective recognition systems, especially for detecting the “relaxation” vs. “stress” states.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a naturally occurring cardiovascular phenomenon referring to the changing timing between consecutive heartbeats. The connection between HRV and overall cardiovascular health and autonomic nervous system function has been well established through prior research and well documented in existing literature. The existing studies, however, included shorter HRV subject recording session, using traditional HRV monitoring methods that do not typically combine electrocardiogram (ECG), seismocardiogram (SCG) and galvanic skin response (GSR) respiration monitoring. The inclusion of longer HRV subject recording may allow for further insight on the possible effects of given observable biological phenomenon on HRV. The current technology for the collection and storage of analog voltage HRV signals exists as separate ECG, SCG and GSR data collection units; all of which are required to make meaningful conclusions about HRV. These individual units work independently from one another, are not portable, must be connected to a power grid at all times, require attachments to the subject at specific body surface locations to ensure data accuracy and require technical expertise to operate efficiently and interpret the obtained data. The study proposes a long-term simultaneous recording device capable of tracking these signals which will allow more detailed inter-signal analysis that can provide more insight into cardiac activity in the presence of changing observable biological phenomena over time.