The ability to recognise an individual's affective state from their facial expression is crucial to human social interaction. However, understanding of facial expression recognition processes is limited because mounting evidence has revealed important differences between posed and genuine facial expressions of emotion. Most previous studies of facial expression recognition have used only posed or simulated facial expressions as stimuli, but posed expressions do not reflect underlying affective state unlike genuine expressions. The current study compared behavioural responses and Evoked Response Potentials (ERPs) to neutral expressions, posed smiles and genuine smiles, during three different tasks. In the first task, no behavioural judgment was required, whereas participants were required to judge whether the person was showing happiness in the second task or feeling happiness in the third task. Behavioural results indicated that participants exhibited a high degree of sensitivity in detecting the emotional state of expressions. Genuine smiles were usually labelled as both showing and feeling happiness, but posed smiles were far less likely to be labelled as feeling happiness than as showing happiness. Analysis of P1 and N170 components, and later orbitofrontal activity, revealed differential activity levels in response to neutral expressions as compared to posed and genuine smiles. This differential activity occurred as early as 135ms at occipital locations and from 450ms at orbitofrontal locations. There were significant interactions between participant behavioural sensitivity to emotional state and P1 and N170 amplitudes. However, no significant difference in ERP activity between posed smiles and genuine smiles was observed until 850ms at orbitofrontal locations. An additional finding was greater right temporal and left orbitofrontal activation suggesting hemispheric asymmetry of facial expression processing systems.

During normal development, face processing involves a gradual shift from a featurally oriented style to a mature configural style by adolescence. This shift may coincide with increased right hemispheric dominance for faces supporting configural processing. Previous studies suggest that individuals diagnosed with ASD continue to process faces using individual parts and features into adulthood. This continued bias may be due to deficits in configural processing abilities. The current study investigated measures of functional connectivity during featural and configural processing of faces in broad autism phenotype sibling (ASD-sibs) children compared to age, sex, and handedness matched normal developing (ND) controls and in children diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder compared to ASD-matched ND controls. Results indicate that children with ASD and ASD-sibs were capable of performing configural processing tasks at similar performance levels to those of ND children. Additionally, patterns of functional network connectivity for configural processing in ASD-sibs were similar to those observed in ND controls. Few network-wide hemispheric differences emerged between groups. While behavioral performance and overall network-wide patterns of connectivity suggest a face processing network that is capable of supporting configural processing in ASD and ASD-sibs, abnormalities were observed in specific regions. The amygdala and fusiform face area showed fewer interactions with the rest of the face processing network in ASD children compared to ND during configural, but not featural processing. Additionally, hemispheric comparisons show greater differences between ASD and ND controls in the right fusiform face area. The ability of these regions to communicate with other regions in the face network could be important for social motivation and attention during configural processing. Interestingly, network connectivity in ASD children during passive viewing of faces, objects, and textures without featural or configural manipulations showed a more functionally integrated, and less segregated network with a lower “wiring cost” during non-face conditions compared to ND children. ASD-sibs may demonstrate a similar milder pattern.

Two of the main safety and health issues recognized during deep cut coal mining are methane and dust hazards. Advances in continuous miner technology have improved safety and productivity. However, these advances have created some environmental problems, notably more dust and methane being generated at the face during coal extraction. Results of studies performed in the last three decades concerning the face ventilation for deep cut mining showed very complicated airflow behavior. The specifics of flow patterns developed by the face ventilation systems presents significant challenge for analytical description even for equipment-free entry. Fortunately, there are methods, such as numerical simulations that could be used to provide an engineering solution to the problem. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes have been successfully applied during the last decade using the power of Supercomputers. Although significant progress has been made, a benchmark industry oriented CFD code dedicated to face ventilation is still not available. The goal of this project is to provide the mining industry a software for CFD analysis and design of face ventilation systems. A commercial CFD system SC/Tetra Thermofluid Analysis System with Unstructured Mesh Generator, copyright © Cradle Co, was selected for a development platform. A number of CFD models were developed for the needs of this study including methane release, dust generation, 3D models of commonly used continuous mining machines, scrubbers and water spray systems. The developed models and the used CFD code were successfully validated in the part for methane dilution, using available data from small scale and full scale experiments. The developed models for simulation of dust control systems need to be validated in the future. The developed code automates all necessary steps needed for simulation of face ventilation systems, starting with the construction of a 3D model, generation of the computational mesh, solving and monitoring the calculations, to post-processing and graphical representation of the obtained results. This code shall allow mining engineers to design better and safer face ventilation systems while providing the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) a tool to check and approve the industry’ proposed ventilation plans.

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This master thesis aims to put an abstract view on culture and leadership in China considering the context of a Chinese society, which is adapting and transforming within the age of globalization and a rapid economic development. The goal of our research is to investigate on influences, trends and manifestations, which help to characterize the foundation and exercise of leadership in China. In order to be able to answers our research questions, we travelled for six weeks to China to conduct in-depth interviews with 15 Chinese leaders in Shanghai and Beijing in order to draw conclusion from the utterances we were able to grasp. Many researchers try to oversimplify the Chinese culture and society as well as its approach to leadership. For this reason we tried to underline the complexity of conducting business in China, and what factors need to be taken into consideration in order to have a successful encounter. The key findings of our thesis are that it is hard to simplify the phenomenon leadership in China, since it highly depends upon the observed company, and also the generation of the leader or follower one is dealing with. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind the complex and rich culture of China, which goes several hundreds of years and has still a huge impact on behavior of today’s Chinese.

The face inversion effect (FIE; Yin, 1969) raises the question of whether upright face identification is mediated by a special mechanism that is disrupted by inversion. The present study investigates the effect of face inversion on the perceptual encoding of spatial frequency (SF) information using a novel variant of the Bubbles technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). In Experiment 1, the SF Bubbles technique was validated using a simple plaid detection task. In Experiment 2, SF tuning of upright and inverted face identification was measured. While the data showed a clear FIE (28% higher accuracy and 455 ms shorter reaction times for upright faces), SF tunings were remarkably similar in both conditions (r = .96; a single SF band of ~2 octaves peaking at ~9 cycles per face width). Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that SF Bubbles is sensitive to bottom-up and top-down induced changes in SF tuning, respectively. Overall, the results show that the same SFs are utilized in upright and inverted face identification, albeit not with equal efficiency.

This thesis compared face-to-face (FTF) communication with the computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, email and chat, for collaborative learning purposes in higher education. Participants (n = 60) worked in groups of three in one of two communication conditions: FTF or CMC. Each group completed two tasks that required different ways of thinking: convergent thinking (finding one correct answer) and divergent thinking (formulating many solutions). Students obtained comparable task scores regardless of communication media. CMC participants appreciated the divergent thinking task more, had more concerns about time, more difficulties with scheduling, more anxiety about completing tasks on time, and fewer three-person meetings than did FTF groups. Participants in both conditions appreciated working in groups. The communication framework of grounding (Clark & Brennan, 1991), proved useful when analysing the results. The study identified key areas for further research and provided grounds for practical recommendations.

Face detection in video sequence is becoming popular in surveillance applications. The trade-off between obtaining discriminative features to achieve accurate detection versus computational overhead of extracting these features, which affects the classification speed, is a persistent problem. Two ideas are introduced to increase the features’ discriminative power. These ideas are used to implement two frontal face detectors examined on a 2D low-resolution surveillance sequence. First contribution is the parallel classifier. High discriminative power features are achieved by fusing the decision from two different features trained classifiers where each type of the features targets different image structure. Accurate and fast to train classifier is achieved. Co-occurrence of Local Binary Patterns (CoLBP) features is proposed, the pixels of the image are targeted. CoLBP features find the joint probability of multiple LBP features. These features have computationally efficient feature extraction and provide high discriminative features; hence, accurate detection is achieved.

Previous studies examining memory biases for threatening faces in social anxiety (SA) have yielded inconclusive results. In the present study, memory and expectancy biases were tested within the context of a novel face recognition paradigm that was designed to offset some of the methodological challenges that have hampered previous research. Undergraduates with high (n = 40) and low (n = 40) levels of SA viewed a series of neutral faces randomly paired with phrases that communicated positive or negative social feedback. Participants’ recognition memory was tested for previously encountered faces, and for their categorization of each encoded face as having been associated with negative (mean) or positive (nice) interpersonal statements. For new faces, participants were asked whether the person seemed mean or nice. Results provided no evidence in support of a general memory bias for threatening (mean) faces among high SA individuals, but instead suggested that high SA individuals lack a positive expectancy bias to appraise new social partners as being nice. Implications are considered for cognitive behavioral and interpersonal models of SA.

Generation of photo-realistic 3D human face models is a hot topic in the area joining computer graphics and computer vision. Many different techniques are used for this purpose, but most of them are not feasible for home users. These techniques may use advanced hardware such as laser scanners, calibrated stereo cameras, or very sophisticated software that can be as expensive as advanced hardware. Face model generation by morphing an initial 3D model with uncalibrated camera photographs is studied in this thesis. Manually marked feature points on photographs are used to deform initial 3D face model. Initial photographs also are processed to form a single texture image covering deformed 3D face model.