Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis

Holidays are rich in terms of experiential benefits and the hedonic nature of the consumption experience is laden with emotional content. The aim of this paper seeks to broaden our understanding of emotions within the context of tourism in two ways. Firstly, it describes the types of emotions tourists experience towards holiday destinations. Secondly, it empirically investigates the structure of tourist’s representations of their emotional experience towards holiday destinations. Findings indicate that tourists are more inclined to rate their experience high in terms of positive emotions and relatively low when it comes to negative emotions. Tourists’ emotional responses are represented by three dimensions: joy, love and positive surprise. Finally, consistent with previous research, emotions have been found to be related to post-consumption evaluations.

Preface.1. Introduction. The Recovery of Virtue for an Ethics of Nature.2. Environmental Ethics.3. Animal Rights.4. The Ethics of Biotechnology.5. The Ethics of Cloning.6. Psychology and Moral Agency.7. Ethics and Gaia.8. Feminism and the Ethics of Nature.9. Towards an Ethic of Wisdom.Select Bibliography

This paper provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, nonpropositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’.

Social media have facilitated information sharing in social networks. Previous research shows that sentiment of text influences its diffusion in social media. Each emotion can be located on a threedimensional space formed by dimensions of valence (positive–negative), arousal (passive/calm– active/excited), and tension (tense–relaxed). While previous research has investigated the effect of emotional valence on information diffusion in social media, the effect of emotional arousal remains unexplored. This study examines how emotional arousal influences information diffusion in social media using a sentiment mining approach. We propose a research model and provide directions for testing it using data collected from Twitter.

The development of virtual story-telling is an ever ongoing process. As long as it does not perform on the same level as a human storyteller, there is room for improvement. The Virtual Storyteller, a project of the HMI department of the University of Twente, uses a Text-to-Speech application that creates synthetic speech from text input. It is de¯nitely not a trivial matter to make synthetic speech sound human, especially when story-telling is involved. There are so much facets of story-telling where storytellers use their voice in order to enhance their performance. This thesis describes the study of how storytellers use their voice in order to convey the emotions that characters in the story are experiencing; speci¯cally how the storyteller changes his voice to make a character say something in an emotional way. An experiment has been conducted to identify the emotional charge in fragments of speech by story-characters. These fragments are then analysed in an attempt to ¯nd out how the emotional charge is linked to the way the storyteller changes his voice. The analysis is then used in the creation of a model that is used by the Text-to-Speech application to synthesise emotional speech instead of neutral speech. This model is implemented in an open-source Text-to-Speech application that uses a Dutch voice. This allows the Virtual Storyteller to create tekst marked with an emotion, which is then used to synthesise emotional speech.

Seeking professional financial advice to assist with financial decision making is an important option for individuals faced with increased responsibility for their financial circumstances. We explore the role of two potential barriers/enablers to accessing advice. First, we explore the role of a variety of financial literacy measures to explain observed financial advice consultation. Second, we introduce a novel measure of financial adviser anxiety. The latter is inspired by evidence in the medical setting suggesting individuals may refrain from seeking advice where objectively it is assessed to be in their interests to do so. This may due to embarrassment, worry or anxiety with the consultation process. A new scale is presented which has strong validity and a demonstrated ability to explain reported future levels of professional advice seeking.

In this paper we study how to address the assessment of affective speech corpora. We propose the use of several coefficients and provide guidelines to obtain a more complete background about the quality of their annotation. This proposal has been evaluated employing a corpus of non-acted emotions gathered from spontaneous interactions of users with a spoken dialogue system. The results show that, due to the nature of non-acted emotional corpora, traditional interpretations would in most cases consider the annotation of these corpora unacceptable even with very high inter-annotator agreement. Our proposal provides a basis to argue their acceptability by supplying a more fine-grained vision of their quality. Index Terms: affective corpora, non-acted emotions, interannotator agreement

Videos and movies are important sources of information in the entertainment and learning form, having great power to affect us, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally. By integrating various media like image, sound and text along time, they are very rich and they are becoming pervasive on the Internet and interactive TV, increasing the need for new and powerful ways to access, browse and view them. Interactive visualization techniques have the potential to help handling with this rich but complex information: both the time when they were released, and the time along which their contents are weaved, in each movie. In previous work we have presented visualizations that allow the access to the movies released over a certain period of time based on genres and rankings, and to overview and browse movies based on their contents represented with tag clouds. In this paper, we explore the movies through visual representations of the different aspects of their contents, especially image, audio, and subtitles, with a focus on emotions. This approach has the ultimate goal of providing overviews, and browsing mechanisms based on interactive visualizations that may provide insights in analytical or more ludic uses, that may be efficient in conveying and accessing information, and are also easy, funny and aesthetical.

This chapter provides a new approach to the study of creativity of adolescents and young adults by combining the idea of self-organisation with theories of emotions. To gather data for this qualitative research, hermeneutic phenomenology/ontology linked with narrative/biography methods were chosen.KeywordsYoung PeopleCreative ProcessDissipative StructureEmotional DevelopmentPattern ModelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

concepts, then, are the basic components of propositions that are themselves the basic units of deep-structure, linguistic thought. Given the importance of abstract concepts to linguistic thought, it is useful to consider these in some depth. The Nature of Abstract Concepts There has been a great deal of research and theory on the nature of abstract concepts (Klausmeier, 1980; Smith and Medin, 1981; Tennyson, 1975). Virtually all of the major discussions of the nature and format of abstract concepts acknowledge the role of semantic features. It was Katz and Fodor (1963) who first popularized the notion that abstract concepts can be defined as sets of semantic features. Unfortunately, to exemplify semantic features as they relate to abstract concepts, one must use words that are not the concepts themselves, only tokens for the abstract concepts. With this in mind, consider Figure 2.4 which illustrates the role of semantic features in defining abstract concepts. The words in set A all represent abstract concepts with the semantic features human, animal, and two-legged. The words in B1 and B2 represent abstract concepts that are differentiated by the fact that all B1 abstract concepts contain the added semantic feature of male, all B2 words represent abstract concepts with the added semantic feature of female. The abstract concepts represented by words in set C do not share a male-female distinction, but they do share a semantic feature that might be called siblings. Semantic feature theory, then, asserts that abstract concepts are defined by sets of semantic features. The abstract concept represented by the word cow is defined by semantic features such as animate, concrete, four-legged, milk-producing, and so on. The abstract concept represented by the word desk is defined by semantic features such as inanimate, concrete, four-legged, used for paper work, and so on.

Future trends point towards the usage of technical systems as companions, adaptable to the user's individual skills, preferences and current emotional state. To enable technical systems to determine a user's emotion, current research focuses on emotion recognition. Besides emotions, personality and moods are eminent as well. Standard emotion recognizers do not consider them adequately and therefore neglect a crucial part of user modelling. The challenge is to gather reliable predictions about the observed emotion of the user and, beyond that, recognise changes in the users emotional reaction during interaction. In this paper we present a mood model that incorporates personality traits based on emotionally labeled data.