We report on a web-based tool for assessing the interpretation degree of the common listeners of the SRoL emotional speech and, separately, tone database for short sentences, in the Romanian language. We designed the tool for allowing us a statistical characterization of the interpretation degree of common, anonymous listeners of the emotional state and tone that characterize the recorded utter...

Can reading others' emotional states be shaped by expertise? We assessed processing of emotional facial expressions in professional actors trained either to voluntary activate mimicry to reproduce character's emotions (as foreseen by the "Mimic Method"), or to infer others' inner states from reading the emotional context (as foreseen by "Stanislavski Method"). In explicit recognition of facial ...

Although emotional functioning is impaired in children with autism, it is unclear if this impairment is due to difficulties with facial expression, autonomic responsiveness, or the verbal description of emotional states. To shed light on this issue, we examined responses to pleasant and unpleasant odors in eight children (8-14 years) with high-functioning autism and 8 age-matched typically deve...

This study addresses the matter of reflexive control of the emotional states by means of Reflexive Game Theory (RGT). It is shown how to build a bridge between RGT and emotions. For this purpose the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model is adopted. The major advantages of RGT are its ability to predict human behavior and unfold the entire spectra of reflexion in the human mind. On the other ha...

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined—incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses—and three conceptions of rationality are considered—logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal object...

Since Damasio introduced the somatic markers hypothesis in Damasio (1994), it has spread through the psychological community, where it is now commonly acknowledged that somatic states are a factor in producing the qualitative dimension of our experiences. Present actions are emotionally guided by those somatic states that were previously activated in similar experiences. In this model, somatic ...

When people communicate, their states of mind are coupled with the explicit content of the messages being transmitted. The implicit information conveyed by mental states is essential to correctly understand and frame the communication messages. In mediation, professional mediators include empathy as a fundamental skill when dealing with the relational and emotional aspects of a case. In court e...

An important question that confronts current research in affective neuroscience as well as in the treatment of emotional disorders is whether it is possible to determine the emotional state of a person based on the measurement of brain activity alone. Here, we first show that an online support vector machine (SVM) can be built to recognize two discrete emotional states, such as happiness and di...

This paper discusses novel research conducted to study the direct impact of learner’s affective changes on the value of a well established EEG-mental engagement index. An acquisition protocol for recording the electrical activity of the human brain, known as electroencephalography or EEG, was implemented in a learning environment specifically constructed for emotional elicitation. Data was coll...

Modeling learners’ emotional states is a promising tool for enhancing learning outcomes and tutoring abilities. In this paper, we present a new perspective of learner emotional modeling according to two fundamental dimensions, namely mental workload and engagement. We hypothesize that analyzing results from learners’ workload and engagement evolution can help Intelligent Tutoring Systems diagno...