Meditation practices purportedly help people develop focused and sustained attention, cultivate feelings of compassionate concern for self and others, and strengthen motivation to help others who are in need. We examined the impact of 3 months of intensive meditative training on emotional responses to scenes of human suffering. Sixty participants were assigned randomly to either a 3-month inten...

The study of emotional signaling has focused almost exclusively on the face and voice. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether people can identify emotions from the experience of being touched by a stranger on the arm (without seeing the touch). In the 3rd study, they investigated whether observers can identify emotions from watching someone being touched on the arm. Two kinds of evidenc...

Spirituality has mostly been studied in psychology as implied in the process of overcoming adversity, being triggered by negative experiences, and providing positive outcomes. By reversing this pathway, we investigated whether spirituality may also be triggered by self-transcendent positive emotions, which are elicited by stimuli appraised as demonstrating higher good and beauty. In two studies...

Individuals can experience negative emotions (e.g., embarrassment) accompanying self-evaluation immediately after recognizing their own facial image, especially if it deviates strongly from their mental representation of ideals or standards. The aim of this study was to identify the cortical regions involved in self-recognition and self-evaluation along with self-conscious emotions. To increase...

In this paper it is analysed how emotions and the social environment affect active and reflective learning processes. First a conceptual analysis is made using recent insights from Cognitive, Affective and Social Neuroscience on the roles of emotions and social interactions on learning. Next, a computational analysis is made using a computational model of learning processes following these insi...

Appraisal theories of emotion assume that similar evaluations of an event result in similar emotions, whereas the evaluation itself may depend on culturally defined concepts, experiences, and values. In other words, cognitions are crucial for the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, and the impact that culture has on emotions is enclosed in their cognitive determinants. Based on this ap...

this article, being in the modern field of sociology of emotions, studies the leadership of emotions during the islamic revolution by imam khomeini. inspired by the views of flam, king, polletta, jaspers & goodwin, this paper examines the requirements of transformation of counter-mobilizing emotions to the mobilizing ones that lead to the active protest against status quo, through emotional lib...

Images become an important and prevalent way to express users’ activities, opinions and emotions. In a social network, individual emotions may be influenced by others, in particular by close friends. We focus on understanding how users embed emotions into the images they uploaded to the social websites and how social influence plays a role in changing users’ emotions. We first verify the existe...

The influence of emotions on intonation patterns (more specifically F0/pitch contours) is addressed in this article. A number of authors have claimed that specific intonation patterns reflect specific emotions, whereas others have found little evidence supporting this claim and argued that F0/pitch and other vocal aspects are continuously, rather than categorically, affected by emotions and/or ...

In this paper, it is analysed how emotions and social environment affect people’s active and reflective learning processes. First, a conceptual analysis is made using recent insights from Cognitive, Affective and Social Neuroscience on the roles of emotions and social interactions in learning. A computational analysis is made using a computational model of learning processes following these ins...