This paper considers affective interactions to achieve empathic engagement with synthetic characters in virtual learning environments, in order to support and induce the expression of empathy in children. The paper presents FearNot!, a school based virtual learning environment, populated by synthetic characters used for personal, social and health education, specifically bullying issues in scho...

Psychiatric symptoms in Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) can include anxiety and affective lability, which require treatment to improve functional outcomes. Three cases in which modest doses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), alone or in combination with anticonvulsants, reduced symptoms of anxiety and affective lability during acute rehabilitation of GBS are presented. These agen...

BACKGROUND There is little published guideline or evidence on treating bipolar affective disorder in patients with renal failure having haemodialysis. CASE We present two patients with bipolar affective disorder with renal failure having haemodialysis. We used lorazepam in one patient to manage the immediate risk of non-engagement with dialysis. Risperidone was added in the second patient for...

Advances in affective computing technologies have made it possible for researchers to investigate brain function while users interact in virtual environments. Progress in sensors and algorithms for off-the-shelf EEG systems has made it possible for gaming researchers to perform real-time estimation of human cognitive and affective states using EEG. In this study our aim was to coordinate “Task ...

The issue of individual differences has always been an important area of research in psychology and, more recently, neuroimaging. A major source of interindividual variability stems from differences in basic affective dispositions. In order to make a contribution to this field of research, we have developed a new type of assessment - the In-Out dispositional affective style questionnaire (IN-OU...

In the absence of clearly established procedures in the workplace, employees will experience a negative affective state. This situation influences their well-being and their intention to behave in ways that benefit the organization beyond their job demands. This impact is more relevant on teamwork where members share the perception of ambiguity through emotional contagion (role ambiguity climat...

The current paper explores possible solutions to the problem of detecting affective states from facial expressions during text/diagram comprehension, a context devoid of interactive events that can be used to infer affect. These data present an interesting challenge for face-based affect detection because likely locations of affective facial expressions within videos of students’ faces are enti...

Two of the major goals in Educational Data Mining are determining students’ state of knowledge and determining whether students are affectively engaged with the task and in positive affective states. These two problems are usually examined separately and multiple methods have been proposed to solve each of them. However, little work has been done on tracing both of these states in parallel and ...

This paper describes several interaction paradigms designed to enable people to interact in social and emotional ways with autonomous animated characters. By exploring a domain that lends itself to affective interactions, this paper may offer some ideas for enhancing emotional engagement in other kinds of products as well.

BACKGROUND Ingestion of sweet food is driven by central reward circuits and restrained by endocrine and neurocrine satiety signals. The specific influence of sucrose intake on central affective and reward circuitry and alterations of these mechanisms in the obese are incompletely understood. For this, we hypothesized that (i) similar brain regions are engaged by the stimulation of sweet taste r...