Prior work suggests that young children do not generalize others' preferences to new individuals. We hypothesized (following Vaish et al., 2008, Psychol. Bull., 134, 383-403) that this may only hold for positive emotions, which inform the child about the person's attitude towards the object but not about the positivity of the object itself. It may not hold for negative emotions, which additiona...

BACKGROUND One widespread view holds that vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) is linked to overall increases in negative emotionality. In contrast, cognitive attribution theories emphasize the importance of blaming oneself rather than others for negative events. Thus far, the contrasting predictions of these models have not been directly compared. Following the attributional perspe...

Most theorists agree that empathy describes multiple distinct but related processes through which people respond to others’ emotions. These include an ‘affective’ component – vicariously taking on others’ feelings – a ‘cognitive’ component – reasoning about others’ emotions – and a ‘motivational’ component – desiring for others’ emotional states to improve. Psychologists variably name these pie...

OBJECTIVES To assess the feasibility and acceptability of a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)-based intervention and determine if the intervention is associated with a significant signal on empathy and emotional competencies. DESIGN Two pre-post proof-of-concept studies. SETTING Participants were recruited at the University of Montreal's Psychology Department (Study 1) and the CHU S...

In recent studies on emotions and computer games the experiential side of emotions is often left uncharted due to methodological constraints. Regarding a comprehensive understanding on computer games and emotions such ignorance is untenable. By basing its analysis on an experience already lived as an emotional playing experience, this paper examines emotions in play in regard to both their qual...

Social cognition or behaviors are, by definition, highly influenced by society and culture. Therefore, I dare to add “in Japan” in the title of my presentation. However, I believe that western societies and Japan share some values and principles hoping that the key points of my talk will be appreciated. In the first part, I will talk about moral emotions. Moral emotions (guilt, shame and embarr...

We describe a set of experiments using automatically labelled data to train supervised classifiers for multi-class emotion detection in Twitter messages with no manual intervention. By cross-validating between models trained on different labellings for the same six basic emotion classes, and testing on manually labelled data, we conclude that the method is suitable for some emotions (happiness,...