Chapter 3.4 - Emotions

There is strong evidence that emotions influence the learning process. For this reason, we explore the relevance of individual and general mouse and keyboard interaction patterns in real-world settings while learners perform free text tasks. To this end, we have modeled users’ mouse movements and keystroke dynamics with data mining techniques, building on previous related research and extending it in terms of some critical modeling issues that may have an impact on detection results. Inspired by practice in affective computing where physiological sensors are used, we argue for the creation of an interaction baseline model, as a reference point in the way how learners interact with the keyboard and mouse. To make the proposed affective model feasible, we have adopted a simplified 2-D self-labeling approach for labeling the users’ affective state. Our approach to affect detection improves results when there is a small amount of data instances available and does not require additional affect-oriented tasks from the learners. Specifically, learners are only asked to self-reflect their emotional state after finishing the tasks and immediately selecting two values in the affect scale. The approach we have followed aims to distill two types of interaction patterns: 1) within-subject patterns (from a single participant) and 2) between-subject patterns (across all participants). Doing this, we aim to combine both the approaches as modeling factors, thus taking advantage of individual and general interaction patterns to predict affect.

The role of stress in drug addiction. An integrative review

Activin, a member of the transforming growth factor-beta superfamily, affords neuroprotection in acute brain injury, but its physiological functions in normal adult brain are largely unknown. Using transgenic (tg) mice expressing a dominant-negative activin receptor mutant under the control of the CaMKIIalpha promoter in forebrain neurons, we identified activin as a key regulator of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)ergic synapses and anxiety-like behavior. In the open field, wild-type (wt) and tg mice did not differ in spontaneous locomotion and exploration behavior. However, tg mice visited inner fields significantly more often than wt mice. In the light-dark exploration test, tg mice made more exits, spent significantly more time on a well-lit elevated bar and went farther away from the dark box as compared to wt mice. In addition, the anxiolytic effect of diazepam was abrogated in tg mice. Thus the disruption of activin receptor signaling produced a low-anxiety phenotype that failed to respond to benzodiazepines. In whole-cell recordings from hippocampal pyramidal cells, enhanced spontaneous GABA release, increased GABA tonus, reduced benzodiazepine sensitivity and augmented GABA(B) receptor function emerged as likely substrates of the low-anxiety phenotype. These data provide strong evidence that activin influences pre- and postsynaptic components of GABAergic synapses in a highly synergistic fashion. Given the crucial role of GABAergic neurotransmission in emotional states, anxiety and depression, dysfunctions of activin receptor signaling could be involved in affective disorders: and drugs affecting this pathway might show promise for psychopharmacological treatment.

Chapter 29 - An Introduction to the Neurobiology of Emotions and Social Behavior

Emotion is an inherently subjective psycho-physiological human state and to produce an agreed-upon representation (gold standard) for continuously perceived emotion requires time-consuming and costly training of multiple human annotators. With this in mind, there is strong evidence in the literature that physiological signals are an objective marker for states of emotion, particularly arousal. In this contribution, we utilise a multimodal dataset captured during a Trier Social Stress Test to explore the benefit of fusing physiological signals - Heartbeats per Minute ($BPM$), Electrodermal Activity (EDA), and Respiration-rate - for recognition of continuously perceived arousal utilising a Long Short-Term Memory, Recurrent Neural Network architecture, and various audio, video, and textual based features. We use the MuSe-Toolbox to create a gold standard that considers annotator delay and agreement weighting. An improvement in Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) is seen across features sets when fusing EDA with arousal, compared to the arousal only gold standard results. Additionally, BERT-based textual features' results improved for arousal plus all physiological signals, obtaining up to .3344 CCC (.2118 CCC for arousal only). Multimodal fusion also improves CCC. Audio plus video features obtain up to .6157 CCC for arousal plus EDA, BPM.

Modification of excessive drinking by cue exposure

The emotional impact of exposure to stressors has not been well quantified in animals. We hypothesised that exogenous induction of stress in sheep would induce a pessimistic judgement bias and increased attention towards a threatening stimulus, suggestive of a negative emotional state. Stress was induced pharmacologically by administering synthetic adrenocorticotropic hormone. Judgement bias was assessed using a spatial go/no-go task after exposure to acute stress (one injection), chronic stress (21 daily injections) and acute-on-chronic stress (2 min isolation after 28 daily injections). Attention bias was assessed during chronic stress only (22 daily injections). In contrast with our hypotheses, there was no strong evidence that Synacthen administration altered judgement bias or attention bias at any stage of the experiment. Stressed sheep were more likely to approach ambiguous locations than saline Control animals, however, statistical evidence for models fitting treatment group was very weak. Overall, our findings suggest that elevated levels of cortisol may not fully explain changes to judgement bias observed in previous studies after environmentally-induced stress. Further studies are required to better understand which aspects of environmentally-induced stress alter judgement bias and to further validate cognitive methods of assessing affect in sheep.