Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics
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paper_title: Affective medicine: Technology with emotional intelligence

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For a long time people have kept emotions out of the deliberate tools of medicine and science; scientists, physicians, and patients have often felt and sometimes expressed emotion, but no tools could sense, measure, and respond to their affective information. A series of recent studies indicates that emotions, particularly stress, anger, and depression, are important factors with serious and significant implications for health. This paper highlights research at the MIT Media Lab aimed at giving computers the ability to comfortably sense, recognize, and respond to certain aspects of human emotion, especially affective states such as frustration, confusion, interest, stress, anger, and joy. Examples of recently developed systems are shown, including computer systems that are wearable and computers that respond to people with a kind of active listening, empathy, and sympathy. Results are reported for computer recognition of emotion, for teaching affective skills to autistics, and for having computers help users manage emotions such as frustration.
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paper_title: Affective medicine: Technology with emotional intelligence

paper_content:

For a long time people have kept emotions out of the deliberate tools of medicine and science; scientists, physicians, and patients have often felt and sometimes expressed emotion, but no tools could sense, measure, and respond to their affective information. A series of recent studies indicates that emotions, particularly stress, anger, and depression, are important factors with serious and significant implications for health. This paper highlights research at the MIT Media Lab aimed at giving computers the ability to comfortably sense, recognize, and respond to certain aspects of human emotion, especially affective states such as frustration, confusion, interest, stress, anger, and joy. Examples of recently developed systems are shown, including computer systems that are wearable and computers that respond to people with a kind of active listening, empathy, and sympathy. Results are reported for computer recognition of emotion, for teaching affective skills to autistics, and for having computers help users manage emotions such as frustration.
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paper_title: Dispositional optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery: The beneficial effects on physical and psychological well-being.

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The effect of dispositional optimism on recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery was examined in a group of 51 middle-aged men. Patients provided information at three points in time-(a) on the day before surgery, (b) 6-8 days postoperatively, and (c) 6 months postoperatively. Information was obtained relating to the patient's rate of physical recovery, mood, and postsurgical quality of life. Information was also gathered regarding the manner in which the patients attempted to cope with the stress of the surgery and its aftermath
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paper_title: Hardiness and Health: A Social Psychophysiological Perspective on Stress and Adaptation

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Social psychological models of clinical disorder often assign an etiological role to the concept of stress and emphasize factors that either increase or decrease one's vulnerability to its effects. In the present article, we critically evaluate the research on one such factor, hardiness, to determine whether this construct reduces the impact of stress on physical health via stress appraisal, coping, and associated psychophysiological arousal. Although data support parts of the hardiness stress-moderation model, the reviewed literature is largely inconsistent
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paper_title: Psychological Defense: Contemporary Theory and Research

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Publisher Summary This chapter discusses psychological defense which refers to the process of regulating painful emotions— such as anxiety, depression, and loss of self-esteem. Defense mechanisms are usually defined more narrowly as mental processes that operate unconsciously to reduce some painful emotion. Defense is further restricted to threats aroused by the individual's thoughts and wishes, particularly psychological conflict over issues of sex and aggression. Later, several types of mechanism of defense are discussed in this chapter. Denial refers primarily to defense against painful aspects of external reality. It is usually considered a primitive defense, both in the sense of developing early and in the sense of crudeness and simplicity. The term self-deception is used in many distinguishable ways. Self-deception is a distinct form of defense in which the individual shows moral weakness in disavowing some unpleasant truth. For many years, the topics of defense and the unconscious were virtually taboo in social psychology. This rejection peaked with the advent of attribution theory where the tendency was to explain all the mental processes in terms of cold cognition. A number of developmental psychologists have proposed that defenses can be conceptualized along with a developmental continuum, according to their complexity and degree of maturity.
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paper_title: Dehydroepiandrosterone antagonizes the neurotoxic effects of corticosterone and translocation of stress-activated protein kinase 3 in hippocampal primary cultures

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Glucocorticoids are toxic to hippocampal neurons. We report here that the steroid dehydroepiandrosterone protects neurons of primary hippocampal cultures against the toxic effects of corticosterone. Corticosterone (20-500 nM) added for 24h to primary cultures of embryonic day 18 rat hippocampus resulted in significant neurotoxicity. Dissociated cells were grown for at least 10 days, initially in serum-containing medium, but serum was removed before adding steroids for 24 h. Neurotoxicity was measured by counting the number of cells stained either for beta-tubulin III or glial fibrillary acidic protein. Corticosterone-induced toxicity was prevented by co-treatment of the cultures with dehydroepiandrosterone (20-500 nM). Dehydroepiandrosterone on its own had little effect, though the highest concentration used (500 nM) was mildly toxic. Immunohistochemical studies on the nuclear translocation of a range of stress-activated protein kinases showed that stress-activated protein kinases 1, 2, 3 and 4 were all translocated by 10 min exposure to corticosterone (100 nM). Dehydroepiandrosterone (100 nM) attenuated the translocation of stress-activated protein kinase 3, but not the others. These experiments show that dehydroepiandrosterone has potent anti-glucocorticoid actions on the brain, and can protect hippocampal neurons from glucocorticoid-induced neurotoxicity. This protective action may involve stress-activated protein kinase 3-related intracellular pathways, though direct evidence for this has still to be obtained.
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paper_title: Ego mechanisms of defense and personality psychopathology.

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It is often not just life stress but also a person's idiosyncratic response to life stress that leads to psychopathology. Thus, despite problems in reliability, the validity of defenses makes them a valuable diagnostic axis for understanding psychopathology. By including a patient's defensive style as part of the diagnostic formulation, the clinician is better able to comprehend what seems initially most unreasonable about the patient and to appreciate what is adaptive as well as maladaptive about the patient's defensive distortions of inner and outer reality. Clinical appreciation of the immature defenses (e.g., hypochondriasis, fantasy, dissociation, acting out, projection, and passive aggression) is particularly useful in classifying and caring for individuals with personality disorders
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paper_title: Evidence that secretory IgA antibody is associated with daily mood.

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In this study, we examined the secretory immune system, the body's first line of defense against invading organisms, and its relation to daily fluctuations of mood. Specifically, secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) was studied. Unlike other psychoimmunity studies that examined all sIgA protein regardless of specificity to invading organisms, ours examined an antigen-specific sIgA response to the oral administration of a harmless protein (rabbit albumin) and monitored the antibody produced in response to the protein. Dental students recorded their daily mood thrice weekly for 8 1/3 weeks, and parotid saliva was obtained from subjects during these contacts. Using a within-subjects analyses strategy, we found that antibody response was lower on days with high negative mood relative to days with lower negative mood, and conversely, sIgA antibody response was higher on days with high positive mood relative to days with lower positive mood. Results from total sIgA protein were in the opposite direction, although not significantly so. These results extend our knowledge of immunological changes and mood, and they suggest that minor life events' role in health may be mediated by the secretory immune system.
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paper_title: Automatic spoken affect classification and analysis

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This paper reports results from preliminary experiments on automatic classification of spoken affect valence. The task was to classify short spoken sentences into one of two classes: approving or disapproving. Using an optimal combination of six acoustic measurements our classifier achieved an accuracy of 65% to 88% for speaker dependent, text-independent classification. The results suggest that pitch and energy measurements may be used to automatically classify spoken affect valence but more research will be necessary to understand individual variations and how to broaden the range of affect classes which can be recognized. In a second experiment we compared human performance in classifying the same speech samples. We found similarities between human and automatic classification results.
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paper_title: Once more with feeling: Affect and language in atypical populations

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The study of clearly identifiable patterns of atypical development can inform normal development in significant ways. Delayed or deviant development puts in high relief not only the sequence of development but also the individual components. This article presents the results of studies that compare adolescents with Williams syndrome, a rare metabolic neurodevelopmental disorder resulting in mental retardation, with cognitively matched adolescents with Down syndrome. We investigate the interaction between affect and language through storytelling. In contrast to the adolescents with Down syndrome, the Williams syndrome subjects tell coherent and complex narratives that make extensive use of affective prosody. Furthermore, stories from the Williams but not the Down subjects are infused with lexically encoded narrative evaluative devices that enrich the referential content of the stories. This contrast in expressivity between two matched atypical groups provides an unusual perspective on the underlying structure of the social cognitive domain.
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paper_title: Emotion detection from speech to enrich multimedia content

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This paper describes an experimental study on the detection of emotion from speech. As computer-based characters such as avatars and virtual chat faces become more common, the use of emotion to drive the expression of the virtual characters becomes more important. This study utilizes a corpus containing emotional speech with 721 short utterances expressing four emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, and the neutral (unemotional) state, which were captured manually from movies and teleplays. We introduce a new concept to evaluate emotions in speech. Emotions are so complex that most speech sentences cannot be precisely assigned to a particular emotion category; however, most emotional states nevertheless can be described as a mixture of multiple emotions. Based on this concept we have trained SVMs (support vector machines) to recognize utterances within these four categories and developed an agent that can recognize and express emotions.
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paper_title: Emotional speech synthesis: from speech database to TTS.

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Modern Speech synthesisers have achieved a high degree of intelligibility, but can not be regarded as natural-sounding devices. In order to decrease the monotony of synthetic speech, the implementation of emotional effects is now being progressively considered. This paper presents a through study of emotional speech in Spanish, and its application to TTS, presenting a prototype system that simulates emotional speech using a commercial synthesiser. The design and recording of a Spanish database will be described and also the analysis of the emotional prosody (by fitting the data to a formal model). Using this collected data, a rule-based simulation of three primary emotions was implemented in the Text-to-Speech system. Finally, the assessment of the synthetic voice through perception experiments will classify the system as capable of producing quality voice with recognisable emotional effects.
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paper_title: Verification of Acoustical Correlates of Emotional Speech using Formant- Synthesis

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This paper explores the perceptual relevance of acoustical correlates of emotional speech by means of speech synthesis. Besides, the research aims at the development of emotion-rules which enable an optimized speech synthesis system to generate emotional speech. Two invesigations using this synthetizer are described : 1) the systematic variation of selected acoustical features to gain a preliminary impression regarding the importance of certain acoustical features for emotional expression, and 2) the specific manipulation of a stimulus spoken under emotionally neutral condition to investigate further the effect of certain features and the overall ability of the synthetizer to generate recognizable emotional expression. It is shown that this approach is indeed capable of generating emotional speech that is recognized almost as well as utterances realized by actors
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paper_title: Recognizing emotion in speech

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The paper explores several statistical pattern recognition techniques to classify utterances according to their emotional content. The authors have recorded a corpus containing emotional speech with over a 1000 utterances from different speakers. They present a new method of extracting prosodic features from speech, based on a smoothing spline approximation of the pitch contour. To make maximal use of the limited amount of training data available, they introduce a novel pattern recognition technique: majority voting of subspace specialists. Using this technique, they obtain classification performance that is close to human performance on the task.
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paper_title: Comprehensive database for facial expression analysis

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Within the past decade, significant effort has occurred in developing methods of facial expression analysis. Because most investigators have used relatively limited data sets, the generalizability of these various methods remains unknown. We describe the problem space for facial expression analysis, which includes level of description, transitions among expressions, eliciting conditions, reliability and validity of training and test data, individual differences in subjects, head orientation and scene complexity image characteristics, and relation to non-verbal behavior. We then present the CMU-Pittsburgh AU-Coded Face Expression Image Database, which currently includes 2105 digitized image sequences from 182 adult subjects of varying ethnicity, performing multiple tokens of most primary FACS action units. This database is the most comprehensive testbed to date for comparative studies of facial expression analysis.
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paper_title: Active appearance models

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We describe a new method of matching statistical models of appearance to images. A set of model parameters control modes of shape and gray-level variation learned from a training set. We construct an efficient iterative matching algorithm by learning the relationship between perturbations in the model parameters and the induced image errors.
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paper_title: Intelligent Agents Who Wear Your Face: Users' Reactions to the Virtual Self

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The three-dimensional models used to embody intelligent agents are becoming increasingly realistic. We discuss two studies in which we embodied intelligently behaving virtual agents with photographically realistic models of human subjects' heads and faces. We then immersed those subjects with agents embodied with their virtual selves and compared their interactions and nonverbal behaviors to separate subjects who were immersed with agents embodied with virtual others. Subjects treated agents embodied with their virtual selves fundamentally differently than agents embodied with virtual others in regards to both measured nonverbal behaviors and questionnaire ratings. Implications for systems incorporating realistic embodied agents are discussed.
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paper_title: The communication of meaningful emotional information for children interacting with virtual actors

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In a virtual environment where users can interact with agents, the way in which the agent displays its internal emotional state and what the user infers from this display is central to effective affective communication. Given the reliance on visual expression of emotion in current VR Systems, any differences between children and adults in the way such information is utilised and perceived raises interesting design issues in relation to the experience and age of the user. Here we discuss some of these issues in relation to the PUPPET project, where the goal is to provide a virtual play environment, using a theatre metaphor, to enable young children's (4-8 years old) story construction. This paper first presents a summary of previous research that demonstrates the special meaning that young children place on facial expressions when gathering information about emotion. Three empirical studies are presented that explore these issues using prototypes of our system. Some design solutions are suggested in conjunction with directions for future empirical work.
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paper_title: Embodied conversational agents

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Embodied conversational agents are computer-generated cartoonlike characters that demonstrate many of the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. They constitute a type of (a) multimodal interface where the modalities are those natural to human conversation: speech, facial displays, hand gestures, and body stance; (b) software agent, insofar as they represent the computer in an interaction with a human or represent their human users in a computational environment (as avatars, for example); and (c) dialogue system where both verbal and nonverbal devices advance and regulate the dialogue between the user and the computer. With an embodied conversational agent, the visual dimension of interacting with an animated character on a screen plays an intrinsic role. Not just pretty pictures, the graphics display visual features of conversation in the same way that the face and hands do in face-to-face conversation among humans.This book describes research in all aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied conversational agents as well as details of specific working systems. Many of the chapters are written by multidisciplinary teams of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, artists, and researchers in interface design. The authors include Elisabeth Andre, Norm Badler, Gene Ball, Justine Cassell, Elizabeth Churchill, James Lester, Dominic Massaro, Cliff Nass, Sharon Oviatt, Isabella Poggi, Jeff Rickel, and Greg Sanders.
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paper_title: Empathic agents to reduce user frustration: The effects of varying agent characteristics

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There is now growing interest in the development of computer systems which respond to users' emotion and affect. We report three small-scale studies (with a total of 42 participants), which investigate the extent to which affective agents, using strategies derived from human-human interaction, can reduce user frustration within human-computer interaction. The results confirm the previous findings of Klein et al. [Klein, J., Moon, Y., Picard, R.W., 2002. This computer responds to user frustration: theory, design and results. Interacting with Computers 142, 119-140] that such interventions can be effective. We also obtained results that suggest that embodied agents can be more effective at reducing frustration than non-embodied agents, and that female embodied agents may be more effective than male embodied agents. These results are discussed in light of the existing research literature.
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paper_title: Capturing subtle facial motions in 3D face tracking

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Facial motions produce not only facial feature points motions, but also subtle appearance changes such as wrinkles and shading changes. These subtle changes are important yet difficult issues for both analysis (tracking) and synthesis (animation). Previous approaches were mostly based on models learned from extensive training appearance examples. However, the space of all possible facial motion appearance is huge. Thus, it is not feasible to collect samples covering all possible variations due to lighting conditions, individualities, and head poses. Therefore, it is difficult to adapt such models to new conditions. In this paper, we present an adaptive technique for analyzing subtle facial appearance changes. We propose a new ratio-image based appearance feature, which is independent of a person's face albedo. This feature is used to track face appearance variations based on exemplars. To adapt the exemplar appearance model to new people and lighting conditions, we develop an online EM-based algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed method improves classification results in a facial expression recognition task, where a variety of people and lighting conditions are involved.
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paper_title: Signal Characteristics of Spontaneous Facial Expressions: Automatic Movement in Solitary and Social Smiles

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The assumption that the smile is an evolved facial display suggests that there may be universal features of smiling in addition to the basic facial configuration. We show that smiles include not only a stable configuration of features, but also temporally consistent movement patterns. In spontaneous smiles from two social contexts, duration of lip corner movement during the onset phase was independent of social context and the presence of other facial movements, including dampening. These additional movements produced variation in both peak and offset duration. Both onsets and offsets had dynamic properties similar to automatically controlled movements, with a consistent relation between maximum velocity and amplitude of lip corner movement in smiles from two distinct contexts. Despite the effects of individual and social factors on facial expression timing overall, consistency in onset and offset phases suggests that portions of the smile display are relatively stereotyped and may be automatically produced.
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paper_title: Gesture-based affective computing on motion capture data

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This paper presents research using full body skeletal movements captured using video-based sensor technology developed by Vicon Motion Systems, to train a machine to identify different human emotions. The Vicon system uses a series of 6 cameras to capture lightweight markers placed on various points of the body in 3D space, and digitizes movement into x, y, and z displacement data. Gestural data from five subjects was collected depicting four emotions: sadness, joy, anger, and fear. Experimental results with different machine learning techniques show that automatic classification of this data ranges from 84% to 92% depending on how it is calculated. In order to put these automatic classification results into perspective a user study on the human perception of the same data was conducted with average classification accuracy of 93%.
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paper_title: Detecting affect from non-stylised body motions

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In this paper we present a novel framework for analysing non-stylised motion in order to detect implicitly communicated affect. Our approach makes use of a segmentation technique which can divide complex motions into a set of automatically derived motion primitives. The parsed motion is then analysed in terms of dynamic features which are shown to encode affective information. In order to adapt our algorithm to personal movement idiosyncrasies we developed a new approach for deriving unbiased motion features. We have evaluated our approach using a comprehensive database of affectively performed motions. The results show that removing personal movement bias can have a significant benefit for automated affect recognition from body motion. The resulting recognition rate is similar to that of humans who took part in a comparable psychological experiment.
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paper_title: Emotion recognition from physiological signals using wireless sensors for presence technologies

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In this article we describe a new approach to enhance presence technologies. First, we discuss the strong relationship between cognitive processes and emotions and how human physiology is uniquely affected when experiencing each emotion. Secondly, we introduce our prototype multimodal affective user interface. In the remainder of the paper we describe the emotion elicitation experiment we designed and conducted and the algorithms we implemented to analyse the physiological signals associated with emotions. These algorithms can then be used to recognise the affective states of users from physiological data collected via non-invasive technologies. The affective intelligent user interfaces we plan to create will adapt to user affect dynamically in the current context, thus providing enhanced social presence.
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paper_title: Non-intrusive physiological monitoring for automated stress detection in human-computer interaction

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Affective Computing, one of the frontiers of Human-Computer Interaction studies, seeks to provide computers with the capability to react appropriately to a user's affective states. In order to achieve the required on-line assessment of those affective states, we propose to extract features from physiological signals from the user (Blood Volume Pulse, Galvanic Skin Response, Skin Temperature and Pupil Diameter), which can be processed by learning pattern recognition systems to classify the user's affective state. An initial implementation of our proposed system was set up to address the detection of "stress" states in a computer user. A computer-based "Paced Stroop Test" was designed to act as a stimulus to elicit emotional stress in the subject. Signal processing techniques were applied to the physiological signals monitored to extract features used by three learning algorithms: Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine to classify relaxed vs. stressed states.
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paper_title: Emotion Recognition Using Bio-sensors: First Steps towards an Automatic System

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The detection of emotion is becoming an increasingly important field for human-computer interaction as the advantages emotion recognition offer become more apparent and realisable. Emotion recognition can be achieved by a number of methods, one of which is through the use of bio-sensors. Bio-sensors possess a number of advantages against other emotion recognition methods as they can be made both inobtrusive and robust against a number of environmental conditions which other forms of emotion recognition have difficulty to overcome. In this paper, we describe a procedure to train computers to recognise emotions using multiple signals from many different bio-sensors. In particular, we describe the procedure we adopted to elicit emotions and to train our system to recognise them. We also present a set of preliminary results which indicate that our neural net classifier is able to obtain accuracy rates of 96.6% and 89.9% for recognition of emotion arousal and valence respectively.
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paper_title: From Physiological Signals to Emotions: Implementing and Comparing Selected Methods for Feature Extraction and Classification

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Little attention has been paid so far to physiological signals for emotion recognition compared to audio-visual emotion channels, such as facial expressions or speech. In this paper, we discuss the most important stages of a fully implemented emotion recognition system including data analysis and classification. For collecting physiological signals in different affective states, we used a music induction method which elicits natural emotional reactions from the subject. Four-channel biosensors are used to obtain electromyogram, electrocardiogram, skin conductivity and respiration changes. After calculating a sufficient amount of features from the raw signals, several feature selection/reduction methods are tested to extract a new feature set consisting of the most significant features for improving classification performance. Three well-known classifiers, linear discriminant function, k-nearest neighbour and multilayer perceptron, are then used to perform supervised classification
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paper_title: An Integrated Approach to Emotion Recognition for Advanced Emotional Intelligence

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Emotion identification is beginning to be considered as an essential feature in human-computer interaction. However, most of the studies are mainly focused on facial expression classifications and speech recognition and not much attention has been paid until recently to physiological pattern recognition. In this paper, an integrative approach is proposed to emotional interaction by fusing multi-modal signals. Subjects are exposed to pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). A feature extraction procedure is used to discriminate between four affective states by means of a Mahalanobis distance classifier. The average classifications rate (74.11%) was encouraging. Thus, the induced affective state is mirrored through an avatar by changing its facial characteristics and generating a voice message sympathising with the user's mood. It is argued that multi-physiological patterning in combination with anthropomorphic avatars may contribute to the enhancement of affective multi-modal interfaces and the advancement of machine emotional intelligence.
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paper_title: Monitoring sleepiness with on-board electrophysiological recordings for preventing sleep-deprived traffic accidents

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Abstract Objective The objective of this study is the development and evaluation of efficient neurophysiological signal statistics, which may assess the driver’s alertness level and serve as potential indicators of sleepiness in the design of an on-board countermeasure system. Methods Multichannel EEG, EOG, EMG, and ECG were recorded from sleep-deprived subjects exposed to real field driving conditions. A number of severe driving errors occurred during the experiments. The analysis was performed in two main dimensions: the macroscopic analysis that estimates the on-going temporal evolution of physiological measurements during the driving task, and the microscopic event analysis that focuses on the physiological measurements’ alterations just before, during, and after the driving errors. Two independent neurophysiologists visually interpreted the measurements. The EEG data were analyzed by using both linear and non-linear analysis tools. Results We observed the occurrence of brief paroxysmal bursts of alpha activity and an increased synchrony among EEG channels before the driving errors. The alpha relative band ratio (RBR) significantly increased, and the Cross Approximate Entropy that quantifies the synchrony among channels also significantly decreased before the driving errors. Quantitative EEG analysis revealed significant variations of RBR by driving time in the frequency bands of delta, alpha, beta, and gamma. Most of the estimated EEG statistics, such as the Shannon Entropy, Kullback–Leibler Entropy, Coherence, and Cross-Approximate Entropy, were significantly affected by driving time. We also observed an alteration of eyes blinking duration by increased driving time and a significant increase of eye blinks’ number and duration before driving errors. Conclusions EEG and EOG are promising neurophysiological indicators of driver sleepiness and have the potential of monitoring sleepiness in occupational settings incorporated in a sleepiness countermeasure device. Significance The occurrence of brief paroxysmal bursts of alpha activity before severe driving errors is described in detail for the first time. Clear evidence is presented that eye-blinking statistics are sensitive to the driver’s sleepiness and should be considered in the design of an efficient and driver-friendly sleepiness detection countermeasure device.
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paper_title: WORKLOAD ISSUES IN MILITARY TACTICAL AIRLIFT

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Military airlift is following the trend in commercial aviation to 2-pilot flightdecks with significant levels of automation. A critical issue is whether the reduced crew can handle the workload involved in military tactical missions, which have many high workload elements the crew do not encounter in the commercial aviation environment. This article outlines a workload assessment strategy based on direct measures of aircrew and mission performance, aircrew subjective evaluations of workload, and psychophysiological indexes and describes its application to tactical airlift missions. The article discusses significant workload challenges one must address in the transition to 2-pilot tactical airlift.
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paper_title: Affective Computing and Autism

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: This article highlights the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing. We propose that a collaboration between autism research and affective computing could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes—from developing new tools to assist people with autism in understanding and operating in the socioemotional world around them, to developing new computational models and theories that will enable technology to be modified to provide an overall better socioemotional experience to all people who use it. This article describes work toward this convergence at the MIT Media Lab, and anticipates new research that might arise from the interaction between research into autism, technology, and human socioemotional intelligence.
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paper_title: Plasma cortisol levels and reactivation of latent Epstein-Barr virus in response to examination stress

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In this study, we explored the possibility that glucocorticoid hormones, known to increase under stress, might be one component of the mechanism involved in induction of latent Epstein Barr virus (EBV). We obtained blood samples from 45 male medical students during examinations and approximately 3-4 weeks before the examinations (baseline) and measured antibody titers to EBV and plasma cortisol levels. We found reproducible changes in EBV, virus capsid antigen (VCA) antibody titers, with higher antibody titers observed in the examination blood samples consistent with the reactivation of latent virus. However, we found no evidence that day and night plasma cortisol values across the sampling points changed significantly from baseline to examinations. Therefore, academic stress did not elevate cortisol levels, but increases in EBV VCA antibody titers were still observed. The data suggest in these subjects that other neuropeptides or hormones were involved in the induction of latent EBV.
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paper_title: Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics: Collaborations on the Road to Genomic Medicine?

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In this report, the authors compare and contrast medical informatics (MI) and bioinformatics (BI) and provide a viewpoint on their complementarities and potential for collaboration in various subfields. The authors compare MI and BI along several dimensions, including: (1) historical development of the disciplines, (2) their scientific foundations, (3) data quality and analysis, (4) integration of knowledge and databases, (5) informatics tools to support practice, (6) informatics methods to support research (signal processing, imaging and vision, and computational modeling, (7) professional and patient continuing education, and (8) education and training. It is pointed out that, while the two disciplines differ in their histories, scientific foundations, and methodologic approaches to research in various areas, they nevertheless share methods and tools, which provides a basis for exchange of experience in their different applications. MI expertise in developing health care applications and the strength of BI in biological “discovery science” complement each other well. The new field of biomedical informatics (BMI) holds great promise for developing informatics methods that will be crucial in the development of genomic medicine. The future of BMI will be influenced strongly by whether significant advances in clinical practice and biomedical research come about from separate efforts in MI and BI, or from emerging, hybrid informatics subdisciplines at their interface.
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paper_title: The use of emotionally expressive avatars in Collaborative Virtual Environments

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We argue that the use of collaborative virtual environments (CVE) which incorporate emotionally expressive avatars has the potential to engender empathy amongst users of such environments, and that the use of this technology is potentially valuable for people with autism. Empirical work in both areas is discussed. Results suggest that the introduction of emotional expressiveness enriches the subjective experience of CVE inhabitants, in particular their enjoyment and how engaging they find virtual encounters. Similarly, exploratory empirical work involving people with autism suggests they were able to understand the emotions expressed by their avatars and use them appropriately.
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paper_title: Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships With Computers And Robots

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The field of Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) is a fast growing and increasingly important area that comprises highly active research activities and strongly interdisciplinary approaches. Socially Intelligent Agents, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Caamero and Bruce Edmonds, emerged from the AAAI Symposium "Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop". The book provides 32 chapters, written by leading SIA researchers, addressing topics such as: social robotics, embodied conversational agents, affective computing, anthropomorphism, narrative and story-telling, social aspects in multi-agent systems, new technologies for education and therapy, and more. This breadth of topics covered in Socially Intelligent Agents provides the reader with a comprehensive look at current research activities in the area. Socially Intelligent Agents serves as an excellent reference for a wide readership, e.g. computer scientists, roboticists, web programmers and designers, computer users, cognitive scientists, and other researchers interested in the study of how humans relate to computers and robots, and how these agents in return can relate to humans. This book is also suitable as research material in a variety of advanced level courses, including Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents, Human-Computer Interaction, Situated, Embodied AI.
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paper_title: SmartCar: detecting driver stress

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Smart physiological sensors embedded in an automobile afford a novel opportunity to capture naturally occurring episodes of driver stress. In a series of ten ninety minute drives on public roads and highways, ECG, EMG, respiration and skin conductance sensors were used to measure the autonomic nervous system activation. The signals were digitized in real time and stored on the SmartCar's Pentium class computer. Each drive followed a pre-specified route through fifteen different events, from which four stress level categories were created according to the results of the subjects self report questionnaires. In total, 545 one minute segments were classified. A linear discriminant function was used to rank each feature individually based on the recognition performance, and a sequential forward floating selection algorithm was used to find an optimal set of features for recognizing patterns of driver stress. Using multiple features improved performance significantly over the best single feature performance.
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paper_title: The effect of task differences, attention and personality on the frequency of body-focused hand movements

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A hypothesized relationship between apparently irrelevant self or object manipulatory hand movements and attentional demand was investigated by observing the frequency of these hand movements during the performance of three tasks: a monologue, mental arithmetic, and rest. The attentional demand of each task was assessed by means of a simultaneous reaction time probe task. The monologue task had both the highest frequency of hand movements and the highest level of attentional demand. However, correlations between these measures were not significant for any of the tasks. The influence of the task differences on movement frequencies was much greater than the effect of individual differences. Correlations of trait anxiety and field dependence measures with movement frequencies varied markedly with task differences. The nature and significance of these movements is considered by reference to similar observations in nonhuman species.
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paper_title: Enabling Reinforcement Learning for Open Dialogue Systems through Speech Stress Detection

paper_content:

The human speech signal contains a wide range of paralinguistic information and the interpretation and exploitation of this information presents a fascinating challenge. This paper seeks to demonstrate that emotion is central to the construction of an openended dialogue system. Emotion forms a useful, practical, metric that enables a agent to both maintain a user’s positive emotional state and allow it to judge and refine its current dialogue strategy. One way to determine the emotional state of the user is through an interpretation of the speech signal. Accordingly, this paper details a method of detecting emotion within speech and then exploiting this information to drive an open-ended dialogue system. After presenting the outline of an advanced open-ended dialogue system we test an initial model to judge the validity of this approach. This simplified model perceives a number of real speech utterances with varying emotional content (ranging from stressed to happy) and learns to manipulate the emotional state of an artificial user through reinforcement learning. The agent acquires the users emotional response to its replies and is able, through a balancing of exploration and exploitation, to maintain the users positive disposition. This initial work is encouraging and clearly shows that emotion can motivate open-ended dialogue. However, a number of substantial challenges remain, including the perception of natural, as opposed to acted, speech and the development of an unsupervised learning approach.
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Title: Affective Medicine: A Review of Affective Computing Efforts in Medical Informatics

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the concept of Affective Computing (AC) and its significance, the motivations behind the research, and the scope of the paper.

Section 2: Related Work
Description 2: Summarize previous research and reviews on the application of Affective Computing in Medical Informatics, outlining key studies and their contributions.

Section 3: The Human Affective State as a Determinant of Health
Description 3: Discuss the relationship between human emotions and health, including historical perspectives and modern findings on how emotions impact physical and mental health.

Section 4: Affective Communication 
Description 4: Describe how human affective states are expressed and communicated through various modalities such as speech, facial expressions, body gestures, and physiological reactions.

Section 5: Applying Affective Computing in Medical Informatics
Description 5: Explore the current applications and potential benefits of integrating Affective Computing technologies in medical informatics, including tele-home health care and stress monitoring.

Section 6: Discussion
Description 6: Provide an analysis of the current state of Affective Computing in medical informatics, its potential future developments, and the challenges and opportunities for creating synergies between these fields.

Section 7: COSPATIAL
Description 7: Describe the COSPATIAL project, aimed at developing collaborative technologies for learning social competence in children, including those with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

Section 8: TeaCheR
Description 8: Detail the TEACHER project, focusing on the development of Virtual Reality and Affective Computing tools to support learning in children with disabilities.

Section 9: AUBADE
Description 9: Discuss the AUBADE project's innovative approach to studying neurological diseases and human emotions.

Section 10: INTREPID
Description 10: Explain the INTREPID project and its aim to develop a wearable system for the treatment of phobias and anxiety.