The study of emotional processes in communication: II. Peripheral blood flow as an indicator of emotionalization

Traditional methods of analyzing human peripheral blood flow (PBF) do not account for its continuous nature or small-scale variation. Sequel transformation is presented as a new methodology for measuring these variations. This analysis generates a richer record of aspects of activation of the autonomous nervous system than traditional interbeat-interval (IBI) measurement. Presumably, in addition to heartbeat (i.e., IBI), other information can be extracted that is consistent with the influence of several physiological and psychological factors. This kind of variation is reflected in the PBF signal. After determining and extracting relevant events from vascular volume data generated by sequel transformation, we demonstrate the use of template analysis to analyze patterns of events as time courses of activation. All procedures are included in the computer program VASC Analyzer.     

Personality Traits Predict Smartphone Usage

The present study investigates to what degree individual differences can predict frequency and duration of actual behaviour, manifested in mobile application (app) usage on smartphones. In particular, this work focuses on the identification of stable associations between personality on the factor and facet level, fluid intelligence, demography and app usage in 16 distinct categories. A total of 137 subjects (87 women and 50 men), with an average age of 24 (SD = 4.72), participated in a 90‐min psychometric lab session as well as in a subsequent 60‐day data logging study in the field. Our data suggest that personality traits predict mobile application usage in several specific categories such as communication, photography, gaming, transportation and entertainment. Extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness are better predictors of mobile application usage than basic demographic variables in several distinct categories. Furthermore, predictive performance is slightly higher for single factor—in comparison with facet‐level personality scores. Fluid intelligence and demographics additionally show stable associations with categorical app usage. In sum, this study demonstrates how individual differences can be effectively related to actual behaviour and how this can assist in understanding the behavioural underpinnings of personality. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Ontological Categories in GOL

General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials.     

Walk this way: approaching bodies can influence the processing of faces

A highly familiar type of movement occurs whenever a person walks towards you. In the present study, we investigated whether this type of motion has an effect on face processing. We took a range of different 3D head models and placed them on a single, identical 3D body model. The resulting figures were animated to approach the observer. In a first series of experiments, we used a sequential matching task to investigate how the motion of an approaching person affects immediate responses to faces. We compared observers’ responses following approach sequences to their performance with figures walking backwards (receding motion) or remaining still. Observers were significantly faster in responding to a target face that followed an approach sequence, compared to both receding and static primes. In a second series of experiments, we investigated long-term effects of motion using a delayed visual search paradigm. After studying moving or static avatars, observers searched for target faces in static arrays of varying set sizes. Again, observers were faster at responding to faces that had been learned in the context of an approach sequence. Together these results suggest that the context of a moving body influences face processing, and support the hypothesis that our visual system has mechanisms that aid the encoding of behaviourally-relevant and familiar dynamic events.     

Using morphs of familiar objects to examine how shape discriminability influences view sensitivity

We investigated how the difficulty of detecting a shape change influenced the achievement of object constancy across depth rotations for object identification and categorization tasks. In three sequential matching experiments, people saw pictures of morphs between two everyday, nameable objects (e.g., bath-sink morphs, along a continuum between "bath" and "sink" end-point shapes). In each experiment, both view changes and shape changes influenced performance. Furthermore, the deleterious effects of view changes were strongest when shape discrimination was hardest. In our earlier research, using morphs of novel objects, we found a similar interaction between view sensitivity and shape sensitivity (Lawson, 2004b; Lawson & Bülthoff, 2006; Lawson, Bülthoff, & Dumbell, 2003). The present results extend these findings to familiar-object morphs. They suggest that recognition remains view-sensitive at the basic level of identification for everyday, nameable objects, and that the difficulty of shape discrimination plays a critical role in determining the degree of this view sensitivity.     

Causal attributions, sanctions, and normal mood variations

The causal-locus hypothesis (CLH) asserts that persons making internal attributions for failure and external attributions for success experience more negative postoutcome moods than persons making the opposite attributions. Three experiments assessed the CLH. Although outcomes consistently affected moods and attributions, attributions did not affect moods. Significant correlations consistent with the CLH were also infrequently obtained. Another theory, the sanctioned-object hypothesis (SOH), was proposed for understanding how causal attributions lead to mood changes. This hypothesis asserts that the application of positive or negative sanctions to objects in the perceptual field is a central determinant of mood and that attributions affect mood when their content and salience activate sanctioning processes. A fourth experiment evaluated the competing theories. The results supported the SOH but not the CLH. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding mood variations and the effects that moods have on the construction of attributions and for adopting methodological alternatives that may be valuable for future laboratory research studying mood variations.