https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/25490/1/affective-computing-review.pdf

A review of affective computing

Natural language processing employs computational techniques for the purpose of learning, understanding, and producing human language content. Early computational approaches to language research focused on automating the analysis of the linguistic structure of language and developing basic technologies such as machine translation, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Today’s researchers refine and make use of such tools in real-world applications, creating spoken dialogue systems and speech-to-speech translation engines, mining social media for information about health or finance, and identifying sentiment and emotion toward products and services. We describe successes and challenges in this rapidly advancing area.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/349/6245/261.full.pdf

Advances in natural language processing.

It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1529100619832930

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements:

https://schererstefan.net/assets/files/papers/1-s2.0-S0167639315000369-main.pdf

A review of depression and suicide risk assessment using speech analysis

Introduction : HIV-related stigma and discrimination continue to hamper efforts to prevent new infections and engage people in HIV treatment, care and support programmes. The identification of effective interventions to reduce stigma and discrimination that can be integrated into national responses is crucial to the success of the global AIDS response. Methods : We conducted a systematic review of studies and reports that assessed the effectiveness of interventions to reduce HIV stigma and discrimination between 1 January 2002 and 1 March 2013. Databases searched for peer-reviewed articles included PubMed, Scopus, EBSCO Host -CINAHL Plus, Psycinfo, Ovid, Sociofile and Popline. Reports were obtained from the www.HIVAIDSClearinghouse.eu , USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse, UNESCO HIV and AIDS Education Clearinghouse, Google, WHO and UNAIDS. Ancestry searches for articles included in the systematic review were also conducted. Studies of any design that sought to reduce stigma as a primary or secondary objective and included pre- and post-intervention measures of stigma were included. Results : Of 2368 peer-reviewed articles and reports identified, 48 were included in our review representing 14 different target populations in 28 countries. The majority of interventions utilized two or more strategies to reduce stigma and discrimination, and ten included structural or biomedical components. However, most interventions targeted a single socio-ecological level and a single domain of stigma. Outcome measures lacked uniformity and validity, making both interpretation and comparison of study results difficult. While the majority of studies were effective at reducing the aspects of stigma they measured, none assessed the influence of stigma or discrimination reduction on HIV-related health outcomes. Conclusions : Our review revealed considerable progress in the stigma-reduction field. However, critical challenges and gaps remain which are impeding the identification of effective stigma-reduction strategies that can be implemented by national governments on a larger scale. The development, validation, and consistent use of globally relevant scales of stigma and discrimination are a critical next step for advancing the field of research in this area. Studies comparing the effectiveness of different stigma-reduction strategies and studies assessing the influence of stigma reduction on key behavioural and biomedical outcomes are also needed to maximize biomedical prevention efforts. Keywords : systematic review; HIV; stigma reduction; discrimination reduction; interventions; measurement. (Published: 13 November 2013) To access the supplementary material to this article please see Supplementary Files in the column to the right (under Article Tools). Citation : Stangl AL et al. Journal of the International AIDS Society 2013, 16 (Suppl 2):18734 http://www.jiasociety.org/index.php/jias/article/view/18734 | http://dx.doi.org/10.7448/IAS.16.3.18734

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.7448/IAS.16.3.18734

A systematic review of interventions to reduce HIV-related stigma and discrimination from 2002 to 2013: how far have we come?

We present SimSensei Kiosk, an implemented virtual human interviewer designed to create an engaging face-to-face interaction where the user feels comfortable talking and sharing information. SimSensei Kiosk is also designed to create interactional situations favorable to the automatic assessment of distress indicators, defined as verbal and nonverbal behaviors correlated with depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this paper, we summarize the design methodology, performed over the past two years, which is based on three main development cycles: (1) analysis of face-to-face human interactions to identify potential distress indicators, dialogue policies and virtual human gestures, (2) development and analysis of a Wizard-of-Oz prototype system where two human operators were deciding the spoken and gestural responses, and (3) development of a fully automatic virtual interviewer able to engage users in 15-25 minute interactions. We show the potential of our fully automatic virtual human interviewer in a user study, and situate its performance in relation to the Wizard-of-Oz prototype.

/pdf/simsensei-kiosk-a-virtual-human-interviewer-for-healthcare-18t9klo36e.pdf

SimSensei kiosk: a virtual human interviewer for healthcare decision support

Although young men who have sex with men (MSM) are at high risk for contracting HIV, few interventions address the affective/automatic factors (e.g., sexual arousal, shame/stigma) that may precipitate young MSM's risk-taking. A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded DVD interactive video intervention that simulated a "virtual date" with guides/mentors reduced sexual risk over 3-months for Black, Latino and Caucasian young MSM. In the current work, limitations of the DVD format (e.g., number of different risk challenges MSM encounter; DVD quickly becomes dated) were addressed with 3-D animated intelligent agents/interactive digital storytelling using a Unity Game platform. The development (e.g., design, art, social science formative research, etc.) of this NIH funded game for changing risky behavior is described as well as the ongoing national randomized "on-line" evaluation over 6 months.

https://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Socially%20Optimized%20Learning%20in%20Virtual%20Environments%20(SOL%20VE).pdf

Teresa Dey

Papers

SimSensei kiosk: a virtual human interviewer for healthcare decision support

Socially optimized learning in virtual environments (SOLVE)