The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with tutorial dialogue in natural language. Observational analyses revealed significant relationships between learning and the affective states of boredom, flow and confusion. The positive correlation between confusion and learning is consistent with a model that assumes that cognitive disequilibrium is one precursor to deep learning. The findings that learning correlates negatively with boredom and positively with flow are consistent with predictions from Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis of flow experiences.

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Two studies provide evidence for the role of cultural familiarity in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. For Chinese located in China and the United States, Chinese Americans, and non-Asian Americans, accuracy and speed in judging Chinese and American emotions was greater with greater participant exposure to the group posing the expressions. Likewise, Tibetans residing in China and Africans residing in the United States were faster and more accurate when judging emotions expressed by host versus nonhost society members. These effects extended across generations of Chinese Americans, seemingly independent of ethnic or biological ties. Results suggest that the universal affect system governing emotional expression may be characterized by subtle differences in style across cultures, which become more familiar with greater cultural contact. The individual who moves from one class to another or from one society to another is faced with the challenge of learning new “dialects” of facial language to supplement his knowledge of the more universal grammar of emotion. (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964, p. 127) To what extent is the recognition of emotion universal versus variable by culture? Researchers in psychology have spent decades in pursuit of this question. Extreme positions taken by early theorists have gradually given way to recent interactionist perspectives integrating evidence for both universality and cultural

This article highlights a range of design and analytical tools for studying the cross-cultural communication of emotion using forced-choice experimental designs. American, Indian, and Japanese participants judged facial expressions from all 3 cultures. A factorial experimental design is used, balanced n × n across cultures, to separate “absolute ” cultural differences from “relational ” effects characterizing the relationship between the emotion expressor and perceiver. Use of a response bias correction is illustrated for the tendency to endorse particular multiple-choice categories more often than others. Treating response bias also as an opportunity to gain insight into attributional style, the authors examined similarities and differences in response patterns across cultural groups. Finally, the authors examined patterns in the errors or confusions that participants make during emotion recognition and documented strong similarity across cultures. Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Program in Organizational Behavior,

Abstract. In an attempt to discover links between learning and emotions, this study adopted an emote-aloud procedure where participants were recorded as they verbalized their affective states while interacting with an intelligent tutoring system, AutoTutor. Participants ’ facial expressions were coding using the Facial Action Coding System and analyzed using association rule mining techniques. The resulting rules are discussed along with implications to the larger project of improving the AutoTutor system into a nonintrusive affect sensitive intelligent tutoring system. While the 20 th century has been ripe with learning theory, these theories have mostly ignored the importance of the link between a persons emotions or affective states and learning (Meyer, & Turner, 2002). However, toward the end of the twentieth century, emotions started to get more attention. Some seminal contributions to the literature include the facial action coding system by Ekman & Friesen (1978), Stein and Levine’s (1991) theory of goals and emotion, Cognitive theory of Emotion (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988), and Russell’s (2003) theory of emotion. Ekman and Friesen (1978) highlighted the expressive aspects of emotions with their Facial Action Coding System that allowed for “basic emotions ” to be identified by coding specific facial behaviors based on the muscles that produce them. Each movement in the face is referred to as an action unit. There are approximately 58 action units. These prototypical facial patterns were used to identify the emotions of happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, and fear (Ekman & Friesen, 1978; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). The coding system was tested primarily on static pictures rather than on changing expressions over time. Unfortunately, for those researchers interesting in the role of emotions in learning, it is doubtful whether these 6 emotions are frequent and functionally significant in the learning process (Kapoor,Mota, & Picard, 2001). More generally, some researchers have challenged the adequacy of basing a complete theory of emotions on these

Abstract. The goal of the study is to investigate cultural differences in avatar expression evaluation and apply findings from psychological study in human facial expression recognition. Our previous study using Japanese designed avatars showed there are cultural differences in interpreting avatar facial expressions, and the psychological theory that suggests physical proximity affects facial expression recognition accuracy is also applicable to avatar facial expressions. This paper summarizes the early results of the successive experiment that uses western designed avatars. We observed tendencies of cultural differences in avatar facial expression interpretation in western designed avatars.

Languages differ in the way that speakers coordinate their interaction moment-by-moment, and this can cause intercultural misunderstandings. We explore this in the domain of listening behavior. One way that listeners show interest and attention is by producing backchannel feedback (short utterances such as okay and hmm) at appropriate times, and these times are determined, in part, by the interlocutor, who signals when such feedback is welcome with various cues. In Arabic these cues include a prosodic feature in the form of a steep continuous drop in pitch. This paper shows that English speakers can misinterpret this, perceiving it as an expression of negative affect, and that this tendency can be substantially alleviated by training.

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

The centrality of emotion and self to social life is almost axiomatic in the psychological literature. What is less accepted, or at least less frequently discussed, is the essential interconnection between these two domains. Yet, as the quotations above suggest, self and emotion are inextricably linked. The experience of self is shaped by a constant and ever-changing flurry of emotions (i.e., “passions”), and feelings of pride, shame, and other emotions could not exist without perceptions and evaluations of the self (Brown & Marshall, 2001). The traditional disconnect between the self and emotion literatures stems, in part, from their divergent theoretical roots. Emotion researchers have, to a large extent, embraced a biological model of affect. This approach has led to major advances in our understanding of the neural underpinnings and adaptive functions of emotions, their interactions with basic cognitive processes, and their automatically recognized and expressed nonverbal signals (Davidson, 2001; Ekman, 2003; LeDoux, 1996; Panksepp, 1998; Phelps, 2005). However, this approach has also led researchers to neglect psychologically complex emotions, such as pride and shame, which are more closely linked to self-evaluative processes. The disconnect also results from the traditional emphasis in the self literature on cognitive rather than affective processes. When research on self-processes began to flourish in the late 1970s and 1980s, the cognitive perspective was emerging as the dominant paradigm, displacing the previously dominant paradigm of behaviorism (Robins, Gosling, & Craik, 1999; Tracy, Robins, & Gosling, 2003). The cognitive approach to studying the self has led to major developments in our understanding of how the self “works ” from an information-processing perspective

For some time the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. Using realistic synthetic faces, we re-examined this relationship for both perception and short-term memory. In Experiment 1 subjects tried to identify whether the emotional expression on a probe stimulus face matched the emotional expression on either of two remembered faces that they had just seen. Results showed that identity strongly influenced recognition short-term memory for emotional expression. In Experiment 2, subjects ’ similarity/dissimilarity judgments were transformed by multi-dimensional scaling into a 2-dimensional description of the faces ’ perceptual representations. Distances among stimuli in the MDS representation, which showed a strong linkage of emotional expression and facial identity, were good predictors of correct and false recognitions obtained previously, in Experiment 1. The convergence of results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggests that the overall structure and configuration of the faces ’ perceptual representation may parallel their representation in short-term memory, and that facial identity modulates the representation of facial emotion, both in perception and in memory. The international community has instructed its member