BACKGROUND Research suggests that interaction between humans and digital environments characterizes a form of companionship in addition to technical convenience. To this effect, humans have attempted to design computer systems able to demonstrably empathize with the human affective experience. Facial electromyography (EMG) is one such technique enabling machines to access to human affective sta...

In a bounded valence graph every vertex has O(1) neighbours. Testing isomorphism of bounded valence graphs is known to be in P [15], something that is not clear to hold for graph isomorphism in general. We show that testing isomorphism for undirected, directed and colored graphs of valence 2 is logspace complete. We also prove the following: If a special version of bounded valence GI is hard fo...

Different accounts of nucleus accumbens (NAcc) function have emphasized its role in representing either valence or salience during incentive anticipation. In an event-related FMRI experiment, we independently manipulated valence and salience by cuing participants to anticipate certain and uncertain monetary gains and losses. NAcc activation correlated with both valence and salience. On trials w...

The neural correlates of lying about affective information were studied using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methodology. Specifically, 13 healthy right-handed Chinese men were instructed to lie about the valence, positive or negative, of pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) while their brain activity was scanned by a 3T Philip Achieva scanner...

In comparison between choice alternatives, judgments of “How much better is a preferred option?” and “How much worse is a less preferred option?” may differ in their magnitudes. Such discrepancies are called “valence effects”. Previously, Yamagishi and Miyamoto (1996) observed systematic positive valence effects (“Better” exceeding “Worse”) in the domain of gains and systematic negative valence...

The Emotional Controls of Nociception (ECON) paradigm involves the presentation of emotionally-charged pictures during which painful stimuli are delivered. Across several ECON studies, unpleasant pictures enhanced pain and nociception, whereas pleasant pictures inhibited pain and nociception. However, at this time it is unknown whether emotional valence (unpleasant, neutral, pleasant) influence...

In the study of music emotions, Valence is usually referred to as one of the dimensions of the circumplex model of emotions that describes music appraisal of happiness, whose scale goes from sad to happy. Nevertheless, related literature shows that Valence is known as being particularly difficult to be predicted by a computational model. As Valence is a contextual music feature, it is assumed h...

This study investigates the role of emotional mediation in sound-color cross-modal correspondence, using two complementary sets of validated stimuli: the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV; Belin et al., 2008), and Musical Emotional Bursts (MEB; Paquette et al., 2013). These stimuli were presented to participants for color associations, emotional associations, and rated for arousal and valence. The...

Although the basolateral amygdala (BLA) is known to play a critical role in the formation of memories of both positive and negative valence, the coding and routing of valence-related information is poorly understood. Here, we recorded BLA neurons during the retrieval of associative memories and used optogenetic-mediated phototagging to identify populations of neurons that synapse in the nucleus...