This paper presents a study on learners' level of anxiety when a podcast was used in developing their public speaking skills. This study employs a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest nonequivalent control group design where the control group was taught using the traditional method whilst a podcast was used as a teaching aid on the treatment group. The podcast makes it possible for the learners...

Exposure is an effective treatment for anxiety but many patients do not respond fully. Affect labeling (labeling emotional experience) attenuates emotional responding. The current project examined whether affect labeling enhances exposure effectiveness in participants with public speaking anxiety. Participants were randomized to exposure with or without affect labeling. Physiological arousal an...

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, the possibility of starting real telemedicine or telepsychology systems was restricted by the cost of the equipment and by the lack of adequate infrastructures. Nonetheless, the technological advances we are witnessing at present have allowed the publication of a series of pioneering works with good and promising results. The analysis of what is happening in the field of te...

The consolidation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in universities has led to significant changes in student training. This paper, part of a Teaching Innovation Project, starts from new training requirements that are fit within Undergraduate Thesis Project, a subject that culminate student learning. Undergraduate Thesis Project is current assessment system that weigh the student acq...

hat happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer gen-erated—to an audience of avatars? If the virtual audience seems attentive, well-behaved, and interested, if they show positive facial expressions with complimen-tary actions such as clapping and nodding, does the speaker infer correspondingly positive evaluations of performance and show fewer signs of ...

This paper presents a new classification algorithm for realtime inference of emotions from the non-verbal features of speech. It identifies simultaneously occurring emotional states by recognising correlations between emotions and features such as pitch, loudness and energy. Pairwise classifiers are constructed for nine classes from the Mind Reading emotion corpus, yielding an average cross-val...

OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was the Polish adaptation of the shortened Public Speaking Anxiety Questionnaire GFER by Spitznagel and co-workers. METHODS GFER is a self-assessment method which consists of 16 statements and is designed to assess emotions, physiological reactions, and thoughts that appear in a situation of public speaking. GFER was used to examine 320 students from Lodz's uni...

This study examined whether negative interpretations of bodily sensations result in a memory bias for such sensations under conditions of social evaluation. Undergraduate students (N=77) were connected to equipment which they were told would measure their physiology and were trained on how to monitor their physiology via computer feedback as they gave a video-taped speech. Approximately half of...

Brazilian foreign policy paradigms and changes in the global scenario since the Cold War created conditions for stronger ties between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries. Recently, Brazil took the lead in regional integration processes and in South-South cooperation initiatives. These strategies and Fiocruz's acknowledged technical expertise resulted in its direct involvement in Br...