Humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli. A consequence of this automatic vigilance for negative valence is that negative words elicit slower responses than neutral or positive words on a host of cognitive tasks. Some researchers have speculated that negative stimuli elicit a general suppression of motor activity, akin to the freezing response exhibited by animals under threat. Alternat...

Various studies have recently shown that the long-held claim that the relation between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary needs to be revisited. In two computational studies we investigated whether word valence can be derived from sound features in English, Dutch and German. In Study 1, we identified the extent to which individual phonological features explained valence scores per...

A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms....

Weshow that repulsive local Coulomb interaction alone can drive valence-skipping charge disproportionation in the degenerate d-band, resulting in effective negative-U . This effect is shown to originate from anisotropic orbitalmultipole scattering, and it occurs only for d1, d4, d6, and d9 fillings (and their immediate surroundings). Explicit boundaries for valence-skipping are derived, and the...

Valence compounds (German: Rektionskomposita) such as Autofahrer ‘car driver’ are a special subclass in the otherwise very heterogeneous class of nominal compounds. As the corresponding verb (fahren ‘to drive’ in the example) governs the (accusative) object (Auto ‘car’), valence compounds allow for a straightforward (event-)semantic interpretation. Hence the automatic detection of valence compo...

Mood is an important aspect of music and knowledge of mood can be used as a basic feature in music recommender and retrieval systems. A listening experiment was carried out establishing ratings for various moods and a number of attributes, e.g., valence and arousal. The analysis of these data covers the issues of the number of basic dimensions in music mood, their relation to valence and arousa...

In this work, we propose using edge valence as a quality predictor when used as a driver for adapting all hexahedral meshes. Edge valence, for hexahedra, is defined as the number of faces attached to an edge. It has shown to be a more reliable quality predictor than node valence for hexahedral meshes. This work presents a general algorithm for predicting edge valence when used with column colla...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to study the neural processing of emotion-denoting words based on a circumplex model of affect, which posits that all emotions can be described as a linear combination of two neurophysiological dimensions, valence and arousal. Based on the circumplex model, we predicted a linear relationship between neural activity and incremental changes in these two affective dimensions. ...

The ability to experience pleasant or unpleasant feelings or to represent objects as "positive" or "negative" is known as representing hedonic "valence." Although scientists overwhelmingly agree that valence is a basic psychological phenomenon, debate continues about how to best conceptualize it scientifically. We used a meta-analysis of 397 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and posi...

Consciousness of the finiteness of one's personal existence influences human thoughts and behaviors tremendously. However, the neural substrates underlying the processing of death-related information remain unclear. The current study addressed this issue by scanning 20 female adults, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, in a modified Stroop task that required naming colors of death-rela...