As an important attribute of facial expression, emotional valence has been well explored, but its processing mechanisms remain ambiguous. Investigating the categorical perception (CP) of emotional valence might help uncover the objective basis of the subjective dichotomy of emotional valence and identify the stage at which this processing of valence information might occur. A judgment task was ...

INTRODUCTION There is mounting evidence for the influence of emotional content on working memory performance. This is particularly important in light of the emotion processing that needs to take place when emotional content interferes with executive functions. In this study, we used emotional words of different valence but with similar arousal levels in an n-back task. METHODS We examined the...

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a goal oriented psychotherapy counseling that aims to instill positive change in a client through discussion. Since the discourse is in the form of semi-structured natural conversation, it often involves a variety of non-verbal social and affective behaviors such as laughter. Laughter carries information related to affect, mood and personality and can offer a w...

Computer programs may go wrong due to exceptional behaviors, out-of-bound array accesses, or simply coding errors. Thus, they cannot be blindly trusted. Scientific computing programs make no exception in that respect, and even bring specific accuracy issues due to their massive use of floating-point computations. Yet, it is uncommon to guarantee their correctness. Indeed, we had to extend exist...

Degree of emotional valence and arousal have been shown to covary with blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal levels in several brain structures. Here we studied brain activity in 17 healthy subjects during perception of facial expressions varying in valence and arousal using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our results revealed correlations with the perceived valence in dorsol...

We discuss the possibility of using pair-equations for the construction of the effective Hamiltonian H eff for valence electrons of an atom. The low-energy part of atomic spectrum is found by solving the eigenvalue problem for H eff. In this way it is possible to account efficiently for the valence-valence and core-valence correlations. We tested this method on a toy model of a four-electron at...

We investigate four variants of valence regulations incorporated in (limited) Lindenmayer systems, focussing on hierarchical relations and closure properties. Strong connections to well-known families of languages obtained by regulated rewriting are established. We prove several new results on valence transducers and valence generalized sequential machines (gsm). In this way, we can show new pr...