How stress influences creativity in game-based situations: Analysis of stress hormones,negative emotions,and working memory

This study aims to integrate neuroscientific techniques into a behavioral experimental design to investigate how stress stimuli may influence stress hormones and negative emotions, subsequently affecting working memory (WM) and creativity in game-based situations. Ninety-six college students participated in this study, in which a game-based experiment lasting 90 min was employed. The main findings were that (1) the employed stress stimuli influence creativity during gaming through two routes: enhancing creativity through cortisol concentration and WM and decreasing creativity by provoking promotion-focused negative emotions (frustration and anger); and (2) the subjective negative emotions and objective cortisol responses do not consistently predict WM and creativity in game-based situations. Accordingly, appropriate challenges or stressors that help increase the cortisol concentration to an attentional level without provoking a strong sense of promotion-focused negative emotions should be considered when designing games aimed at teaching creativity.     

The effectiveness of a math game: The impact of integrating conceptual clarification as support

This study investigates the impact of integrating conceptual clarifications as support in an educational math game, and explores the impact of adding this (internal vs. external) support on students’ game and mathematical performance, intrinsic motivation, and game perception. Three conditions are established: a condition in which internal support is offered, a condition in which (identical) external support is offered, and a control condition in which no support is added to the game. One hundred twenty-two vocational secondary education students participated in this study. The results of this study indicate that students benefit from playing with an educational game in order to enhance their proportional reasoning skills. Adding conceptual clarifications as instructional support in an intrinsically integrated game is not recommended. If the support is given to the students anyhow, it is advised to offer it externally because internally integrating this support leads to a decrease in performance and motivation. Hence, not only support as such, but also the way it is integrated in the game-based learning process, might be decisive for its effectivity. Obviously, further research is warranted in order to replicate these findings also for other types of support, other game-based learning environments and other target groups.     

Dynamic evolution of collective emotions in social networks: a case study of Sina weibo

Emotion is a fundamental object of human existence and determined by a complex set of factors. With the rapid development of online social networks (OSNs), more and more people would like to express their emotion in OSNs, which provides wonderful opportunities to gain insight into how and why individual emotion is evolved in social network. In this paper, we focus on emotion dynamics in OSNs, and try to recognize the evolving process of collective emotions. As a basis of this research, we first construct a corpus and build an emotion classifier based on Bayes theory, and some effective strategies (entropy and salience) are introduced to improve the performance of our classifier, with which we can classify any Chinese tweet into a particular emotion with an accuracy as high as 82%. By analyzing the collective emotions in our sample networks in detail, we get some interesting findings, including a phenomenon of emotion synchronization between friends in OSNs, which offers good evidence for that human emotion can be spread from one person to another. Furthermore, we find that the number of friends has strong correlation with individual emotion. Based on those useful findings, we present a dynamic evolution model of collective emotions, in which both self-evolving process and mutual-evolving process are considered. To this end, extensive simulations on both real and artificial networks have been done to estimate the parameters of our emotion dynamic model, and we find that mutual-evolution plays a more important role than self-evolution in the distribution of collective emotions. As an application of our emotion dynamic model, we design an efficient strategy to control the collective emotions of the whole network by selecting seed users according to k-core rather than degree.     

Does the emotional design of scaffolds enhance learning and motivational outcomes in game-based learning?

Background

In recent years, the importance of emotions in learning has been increasingly recognized. Applying emotional design to induce positive emotions has been considered a means to enhance the instructional effectiveness of digital learning environments. However, only a few studies have examined the specific effects of emotional design in game-based learning.

Objectives

This quasi-experimental study utilized a value-added research approach to investigate whether emotional design applied to scaffolding in a game-based learning environment improves learning and motivational outcomes more than emotionally neutral scaffolding.

Methods

A total of 138 participants, mean age of 11.5 (SD = 0.73) participated in the study. A total of 68 participants played the base version of a fraction learning game (Number Trace), where scaffolding was provided with emotionally neutral mathematical notations, and 70 participants played the value-added version of the game using emotionally designed animated scaffolding agents. Pre-and post-tests were used to measure conceptual fraction knowledge and self-reported measures of situational interest and situational self-efficacy to evaluate motivational outcomes.

Results and Conclusions

Our results indicate that the emotional design applied to scaffolds can improve the educational value of a game-based learning environment by enhancing players' situational interest and situational self-efficacy. However, although the intervention improved the participants' conceptual fraction knowledge, there was no significant difference between the scaffolding conditions in participants' learning outcomes.

Takeaways

The results suggest that emotional design can increase the educational impact of game-based learning by promoting the development of interest, as well as improving self-efficacy.     

Emotion understanding and performance during computer-supported collaboration

Individuals collaborating around and through computers benefit from receiving information that helps them understand one another, which is often termed awareness. This article explores what collaborators understand about each other’s emotions and the potential benefits for performance that might come from raising this understanding. In Experiment 1 co-located collaborators judged each other’s emotions after playing a game that required cooperative data collection and analysis. Their judgements were largely inaccurate and based on their own emotions, suggesting limited emotion understanding. Experiment 2 explored if this could be overcome by making collaborators aware of each other’s emotions. Co-located and remote collaborators played a cooperative puzzle-solving game under conditions of awareness or no awareness. Awareness was manipulated by making collaborators share their self-reported emotions during key moments of their game play. Both remote and co-located collaborators improved their performance after sharing their emotions. However, unlike co-located collaborators, remote collaborators also improved their understanding of each other’s emotions and experienced more positive affect. We conclude by discussing the content of collaborators’ emotion understanding and the probable mechanisms underlying the observed effects of being made aware of a partner’s emotions.     

基于情绪相关事件上下文的隐含情绪分类方法研究

情绪分类是情绪分析研究中的一个基本任务,旨在对文本表达的情绪进行分类。目前,该任务是自然语言处理研究中的一个热点问题。已有的研究一般借助于情绪关键词(例如,“高兴”,“伤心”)来进行情绪分类。然而,在实际中,存在大量的没有情绪关键词但表达情绪的文本,我们称这类情绪表达为隐含情绪表达。该文关注隐含情绪分类方法研究,提出了基于情绪关联事件的隐含情绪分类方法,我们认为情绪的关联事件可以用于对情绪类别进行分类。具体实现中,我们首先采用情绪关键词获得句子群;然后,去除情绪关键词,将上下文作为关联事件表达文本;最后,利用上下文进行情绪分类。实验结果表明,以上下文进行的情绪分类结果达到了一定的性能,远远好于随机分类结果。这一结果为进一步隐含情绪分类提供了良好的基础。     

The evaluation of different gaming modes and feedback types on game-based formative assessment in an online learning environment

This study proposed an online learning system for energy education, modifying the typical rules of tic-tac-toe and incorporating multiple choice tests into the game in order to develop a game-based formative assessment tool for an online learning course. In order to explore how different gaming modes and feedback types in this game-based formative assessment affect knowledge acquisition effectiveness and participation perceptions, a tic-tac-toe quiz game (TRIS-Q) with two gaming modes: single-player online game (SOG) and multi-player online game (MOG), and two feedback types: immediate elaborated feedback (IEF) and no immediate elaborated feedback (no IEF), were developed. A 2(SOG vs. MOG) × 2(IEF vs. no IEF) between-subject experiment was also conducted to investigate the effects on 109 ninth-grade students from four junior high school classes. The research findings indicated that different gaming modes of TRIS-Q did not affect the effectiveness of knowledge acquisition; providing IEF for each question answered in the game facilitated the enhancement of both energy knowledge acquisition and student tic-tac-toe ability when comparing it with the no IEF type. Additionally, the different gaming modes and feedback types did not affect participation perceptions.     

The influence of competition,cooperation, and player relationship in a motor performance centered computer game

We conducted an experiment to study the effects of goal structure in multiplayer gaming (competition vs. cooperation) and relationship type between players (positive pre-existing relationship [friends] vs. no pre-existing relationship [strangers]) on player motivation (as indicated by perceived effort put into the task), goal commitment, and performance in playing a balloon popping game. The cooperative goal structure was found to lead to greater effort put into the game than the competitive goal structure. In addition, playing with friends resulted in a stronger commitment to the in-game goals than playing with strangers in the cooperative goal structure context, yet no difference was found between playing with friends and playing with strangers with regard to goal commitment in the competitive goal structure context. A moderated mediation relationship was found among the variables. Theoretical contributions to the current literature on goal structure and motivation, practical implications for exergame design, and directions for future research are discussed.     

基于SVM-KNN算法的情绪脑电识别

情绪识别与日常生活的诸多领域都有很大联系.然而,通过单一算法难以获得较高的情绪识别准确率,为此,提出一种基于支持向量机(support vector machine,SVM)和K近邻(K-nearest neighbors,KNN)融合算法(SVM-KNN)的情绪脑电识别模型.在情绪分类时,首先计算待识别样本与最优分类...     

The effects of computer games on primary school students’ achievement and motivation in geography learning

The implementation of a computer game for learning about geography by primary school students is the focus of this article. Researchers designed and developed a three-dimensional educational computer game. Twenty four students in fourth and fifth grades in a private school in Ankara, Turkey learnt about world continents and countries through this game for three weeks. The effects of the game environment on students’ achievement and motivation and related implementation issues were examined through both quantitative and qualitative methods. An analysis of pre and post achievement tests showed that students made significant learning gains by participating in the game-based learning environment. When comparing their motivations while learning in the game-based learning environment and in their traditional school environment, it was found that students demonstrated statistically significant higher intrinsic motivations and statistically significant lower extrinsic motivations learning in the game-based environment. In addition, they had decreased focus on getting grades and they were more independent while participating in the game-based activities. These positive effects on learning and motivation, and the positive attitudes of students and teachers suggest that computer games can be used as an ICT tool in formal learning environments to support students in effective geography learning.     

阅读严肃文学小说对脸部情绪识别的影响——ERP证据

该研究采用事件相关电位(ERP)观察了被试在识别积极、中性和消极的脸部情绪时,在大脑颞枕部电极点上引发的N170效应,来探索阅读严肃文学小说是否会影响人对他人情绪的反应。阅读组被试在两次脸部情绪识别测试之间阅读严肃文学小说,而对照组没有。第二次测试相比第一次测试,N170的幅度增大,但是阅读严肃文学小说会抑制N170幅度增益,且对情绪越积极的刺激图片抑制越大。据此,阅读对他人脸部情绪的识别确有影响。研究推测阅读可能抑制大脑中的脸部情绪特异性,进而可能提高对脸部情绪的感知力。     

Towards building a social emotion detection system for online news

Social emotion detection of online users has become an important task for mining public opinions. Social emotion detection aims at predicting the readers’ emotions evoked by news articles, tweets, etc. In this article, we focus on building a social emotion detection system for online news. The system is built based on the modules of document selection, Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and social emotion lexicon generation. Empirical studies are extensively conducted on a large scale real-world collection of news articles. Experiments show that the document selection algorithm has a positive effect on the social emotion detection. The system performs better with the words and POS combination compared to a feature set consisting only of words. POS is also useful to detect emotion ambiguity of words and the context dependence of their sentiment orientations. Furthermore, the proposed method of generating the lexicon outperforms the baselines in terms of social emotion prediction.     

基于人工智能的情感模型建立

以OCC情感模型和心理学家Ekman的情感分类两大理论为基础，建立了一个机器人情感模型．本模型通过设计一系列通用型参数，来达到模型适用于多种环境的目的，例如虚拟游戏人物、智能玩具．此外，还引入了情感空间设计，并在情感空间中设计了一系列情感点，可以通过移动情感点或者修改情感点区域的大小，来达到改变情感模型性格特征的目的．     

Learning immunology in a game: Learning outcomes,the use of player characters,immersion experiences and visual attention distributions

This study contributed to the current body of literature on game-based learning by investigating the way playing an educational game, Humunology, affected learning about the immune system and examining further the association between game immersion and visual attention distribution. A total of 79 undergraduate and graduate students participated, and data were collected both in situ and ex situ. The results showed that the students learned through playing Humunology, and the analyses of the use of player characters indicated that the game design facilitated gameplay behaviours that are consistent with the science content. The use of the eye-tracking method also revealed that students who were more immersed in playing Humunology paid more attention to areas related to player characters. The interpretations and limitations are discussed further.     

Emotions as Constraining and Facilitating Factors for Creativity: Companionate Love and Anger

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.     

Achievement goals influence mastery experience via two paths in digital creativity games among elementary school students

Although cultivating creativity is greatly emphasized in elementary school education and that digital games can be a promising tool for improving creativity, little research has been conducted to identify and explore how player‐related factors might influence the learning outcomes of digital creativity games. This study identifies 3 individual traits pertaining to digital creativity game playing and examines how these determinants influence self‐efficacy and mastery experiences of creativity using structural equation modelling. The participants were 275 4th through 6th graders, and the employed method was inventory investigation. The findings reveal that the participants spend a large proportion of time playing digital games after school. Moreover, the results suggest that motivation for achieving both mastery goals and performance goals is crucial to enhancing self‐efficacy and achieving mastery experience in creativity. Additionally, such motivation might enhance mastery experience via two paths: the experience of flow states and the strengthening of self‐determination and self‐efficacy. The findings of this study shed light on the design of digital games for creativity training.     

情感智能主体模型

为使智能主体能有效处理情感,具有更高的智能性,论文在传统BDI智能主体模型的基础上,首次提出了一种情感智能主体模型结构,该模型通过建立情感知识库实现情感表示,利用情感推理算法实现情感推理,从而完成简单情感的处理。模型已初步实现,应用结果表明该模型能有效实现简单情感处理。     

人机交互中的智能体情感计算研究

机器的情感是通过融入具有情感能力的智能体实现的,虽然目前在人机交互领域已经有大量研究成果,但有关智能体情感计算方面的研究尚处起步阶段,深入开展这项研究对推动人机交互领域的发展具有重要的科学和应用价值。本文通过检索Scopus数据库选择有代表性的文献,重点关注情感在智能体和用户之间的双向流动,分别从智能体对用户的情绪感知和对用户情绪调节的角度开展分析总结。首先梳理了用户情绪的识别方法,即通过用户的表情、语音、姿态、生理信号和文本信息等多通道信息分析用户的情绪状态,归纳了情绪识别中的一些机器学习方法。其次从用户体验角度分析具有情绪表现力的智能体对用户的影响,总结了智能体的情绪生成和表现技术,指出智能体除了通过表情之外,还可以通过注视、姿态、头部运动和手势等非言语动作来表现情绪。并且梳理了典型的智能体情绪架构,举例说明了强化学习在智能体情绪设计中的作用。同时为了验证模型的准确性,比较了已有的情感评估手段和评价指标。最后指出智能体情感计算急需解决的问题。通过对现有研究的总结,智能体情感计算研究是一个很有前景的研究方向,希望本文能够为深入开展相关研究提供借鉴。     

基于多特征融合的抽象画情感研究

抽象画作为一种寓意含蓄的艺术作品,传递出的情感也是含蓄的,确定其情感分类也比较困难,为此采用多特征融合方式预测抽象画的情感。首先采用K-means聚类提取抽象画图像的主色调作为底层颜色特征,采用灰度—梯度共生矩阵提取底层纹理特征,采用卷积神经网络自动提取高层语义特征;其次由于特征维度不同,采用多核学习对底层和高级语义特征进行融合;最后采用支持向量机实现抽象画情感识别,分为积极与消极两类。在MART数据集上进行测试,并与其他现有分类模型进行了比较,实验结果显示该方法在测试性能上优于已有模型。     

Challenging games help students learn: An empirical study on engagement,flow and immersion in game-based learning

In this paper, we investigate the impact of flow (operationalized as heightened challenge and skill), engagement, and immersion on learning in game-based learning environments. The data was gathered through a survey from players (N = 173) of two learning games (Quantum Spectre: N = 134 and Spumone: N = 40). The results show that engagement in the game has a clear positive effect on learning, however, we did not find a significant effect between immersion in the game and learning. Challenge of the game had a positive effect on learning both directly and via the increased engagement. Being skilled in the game did not affect learning directly but by increasing engagement in the game. Both the challenge of the game and being skilled in the game had a positive effect on both being engaged and immersed in the game. The challenge in the game was an especially strong predictor of learning outcomes. For the design of educational games, the results suggest that the challenge of the game should be able to keep up with the learners growing abilities and learning in order to endorse continued learning in game-based learning environments.