A real-time automatic pavement crack and pothole recognition system for mobile Android-based devices

Due to the rapid growth of vehicles and traffic accidents caused by road pavement defects, road safety has become a pressing concern worldwide. For this reason, Countries and Federal States have started focusing their resources on the analysis of civil infrastructures to assess their safety and serviceability. The analyses are performed by specialized teams of inspectors and structural engineers who manually inspect road infrastructures and provide detailed reports about the detected pavement distresses and their magnitudes. This work aims at providing a new system able to detect the framed distress using solely the computational resources provided by a mobile device To reach this goal, an automatic pavement distress recognition system based on the OpenCV library is developed and embedded in a mobile application, enabling the recognition of three common pavement distresses: Pothole, Longitudinal-Transversal Cracks, and Fatigue Cracks. Our method, tested on several Android mobile platforms, is able recognize the pavement distresses of interest reaching more than 0.7 of Precision, Recall, Accuracy, and F-Measure. This application promises to improve the on-site work of inspectors by decreasing the time required to perform inspections while ensuring, at the same time, a higher level of accuracy.     

Stress and health outcomes: The mediating role of negative affectivity in female health care workers.

The current study explored the interrelationships among occupational stress, family stress, poor physical health, and psychological distress and examined the mediating role of negative affectivity (NA) in the stress and health process. A cross-sectional, nonexperimental design was used and a convenience sample of 271 female health care workers was recruited from northeastern Ohio. Data were collected with a self-reported questionnaire, scanned using Teleform Software, and electronically transferred to the SPSS format. Data analyses were performed in three separate phases: preliminary, measurement model, and structural model analyses (using structural equation modeling). Results suggested that occupational stress had a significant effect on psychological distress, and family stress had a significant impact on both poor physical health and psychological distress. NA partially mediated the effect of occupational stress on psychological distress. The effects of family stress on poor physical health and psychological distress were also partially mediated through NA. The indirect to total effect ratios were 30%, 17.15%, and 28%, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-relevance processing in the human amygdala: Gaze direction, facial expression, and emotion intensity.

How the processing of emotional expression is influenced by perceived gaze remains a debated issue. Discrepancies between previous results may stem from differences in the nature of stimuli and task characteristics. Here we used a highly controlled set of computer-generated animated faces combining dynamic emotional expressions with varying intensity, and gaze shifts either directed at or averted from the observer. We predicted that perceived self-relevance of fearful faces would be higher with averted gaze—signaling a nearby danger; whereas conversely, direct gaze would be more relevant for angry faces—signaling aggressiveness. This interaction pattern was observed behaviorally for emotion intensity ratings, and neurally for functional magnetic resonance imaging activation in amygdala, as well as fusiform and medial prefrontal cortices, but only for mild- and not high-intensity expressions. These results support an involvement of human amygdala in the appraisal of self-relevance and reveal a crucial role of expression intensity in emotion and gaze interactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What you feel is how you compare: How comparisons influence the social induction of affect.

Concordant and discordant affective reactions can occur after the mere perception of another person's affective expression. Most previous theorizing has been concerned with the explanation of affective concordance, typically referred to as emotional contagion, although discordant affect has received little attention. The authors propose an integrative account for the explanation of both outcomes based on a social comparison framework. Studies 1 and 2 suggest that two distinct types of comparison processes can trigger concordant or discordant affective reactions. Study 3 extends these findings by demonstrating that the influence of comparison processes on affect in an established mood contagion paradigm. The authors attempt to integrate previous research into the present account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

She’s emotional. He’s having a bad day: Attributional explanations for emotion stereotypes.

People believe that women are the more emotional sex. This belief stems less from what men and women actually do than from the explanations given for their behaviors. In 2 studies, participants who were given situational information about the causes of emotional expression in target faces nonetheless more frequently judged feminine targets depicting emotions as “emotional” (i.e., a dispositional attribution for the emotional behavior), whereas they more frequently judged masculine targets as “having a bad day” (i.e., a situational attribution for the emotional behavior). These findings help explain the pervasive belief that women are more emotional when compared with men, even when the scientific veracity of this belief is questionable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting distress-induced eating with self-reports: Mission impossible or a piece of cake?

Comments on the original article, "Assessing yourself as an emotional eater: Mission impossible?" by C. Evers, D. T. D. de Ridder, and M. A. Adriaanse (see record 2009-20990-009). Results of a functional MRI study (Bohon, Stice, & Spoor, 2009) contradict the assertion that it is "impossible" to self-assess emotional eating because the self-report emotional eating scale of the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ-em) predicted important individual differences in reward response during negative moods. Evers et al advance their argument in the context of results of four experiments where self-reported “emotional eaters” (DEBQ-em) did not eat more food during emotional encounters as compared to control conditions or “no emotional eaters.” However, the core characteristic of emotional eaters is not that they eat so much during distress (though binge eaters may do), but that they do not show the typical stress response of eating less (the typical stress response being loss of appetite because of physiological effects that mimic satiety) (Gold & Chrousos, 2002). Accordingly, the moderator effect of emotional eating during distress would be that. “No emotional eaters” eat less and “emotional eaters” eat the same or more compared to control conditions. Close inspection of the results of Evers et al reveals that their “no emotional eaters” did not show the typical stress response of eating less. This opens the possibility that the null findings of Evers et al may be simply explained by misclassification of “no emotional eaters” versus “emotional eaters” because of their use of median splits (a procedure notorious for possible misclassification of subjects into distinct groups). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting the duration of emotional experience: Two experience sampling studies.

The authors present 2 studies to explain the variability in the duration of emotional experience. Participants were asked to report the duration of their fear, anger, joy, gratitude, and sadness episodes on a daily basis. Information was further collected with regard to potential predictor variables at 3 levels: trait predictors, episode predictors, and moment predictors. Discrete-time survival analyses revealed that, for all 5 emotions under study, the higher the importance of the emotion-eliciting situation and the higher the intensity of the emotion at onset, the longer the emotional experience lasts. Moreover, a reappearance, either physically or merely mentally, of the eliciting stimulus during the emotional episode extended the duration of the emotional experience as well. These findings display interesting links with predictions within N. H. Frijda's theory of emotion, with the phenomenon of reinstatement (as studied within the domain of learning psychology), and with the literature on rumination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A prospective investigation of the vulnerability of memory for positive and negative emotional scenes to the misinformation effect.

This study examined (prospectively) the impact of the emotional content of visual scenes on memory accuracy and susceptibility to misinformation over time. After viewing a highly positive and highly negative photographic image, half of participants (N = 80) were exposed to misinformation concerning the images and later responded to a series of questions about the details of each. After 1 week or 1 month, participants returned and were asked (unexpectedly) about the images. Overall, memories of misled participants were substantially less accurate than nonmisled participants, a pattern persisting at 1-week and 1-month follow-up, although the passage of time decreased accuracy of all participants. Relative to positive images, negative images were associated with a greater susceptibility to false memories for a major misleading detail at both sessions. Thus, relative to positive emotion, negative emotion specifically heightens suggestibility in the presence of major misinformation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness.

Emotional expressions influence social judgments of personality traits. The goal of the present research was to show that it is of interest to assess the impact of neutral expressions in this context. In 2 studies using different methodologies, the authors found that participants perceived men who expressed neutral and angry emotions as higher in dominance when compared with men expressing sadness or shame. Study 1 showed that this is also true for men expressing happiness. In contrast, women expressing either anger or happiness were perceived as higher in dominance than were women showing a neutral expression who were rated as less dominant. However, sadness expressions by both men and women clearly decreased the extent to which they were perceived as dominant, and a trend in this direction emerged for shame expressions by men in Study 2. Thus, neutral expressions seem to be perceived as a sign of dominance in men but not in women. The present findings extend our understanding of the way different emotional expressions affect perceived dominance and the signal function of neutral expressions—which in the past have often been ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

情感理念在视觉传达设计中的运用

目的 探索视觉传达设计中的情感理念的表现方式。方法 视觉传达设计承载着信息传递、情感交互等功能,发展至今已然走进了社会生活的各个角落,成为一个热门领域。将视觉传达设计作为研究对象,从最基本的概念着手,引出其所遵循的基本原则,发现情感理念的融入和凸显对视觉传达设计的积极作用,并提出情感融入的诸多可能性,列举出趣味性、完整性、独特性等方面的价值表现,最后从设计形式和设计方法两个方面分别就两者的融合路径展开探讨,以期能够得出更加合理的融合应用方式。结论 情感层面的表现语言与当代人的内心需求相契合,是人们内心真实想法的形象表达,其与视觉传达设计的组合能够促成美妙新颖的视觉体验,令受众在细品之后获得妙趣体验。