Augusta Gaspar

Chimpanzee Faces Under the Magnifying Glass: Emerging Methods Reveal Cross-Species Similarities and Individuality

Independently, we created descriptive systems to characterize chimpanzee facial behavior, responding to a common need to have an objective, standardized coding system to ask questions about primate facial behaviors. Even with slightly different systems, we arrive at similar outcomes, with convergent conclusions about chimpanzee facial mobility. This convergence is a validation of the importance of the approach, and provides support for the future use of a facial action coding system for chimpanzees, ChimpFACS. Chimpanzees share many facial behaviors with those of humans. Therefore, processes and mechanisms that explain individual differences in facial activity can be compared with the use of a standardized systems such as ChimpFACS and FACS. In this chapter we describe our independent methodological approaches, comparing how we arrived at our facial coding categories. We present some Action Descriptors (ADs) from Gaspar’s initial studies, especially focusing on an ethogram of chimpanzee and bonobo facial behavior, based on studies conducted between 1997 and 2004 at three chimpanzee colonies (The Detroit Zoo; Cleveland Metroparks Zoo; and Burger’s Zoo) and two bonobo colonies (The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium; The Milwaukee County Zoo). We discuss the potential significance of arising issues, the minor qualitative species differences that were found, and the larger quantitative differences in particular facial behaviors observed between species, e.g., bonobos expressed more movements containing particular action units (Brow Lowerer, Lip Raiser, Lip Corner Puller) compared with chimpanzees. The substantial interindividual variation in facial behavior within each species was most striking. Considering individual differences and the impact of development, we highlight the flexibility in facial activity of chimpanzees. We discuss the meaning of facial behaviors in nonhuman primates, addressing specifically individual attributes of Social Attraction, facial expressivity, and the connection of facial behavior to emotion. We do not rule out the communicative function of facial behavior, in which case an individual’s properties of facial behavior are seen as influencing his or her social life, but provide strong arguments in support of the role of facial behavior in the expression of internal states.

Preschooler’s faces in spontaneous emotional contexts—how well do they match adult facial expression prototypes?

Prototypical facial expressions of emotion, also known as universal facial expressions, are the underpinnings of most research concerning recognition of emotions in both adults and children. Data on natural occurrences of these prototypes in natural emotional contexts are rare and difficult to obtain in adults. By recording naturalistic observations targeted at emotional contexts in day-to-day kindergarten activities, we investigated the spontaneous facial behavior of 3-year-old children in order to explore associations between context and facial activity and verify the degree of matching between the well-known adult prototypes and facial configurations actually produced by children. When taken individually, most facial actions matched those that comprise the respective emotion prototypical face, but full facial configurations with all characteristic facial actions were scarce but for joy.

A serious game to prevent bullying and promote empathy

Bullying is a real and serious problem with severe consequences for the young victims of this phenomenon. Serious Games have proven their effectiveness in therapeutic approaches to problems within the Conflict Resolution domain, thereby revealing a potential to be explored in the mitigation of peer violence in and outside the school. This paper presents a Serious Game whose main goal is to promote empathy as a mean to prevent bullying; the rationale for the prevention is that by helping victims and observers of these episodes of violence to practice an attitude/behavior change toward bullying one will be training and increasing those attitudes and behavioral competences for the real bullying situations. The relevance of our proposal is based on the high prevalence of bullying and the lack of demonstrated effectiveness of the current prevention interventions. The game runs on different platforms (smartphone, tablet, PC), provides flexibility in the choice of scenarios and in the game playing role. Players decisions have obvious effects in the subsequent levels of the game. The treatment or intervention resorting to this game may take place at the therapists office or outside, in an independent way. In every game session a data set is recorded for later analysis by the therapist. We also implemented a Back Office application integrated with the game to support the therapist in several monitoring tasks.

On Prototypical Facial Expressions Versus Variation in Facial Behavior: What Have We Learned on the “Visibility” of Emotions from Measuring Facial Actions in Humans and Apes

It has long been recognized that behavior evolves as do other traits and that it may have great impact on evolution. It tends to be conservative when survival and fast responding are at stake, and because of that, similar patterns can be found across populations or species, typical in their form and intensity, and often also typical in context and consequence. Such fixed stereotypic patterns that evolved to communicate are known as displays, and their phylogenies can virtually be traced. In this chapter, we contrast and discuss two coexisting trends in the study of the meaning and origins of human facial expression: one, with a tradition of exploring cross-cultural commonalities in the recognition of facial expression, that may indicate species-specific displays of emotion (prototypical facial expressions) and another that builds upon the growing evidence that such expressive prototypes are outnumbered by a diversity of facial compositions that, even in emotional situations, vary in relation to culture, context, group, maturation, and individual factors. We present behavioral studies that look at links between basic emotion and facial actions in both human and non-human primates and discuss the role of multiple factors in facial action production and interpretation.

Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment

Social Anxiety affects a significant number of people, limiting their personal and social life. We describe an interactive Virtual Reality approach to the exposure therapy for social anxiety, resorting to virtual characters that exhibit combinations of facial and body expressions controllable in real-time by the therapist. The application described in this paper updates and significantly improves a former version: ameliorating the graphical quality of the virtual characters and providing them with the ability of articulating a set of sentences. The application executes in ordinary computers and it is easily used in counselling and research contexts. Although we have only resorted to free or very low cost 3D models of virtual humans, we adopted strategies to obtain an adequate final quality that we were able to validate with a significant number of observers. Moreover, a set of therapists tested the application and gave positive feedback about its potential effectiveness in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.

A serious game-based solution to prevent bullying

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a Serious Game with the main purpose of inducing attitude changes as a way to prevent bullying, in a target audience of young people between 10 and 12 years old. Design/methodology/approach The rationale for prevention is: first, to help victims of these aggressive episodes to acquire or improve competencies in avoiding or dealing with future real bullying situations; and second, to promote empathy toward the victims in bystanders. A back office application complements the game, providing substantial assistance to psychologists while using the game with patients in therapy or in research work. Findings Both components, the game and the back office, were evaluated with volunteers. The user study leads the authors to the conclusion that the current version of the game holds good potential in bullying prevention: the young people that played the game in a continuous time span, at the end of this testing process, have expressed improvements in their bullying prevention strategies. The back office application, a distinctive feature of the solution when compared to other similar bullying prevention solutions, was positively assessed by the psychologists who tested it. Originality/value The game deals with strong social features, such as number of friends and invitations to social events (e.g. a birthday party), to which young people give much importance. Additionally, it offers a variability of scenarios and consequences of actions, taking into account the user’s performance in the game. The main factors that makes the presented solution stand out in comparison with other similar bullying prevention solutions are mainly the following: It includes a back office application to assist therapists with data management features; the role of the player in the game can be chosen according to his own profile; it is possible to play even outside a therapy session (e.g. at home); and it is a portable solution.

Sense of presence inside a feared (virtual) tunnel

Virtual Reality in Exposure Therapy allows exposing patients to simulations of feared situations, even in cases where actual exposure is not possible or difficult. We have created a Web application that helps therapists performing this type of therapy when dealing with patients that suffer from anxiety of crossing road tunnels. The application contains a set of animations of virtual scenarios recreating a car journey across a tunnel visualized from the point of view of the traveler sitting beside the driver and exhibiting a set of potential anxiety inductors. In this paper we describe the application and report a user study to assess the adequacy of our application as a VRET tool and also to compare the impact of visualizing the animations resorting to two distinct low cost apparatus: a versatile immersive equipment and a big projection.

Da psicologia à biologia evolutiva: para uma abordagem integrada de personalidade

O conceito de personalidade e complexo e nao inteiramente consensual. No entanto, ultrapassados os detalhes das varias definicoes operacionais, permanece constante o facto da personalidade caracterizar um modo individual de interagir com o mundo e de um dos seus aspectos mais marcantes e menos susceptiveis de mudanca ser o modo particular como o individuo se relaciona com os outros, conferindo as suas accoes um determinado grau de previsibilidade. A personalidade, enquanto atribuicao de outra especie que nao a humana, foi praticamente tabu ate A decada de 80, quando os etologos ocupados com as especies filogeneticamente mais proximos da humana comecaram a referir-se ao caracter bem demarcado de cada um dos seus objectivos de estudo – chimpanzes (Pan troglodytes spp) – (e.g., De Waal, 1982; Goodall, 1986) e Stevenson-Hinde (1983a; 1983b) e colaboradores (Stevenson-Hide et al., 1980) publicaram os resultados de um estudo prolongado de Macacos Rhesus (Macaca mulatta). (...)