Hiroshi Yamada

Cultural Differences in the Relative Contributions of Face and Context to Judgments of Emotions

Previous judgment studies of facial expressions of emotion in context have provided mixed results. This article clarifies and extends this literature by testing judgments across cultures and by using novel methodologies that examine both face and context effects. Two studies involving observers from three cultures provided evidence for both face and context effects in emotion judgments and cultural differences in both. Japanese and South Korean observers were more influenced by context than Americans, and these differences were mediated by personality traits. The results provided a more nuanced view of how both culture and emotion moderate judgments of faces in context and how cultural differences existed in the judgments, which were predicted using a construct known as Context Differentiation.

A similarity-based neural network for facial expression analysis

In this paper, we introduce a novel model for the measuring of human subjective evaluation by using Relevance Learning based on a similarity-based multilayer perceptron. This work aims to achieve a multidimensional perceptual scaling that associates the physical features of a face with its semantic vector in a low-dimensional space. Unlike the conventional multilayer perceptron that learns from a set of an input feature vector and the desired output, the proposed network can obtain a nonlinear mapping between the input feature vectors and the outputs from a pair of objects and their desired relevance (distance). We conducted a facial expression analysis with both a psychological model of line-drawing image of facial expression and a real image set. Regarding the construction of semantic space, the proposed approach not only shows a good performance as compared with the conventional statistical method but is also able to project new data that are not used during the training phase. We will show some experimental results and discuss the obtained mapping function.

Multidimensional Scaling of Computer-generated Abstract Forms

We tried to find perceptual attributes of perceived forms and to construct a “perceived-form space” like a perceived-color space, applying a nonmetric individual-differences multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique. Three experiments were conducted on computer-generated abstract forms, varying the frequency and amplitude of sinusoidal or chopping wave superimposed on a circle and the random modulation in the local frequency and amplitude of the waveform. The results of MDS indicated consistently three dimensions, complexity, regularity and curvedness, corresponding to the frequency, the smallness of the random modulation, and the curvature of the waveform, respectively, with high squared Rs. The results of Semantic Differential were highly correlated with the results of MDS.

Ubiquitin-positive inclusions in ependymal cells

Ubiquitin-positive inclusions (UbIs) have not been well studied in ependymal cells. Since we detected such UbIs in the central canals of the medulla and spinal cord while investigating UbIs in neurodegenerative diseases, we studied UbIs in the entire ependymal system of 42 patients with various neurological diseases and of 10 non-neurological controls. UbIs were located in the cytoplasm of the ependymal cells, and were round to oval in shape, measuring 4–11xa0μm in diameter. The UbIs were non-argyrophilic and undetectable by hematoxylin and eosin staining, but mildly reactive to periodic acid-Schiff staining with and without digestion. The UbIs were variably immunoreactive for anti-epithelial membrane antigen (EMA) antibody, but did not react with several other antibodies. The co-existence of ubiquitin and EMA was confirmed by confocal laser microscopy. Throughout the ependymal system, UbIs were variably found in ependymal cells as well as in subependymal cells. There was no significant difference in the overall incidence of either ependymal or subependymal UbIs between the patients with neurological diseases and controls. However, ependymal UbIs in the central canal were more frequent in the neurological disease patients than in controls, although there was no disease specificity. This is the first comprehensive report to show common occurrence of UbIs in the ependymal cells of adult human brains.

Is average face recognized as the average

In this paper, we address a very basic question of whether the average face of two face images is recognized as the average by a human. First, average faces were calculated for each of the pairs of images in our stimuli samples. Then, we conducted psychological experiments to compare an average face with two of the face images that were utilized for its calculation. In the experiment, participants were instructed to compare in terms of similarity as a whole and, select the image which is more similar to the average. Results showed that responses of the participants were nonuniformly-distributed across original image stimuli, suggesting that there was a significant bias on recognition of an average face. Eigenface space was constructed based on principal component analysis (PCA). Higher correlation was found between human and PCA based computer recognitions.

A Study on Minor Anomalies in the Oral Region

In children with congenital anomalies, minor anomalies may often occur in their oral regions. This is more so in children with Down’s syndrome. But tooth anomalies in children with Down’s syndrome at their deciduous tooth stage have been little known. In this study, the authors examined the incidence of tooth anomalies in a group of 108 children with Down’s syndrome at their deciduous tooth stage, compared it with that in the group of 16,233 twoyear-old children dealt with in our previous report and obtained the following results : 1) In the incidence of tooth anomalies at the deciduous tooth stage, a marked difference was noted between children with Down’s syndrome at 61.1 1 % and normal children at 6.22%. 2) In terms of the form of anomaly, fused teeth were seen at the highest rate of incidence in normal children, whereas the incidence of missing teeth was the highest in children with Down’s syndrome.