Publications related to Adult human perception of distress in the cries of bonobo, chimpanzee, and human infants

SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Hwayeong Jeong

Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

Amygdala volumes and associations with socio-emotional competencies in preterm youth: cross-sectional and longitudinal data

Laura Ioana Gui, Elda Fischi Gomez, Petra Susan Hüppi, Vanessa Siffredi

Background Socio-emotional difficulties often result from very preterm (VPT) birth. The amygdala's developmental trajectory, including its nuclei, has been recognized as a significant factor in observed difficulties. This study aims to assess the relations ...

Springernature2024

“But of course i’m going to look happy” or “He needed to know I was angry”? Comparing use of emotional labour in teamwork in engineering and hospitality students

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Being able to work effectively in a team is a vital professional skill but how do students in different disciplines, engineering and hospitality, display their emotions when working together? We investigated their self-reported use of emotional labour stra ...

EAPRIL - European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning2024

Euclid preparation XXXVII. Galaxy colour selections with Euclid and ground photometry for cluster weak-lensing analyses

Matthias Wiesmann, Georges Meylan, Frédéric Courbin, Fabio Finelli, Richard Massey, Maurizio Martinelli, Gianluca Castignani, Marcello Farina, Yi Wang

Aims. We derived galaxy colour selections from Euclid and ground-based photometry, aiming to accurately define background galaxy samples in cluster weak-lensing analyses. These selections have been implemented in the Euclid data analysis pipelines for gala ...

Edp Sciences S A2024

Uncovering interactions between Descending Neurons as a functional principle of behavioural control

Jonas Friedrich Braun

Animals, including humans, exhibit a remarkable variety of complex behaviours. How the nervous system controls all these behaviours ranging from simple, stereotyped movements to flexible, adaptive actions is a central questions of neuroscience. One of the ...

EPFL2024

Reproductive isolation arises during laboratory adaptation to a novel hot environment

Ana Marija Jaksic

Background: Reproductive isolation can result from adaptive processes (e.g., ecological speciation and mutation-order speciation) or stochastic processes such as "system drift" model. Ecological speciation predicts barriers to gene flow between populations ...

BMC2024

Empathetic Conversational Agents for Distress Support

Kalpani Anuradha Welivita

Due to the increasing demands of today's fast-paced world, mental health concerns are on the rise, which necessitates innovative approaches to provide support to those in need. Open-domain conversational agents known as chatbots, offer a unique opportunit ...

EPFL2023

Compassion and Engineering Students’ Moral Reasoning: The Emotional Experience of Engineering Ethics Cases

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Background: There has been an increase in interest in emotion in engineering and science ethics education. There is also evidence that emotional content in case studies may improve students’ learning and enhance awareness, understanding, and motivation con ...

American Society for Engineering Education2023

Emotional labor experienced in team-projects: A comparison of engineering and hospitality students

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Team projects are an integral part of the student learning experience. However, emotions can significantly affect student performance during team projects. Students use different emotion regulation strategies, such as surface-acting (emotive dissonance) an ...

2023

Frequent asymmetric migrations suppress natural selection in spatially structured populations

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Alia Abbara

Natural microbial populations often have complex spatial structures. This can impact their evolution, in particular the ability of mutants to take over. While mutant fixation probabilities are known to be unaffected by sufficiently symmetric structures, ev ...

Oxford Univ Press2023

Emotional sounds in space: asymmetrical representation within early-stage auditory areas

Stephanie Clarke

Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that the spatial origin of sounds may influence the perception of emotional valence. Using 7T fMRI we have investigated the impact of the categories of sound (vocalizations; non-vocalizations), emotional valence (p ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Reanalysis of mtDNA mutations of human primordial germ cells (PGCs) reveals NUMT contamination and suggests that selection in PGCs may be positive

Konstantin Popadin

The resilience of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) to a high mutational pressure depends, in part, on negative purifying selection in the germline. A paradigm in the field has been that such selection, at least in part, takes place in primordial germ cells ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

Are engineering teachers ready to leverage the power of play to teach transversal skills?

Siara Ruth Isaac, Roland John Tormey, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Natascia Petringa, Yousef Jalali

What conceptions do teachers hold about learning activities to develop students’ transversal skills? This qualitative exploration at a research-intensive engineering school draws on interviews and focus groups to explore teachers’ ideas about developing in ...

2023

Towards Novel Evaluation Methods for Social Dialog Systems

Ekaterina Svikhnushina

Language has shaped human evolution and led to the desire to endow machines with language abilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing enable us to achieve this breakthrough in human-machine interaction. However, introducing conversational ...

EPFL2023

Academic boredom(s): a person-centered investigation

Alexandra Corina Niculescu

Should we refer to boredom or boredoms? Research on the emotion of boredom sets itself apart from studies on other emotions by posing the question: is boredom a singular concept or does it have multiple facets? In this manuscript presenting empirical resea ...

2023

Mitochondrial Pseudogenes Suggest Repeated Inter-Species Hybridization among Direct Human Ancestors

Konstantin Popadin

The hypothesis that the evolution of humans involves hybridization between diverged species has been actively debated in recent years. We present the following novel evidence in support of this hypothesis: the analysis of nuclear pseudogenes of mtDNA ("NUM ...

MDPI2022

Emotional empathy and engineering students’moral reasoning

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Although engineering education is often characterized as a rational activity, research suggests that emotions are vital for learning at all levels of education. In ethics education, there is evidence that including mild emotional information in case studie ...

2022

Towards Empathetic Open-Domain Chatbots

Yubo Xie

The research community of dialog generation has been interested in incorporating emotional information into the design of open-domain dialog systems ever since neural networks (sequence-to-sequence models in particular) were adopted for modeling dialogs. T ...

EPFL2022

Questioning Wizard of Oz: Effects of Revealing the Wizard behind the Robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Pierre Pravin Oppliger, Jauwairia Nasir, Barbara Bruno

Wizard of Oz, a very commonly employed technique in human-robot interaction, faces the criticism of being deceptive as the humans interacting with the robot are told, if at all, only at the end of their interaction that there was in fact a human behind the ...

IEEE2022

PEACE: A Model of Key Social and EmotionalQualities of Conversational Chatbots

Pearl Pu Faltings, Ekaterina Svikhnushina

Open-domain chatbots engage with users in natural conversations to socialize and establish bonds. However, designing and developing an effective open-domain chatbot is challenging. It is unclear what qualities of a chatbot most correspond to users' expecta ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022