Karl Grammer

University of Vienna | UniWien · Department of Anthropology

Investigating gender differences based on emotional changes using electroencephalogram (EEG) is essential to understand various human behavior in the individual situation in our daily life. However, gender differences based on EEG and emotional states are not thoroughly investigated. The main novelty of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to prop...

Investigating gender differences based on emotional changes becomes essential to understand various human behaviors in our daily life. Ten students from the University of Vienna have been recruited by recording the electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset while watching four short emotional video clips (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutral) of audiovis...

Investigating gender differences based on emotional changes supports automatic interpretation of human intentions and preferences. This allows emotion applications to respond better to requirements and customize interactions based on affective responses. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a tool that potentially can be used to detect gender differen...

Developing a brain mapping for emotional changes over the brain regions remains a crucial goal for improving the process of emotional recognition. The EEGs of forty volunteer individuals were gotten while the individuals were shown seven, short video clips (i.e., anger, anxiety, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral). The motivation of...

Subtle nonverbal changes can influence perception, signal individual’s affective state and act as gateways in interpersonal communications. In this exploratory study, we investigated the effect of previously uninvestigated female leg posture (in-toeing vs. out-toeing) on gazing behavior and perceived attractiveness. Results showed a small effect: p...

Identifying emotions has become essential for comprehending varied human behavior during our daily lives. The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been adopted for eliciting information in terms of waveform distribution over the scalp. The rationale behind this work is twofold. First, it aims to propose spectral, entropy and temporal biomarkers for emoti...

The motivation of this study was to detect the most effective electroencephalogram (EEG) channels for various emotional states of the brain regions (i.e. frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital). The EEGs of ten volunteer participants without health conditions were captured while the participants were shown seven, short, emotional video clips wit...

The present study sought to investigate and identify the gender differences by studying the emotional states (i.e. angry, anxiety, disgust, happiness, sadness and surprise) and their effects on the brain regions (i.e. frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital). Emotional electroencephalography (EEG) data was recorded from ten healthy while the volu...

The present study sought to employ audio-visual video clip stimuli to explore the electroencephalography-based (EEG) correlation between various emotional states. To that end, seven short video clips were shown to ten volunteer participants without health conditions whilst emotional EEG data were captured. The method of independent component analys...

Male parental investment can contribute to the fitness of both sexes through increased fertility and child survivorship. The level and intensity of parental investment are dependent upon ecological variations: in harsh and demanding environments, the need for biparental care increases. Moreover, when environmental pressures increase, uncertainty ov...

Previous studies have documented links between sub-clinical narcissism and the active pursuit of short-term mating strategies (e.g., unrestricted sociosexuality, marital infidelity, mate poaching). Nearly all of these investigations have relied solely on samples from Western cultures. In the current study, responses from a cross-cultural survey of...

"CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy" is an FP7 project that that is devoted to developing a cognitive underwater robotic system that will help divers during their activities in this hazardous environment. The envisioned resulting system will play a threefold role similar to those that a human buddy diver should have: buddy "observer", buddy...

Divers operate in harsh and poorlymonitored environments, inwhich the slightest unexpected disturbance, technical malfunction, or lack of attention can have catastrophic consequences. Motivated by these considerations, the “CADDY—Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy” FP7 project sets forth the main goal of developing a cooperative autonomous underwate...

"CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy" is an FP7 project that started in January 2014. Seven partner institutions have joined their efforts towards developing a cognitive underwater robotic system that will help divers during their activities in this hazardous environment. The resulting system will play a threefold role similar to those that a...

This paper summarizes the main accomplishments of the first year of the FP7 project “CADDY — Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy”. The main objective of the project is to replace a human buddy diver with an autonomous underwater vehicle and add an autonomous surface vehicle to improve monitoring, assistance, and safety of the diver's mission. While a...

There is more to female attractiveness than a pretty face. Human mate choice decisions are guided by different cues, which in combination may give a better estimate of a general condition. We hypothesized that such signal redundancy might be true for vocal and visual cues of human female attractiveness. To test this we used photographs of women's f...

Former research has examined potential human sex differences in spatial abilities or home range size. Both are assumed to have an adaptive function. In this study we combined the investigation of home range size in an urban environment and spatial abilities by accuracy analysis of cognitive maps. Participants (n = 87) drew a sketch of their home ra...

Textbooks on evolutionary psychology and biology cite the case of the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty (1672-1727) who was supposed to have sired 888 children. This example for male reproduction has been challenged and led to a still unresolved discussion. The scientific debate is shaped by assumptions about reproductive...

In recent years, evidence has been gathered indicating increased attractiveness of female faces at the point of ovulation. In this paper, we asked what changes in facial appearance occur during menstrual cycle that lead to this shift in attractiveness. We analysed facial photographs of 20 young women with a normal cycle. We found evidence for textu...

Attractive facial features in women are assumed to signal fertility, but whether facial attractiveness predicts reproductive success in women is still a matter of debate. We investigated the association between facial attractiveness at young adulthood and reproductive life history-number of children and pregnancies-in women of a rural community. Fo...

Embodiment theory suggests a direct link between gesturing, gesticulation and language production. In growth-point theory the constant interaction between gesturing and language generates thought (McNeill, 1967). Gestures are thus not only signs but a direct expression of thought and cognition. Consequently, the communicative function of gesturing...

Cross-culturally, fragrances are used to modulate body odor, but the psychology of fragrance choice has been largely overlooked. The prevalent view is that fragrances mask an individual's body odor and improve its pleasantness. In two experiments, we found positive effects of perfume on body odor perception. Importantly, however, this was modulated...

It was recently shown that Austrians associate car front geometry with traits in a way that could be related to face shape geometry mapping to those same overall suites of traits. Yet, possible confounding effects of familiarity with the car models, media coverage and entertainment could not be ruled out. In order to address this, the current study...

The relationship between socioeconomic status and health parameters such as growth rate is known to be strong: A lower socioeconomic position is usually accompanied by higher stress load through less nutritional income and higher work load, which is then reflected in the body1,2. Like reduced body height, the appearance of a certain kind of between...

Men and women score differently on some personality traits and people’s behavior reflects who they are. Therefore, males and females could be expected to express themselves differently on a behavioral level. To test this idea we turned the public performances of speakers (20 female and 20 male) into stick figure movies. Students of the University o...

Inclusive fitness theory presumes a human ability to discriminate between kin and non-kin. The present study investigated to what extent computer-generated similarity or dissimilarity can be discerned as phenotypic resemblance or dissimilarity, respectively, on a conscious level. Furthermore, sex differences assumed from female dispersal theory wer...

Overview: Human brains are basically social, and use communication mechanisms that have evolved during our evolutionary past. Thus, we suggest that even in communication with and by machines, humans will tend to react socially and use communication mechanisms that are primarily social and embodied. One of these mechanisms is communicative feedback,...

A number of recent studies use body odor samples to study how odor affects various human social interactions. However, the methods used vary considerably, and only limited attention has been paid to the validity of the particular approaches adopted. One of the crucial points in body odor sampling is its length. Here we report the results of a study...

Humans tend to judge and sort their social and non-social environment permanently into a few basic categories: ‘likes’ and ‘don’t likes’. Indeed we have developed general preferences for our social and non-social environment. These preferences can be subsumed under the term ‘evolutionary aesthetics’ (Voland & Grammer 2003). Indeed humans and animal...

Human saliva not only helps control oral health (with anti-microbial proteins), but it may also play a role in chemical communication. As is the case with other mammalian species, human saliva contains peptides, proteins, and numerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A high-throughput analytical method is described for profiling a large number of...

Humans' proneness to see faces even in inanimate structures such as cars has long been noticed, yet empirical evidence is scarce. To examine this tendency of anthropomorphism, participants were asked to compare specific features (such as the eyes) of a face and a car front presented next to each other. Eye movement patterns indicated on which visua...

When people form impressions about others, they are mostly influenced by non-verbal cues. Thus, politicians and other leaders are judged by the behavior they display. To analyze the relation between non-verbal behavior and impression formation body movements of politicians giving a speech were transformed into animated stick figures. Subjects then...

Over the past decades, information about the characteristics of attractiveness has accumulated. We know about eight pillars of beauty, among them youthfulness, symmetry, hormone markers and body odor. But what is the biological function of these attractive signals? Is there one common function to be found in all eight beauty markers? In this paper,...

Certain features of facial appearance perceptually resemble expressive cues related to facial displays of emotion. We hypothesized that because expressive markers of anger (such as lowered eyebrows) overlap with perceptual markers of male sex, perceivers would identify androgynous angry faces as more likely to be a man than a woman (Study 1) and wo...

Expressing and recognizing affective states with respect to facial expressions is an important aspect in perceiving virtual humans as more natural and believable. Based on the results of an empirical study a system for simulating emotional facial expressions for a virtual human has been evolved. This system consists of two parts: (1) a control arch...

Animal studies assessing mechanisms of self-starvation under conditions of stress and diet suggest a pivotal role for the mesolimbic reward system in the maintenance of core symptoms in anorexia nervosa, which is corroborated by initial empirical evidence in human studies. The authors examined activity in the ventral striatal system in response to...

Body dissatisfaction is of high prevalence among women all over the Western world. It is often suggested that sociocultural processes are the main cause of such widespread dissatisfaction. Here, we consider how perceptual effects may influence ideas of body normality and body ideals. Women who varied on a measure of body dissatisfaction rated a ran...

Evidence for attentional biases to weight- and shape-related information in women with eating concerns is inconclusive. We investigated whether body dissatisfaction is associated with an attentional bias toward thin bodies using a modified dot probe task. In three studies, we found that undergraduate females were faster to discriminate the directio...

The evolutionary constraints that lead to the evolution of sexual reproduction are framed by the better repair mechanisms that repair fatal mutations, as well as the need for variable immune systems imposed on large organisms by parasites, such as viruses and bacteria. Besides the evolution of sexual reproduction, these factors also affect mate cho...

Certain features of facial appearance perceptually resemble expressive cues related to facial displays of emotion. We hypothesized that because expressive markers of anger (such as lowered eyebrows) overlap with perceptual markers of male sex, perceivers would identify androgynous angry faces as more likely to be a man than a woman (Study 1) and wo...

Zusammenfassung Die Bedeutung von Geruchsstoffen für die menschliche Reproduktion wurde bisher von der Medizin vernachlässigt. Es lässt sich aber zeigen, dass männliche Geruchsstoffe (Androstenol/Androstenon) aus dem Schweiss direkten Einfluss auf den weiblichen Menstruationszyklus haben. Ebenso können weibliche Geruchsstoffe aus dem Vaginalsekret...

Over evolutionary time, humans have developed a selective sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information on sex, age, emotions, and intentions. This ability might not only be applied to our conspecifics nowadays, but also to other living objects (i.e., animals) and even to artificial structures, such as cars. To investigate this...

This chapter introduces motion quality as an analog signal in communication. It begins with an overview of the history of motion research, and then introduces a communication model that goes beyond signal 'ping-pong' theories, based on the evolutionary constraints of communication. Finally, it presents empirical studies on motion quality and the ex...

Visible skin condition of women is argued to influence human physical attraction. Recent research has shown that people are sensitive to variation in skin color distribution, and such variation affects visual perception of female facial attractiveness, healthiness, and age. The eye gaze of 39 males and females, aged 13 to 45 years, was tracked whil...

Communicative feedback refers to unobtrusive (usually short) vocal or bodily expressions whereby a recipient of information can inform a contributor of information about whether he/she is able and willing to communicate, perceive the information, and understand the information. This paper provides a theory for embodied communicative feedback, descr...

Several studies have shown that microbial action is responsible for many compounds responsible for human odour. In this paper, we compare the pattern of microbial profiles and that of chemical profiles of human axillary odour by using multivariate pattern matching techniques. Approximately 200 subjects from Carinthia, Austria, participated in the s...

Evolutionary psychology suggests that skin signals aspects of mate value, yet only limited empirical evidence exists for this assertion. We sought to study the relationship between perception of skin condition and homogeneity of color/chromophore distribution. Cropped skin cheek images from 170 girls and women (11-76 years) were blind-rated for att...

The majority of works in metabolomics employ approaches based on principal components analysis (PCA) and partial least-squares, primarily to determine whether samples fall within large groups. However, analytical chemists rarely tackle the problem of individual fingerprinting, and in order to do this effectively, it is necessary to study a large nu...

A newly devised fuzzy metric for measuring the dissimilarity between two planar chromatographic profiles is proposed in this paper. It does not require an accurately assigned sample-feature matrix and can cope with slight imprecision of the positional information. This makes it very suitable for 1-D techniques which do not have a second spectroscop...

Pattern recognition studies are performed on the gas chromatography mass spectrometry of extracts of human sweat of 182 subjects sampled 5 times (over 5 fortnights), in an attempt to determine whether it is possible to classify samples into those arising from males and females. All methods were applied to peak tables of square root normalised GC-MS...