Kresimir Cosic

• Professor
• University of Zagreb

During the war time dysregulation of negative emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, frustration, sadness, humiliation, and hopelessness can overrule normal societal values, culture, and endanger global peace and security, and mental health in affected societies. Therefore, it is understandable that the range and power of negative emotions may play...

This article provides an overview of the mental health challenges faced by pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs), whose stressful professional lives may negatively impact global flight safety and security. The adverse effects of mental health disorders on their flight performance pose a particular safety risk, especially in sudden unexpected st...

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is defined as heart rate variability (HRV) synchronised with respiration, characterized by heart rate increase during inspiration and heart rate decrease during expiration. Accurate and robust quantification of resting RSA is crucial, as it serves as a reliable and noninvasive biomarker of emotion regulation capac...

Global security organizations failed to protect our societies and our nations in the case of unprovoked Russian invasion on Ukraine. This aggression is the greatest tectonic change in the global geopolitical security order since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, the world needs new global security architecture to prevent escalation of extreme mil...

The COVID-19 pandemic has adverse consequences on human psychology and behavior long after initial recovery from the virus. These COVID-19 health sequelae, if undetected and left untreated, may lead to more enduring mental health problems, and put vulnerable individuals at risk of developing more serious psychopathologies. Therefore, an early disti...

Cognitive load is related to the amount of working memory resources used in the execution of various mental tasks. Different multimodal features extracted from peripheral physiology, brain activity, and oculometric reactions have been used as non-intrusive, reliable, and objective measures of cognitive load. In this paper, we use data from 38 parti...

In this paper, we investigate the potential of generic physiological features of stress resilience in predicting air traffic control (ATC) candidates' performance in a highly-stressful low-fidelity ATC simulator scenario. Stress resilience is highlighted as an important occupational factor that influences the performance and well-being of air traff...

Cognitive load can be estimated using individuals’ task performance, their subjective measures, and neurophysiological measures. Neurophysiological measures, which among others include brain activation signals obtained with various brain imaging techniques, such as the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and signals from the peripheral p...

Air traffic control officers (ATCOs) are rigorously selected from the vast number of applicants and extensively trained, in order to have the required psychological and behavioural characteristics for this stressful occupation, as well as specialised performance competencies while controlling air traffic, such as situational awareness, workload man...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its immediate aftermath present a serious threat to the mental health of health care workers (HCWs), who may develop elevated rates of anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, or even suicidal behaviors. Therefore, the aim of this article is to address the problem of prevention of HCWs...

Deep emotional traumas in societies overwhelmed by large-scale human disasters, like, global pandemic diseases, natural disasters, man-made tragedies, war conflicts, social crises, etc., can cause massive stress-related disorders. Motivated by the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic, the article provides an overview of scientific evidence regarding...

Comprehensive multimodal psychophysiological measurements and smart data analysis based on wearable and low-cost technologies could enhance traditional air traffic controller (ATC) selection process. Many recent studies in neuro-cognitive science and stress resilience illustrated effectiveness of these multimodal measurements and appropriate metric...

Stress resilience is of particular research interest in highly stressful professions, such as first responders, soldiers, pilots, air traffic controllers etc. One of the key brain areas responsible for stress regulation is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), whose activation can be imaged using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as well as func...

Stress resilience is recognized as an important occupational prerequisite for Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). A system for input/output multimodal stress resilience assessment based on physiological features has been developed and applied in the ATC selection process on forty ATC candidates, as well as on forty age/sex-matched control subjects. The...

Acute and chronic neck pain are common medical conditions, and the treatment typically includes physical therapy involving daily exercises. Insufficient motivation of people afflicted with neck pain to adhere to the prescribed exercise regimen may delay their recovery. Accordingly, in this work, we propose a system that motivates the users to perfo...

Pervasiveness of extreme negative emotions, especially anger, hatred and humiliation, as well as negative appraisal style, has a significant impact on the process of societal radicalization. Dominance of such emotions, and the corresponding appraisal style, very often threaten societal security. Emotionally Based Strategic Communications (EBSC), pr...

This paper presents an extensive statistical analysis of the acoustic startle response of two vocal parameters: fundamental frequency (F0) and root-mean-square energy (E), as well as of the orbicularis oculi (eyeblink) surface electromyography (sEMG). An experiment was conducted in which fourteen participants were exposed to acoustic startle stimul...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important tool in modern medicine, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used for brain mapping and understanding cognitive behaviour in humans. As part of a larger study, 13 male candidates for Croatian military Special Forces (mean age + std = 25.77 + 3.27) were undertaken through a comp...

A stronger focus on the human factor, as the basis of the national security system, requires more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research efforts. In this paper, by social resilience we mean the ability of a society to recover relatively quickly from possible disturbances that threaten its functionality and stability, as well as harmonious...

National security, in the context of systems theory, can be defined as a set of hierarchically complex, multidimensional, nonlinear, and stochastic dynamical systems. Within such a theoretical concept, the definition of the resilience of a national security system refers to its ability to respond in a timely manner to all possible short-term and lo...

The present paper proposes speech features derived from the fundamental frequency (F0) contour decomposition. The decomposition method is designed in order to differentiate, as much as possible, simultaneous neurobiological effects on vocal fold vibration. The focus of this paper is placed on involuntary disturbances of such vibrations, which are a...

Background and objective: This article presents a multimodal analysis of startle type responses using a variety of physiological, facial, and speech features. These multimodal components of the startle type response reflect complex brain-body reactions to a sudden and intense stimulus. Additionally, the proposed multimodal evaluation of reflexive...

The important needs of training, exposure, and adoption of specific skills and operating procedures in a safe and cost-effective way strongly encourage the use of virtual environments. A critical component in such environments is interactive control of events and objects that are presented to a trainee. In this paper, we present a platform named th...

This paper presents a comparison of two methods for measuring the acoustic startle response: orbicularis oculi (eyeblink) electromyogram (EMG), which is the conventional measure, and voice fundamental frequency (F0) variations as a consequence of laryngeal muscle innervations. A comparative analysis of the two approaches was performed using statist...

Different startle type stimuli, like acoustic startle and air blast probes, as well as a variety of sudden and intense visual and auditory stimuli of different valence and arousal, based on IAPS images and/or IADS sounds may induce a variety of multimodal startle type responses which reflect complex brain-body interactions. The obtained experimenta...

Elicitation of startle reflex and affective reactions by visual, auditory and tactile stimuli, as well as synchronized measurement of the corresponding physiological, speech and facial responses has been conducted in healthy participants, using a developed laboratory system. Ten female first-year university students passed through five elicitation...

In order to improve intelligent Human-Computer Interaction it is important to create a personalized adaptive emotion estimator that is able to learn over time emotional response idiosyncrasies of individual person and thus enhance estimation accuracy. This paper, with the aim of identifying preferable methods for such a concept, presents an experim...

Affective multimedia documents such as images, sounds or videos elicit emotional responses in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in affective multimedia databases and successfully used for a wide variety of research in psychology and neuroscience in areas related to attention and emotion processing. Although important all affective mu...

It is well known that emotional stressors may have adverse effects on cognitive-motor performance. The system for evaluation of cognitive-emotional interactions, described in this paper, is based on real-time interplay between a selected cognitive task and selected emotional stressors, and may facilitate insight into an individual’s variation of co...

This paper presents an improvement of conventional supervised-learning emotional state estimation in the form of dimensional valence-arousal values. In the proposed approach, outputs of the conventional estimator are additionally adapted using a priori knowledge about valence-arousal relations, which is extracted from the estimator's training set....

Contemporary psychiatry is looking at affective sciences to understand human behavior, cognition and the mind in health and disease. Since it has been recognized that emotions have a pivotal role for the human mind, an ever increasing number of laboratories and research centers are interested in affective sciences, affective neuroscience, affective...

Multimodal paradigm for cognitive-emotional elicitation, estimation and regulation may strengthen military training and enhance selection process. It includes multiple sessions involving mission-relevant audio-visual stimulation and simultaneous measurement of the trainee's multimodal physiological, facial and vocal response. The initial audio-visu...

Without understanding the importance which emotions may have in any conflict on military as well as civilians, it will be almost impossible to understand complexity and uncertainty of future warfare. Better and deeper understanding of emotion conditioning and structuring, as well as their regulation in future warfare might be applied as powerful co...

Multimedia documents such as images, sounds or videos can be used to elicit emotional responses in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in affective multimedia databases and successfully used for a wide variety of research in affective computing, human-computer interaction and cognitive sciences. Affective multimedia databases are simpl...

Abstract. Group based dominant emotional maps characterized by long lasting negatively valenced emotions, such as fear, anger, hatred or humiliation may elicit strong extreme political attitudes, actions and behaviors, as well as massive posttraumatic stress disorders. The impact of these dominant negatively valenced emotions on political attitudes...

Demanding pilot missions in highly stressful operational environment and under the intense psychological pressure are main reason for increase of flight accidents due to human’s errors. Therefore, development of appropriate virtual reality (VR) environments for pilot’s mental readiness training, i.e. more rational and effective pilot thinking and a...

Abstract This article discusses the potential of emotionally based strategic communications (EBSCs) as an extension of traditional strategic communications in prevention of societal stress-related disorders. The concept of EBSCs takes into consideration dominant emotional maps of a specific sociocultural environment in which communications take pla...

Every year, 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke, when the blood supply to the brain is blocked orwhen a blood vessel in the brain bursts. After a stroke, specific pattern of cortical reorganization has been described (1). During the past few years, three principles for remodeling motor cortex; forced use of the affected limb (2, 3,), constr...

Collective and negatively valenced emotions, such as fear, anger, hatred or humiliation, may contribute to the emergence of extreme political attitudes and behaviours. We refer to the impact of negatively valenced emotions on political attitudes and (in)tolerance as the "toxic power of negatively valenced emotions". The neural mechanisms and neural...

Professional military training makes tough demands on soldiers’ perceptual and motor skills, as well as on their physical fitness and cognitive capabilities in the course of preparation for stressful operational environments. In this pilot study we attempted to identify difference in pattern of neural responses between extensively trained, professi...

Emotionally annotated databases are repositories of multimedia documents with annotated affective content that elicit emotional responses in exposed human subjects. They are primarily used in research of human emotions, attention and development of stress-related mental disorders. This can be successfully exploited in larger processes like selectio...

Pain is among the most common medical complaints, and is associated with impaired quality of life of affected individuals and consequent large societal costs. Taking into account the multidimensional nature of pain, this paper describes the concept of the pain mental state vector, which integrates affective, cognitive, physiological, and motor repr...

New research directions in personalized mental health virtual reality (VR) therapy are proposed, particularly in the areas of prevention and treatment of stress-related disorders. Concepts and tools regarding personalized audio-visual stimuli generation, multimodal emotional state estimation, and closed-loop stimuli delivery based on the patient’s...

Collectively negative valenced emotions, such as fear, anger, hatred or humiliation, may contribute to the emergence of extreme political attitudes and behaviours. Empirical studies demonstrate that, e.g., group-based hatred is the most important antecedent of political intolerance. We refer to the impact of negatively valenced emotions on politica...

Serious mental health problems in the current large-scale NATO operations underscore the importance of predeployment mental stress resistance program. Therefore, the development of new effective training tools and coping strategies for the minimization of operational stress disorders is extremely important. The concept of closed-loop virtual realit...

Stressful situations have large impact on our cognition, emotions and behavior. There is a great individual variability in the stress-coping skills which are of vital importance for professionals who work in highly stressful environment. Investigation of neural circuits involved in response to stress may help explain why some individuals are vulner...

Croatian defense expert denounces North Korean torpedo attack. Korea Times interview with Prof. Krešimir Ćosić, an associate member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering.

Significant proportion of severe psychological problems related to combat stress in recent large peacekeeping operations underscores importance of effective methods for strengthening the stress resilience of military personnel. Virtual reality (VR) adaptive stimulation presented in the paper, based on estimation of the participant’s emotional state...

The significant proportion of severe psychological problems related to intensive stress in recent large peacekeeping operations underscores the importance of effective methods for strengthening the prevention and treatment of stress-related disorders. Adaptive control of virtual reality (VR) stimulation presented in this work, based on estimation o...

A significant proportion of severe psychological problems in recent large-scale peacekeeping operations underscores the importance of effective methods for strengthening the stress resilience. Virtual reality (VR) adaptive stimulation, based on the estimation of the participant's emotional state from physiological signals, may enhance the mental re...

The economic strength of almost every country depends most on its technological innovation and vitality as the foundation of its economic competitiveness. Unfortunately, the technological innovation potential of the Croatian economy today is very limited, and due to insufficient investments in modernization, it has seriously lagged behind. Only a c...

A significant proportion of severe psychological problems in recent large-scale peacekeeping operations underscores the importance of effective methods for strengthening the stress resilience. Virtual reality (VR) adaptive stimulation, based on the estimation of the participant's emotional state from physiological signals, may enhance the mental re...

The computer system for arousing, recognizing and managing emotional states is based on the concept of adaptive simulation of virtual reality (VR) controlled by the individual physiological characteristics of the individual. It is designed with the intention of intelligently and self-controlling the influence of selected audio-visual stimuli on the...

Successful management of emotional stimuli is a pivotal issue concerning Affective Computing (AC) and the related research. As a subfield of Artificial Intelligence, AC is concerned not only with the design of computer systems and the accompanying hardware that can recognize, interpret, and process human emotions, but also with the development of s...

The paper presents design and evaluation of emotional state estimator based on artificial neural networks for physiology-driven adaptive virtual reality (VR) stimulation. Real-time emotional state estimation from physiological signals enables adapting the stimulations to the emotional response of each individual. Estimation is first evaluated on ar...

Significant proportion of psychological problems related to combat stress in recent large peacekeeping operations underscores importance of effective methods for strengthening the stress resistance of military personnel. Adaptive control of virtual reality (VR) stimulation, based on estimation of the subject's emotional state from physiological sig...

Generating audio and visual stimuli is an integral part of multimedia-based exposure therapy, as well as psychological stress inoculation training in NATO and UN peacekeeping operations. The audio and visual stimuli generator, developed within this work, can display static images and video clips, generate sounds, and display synthetic virtual stimu...

In multimedia exposure therapy and psychological training for stress adjustment, assessments of the subject's emotional state play a key role. A complete picture of a subject’s emotional state is obtained from a multimodal online emotional state estimator. The input sets of estimator signals include various physiological signals, the subject's voic...

Intense multi-factorial stresses faced by participants in combat operations may cause high levels of psychological suffering that may progress to serious mental disorders or even suicide. Therefore, the impact of stress and mental disorders on modern military is analyzed, including the role and importance of military training and leadership in prot...

Training of helicopter external load operations is important for the pilot and crew readiness to deal with real-world situations like aerial firefighting, search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters and accidents, delivery of humanitarian supplies to the afflicted areas etc. Training of external load operations places additional simulation...

Since the 1990’s, virtual reality (VR) has been applied in psychotherapy of various anxiety disorders, from phobias to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). VR is often used with exposure therapy, in which the therapist helps the patients to face, process, and overcome their fears. In VR exposure therapy, the therapist via graphical user interface...

The design and development of a system for automated adaptation of virtual reality based scenarios driven by the subject’s physiology is presented, with a rationale regarding application of the system in PTSD treatment. The system functions in two operating modes corresponding to the major phases of the treatment protocol. In the initial testing mo...

Application of virtual reality (VR) to the treatment of psychological disorders experiences significant expansion and is projected to further increase in the future. As various massive traumatic events occur around the globe, their psychological consequences, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), affect numerous individuals and their societies...

Immersive virtual reality (VR), with the images and audio being delivered to the subject via head-mounted display (HMD), is more than adequate state-of-the-art technology for functional assessment of whiplash injuries. The paper deals with optimal adaptation algorithms in the context of several VR kinematical tests for whiplash injury assessment. E...

Several studies using VR exposure therapy for PTSD have been conducted to date, with promising results. The need for better accuracy of the patient's arousal assessment requires aggregation of various measures of arousal, including physiological ones, which may increase mental burden on the therapist. Assessment of the patient's arousal automated b...

The extent of the negative consequences of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on individuals and society, as well as the partial success of existing pharmacotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic approaches to the treatment of PTSD, indicate the need to find new and improve existing approaches to treatment of this disorder. Among modern approaches to...

US Adriatic Charter initiative and cooperation is important instrument for promoting regional security and stability as well as prevention of Illicit Trafficking through Adriatic Sea. Regional security and stability as well as the fight against international terrorism, organized crime and corruption will remain long-lasting commitment. The A3 partn...

In the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it is difficult to produce complete and lasting positive effects with existing pharmacotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic procedures. Among the various psychotherapeutic procedures with the largest base of positive results in the treatment of PTSD, exposure therapy stands out, during which th...

Objective assessment of the severity of whiplash injuries is difficult for many reasons. This paper therefore describes a VR-based approach to assessment of cervical range-of-motion (ROM) in whiplash injury patients. Patient's task in the test is to maintain a virtual marker on a static vir-tual object at different positions within the virtual worl...

Relatively large defense industry during the cold war time has been significantly reduced in many transitional states in the last decade due to heavy defense budget downsizing. These heavy budget cuts caused collapse of many large defense corporations in these countries. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 21st century in the post cold war time ma...

This article presents the concept of a high-tech interdisciplinary approach to the therapy of Homeland War veterans suffering from PTSD. This research on the treatment of PTSD patients is based on virtual reality and digital biofeedback technologies. The main contribution of the research relates to the design and development of complex dynamically...

VR as a source of controllable visual and audio stimulations, which initiate and induce different kinematical, psychological, cognitive, and emotional reactions from the subject, is more than adequate state-of-the-art technology for assessment of whiplash injuries. A series of kinematical tests, which are integrated in Whiplash Injury Advanced Cont...

A relatively large defence industry during the Cold War period has been significantly reduced in many transitional states in the last decade due to heavy defence budget downsizing. These heavy budget cuts caused the collapse of many large defence corporations. Furthermore, since the beginning of the 21st century in the post-Cold Wor period many tra...

This paper discusses the process of modernization and upgrading of the semi-automatic command to line of sight (SACLOS) antitank guided missile systems Fagot/Konkurs. The design and implementation procedure of guidance system, based on digital technology is described, as well as training and diagnostic equipments which perform logical parts of whol...

This paper examines problem of synthesis of homing guidance law of the short range antiaircraft missiles. The presented research is based on the results of Shinar's and Forte's approach which refers to transforming very complex stochastic differential game to the matrix game with a saddle point solution in the domain of the mixed guidance strategie...

Unfounded claims based on twitching injuries of the cervical spine represent a large financial cost to insurance companies, mainly due to the lack of standardized procedures for assessing and classifying such injuries. The expert system in the design and development phase at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing called Whiplash Injury...

Economic development of nation is in firm correlation with economic growth. According to modern comprehensions contemporary theoreticians of economic growth mainly agree that technological progress is the main determinant of long-term economic growth. For technological progress and innovations especially significant are processes and activities of...

Offset agreements contain a wide spectrum of activities that can be grouped into: coproduction and subcontracting, technology transfers, in-country procurements, marketing assistance, financial assistance, investments, joint ventures, etc. Such business arrangements minimize trade and payment imbalances applied by expanding number of developing and...

The traditional view of democracy reflects the structural separation of powers among legislative, executive and judicial branches. This structure alone is not sufficient to ensure that a system of governance is truly effective. The problems that modern governments face are very complex and require very complex solutions and comprehensive policy ana...

Main Topics of the Round Table: I Intelligence estimates of the changes in Europe at the end of the 20th Century II The role of Intelligence in conflict resolution (crises and wars in Southeast Europe) III Subjects and methods of Intelligence agencies at the beginning of the 21st century: possibilities and limits IV Ethics and legal norms for Inte...

Although Southeast Europe has been a source and scene of wider European conflicts in the twentieth century, crisis management by the EU, NATO, OSCE, succeeded only temporarily in extinguishing the fire and removing the sources of conflict. Therefore, the international community should apply short-term crisis management and devise long-term proposal...

One of the specific areas of research in social sciences are international relations, specially because the part of the domain of international relations encapsulates the research on the initiation and intensity of wars, and those particular problems have been addressed by various formal approaches. By applying formal approach we expect to obtain s...

The system dynamics model of restructuring officer personnel is presented as part of a wider problem of restructuring the overall armed forces of the Republic of Croatia. Optimal restructuring of the existing officer personnel implies a shift from the present, relatively non-homogeneous officer structure (based on rankan d age categories), to the p...

Hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation based on modern digital signal processors is a cost-effective technology for the design and evaluation of various sophisticated weapon and industrial systems. In this article a HIL simulation is presented through the very complex problem of modernisation of the semi-automatic command to line of sight (SACLOS) m...

This paper discusses the design and the use of multi-level Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations as a powerful tool for the modernization of a complex system. This approach will be illustrated by describing a HIL simulator that was developed as the key component for a non-destructive and cost-effective prototype development process for a moderniza...

[Invited Opening Speech of MIPRO 1999 Conference] A comprehensive understanding of the role and interconnectedness of the defense system and the system of higher education and scientific institutions in the function of economic development and national security of the Republic of Croatia is of special importance. A critical review of the Strategy...

NATO’s role in supplementing the work of other international institutions to consolidate democracy and foster the integration of Southeastern Europe, as volatile region, into the transatlantic community is extremely important. To achieve these objectives, the Alliance should expand its consultations with governments in the region. Moreover, it shou...