Marcello Mortillaro

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Interfaculty Centre for Affective Sciences

Although there is general consensus concerning the importance and function of interest in our daily lives, there is little agreement about its nature. Four studies of increasing ecological validity (total N = 993) were carried out to compare two different characterizations of interest in terms of the key appraisals involved. The findings indicate t...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has gained significant popularity as a scientific construct over the past three decades, yet its conceptualization and measurement still face limitations. Applied EI research often overlooks its components, treating it as a global characteristic, and there are few widely used performance-based tests for assessing ability...

Introduction According to recent meta-analyses, emotional intelligence can significantly predict academic performance. In this research, we wanted to investigate a particular group of students for which emotional intelligence should be crucial. Namely, we examined whether emotional intelligence, conceptualized as an ability, uniquely contributes to...

It has been proposed that emotional intelligence (EI) functions as a magnifier of emotional experience. This phenomenon, called the "hypersensitivity hypothesis," predicts that high EI amplifies the emotional aspects of experience (Fiori & Ortony, 2021). We tested whether high EI individuals show stronger attention to emotional than neutral express...

The development of a two-stage approach for appraisal inference from automatically detected Action Unit (AUs) intensities in recordings of human faces is described. AU intensity estimation is based on a hybrid approach fusing information from individually fitted mesh model of the faces and texture information. Evaluation results for two datasets an...

Objectives It is commonly argued that older adults show difficulties in standardized tasks of emotional expression perception, yet most previous works relied on classic sets of static, decontextualized, and stereotypical facial expressions. In real-life, facial expressions are dynamic and embedded in a rich context, two key factors that may aid emo...

Drawing upon multidimensional theories of intelligence, the current paper evaluates if the Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECo) fits within a higher-order intelligence space and if emotional intelligence (EI) branches predict distinct criteria related to adjustment and motivation. Using a combination of classical and S-1 bifactor models, we find...

When perceiving emotional facial expressions there is an automatic tendency to react with a matching facial expression. A classic explanation of this phenomenon, termed the matched motor hypothesis, highlights the importance of topographic matching, that is, the correspondence in body parts, between perceived and produced actions. More recent studi...

Theory and research on emotion expression, both on production and recognition, has been dominated by a categorical emotion approach suggesting that discrete emotions are elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations that can then be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. This tradition is increasingly chal...

Research on facial emotion expression has mostly focused on emotion recognition, assuming that a small number of discrete emotions is elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations as captured in still photographs. These are expected to be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. In contrast, appraisal theori...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been frequently studied as a predictor of work criteria, but disparate approaches to defining and measuring EI have produced rather inconsistent findings. The conceptualization of EI as an ability to be measured with performance-based tests is by many considered the most appropriate approach, but only few tests devel...

Interest drives our focus of attention and plays an important role in social communication. Given its relevance for many activities (e.g., learning, entertainment) a system able to automatically detect someone's interest has several potential applications. In this paper, we analyze the physiological and behavioral patterns associated with visual in...

The majority of research on emotion expression has focused on static facial prototypes of a few selected, mostly negative emotions. Implicitly, most researchers seem to have considered all positive emotions as sharing one common signal (namely, the smile), and consequently as being largely indistinguishable from each other in terms of expression. R...

Although research on facial emotion recognition abounds, there has been little attention on the nature of the underlying mechanisms. In this article, using a "reverse engineering" approach, we suggest that emotion inference from facial expression mirrors the expression process. As a strong case can be made for an appraisal theory account of emotion...

In this article, we review the INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) – the first of its kind – in light of the recent developments in affective and behavioural computing. The impact of the first ComParE instalment is manifold: first, it featured various new recognition tasks including social signals such as laughter and...

A new wave of studies on emotion recognition encourages researchers to look beyond the face as the sole source of pertinent information. One study has proposed that, while there is overwhelming evidence that negative emotions may be differentiated in static facial expressions, postural information is needed to differentiate positive emotions such a...

Emotions are brief episodes during which several functional components are synchronized in response to an eliciting event. Emotions can be assessed by measuring responses in each of these components: subjective feeling, physiology, expression, and motivation. In this article we review the most advanced methods that can be used to assess emotions in...

Our experience of stress depends on how we evaluate the circumstances impacting our individual well-being. In principle, any event can be a stressor. Certain events can produce complex emotional states, such as a mixture of anger and worry. If such states are prolonged, they can lead to stress. Stress can be identified by means of such expressive c...

Most computer models for the automatic recognition of emotion from nonverbal signals (e.g., facial or vocal expression) have adopted a discrete emotion perspective, i.e., they output a categorical emotion from a limited pool of candidate labels. The discrete perspective suffers from practical and theoretical drawbacks that limit the generalizabilit...

In two studies, the robustness of anger recognition of bodily expressions is tested. In the first study, video recordings of an actor expressing four distinct emotions (anger, despair, fear, and joy) were structurally manipulated as to image impairment and body segmentation. The results show that anger recognition is more robust than other emotions...

The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech. It further introduces conflict in group discussions as a new task and deals with autism and its manifestations in speech. Finally, emotion is revisited as task, albeit with a broader range of ove...

WITHOUT DOUBT, THERE IS EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IN ALMOST ANY KIND OF SOUND RECEIVED BY HUMANS EVERY DAY: be it the affective state of a person transmitted by means of speech; the emotion intended by a composer while writing a musical piece, or conveyed by a musician while performing it; or the affective state connected to an acoustic event occurring...

Emotions are defi ned as dynamic episodes characterized by a high degree of coordination between several organismic subsystems in the interest of optimal adaptation to relevant events. We argue that the constitutive feature of emotions—synchronization of response channels—is linked to the evolutionary origin of emotional expressions by suggesting t...

We highlight the need to focus on the underlying determinants and production mechanisms to fully understand the nature of facial expression of emotion and to settle the theoretical debate about the meaning of motor expression. Although emotion theorists have generally remained rather vague about the details of the process, this has been a central c...

Several methods are available for coding body movement in nonverbal behavior research, but there is no consensus on a reliable coding system that can be used for the study of emotion expression. Adopting an integrative approach, we developed a new method, the body action and posture coding system, for the time-aligned micro description of body move...

We tested Ekman's (2003) suggestion that movements of a small number of reliable facial muscles are particularly trustworthy cues to experienced emotion because they tend to be difficult to produce voluntarily. On the basis of theoretical predictions, we identified two subsets of facial action units (AUs): reliable AUs and versatile AUs. A survey o...

Most models of automatic emotion recognition use a discrete perspective and a black-box approach, i.e., they output an emotion label chosen from a limited pool of candidate terms, on the basis of purely statistical methods. Although these models are successful in emotion classification, a number of practical and theoretical drawbacks limit the rang...

A learning environment for the training of communicative competence has to consider the complexity of human experience, since it requires a number of cues that are managed hic et nunc in the flow of communicative exchange. Therefore, communicative competence has been traditionally considered as a typical face-to-face learning topic. So far, few opp...

Do members of different cultures express (or "encode") emotions in the same fashion? How well can members of distinct cultures recognize (or "decode") each other's emotion expressions? The question of cultural universality versus specificity in emotional expression has been a hot topic of debate for more than half a century, but, despite a sizeable...

Research on the perception of emotional expressions in faces and voices is exploding in psychology, the neurosciences, and affective computing. This article provides an overview of some of the major emotion expression (EE) corpora currently available for empirical research and introduces a new, dynamic, multimodal corpus of emotion expressions, the...

Emotion communication research strongly focuses on the face and voice as expressive modalities, leaving the rest of the body relatively understudied. Contrary to the early assumption that body movement only indicates emotional intensity, recent studies have shown that body movement and posture also conveys emotion specific information. However, a d...

Positive emotions are crucial to social relationships and social interaction. Although smiling is a frequently studied facial action, investigations of positive emotional expressions are underrepresented in the literature. This may be partly because of the assumption that all positive emotions share the smile as a common signal but lack specific fa...

This paper presents a framework for analysis of affective behavior starting with a reduced amount of visual information related to human upper-body movements. The main goal is to individuate a minimal representation of emotional displays based on nonverbal gesture features. The GEMEP (Geneva multimodal emotion portrayals) corpus was used to validat...

Emotions are attracting growing attention within the instructional design research community. However, clarification is still required as to how exactly to address emotions within the field of e-learning. The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, we will focus on the reasons for including emotions within the instructional technology domain, and...

This paper reports preliminary experiments on automatic attribution of personality traits based on nonverbal vocal behavioral cues. In particular, the work shows how prosodic features can be used to predict, with an accuracy up to 75% depending on the trait, the personality assessments performed by human judges on a collection of 640 speech samples...

The main goal of this chapter is to discuss the potential of affective computing for improving the e-learning experience, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective. First, we focus on the important role emotions play in the (e-)learning process and on the rationale to include affect in e-learning design. Second, we briefly present three t...

Emotional expression in music performance includes important cues arising from the body movement of the musician. This movement is related to both the musical score execution and the emotional intention conveyed. In this experiment, a pianist was asked to play the same excerpt with different emotionally expressive intentions. The aim was to verify...

Emotions are attracting growing attention within the instructional design research community. However, clarification is still required as to how exactly to address emotions within the field of e-learning. The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, we will focus on the reasons for including emotions within the instructional technology domain, and...

New trends in information technology are strongly influencing and shaping the growth of e-learning, and progressively resolving a number of critical issues currently limiting its dissemination to wider populations. The main goal of this chapter is to outline the MySelf Project, which aims to expand the potential of e-learning through the implementa...

This paper presents a multimodal database developed within the EU- funded project MYSELF. The project aims at developing an e-learning platform endowed with affective computing capabilities for the training of relational skills through interactive simulations. The database includes data coming from 34 participants and concerning physiological param...

The importance of emotions in learning process is more and more acknowledged. This paper presents preliminary work carried out within the EUfunded project MYSELF. The project aims at developing an e-learning platform endowed with affective computing capabilities for the training of relational skills through interactive simulations. Three main issue...

Nonostante una lunga tradizione di studi, le emozioni costituiscono ancora oggi un oggetto per molti aspetti poco definito. In particolare, pochi risultati confermati sono disponibili per l'espressione vocale delle emozioni e per i suoi aspetti fisiologici. Questa assenza di risultati può essere spiegata attraverso l'adozione della teoria processua...