Niklas Ravaja

• PhD
• Professor (eHealth and well-being) at University of Helsinki

A reliable experience of time is critical for perception and action in the present, for accurately remembering our past, and for successfully planning a future. Theories of time perception commonly assume a central mechanism keeps time by providing a relatively independent, internal clock. Recent work, however, shows imaginary self-movements alter...

We present an ongoing magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigating how emotional salience and semantic coherence of conversation content influence neural tracking of speech in a multi-speaker, audio-visual “cocktail-party” paradigm. Participants attend one of two simultaneous conversations whose topics systematically vary in emotionality (e.g.,...

Previous research shows that individuals exhibit overall lower engagement during video calls compared to face-to-face conversations, indicated by delayed and less frequent turn transitions. In face-to-face interactions, a lack of engagement from co-participants is known to cause physiological stress in the active speaker. Whether similar influences...

Incorporating the sense of touch through haptics in virtual spaces enables people to communicate emotions and engage in more naturalistic and meaningful social interactions. Advances in haptics and virtual reality technologies and applications have been essential to support researchers in the exploration of mediated social touch in virtual environm...

Previous research shows that individuals exhibit overall lower engagement during video calls compared to face-to-face conversations, indicated by delayed and less frequent turn-transitions. In face-to-face interactions, a lack of engagement from co-participants is known to cause physiological stress in the active speaker. Whether similar influences...

Subjective estimates of duration are affected by emotional expectations about the future. For example, temporal intervals preceding a threatening event such as an electric shock are estimated as longer than intervals preceding a non-threatening event. However, it has not been unequivocally shown that such temporal overestimation occurs also when an...

Generative models are powerful tools for producing novel information by learning from example data. However, the current approaches require explicit manual input to steer generative models to match human goals. Furthermore, how these models would integrate implicit, diverse feedback and goals of multiple users remains largely unexplored. Here, we p...

Background Insufficient physical activity is a public health concern. New technologies may improve physical activity levels and enable the identification of its predictors with high accuracy. The Precious smartphone app was developed to investigate the effect of specific modular intervention elements on physical activity and examine theory-based pr...

Subjective estimates of duration are affected by emotional expectations about the future. For example, temporal intervals preceding a threatening event such as an electric shock are estimated as longer than intervals preceding a non-threatening event. However, it has not been unequivocally shown that such temporal overestimation occurs also when an...

Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and posit...

Individuals with grandiose narcissism exhibit enhanced antagonism and a defensive pattern of discordance between their emotional and physiological reactions to self-threatening evaluations. Although theoretical perspectives link narcissistic defensiveness to negative emotions, empirical evidence linking grandiose narcissism to emotional reactivity...

Introduction This meta-analysis investigated (1) whether ethnic minority and majority members have a neural inter-group bias toward each other, and (2) whether various ethnic groups (i.e., White, Black, and Asian) are processed in the brain differently by the other respective ethnicities. Methods A systematic coordinate-based meta-analysis of func...

Background Low education, low cognitive abilities, and certain cognitive styles are suggested to predispose to social intolerance and prejudices. Evidence is, however, restricted by comparatively small samples, neglect of confounding variables and genetic factors, and a narrow focus on a single sort of prejudice. We investigated the relationships o...

The current pilot study examines the effects of a mindfulness intervention versus relaxation-based active control on psychophysiological reactivity measured by heart rate (HR), high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), skin conductance level (SCL), and number of skin conductance responses (SCR) in adolescents. A total of 110 students, ages 12...

Subjective estimates of elapsed time are sensitive to the fluctuations in an emotional state. While it is well known that dangerous and threatening situations, such as electric shocks or loud noises, are perceived as lasting longer than safe events, it remains unclear whether anticipating a threatening event speeds up or slows down subjective time...

We investigated whether temperament modifies an association between polygenic intelligence potential and cognitive test performance in midlife. The participants (n = 1647, born between 1962 and 1977) were derived from the Young Finns Study. Temperament was assessed with Temperament and Character Inventory over a 15-year follow-up (1997, 2001, 2007,...

Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time...

Intersubjectivity is a precondition for human life – for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. Through empirical examination of social interactions in everyday and institutional settings, the authors in this volume explore the achievement and maintenance of intersubjectivity. The contributions show how language c...

BACKGROUND Insufficient physical activity is an increasing public health concern. New technologies may help to change physical activity levels while also enabling the identification of key predictors with high accuracy. The Precious smartphone app was developed to investigate the effect of specific, modular intervention elements on physical activit...

The tendency to simulate the pain of others within our own sensorimotor systems is a vital component of empathy. However, this sensorimotor resonance is modulated by a multitude of social factors including similarity in bodily appearance, e.g. skin colour. The current study investigated whether increasing self-other similarity via virtual transfer...

Supplementary material for the publication "Increasing self–other similarity modulates ethnic bias in sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain". The material entails a supplementary method section, tables, and figures.

In-group favoritism and prejudices relate to discriminatory behaviors but, despite decades of research, understanding of their neural correlates has been limited. A systematic coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (altogether 87 original datasets, n = 2328) was conducted to investigate neural inter-g...

Social touch is increasingly utilized in a variety of psychological interventions, ranging from parent-child interventions to psychotherapeutic treatments. Less attention has been paid, however, to findings that exposure to social touch may not necessarily evoke positive or pleasant responses. Social touch can convey different emotions from love an...

Digitalisaation myötä terveydenhuollon toiminnot muuttuvat nopeasti, ja sähköiset työkalut sekä pal-velut ovat jo arkipäivää. Vaikutukset näkyvät koulutustarpeena, koska terveydenhuollon ammattilaisten digiosaaminen tulee turvata. Lääkärien peruskoulutuksen tulisi sisältää etälääketiedettä ja sähköisen terveydenhuollon palveluja (e-health) koskevaa...

Social touch is essential to human development and communication. Mediated social touch is suggested as a solution for circumstances where distance prevents skin-to-skin contact. However, past research aimed at demonstrating efficacy of mediated touch in reducing stress and promoting helping have produced mixed findings. These inconsistent findings...

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom-built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The presence of another user’s avatar in shared virtual space supports social interactions and provides an active target for evoked compassion. The system incorporates respiration and bra...

While we instantaneously recognize a face as attractive, it is much harder to explain what exactly defines personal attraction. This suggests that attraction depends on implicit processing of complex, culturally and individually defined features. Generative adversarial neural networks (GANs), which learn to mimic complex data distributions, can pot...

Trait emotional intelligence and evoked empathy may help in a task where emotion-evoking source material is utilized to ideate solutions and services for the end-user. Participants of the current study read life stories of different persons, with perspective-taking instruction to evoke either high or low empathy. The reading was followed with ideat...

C omputer games have already proved useful beyond their function as entertainment. Among others, they serve as a great resource for research by providing realistic, familiar, and yet relatively complex and diverse stimuli for experiments. However, the same features that make them potentially useful also make them particularly challenging to use in...

Interpersonal touch is critical for social-emotional development and presents a powerful modality for communicating emotions. Virtual agents of the future could capitalize on touch to establish social bonds with humans and facilitate cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We studied whether the emotional expression of a virtual agent would affect the...

We investigate the relationship of morality and political orientation by focusing on the influential results showing that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typica...

We investigate the findings that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typical measure of political orientation, a political self-placement item. We used a predefined...

The human brain processes language to optimise efficient communication. Studies have shown extensive evidence that the brain’s response to language is affected both by lower-level features, such as word-length and frequency, and syntactic and semantic violations within sentences. However, our understanding on cognitive processes at discourse level...

According to a socio-functional perspective on emotions, displaying shame with averted gaze and a slumped posture following a norm violation signals that the person is ready to conform to the group’s moral standards, which in turn protects the person from social isolation and punishment. Although the assumption is intuitive, direct empirical eviden...

Background This study investigated (i) whether compassion is associated with blood pressure or hypertension in adulthood and (ii) whether familial risk for hypertension modifies these associations.Method The participants (N = 1112–1293) came from the prospective Young Finns Study. Parental hypertension was assessed in 1983–2007; participants’ blood...

Go/No-Go tasks, which require participants to inhibit automatic responses to images of palatable foods, have shown diagnostic value in quantifying food-related impulses. Moreover, they have shown potential for training to control impulsive eating. To test the hypothesis that training modulates early neural markers of response inhibition, the curren...

To date, experiments aimed at demonstrating whether effects of naturalistic social touch can be replicated with Mediated Social Touch (MST) provide mixed findings. A possible explanation could be a lack of realism of current haptic displays in combination with not sufficiently taking contextual factors of social touch into account. Using a qualitat...

With the advent of consumer grade virtual reality (VR) headsets and physiological measurement devices, new possibilities for mediated social interaction emerge enabling the immersion to environments where the visual features react to the users’ physiological activation. In this study, we investigated whether and how individual and interpersonally s...

Go/No-Go tasks, which require participants to inhibit automatic responses to images of palatable foods, have shown diagnostic value in quantifying food-related impulses.Moreover, they have shown potential for training to control impulsive eating. To test a suggested hypothesis that training modulates early neural markers of responseinhibition, the...

We examined the emotional and psychophysiological underpinnings of social interaction in the context of autism spectrum disorder, more specifically, involving participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (AS). We recorded participants’ autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation (electrodermal activity, heart rate, and heart rate variability) and fa...

Motivational intensity has been previously linked to information processing. In particular, it has been argued that affects which are high in motivational intensity tend to narrow cognitive scope. A similar effect has been attributed to negative affect, which has been linked to narrowing of cognitive scope. In this paper, we investigated how these...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between nonverbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of semiotics—the decoding of the meaning of a message—is...

PeyeDF is a Portable Document Format (PDF) reader with eye tracking support, available as free and open source software. It is especially useful to researchers investigating reading and learning phenomena, as it integrates PDF reading-related behavioural data with gaze-related data. It is suitable for short and long-term research and supports multi...

Purpose This study investigates how media brand knowledge, defined as a structural feature of the message, influences emotional and attentional responses to, and memory of, news messages. Design/methodology/approach Self-reports, facial electromyography (EMG) and electroencephalography were used as indices of emotional valence, arousal and attenti...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between non-verbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of decoding the meaning of a message – the semiotics –...

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The system incorporates respiration and brainwave based biofeedback that enables responsiveness to the shared physiological states of the users. The presence of another user's avatar in t...

The article investigates the interactional work required to launch a complaint about nonpresent third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain, and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilita...

BACKGROUND Background: Increasing physical activity may prevent serious health problems, and active use of self-regulation techniques such as goal setting, self-monitoring and action planning can support higher activity levels. While many smartphone apps offer these self-regulation techniques, few apps offer systematic motivational support for phys...

Background: Most adults do not engage in sufficient physical activity to maintain good health. Smartphone apps are increasingly used to support physical activity but typically focus on tracking behaviors with no support for the complex process of behavior change. Tracking features do not engage all users, and apps could better reach their targets...

In this paper we show that heart-rate based audio/sonification biofeedback (HRSB) can be used to facilitate emotion regulation during poker play. We report on a laboratory experiment (N=29) where participants play No Limit Texas Hold’em poker while hearing heartbeats synchronized with their actual heart-rate (biofeedback condition) or at steady pac...

Receiving a touch or smile increases compliance in natural face-to-face settings. It has been unclear, however, whether a virtual agent’s touch and smile also promote compliance or whether there are individual differences in proneness to nonverbal persuasion. Utilising a multimodal virtual reality, we investigated whether touch and smile promoted c...

Two central dimensions in psychotherapeutic work are a therapist’s empathy with clients and challenging their judgments. We investigated how they influence psychophysiological responses in the participants. Data were from psychodynamic therapy sessions, 24 sessions from 5 dyads, from which 694 therapist’s interventions were coded. Heart rate and el...

The effects of bio-adaptation-based visual cues in conveying affective information was studied while conducting social meditation in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a laboratory study, 22 dyads practiced a short duration, modified version of empathy-evoking compassion meditation. The immersive VR provided electroencephalography (EEG) -based...

Trait-like sensitivity to stress in long QT syndrome patients has been documented previously. In addition, mental stress has been associated with symptomatic status of long QT syndrome. We examined whether the symptomatic type 1 long QT syndrome patients would be more sensitive to mental stress compared to asymptomatic patients and whether there wo...

We show that contextual variables in a Multiple Criteria Decision Making task influence choice quality. Based on an experiment we investigate the effects of product type, emotional attachment, and the amount and structure of information provided. We measured choice quality with nondominance, which is a desirable property of good choices. Regarding...

In moral foundations research, two single-item measures of political orientation – with anchors labeled “liberal-conservative” or “left-right” – have been alternatively used. Using a Finnish representative sample, we employed both measures. High conservatism was associated with binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity), while the assoc...

Affective symbiosis for human–computer interaction refers to the dynamic relationship between the user and affective virtual agents. In order to facilitate a true, immersive experience, we believe that it is necessary to adapt the presentation of an affective agent to the user’s affective state. Investigating the experience, behavior, and physiolog...

Performance review discussions of real manager–subordinate pairs were examined in two studies to investigate the effects of trait emotional intelligence (EI) on dyad member’s felt and expressed emotions. Altogether there were 84 managers and 122 subordinates in two studies using 360 measured and self-reported trait EI. Facial electromyography, and...

Meditation and mindfulness techniques are useful for both treatment of various disorders as well as improving the quality of life in general. Meditation offers intriguing possibilities for BCI as it is targeted at able-bodied general population and goes beyond the traditional explicit control BCI paradigm. In previous work, we have shown how neurof...

Automatic annotation of media content has become a critically important task for many digital services as the quantity of available online media content has grown exponentially. One approach is to annotate the content using the physiological responses of the media consumer. In the present paper, we reflect on three case studies that use brain signa...

Receiving a tender caress from a caregiver or spouse reduces stress and promotes emotional well-being, but receiving the same caress from a stranger makes us feel uncomfortable. According to recent neurophysiological findings, we not only react differently to the invited versus uninvited touch but also perceive the touch differently depending on co...

Earlier studies have revealed cross-modal visuo-tactile interactions in endogenous spatial attention. The current research used event-related potentials (ERPs) and virtual reality (VR) to identify how the visual cues of the perceiver’s body affect visuo-tactile interaction in endogenous spatial attention and at what point in time the effect takes p...

Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher’s emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee’s...

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any expli...

Digital monitoring of physiological signals can allow computer systems to adapt unobtrusively to users, so as to enhance personalised ‘smart’ interactions. In recent years, physiological computing has grown as a research field, and it is increasingly considered in diverse applications, ranging from specialised work contexts to consumer electronics....

Virtual reality presents an extraordinary platform for multimodal communication. Haptic technologies have been shown to provide an important contribution to this by facilitating co-presence and allowing affective communication. However, the findings of the affective influences rely on studies that have used myriad different types of haptic technolo...

Psychophysiological activity was recorded during development discussions of 44 manager-subordinate pairs to examine the effects of the Big Five personality traits Extraversion and Conscientiousness, and personality similarity during dyadic social interaction. Facial electromyography and frontal electroencephalography (EEG) asymmetry were collected...

The application of psychophysiology in human-computer interaction is a growing field with significant potential for future smart personalised systems. Working in this emerging field requires comprehension of an array of physiological signals and analysis techniques. Electromyography (EMG)is a useful signal to estimate the emotional context of indiv...

Knowledge sharing is an employee behavior, critical to organizational success in knowledge-intensive work environments. This study set out to empirically test the model of knowledge-sharing motivation designed and presented in this journal by Gagné (2009). The model combines two established behavioral theories, the theory of planned behavior and se...

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user's interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance...

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user's interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance...

Television viewers’ attention is increasingly more often divided between television and “second screens”, for example when viewing television broadcasts and following their related social media discussion on a tablet computer. The attentional costs of such multitasking may vary depending on the ebb and flow of the social media channel, such as its...

Excluded data. (PDF)

Linear Mixed Model equations. (PDF)

In accordance with the guidelines of PLOS ONE concerning data availability, Appendix S3 contains all SPSS data analysis files for the experiment. To protect participants’ privacy, participant identifiers have been anonymized and no participant-related data are included in the data files. (ZIP)