Sylwia Hyniewska

• PhD
• Psychotherapist in training at University of Zurich

The ability to judge others' emotions is required for the establishment and maintenance of smooth interactions in a community. Several lines of evidence suggest that the attribution of meaning to a face is influenced by the facial actions produced by an observer during the observation of a face. However, empirical studies testing causal relationshi...

Objective To propose a set of internationally harmonized procedures and methods for assessing neurocognitive functions, smell, taste, mental, and psychosocial health, and other factors in adults formally diagnosed with COVID-19 (confirmed as SARS-CoV-2 + WHO definition). Methods We formed an international and cross-disciplinary NeuroCOVID Neuropsy...

Atypical emotion interpretation has been widely reported in individuals with borderline personality disorder (iBPD); however, empirical studies reported mixed results so far. We suggest that discrepancies in observations of emotion interpretation by iBPD can be explained by biases related to their fear of rejection and abandonment, i.e., the three...

Background/Objectives: Considering the importance of physical activity on the development of cognitive functions in children, the aim of this study was to assess the effects of a ten-week training program using the Interactive Floor device (© Funtronic), i.e., a kinesthetic educational game, and aerobic activity training on executive functions in 9...

COVID-19 has been considered a possible cause of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or similar conditions. However, what specific disease symptoms may contribute most to prolonged PTSD-like symptoms in COVID-19 survivors is unclear. The study aimed to present the factor structure of COVID-19 symptoms and identify which symptoms of COVID-19 best...

COVID-19 can lead to changes in the brain and, consequently, to long-term neuropsychological disturbances. Epidemiology, complex mechanisms, spectrum of symptoms and their variability over time have not been still fully understood. The chapter presents the cases of two women (D.A. 31 y.o. and A.R. 48 y.o.), both with higher education, without healt...

By immersing themselves in a game users may exert themselves more than they would in every day life. One important driving factor in games and many forms of exercise is competition, at once engaging socially in the activity and trying to outdo an opponent or oneself. Large differences in fitness levels make competition infeasible between some oppon...

Objective: To propose a set of internationally harmonized procedures and methods for assessing neurocognitive functions, smell, taste, mental, and psychosocial health, and other factors in adults formally diagnosed with COVID-19 (confirmed as SARS-CoV-2 + WHO definition). Methods: We formed an international and cross-disciplinary NeuroCOVID Neur...

Given the high mortality of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), having severe COVID-19 may be a life-threatening event, especially for individuals at high risk of complications. Therefore, in the article we try to answer two questions that are relevant to public mental health: Can we define groups who are at higher risk of developing pandemic-...

Most past research has focused on the role played by social context information in emotion classification, such as whether a display is perceived as belonging to one emotion category or another. The current study aims to investigate whether the effect of context extends to the interpretation of emotion displays, i.e. smiles that could be judged eit...

Purpose: Numerous studies suggest that infection with coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes acute respiratory distress syndrome and COVID-19 illness, can lead to changes in the central nervous system (CNS). Consequently, some individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection may also present the symptoms of neuropsychological disorders. The goals of this liter...

The ability to detect food plays an indispensable role in our survival and wellbeing. Previous psychological studies have revealed that food is detected more rapidly than non-food items. However, whether the detection of food could be modulated by cultural factors remains unknown. We investigated this issue in the present study using a visual searc...

Understanding intrusive mentation, rumination, obsession, and worry, known also as "repetitive thought" (RT), is important for understanding cognitive and affective processes in general. RT is of transdiagnostic significance—for example obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia and addictions involve counterproductive RT. It is also a key but under-a...

Given the high coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mortality, this disease may be a life-threatening event, especially for individuals at high risk of complications. Therefore, in the article we try to answer two questions that are relevant to public mental health: Can we define groups who are at higher risk of developing pandemic-related PTSD? How...

Previous psychological studies have shown that images of food elicit hedonic responses, either consciously or unconsciously, and that participants’ cultural experiences moderate conscious hedonic ratings of food. However, whether cultural factors moderate unconscious hedonic responses to food remains unknown. We investigated this issue in Polish an...

Facial expressions that show emotion play an important role in human social interactions. In previous theoretical studies, researchers have suggested that there are universal, prototypical facial expressions specific to basic emotions. However, the results of some empirical studies that tested the production of emotional facial expressions based on...

Researchers have theoretically proposed that humans decode other individuals' emotions or elementary cognitive appraisals from particular sets of facial action units (AUs). However, only a few empirical studies have systematically tested the relationships between the decoding of emotions/appraisals and sets of AUs, and the results are mixed. Furthe...

Humans modify their facial expressions in order to communicate their internal states and sometimes to mislead observers regarding their true emotional states. Evidence in experimental psychology shows that discriminative facial responses are short and subtle. This suggests that such behavior would be easier to distinguish when captured in high reso...

Beaudoin, L. P., Hyniewska, Sylwia, & Bastien, C. (2017). Towards an affective information-processing theory of sleep onset and insomnia. (Paper to be presented at ISRE-2017). We develop a cognitive-affective theory of sleep onset and insomnia (Beaudoin, 2013, 2014). http://summit.sfu.ca/item/16915

Governments across the world are investing in smart metering devices that report energy use to the user with the aim of reducing consumption. However, the effectiveness of such In-Home Displays (IHDs) has been questioned, since savings are small. This is possibly because informing the consumer of their consumption in kWh, or monetary units, fails t...

Humans modify facial expressions in order to mislead observers regarding their true emotional states. Being able to recognize the authenticity of emotional displays is notoriously difficult for human observers. Evidence in experimental psychology shows that discriminative facial responses are short and subtle. This suggests that such behavior would...

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine if gaze and emotional expression, both highly self-relevant social signals, affect the recollection accuracy of perceived faces in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). Methods: Forty patients with MTLE (twenty-one without surgery and nineteen after anterior temporal lobectomy) 25 as well...

Intrusive mentation, rumination, obsession, and worry, referred to by Watkins [1] as "repetitive thought" (RT), are of great interest to psychology. This is partly because every typical adult is subject to "RT". A critical feature of "RT" is of transdiagnostic significance—for example obsessive compulsive disorder, insomnia and addictions involve u...

Individuals with epilepsy have been reported dysfunctional in their understanding of social signals, which might partially explain their lower levels of life satisfaction. Extensive assessment is necessary, particularly when the mesial temporal lobe, responsible for emotion processing, is affected. Authors aimed to examine multiple levels of social...

Expressive behaviors are an indispensable part of any believeable virtual agent. They add liveliness to the virtual character and allow for clearer communication. This chapter is dedicated to computational models of expressive behaviors. The variety of these models arise from the richness of the theories trying to explain human behavior. For this r...

Understanding the internal states of others is essential in social exchanges. The aim of the presented thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of the impact nonverbal cues have on the perception of internal states, namely of emotions and associated cognitive appraisals. First, we explored naturalistic behaviour from a hidden camera, described w...

This chapter presents some theoretical approaches from affective psychology that have contributed to modeling conversational agents' facial behavior. It also examines how discrete emotion theories, as well as dimensional and componential emotion theories, view these expressions in the framework of the complex process that is emotion. Further, the c...

We present a computational model that generates listening behaviour for a virtual agent. It triggers backchannel signals according to the user’s visual and acoustic behaviour. The appropriateness of the backchannel algorithm in a user-agent situation of storytelling, has been evaluated by naïve participants, who judged the algorithm-ruled timing of...

Emotional expressions play a very important role in the interaction between virtual agents and human users. In this paper, we present a new constraint-based approach to the generation of multimodal emotional displays. The displays generated with our method are not limited to the face, but are composed of different signals partially ordered in time...

Our aim is to build a real-time Embodied Conversational Agent able to act as an interlocutor in interaction, generating automatically verbal and non verbal signals. These signals, called backchannels, provide information about the listener’s mental state towards the perceived speech. The ECA reacts differently to user’s behavior depending on its pr...

One of the most desirable characteristics of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) is the capability of interacting with users in a human-like manner. While listening to a user, an ECA should be able to provide backchannel signals through visual and acoustic modalities. In this work we propose an improvement of our previous system to generate mult...

1.1. Les agents conversationnels expressifs Ces dernières années, on observe un intérêt croissant pour le développement d'agents conversationnels animés (ACA) exprimant des émotions. Les ACAs sont des agents virtuels capables de communiquer de façon autonome avec un usager, que ce soit à travers des modes verbaux ou non-verbaux. L'intérêt pour le d...

Notre but est de construire un agent conversationnel animé, capable de se comporter comme un interlocuteur lors dune interaction avec un utilisateur en temps-réel. Pour être crédible, lACA doit avoir un comportement découte différent (rétroactions) en fonction de sa personnalité. Dans ce papier, nous présentons un algorithme de sélection de rétroac...

This paper presents a concept and initial evaluation of the emotional interactive storyteller system. Our concept is derived from our knowledge of the pre-medieval oral storytelling tradition and its application to therapeutic storytelling. Our initial evaluations are based on a mock-up of the concept where emotional content of the story is reinfor...

In this paper we present a system which allows embodied conversational agent to display multimodal sequential expressions. Recent studies show that several emotions are expressed by a set of different nonverbal behaviors which include different modalities: facial expressions, head and gaze movements, gestures, torso movements and posture. Multimoda...

A model of multimodal sequential expressions of emotion for an Embodied Conversational Agent was developed. The model is based on video annotations and on descriptions found in the literature. A language has been derived to describe expressions of emotions as a sequence of facial and body movement signals. An evaluation study of our model is presen...

In this paper we present a system which allows a virtual character to display multimodal sequential expressions i.e. expressions that are composed of different signals partially ordered in time and belonging to different nonverbal communicative channels. It is composed of a language for the description of such expressions from real data and of an a...

In this paper we present an evaluation study on mimicry per-formed by an Embodied Conversational Agent while being a listener during an interaction with a human user. Previous research has shown the importance of mimicry in human-human interaction, highlighting its relation with the level of engagement between interactants. In the present work we a...

In this paper we present an evaluation study on mimicry performed by an Embodied Conversa-tional Agent while being a listener during an in-teraction with a human user. Through an exper-imental setting, we analyze humans' reactions to agent's mimicry, in particular in relation with smiles. Results show that the agent's behavior influences the user's...