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Previous research has found that individuals with social phobia differ from controls in their processing of emotional faces. For instance, people with social phobia show increased attention to briefly presented threatening faces. However, when exposure times are increased, the direction of this attentional bias is more unclear. Studies investigating eye movements have found both increased as well as decreased attention to threatening faces in socially anxious participants. The current study investigated eye movements to emotional faces in eight patients with social phobia and 34 controls. Three different tasks with different exposure durations were used, which allowed for an investigation of the time course of attention. At the early time interval, patients showed a complex pattern of both vigilance and avoidance of threatening faces. At the longest time interval, patients avoided the eyes of sad, disgust, and neutral faces more than controls, whereas there were no group differences for angry faces.

Basic capturing of emotion on user experience of web applications and browsing is important in many ways. Quite often, online user experience is studied via tangible measures such as task completion time, surveys and comprehensive tests from which data attributes are generated. Prediction of users’ emotion and behaviour in some of these cases depends mostly on task completion time and number of clicks per given time interval. However, such approaches are generally subjective and rely heavily on distributional assumptions making the results prone to recording errors. This paper aims to propose a novel method – a window dynamic control system – that addresses the foregoing issues.

Primary data were obtained from laboratory experiments during which 44 volunteers had their synchronized physiological readings – skin conductance response, skin temperature, eye movement behaviour and users activity attributes taken by biosensors. The window-based dynamic control system (PHYCOB I) is integrated to the biosensor which collects secondary data attributes from these synchronized physiological readings and uses them for two purposes: for detection of both optimal emotional responses and users’ stress levels. The method’s novelty derives from its ability to integrate physiological readings and eye movement records to identify hidden correlates on a webpage.

The results from the analyses show that the control system detects basic emotions and outperforms other conventional models in terms of both accuracy and reliability, when subjected to model comparison – that is, the average recoverable natural structures for the three models with respect to accuracy and reliability are more consistent within the window-based control system environment than with the conventional methods.

Graphical simulation and an example scenario are only provided for the control’s system design.

The novelty of the proposed model is its strained resistance to overfitting and its ability to automatically assess user emotion while dealing with specific web contents. The procedure can be used to predict which contents of webpages cause stress-induced emotions to users.

This paper aims to discuss the utility of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as a treatment for children with intellectual disabilities (ID) who have experienced trauma.

Relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance and literature were reviewed to provide support for the use of EMDR as a treatment for trauma in children with ID.

There is a growing body of evidence which demonstrates that EMDR therapy is successful for the treatment of trauma in adults and children. However, for children with ID, the research is limited despite those with ID being more likely than non-disabled peers to experience trauma such as abuse or neglect.

EMDR can only be facilitated by trained mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists (clinical, forensic, counselling or educational) or occupational therapists or social workers with additional training. Finally, general practitioners who are experienced in psychotherapy or psychological trauma and have accreditation. Therefore, this highlights that there may be a lack of trained staff to facilitate this intervention and that those who are generally working with the client closely and long term such as learning disability nurses are not able to conduct this intervention.

This paper presents an account of NICE guidance and evidence of the efficacy of EMDR as a treatment for adults, children and those with ID.

A disproportionate fear of vomiting, or emetophobia, is a chronic and disabling condition which is characterized by a tendency to avoid a wide array of situations or activities that might increase the risk of vomiting. Unlike many other subtypes of specific phobia, emetophobia is fairly difficult to treat. In fact, there are only a few published cases in the literature. This paper presents a case of a 46-year old woman with emetophobia in which a trauma-focused treatment approach was applied; that is, an approach particularly aimed at processing disturbing memories of a series of events which were considered to be causal in the etiology of her condition. Four therapy sessions of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) produced a lasting decrease in symptomatology. A 3-year follow up showed no indication of relapse.

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to explore the fixation of the eyes of human resource (HR) professionals' when identifying emotions in the context of workplace research and to propose measures that might support them in their role.

This paper combines a contemporary literature review with reflections from practice to develop more nuanced understandings of 39 HR professionals' ability to recognise emotions. This paper used eye-tracking technology more commonly used in laboratory-based students to explore the fixation of the eye when identifying emotions.

The preliminary findings suggest that HR professionals with higher levels of emotional recognition principally focus on the eyes of the recipient, whereas those with lower levels or emotional recognition focus more so the nose or the randomly across the face, depending on the level of emotional recognition. The data suggest that women are better than men, in the sample group at recognising emotions, with some variations in recognising specific emotions such as disgust.

The viewpoint paper proposes a number of implications for middle leaders and suggests that middle leaders should proactively seek out opportunities to be engaged in activities that support the Default Mode Network (DMN) function of the brain and subsequently the relationship-orientated aspects of leadership, for example, coaching other staff members. However, it has to be recognised that the sample size is small and further work is needed before any generalisations can be made.

This paper offers a contemporary review underpinned by a preliminary study into HR professionals' ability to recognise emotions.

Conversational agents (chatbots, avatars and robots) are increasingly substituting human employees in service encounters. Their presence offers many potential benefits, but customers are reluctant to engage with them. A possible explanation is that conversational agents do not make optimal use of communicative behaviors that enhance relational outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to identify which human-like communicative behaviors used by conversational agents have positive effects on relational outcomes and which additional behaviors could be investigated in future research.

This paper presents a systematic review of 61 articles that investigated the effects of communicative behaviors used by conversational agents on relational outcomes. A taxonomy is created of all behaviors investigated in these studies, and a research agenda is constructed on the basis of an analysis of their effects and a comparison with the literature on human-to-human service encounters.

The communicative behaviors can be classified along two dimensions: modality (verbal, nonverbal, appearance) and footing (similarity, responsiveness). Regarding the research agenda, it is noteworthy that some categories of behaviors show mixed results and some behaviors that are effective in human-to-human interactions have not yet been investigated in conversational agents.

By identifying potentially effective communicative behaviors in conversational agents, this study assists managers in optimizing encounters between conversational agents and customers.

This is the first study that develops a taxonomy of communicative behaviors in conversational agents and uses it to identify avenues for future research.

Cognitive computing is part of AI and cognitive applications consists of cognitive services, which are building blocks of the cognitive systems. These applications mimic the human brain functions, for example, recognize the speaker, sense the tone of the text. On this paper, we present the similarities of these with human cognitive functions. We establish a framework which gathers cognitive functions into nine intentional processes from the substructures of the human brain. The framework, underpins human cognitive functions, and categorizes cognitive computing functions into the functional hierarchy, through which we present the functional similarities between cognitive service and human cognitive functions to illustrate what kind of functions are cognitive in the computing. The results from the comparison of the functional hierarchy of cognitive functions are consistent with cognitive computing literature. Thus, the functional hierarchy allows us to find the type of cognition and reach the comparability between the applications.