PyPlutchik: Visualising and comparing emotion-annotated corpora

Communication challenges and experiences between parents and providers in South Korean paediatric emergency departments: a qualitative study to define AI-assisted communication agents

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to explore communication challenges between parents and healthcare providers in paediatric emergency departments (EDs) and to define the roles and functions of an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted communication agent that could bridge existing gaps.

DESIGN

A qualitative study using in-depth interviews and affinity diagram methodology to analyse interview data.

SETTING

A tertiary paediatric ED in South Korea.

PARTICIPANTS

11 parents of paediatric patients and 11 ED staff members (physicians, nurses and security personnel).

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES

The study examined parent-provider communication difficulties, emotional responses and situational factors contributing to miscommunication and increased workload for ED staff.

RESULTS

The study identified key emotional factors-fear, anger and sadness-that negatively affect communication between parents and ED staff. Parents experienced frustration due to uncertainty, insufficient information and difficulty navigating the ED process. ED staff faced challenges in managing anxious or demanding parents, resulting in increased workload and communication breakdowns.

CONCLUSIONS

An AI-assisted communication agent could help mitigate these challenges by providing timely information, managing non-medical inquiries and supporting both parents and ED staff at critical stages of the ED visit. Implementing such technology has the potential to improve communication and enhance overall patient care in paediatric emergency settings.

EmoAtlas: An emotional network analyzer of texts that merges psychological lexicons, artificial intelligence, and network science

We introduce EmoAtlas, a computational library/framework extracting emotions and syntactic/semantic word associations from texts. EmoAtlas combines interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) for syntactic parsing in 18 languages and psychologically validated lexicons for detecting the eight emotions in Plutchik's theory. We show that EmoAtlas can match or surpass transformer-based natural language processing techniques, BERT or large language models like ChatGPT 3.5 or LLaMAntino, in detecting emotions from Italian and English online posts and news articles (e.g., achieving 85.6 % accuracy in detecting anger in posts vs the 68.8 % value of ChatGPT and 89.9% value for BERT). EmoAtlas presents important advantages in terms of speed and absence of fine-tuning, e.g., it runs 12x faster than BERT on the same data. Testing EmoAtlas' and easily trainable transformers' relevance in a psychometric task like reproducing human creativity ratings for 1071 short texts, we find that EmoAtlas and BERT obtain equivalent predictive power (fourfold cross-validation, ρ ≈ 0.495 , p < 10 - 4 ). Combining BERT's semantic features with EmoAtlas' emotional/syntactic networks of words gets substantially better at estimating creativity rates of stories ( ρ = 0.628 , p < 10 - 4 ). This indicates an interplay between the creativity of narratives and their semantic, emotional, and syntactic structure. Via interpretable emotional profiles and syntactic networks, EmoAtlas can also quantify how emotions are channeled through specific words in texts, e.g., how did customers frame their ideas and emotions towards "beds" in hotel reviews? We release EmoAtlas as a standalone "text as data" computational tool and discuss its impact in extracting interpretable and reproducible insights from texts.

Characterizing the patient experience of physical restraint in psychiatric settings via a linguistic, sentiment, and metaphor analysis

Physical Restraint (PR) is a coercive procedure used in emergency psychiatric care to ensure safety in life-threatening situations. Because of its traumatic nature, studies emphasize the importance of considering the patient's subjective experience. We pursued this aim by overcoming classic qualitative approaches and innovatively applying a multilayered semiautomated language analysis to a corpus of narratives about PR collected from 99 individuals across seven mental health services in Italy. Compared to a reference corpus, PR narratives were characterized by reduced fluency and lexical density, yet a greater use of emotional and cognitive terms, verbs, and first-person singular pronouns. Sadness was the most represented emotion, followed by anger and fear. One-third of the PR narratives contained at least one metaphor, with Animals and War/Prison as the most distinctive source domains. The quality and length of the PR experience impacted both the structure and the sentiment of the narratives. Findings confirm the distressful nature of PR but also point to the use of various linguistic mechanisms which might serve as an early adaptive response toward healing from the traumatic experience. Overall, the study highlights the importance of Natural Language Processing as an unobtrusive window into subjective experience, offering insights for therapeutic choices.

Navigating the emotional landscape: exploring caregivers' journey alongside breast cancer survivors with chronic pain

PURPOSE

Caregiving is a crucial but frequently overlooked part of cancer care, as well as the main emotions experienced by caregivers during that journey. This qualitative study aimed to explore the emotional landscape of informal caregivers in supporting breast cancer survivors (BCs) living with chronic pain (CP).

METHODS

We conducted 3 focus groups with informal caregivers of BCs with CP. For the sentiment analysis, we used R Software and the NRC Emotion Lexicon following Plutchik's theoretical framework of emotions. The emotion spectrum was visualized using the "PyPlutchik" package in Python.

RESULTS

Caregivers (Mage = 43.17, SD = 10.97) predominantly experienced negative emotions (n = 65; M = 0.06, SD = 0.25) compared to positive ones (n = 37; M = 0.10, SD = 0.31), with sadness (n = 46), fear (n = 43), and disgust (n = 37) being most common, alongside feelings of remorse (n = 37), despair (n = 41), and shame (n = 37). The COVID-19 pandemic, as reported by caregivers, also intensified feelings of shame, frozenness, and ambivalence. Despite more frequent negative sentiments, trust (n = 53) and hope (n = 24) were consistently expressed, indicating a complex emotional landscape where positive and negative feelings coexist.

DISCUSSION

This study identifies the broad spectrum of emotions experienced by caregivers in the context of BCs with CP, ranging from individualistic feelings (e.g., fear, despair) to social emotions (e.g., shame, frozenness), and even includes instances of positive emotions (e.g., trust, hope). While our study highlights the emotional toll on caregivers, we suggest that future research and interventions focus more on providing effective support frameworks to manage these emotional challenges. Any discussion regarding the specific impacts of these emotional experiences on clinical outcomes (e.g., quality of life, fear of cancer recurrence) should be approached with caution.

Multimodal driver emotion recognition using motor activity and facial expressions

Driving performance can be significantly impacted when a person experiences intense emotions behind the wheel. Research shows that emotions such as anger, sadness, agitation, and joy can increase the risk of traffic accidents. This study introduces a methodology to recognize four specific emotions using an intelligent model that processes and analyzes signals from motor activity and driver behavior, which are generated by interactions with basic driving elements, along with facial geometry images captured during emotion induction. The research applies machine learning to identify the most relevant motor activity signals for emotion recognition. Furthermore, a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is employed to extract probability vectors from images corresponding to the four emotions under investigation. These data sources are integrated through a unidimensional network for emotion classification. The main proposal of this research was to develop a multimodal intelligent model that combines motor activity signals and facial geometry images to accurately recognize four specific emotions (anger, sadness, agitation, and joy) in drivers, achieving a 96.0% accuracy in a simulated environment. The study confirmed a significant relationship between drivers' motor activity, behavior, facial geometry, and the induced emotions.

Prenatal anxiety recognition model integrating multimodal physiological signal

Anxiety among pregnant women can significantly impact their overall well-being. However, the development of data-driven HCI interventions for this demographic is often hindered by data scarcity and collection challenges. In this study, we leverage the Empatica E4 wristband to gather physiological data from pregnant women in both resting and relaxed states. Additionally, we collect subjective reports on their anxiety levels. We integrate features from signals including Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Skin Temperature (SKT), and Inter-Beat Interval (IBI). Employing a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, we construct a model capable of evaluating anxiety levels in pregnant women. Our model attains an emotion recognition accuracy of 69.3%, marking achievements in HCI technology tailored for this specific user group. Furthermore, we introduce conceptual ideas for biofeedback on maternal emotions and its interactive mechanism, shedding light on improved monitoring and timely intervention strategies to enhance the emotional health of pregnant women.

Sentiment Analysis of Patient- and Family-Related Sepsis Events: Exploratory Study

BACKGROUND

Despite the life-threatening nature of sepsis, little is known about the emotional experiences of patients and their families during sepsis events. We conducted a sentiment analysis pertaining to sepsis incidents involving patients and families, leveraging textual data retrieved from a publicly available blog post disseminated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

OBJECTIVE

This investigation involved a sentiment analysis of patient- and family-related sepsis events, leveraging text responses sourced from a publicly accessible blog post disseminated by the CDC. Driven by the imperative to elucidate the emotional dynamics encountered by patients and their families throughout sepsis incidents, the overarching aims centered on elucidating the emotional ramifications of sepsis on both patients and their families and discerning potential avenues for enhancing the quality of sepsis care.

METHODS

The research used a cross-sectional data mining methodology to investigate the sentiments and emotional aspects linked to sepsis, using a data set sourced from the CDC, which encompasses 170 responses from both patients and caregivers, spanning the period between September 2014 and September 2020. This investigation used the National Research Council Canada Emotion Lexicon for sentiment analysis, coupled with a combination of manual and automated techniques to extract salient features from textual responses. The study used negative binomial least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regressions to ascertain significant textual features that correlated with specific emotional states. Moreover, the visualization of Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions facilitated the discernment of prevailing emotions within the data set.

RESULTS

The results showed that patients and their families experienced a range of emotions during sepsis events, including fear, anxiety, sadness, and gratitude. Our analyses revealed an estimated incidence rate ratio (IRR) of 1.35 for fear-related words and a 1.51 IRR for sadness-related words when mentioning "hospital" in sepsis-related experiences. Similarly, mentions of "intensive care unit" were associated with an average occurrence of 12.3 fear-related words and 10.8 sadness-related words. Surviving patients' experiences had an estimated 1.15 IRR for joy-related words, contrasting with discussions around organ failure, which were associated with multiple negative emotions including disgust, anger, fear, and sadness. Furthermore, mentions of "death" were linked to more fear and anger words but fewer joy-related words. Conversely, longer timelines in sepsis events were associated with more joy-related words and fewer fear-related words, potentially indicating improved emotional adaptation over time.

CONCLUSIONS

The study's outcomes underscore the imperative for health care providers to integrate emotional support alongside medical interventions for patients and families affected by sepsis, emphasizing the emotional toll incurred and highlighting the necessity of acknowledgment and resolution, advocating for the use of sentiment analysis as a means to tailor personalized emotional aid, and thereby potentially augmenting both patient and family welfare and overall outcomes.

Visualizing software refactoring using radar charts

Refactoring tools have advanced greatly and are being used in many large projects. As a result, a great deal of information is now available about past refactoring and its effects on the source code. However, when multiple refactoring is performed at once, it becomes more difficult to analyze their impact. Refactoring visualization can help developers create more maintainable code that is easier to understand and modify over time. Although there is an increasing interest in visualizing code changes in software engineering research, there has been relatively little research on visualizing the process of refactoring. In this paper, we propose a Radar Chart Refactoring Visualization (RcRV) approach to visualize software refactoring of source code across multiple software releases. Radar charts are a form of 2D visualization that can show multiple variables on a single chart. The RcRv receives input from developers or through refactoring identification tools, such as Ref-Finder, to generate charts. The generated charts can show the changes made during the refactoring process, highlighting areas of the trend of refactoring over evolution for multiple refactoring, multiple methods, and multiple classes. The evaluation study conducted to assess the usefulness of the RcRV tool has shown that the proposed tool is useful to developers, appealing, and easy to use. The proposed method of visualization can be beneficial for developers and maintainers to detect design violations and potential bugs in the code, thus saving time and effort during the development and maintenance process. Therefore, this research presents a significant contribution to the software engineering field by providing developers with an efficient tool to enhance code quality and maintainability.

Patients' Clinical and Psychological Status in Different COVID-19 Waves in Italy: A Quanti-Qualitative Study

BACKGROUND

COVID-19 waves have been characterized by different clinical manifestations, a decrease of functional abilities, and the presence of psychological symptoms. The aims of this study were to investigate differences in physical and psychological symptoms during the three Italian waves of the coronavirus pandemic.

METHODS

Patients undergoing a functional, cardiological and pneumological check-up follow-up at ICS Maugeri Institutes, 2-3 months after recovery from COVID-19 were consecutively recruited to participate in the study, completing a quanti-qualitative questionnaire about anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms, and personal resources.

RESULTS

104 patients were recruited: 44 and 60 during the first and second/third pandemic waves, respectively. Physical comorbidities were more present in the second/third waves compared to the first one, while no significant differences were found in anxious and depressive symptoms, which were significantly higher than normal during the three waves; PTSD symptoms were reported by 56.3% of patients. Family, social support, and a positive mindset were described as resources to cope with the COVID-19 burden. Negative affects arose during outbreaks (panic) and the disease (fear), while positive affect (joy) characterized only the follow-up period.

CONCLUSION

This study shows how psychophysical symptoms might change during the pandemic waves and highlights the importance of protective factors to balance the subjective distress.

Mental Health Analysis in Social Media Posts: A Survey

The surge in internet use to express personal thoughts and beliefs makes it increasingly feasible for the social NLP research community to find and validate associations between social media posts and mental health status. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of social media data bring to fore the importance of real-time responsible AI models for mental health analysis. Aiming to classify the research directions for social computing and tracking advances in the development of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) based models, we propose a comprehensive survey on quantifying mental health on social media. We compose a taxonomy for mental healthcare and highlight recent attempts in examining social well-being with personal writings on social media. We define all the possible research directions for mental healthcare and investigate a thread of handling online social media data for stress, depression and suicide detection for this work. The key features of this manuscript are (i) feature extraction and classification, (ii) recent advancements in AI models, (iii) publicly available dataset, (iv) new frontiers and future research directions. We compile this information to introduce young research and academic practitioners with the field of computational intelligence for mental health analysis on social media. In this manuscript, we carry out a quantitative synthesis and a qualitative review with the corpus of over 92 potential research articles. In this context, we release the collection of existing work on suicide detection in an easily accessible and updatable repository:https://github.com/drmuskangarg/mentalhealthcare.

The emotional side of taking part in a cancer clinical trial

BACKGROUND

Taking part in a cancer clinical trial often represents a source of psychological distress and emotional activation among patients and their caregivers. Nowadays, social media platforms provide a space for these groups to freely express and share their emotional experiences.

AIMS

We aimed to reveal the most prevalent basic and complex emotions and sentiments in the posts of the patients and caregivers contemplating clinical trials on Reddit. Additionally, we aimed to categorize the types of users and posts.

METHODS

With the use of keywords referring to clinical trials, we searched for public posts on the subreddit 'cancer'. R studio v. 4.1.2 (2021-11-01) and NRC Emotion Lexicon was used for analysis. Following the theoretical framework of Plutchik's wheel of emotions, the analysis included: 8 basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and 4 types of complex emotions (primary, secondary, tertiary, and opposite dyads). We utilized the package 'PyPlutchik' to visualize the emotion wheels in Python 3.10.5.

RESULTS

A total of 241 posts were included in the final database. User types (129 patients, 112 caregivers) and post types (142 expressed shared experience, 77 expressed advice, and 85 conveyed both) were identified. Both positive (N = 2557, M = .68) and negative (N = 2154, M = .57) sentiments were high. The most prevalent basic emotions were: fear (N = 1702, M = .45), sadness (N = 1494, M = .40), trust (N = 1470, M = .44), and anticipation (N = 1376, M = .37). The prevalence of complex/dyadic emotions and their interpretation is further discussed.

CONCLUSION

In this contribution, we identified and discussed prevalent emotions such as fear, sadness, optimism, hope, despair, and outrage that mirror the psychological state of users and affect the medical choices they make. The insights gained in our study contribute to the understanding of the barriers and reinforcers to participation in trials and can improve the ability of healthcare professionals to assist patients when confronted with this choice.

Emotional profiling and cognitive networks unravel how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

COVID-19 vaccines have been largely debated by the press. To understand how mainstream and alternative media debated vaccines, we introduce a paradigm reconstructing time-evolving narrative frames via cognitive networks and natural language processing. We study Italian news articles massively re-shared on Facebook/Twitter (up to 5 million times), covering 5745 vaccine-related news from 17 news outlets over 8 months. We find consistently high trust/anticipation and low disgust in the way mainstream sources framed "vaccine/vaccino". These emotions were crucially missing in alternative outlets. News titles from alternative sources framed "AstraZeneca" with sadness, absent in mainstream titles. Initially, mainstream news linked mostly "Pfizer" with side effects (e.g. "allergy", "reaction", "fever"). With the temporary suspension of "AstraZeneca", negative associations shifted: Mainstream titles prominently linked "AstraZeneca" with side effects, while "Pfizer" underwent a positive valence shift, linked to its higher efficacy. Simultaneously, thrombosis and fearful conceptual associations entered the frame of vaccines, while death changed context, i.e. rather than hopefully preventing deaths, vaccines could be reported as potential causes of death, increasing fear. Our findings expose crucial aspects of the emotional narratives around COVID-19 vaccines adopted by the press, highlighting the need to understand how alternative and mainstream media report vaccination news.

Fat stigma and body objectification: A text analysis approach using social media content

This study investigates how female and male genders are positioned in fat stigmatising discourses that are being conducted over social media. Weight-based linguistic data corpus, extracted from three popular social media (SM) outlets, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, was examined for fat stigmatising content. A mixed-method analysis comprising sentiment analysis, word co-occurrences and qualitative analysis, assisted our investigation of the corpus for body objectification themes and gender-based differences. Objectification theory provided the underlying framework to examine the experiential consequences of being fat across both genders. Five objectifying themes, namely, attractiveness, physical appearance, lifestyle choices, health and psychological well-being, emerged from the analysis. A deeper investigation into more facets of the social interaction data revealed overall positive and negative attitudes towards obesity, which informed on existing notions of gendered body objectification and weight/fat stigmatisation. Our findings have provided a holistic outlook on weight/fat stigmatising content that is posted online which can further inform policymakers in planning suitable props to facilitate more inclusive SM spaces. This study showcases how lexical analytics can be conducted by combining a variety of data mining methods to draw out insightful subject-related themes that add to the existing knowledge base; therefore, has both practical and theoretical implications.

DASentimental: Detecting Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in Texts via Emotional Recall, Cognitive Networks, and Machine Learning

Most current affect scales and sentiment analysis on written text focus on quantifying valence/sentiment, the primary dimension of emotion. Distinguishing broader, more complex negative emotions of similar valence is key to evaluating mental health. We propose a semi-supervised machine learning model, DASentimental, to extract depression, anxiety, and stress from written text. We trained DASentimental to identify how N = 200 sequences of recalled emotional words correlate with recallers’ depression, anxiety, and stress from the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21). Using cognitive network science, we modeled every recall list as a bag-of-words (BOW) vector and as a walk over a network representation of semantic memory—in this case, free associations. This weights BOW entries according to their centrality (degree) in semantic memory and informs recalls using semantic network distances, thus embedding recalls in a cognitive representation. This embedding translated into state-of-the-art, cross-validated predictions for depression (R = 0.7), anxiety (R = 0.44), and stress (R = 0.52), equivalent to previous results employing additional human data. Powered by a multilayer perceptron neural network, DASentimental opens the door to probing the semantic organizations of emotional distress. We found that semantic distances between recalls (i.e., walk coverage), was key for estimating depression levels but redundant for anxiety and stress levels. Semantic distances from “fear” boosted anxiety predictions but were redundant when the “sad–happy” dyad was considered. We applied DASentimental to a clinical dataset of 142 suicide notes and found that the predicted depression and anxiety levels (high/low) corresponded to differences in valence and arousal as expected from a circumplex model of affect. We discuss key directions for future research enabled by artificial intelligence detecting stress, anxiety, and depression in texts.