Annotateddimensionsinclude Valence, Arousal and Emotion label, with annotations gathered using Prolific.

Understanding how driver mental states differ between active and autonomous driving is critical for designing safe human-vehicle interfaces. This paper presents the first EEG-based comparison of cognitive load, fatigue, valence, and arousal across the two driving modes. Using data from 31 participants performing identical tasks in both scenarios of three different complexity levels, we analyze temporal patterns, task-complexity effects, and channel-wise activation differences. Our findings show that although both modes evoke similar trends across complexity levels, the intensity of mental states and the underlying neural activation differ substantially, indicating a clear distribution shift between active and autonomous driving. Transfer-learning experiments confirm that models trained on active driving data generalize poorly to autonomous driving and vice versa. We attribute this distribution shift primarily to differences in motor engagement and attentional demands between the two driving modes, which lead to distinct spatial and temporal EEG activation patterns. Although autonomous driving results in lower overall cortical activation, participants continue to exhibit measurable fluctuations in cognitive load, fatigue, valence, and arousal associated with readiness to intervene, task-evoked emotional responses, and monotony-related passive fatigue. These results emphasize the need for scenario-specific data and models when developing next-generation driver monitoring systems for autonomous vehicles.

Abstract--In this paper, we introduce Story2MIDI, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer-based model for generating emotion-aligned music from a given piece of text. T o develop this model, we construct the Story2MIDI dataset by merging existing datasets for sentiment analysis from text and emotion classification in music. The resulting dataset contains pairs of text blurbs and music pieces that evoke the same emotions in the reader or listener . Despite the small scale of our dataset and limited computational resources, our results indicate that our model effectively learns emotion-relevant features in music and incorporates them into its generation process, producing samples with diverse emotional responses. We evaluate the generated outputs using objective musical metrics and a human listening study, confirming the model's ability to capture intended emotional cues. We live in a world with an ever-growing demand for entertainment and multimedia content. The rise of social media and platforms for music, audio-books, and podcasts has gained tremendous momentum. At the heart of many of these forms of entertainment lies a narrative, a story that drives the experience, whether in a film, a game, a podcast, or a documentary.

Study Objectives: Wrist accelerometry is widely used for inferring sleep-wake state. Previous works demonstrated poor wake detection, without cross-device generalizability and validation in different age range and sleep disorders. We developed a robust deep learning model for to detect sleep-wakefulness from triaxial accelerometry and evaluated its validity across three devices and in a large adult population spanning a wide range of ages with and without sleep disorders. Methods: We collected wrist accelerometry simultaneous to polysomnography (PSG) in 453 adults undergoing clinical sleep testing at a tertiary care sleep laboratory, using three devices. We extracted features in 30-second epochs and trained a 3-class model to detect wake, sleep, and sleep with arousals, which was then collapsed into wake vs. sleep using a decision tree. To enhance wake detection, the model was specifically trained on randomly selected subjects with low sleep efficiency and/or high arousal index from one device recording and then tested on the remaining recordings. Results: The model showed high performance with F1 Score of 0.86, sensitivity (sleep) of 0.87, and specificity (wakefulness) of 0.78, and significant and moderate correlation to PSG in predicting total sleep time (R=0.69) and sleep efficiency (R=0.63). Model performance was robust to the presence of sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and periodic limb movements in sleep, and was consistent across all three models of accelerometer. Conclusions: We present a deep model to detect sleep-wakefulness from actigraphy in adults with relative robustness to the presence of sleep disorders and generalizability across diverse commonly used wrist accelerometers.

--Foundation Models (FMs) are rapidly transforming Affective Computing (AC), with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now capable of recognising emotions in zero-shot settings. This paper probes a critical but underexplored question: what visual cues do these models rely on to infer affect, and are these cues psychologically grounded or superficially learnt? We benchmark varying scale VLMs on a teeth-annotated subset of AffectNet dataset and find consistent performance shifts depending on the presence of visible teeth. Through structured introspection of -the best-performing model, i.e., GPT -4o, we show that facial attributes like eyebrow position drive much of its affective reasoning, revealing a high degree of internal consistency in its valence-arousal predictions. These patterns highlight the emergent nature of FMs behaviour, but also reveal risks: shortcut learning, bias, and fairness issues--especially in sensitive domains like mental health and education. Understanding and interpreting human emotions is fundamental to social interaction. From early developmental cues in infants, to high-stakes decision-making in adults, facial expressions serve as a primary channel for conveying affect.

Factor analysis studies have shown that the primary dimensions of word meaning are Valence (V), Arousal (A), and Dominance (D). Existing lexicons such as the NRC VAD Lexicon, published in 2018, include VAD association ratings for words. Here, we present a complement to it, which has human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 10k English Multiword Expressions (MWEs) and their constituent words. We also increase the coverage of unigrams, especially words that have become more common since 2018. In all, the new NRC VAD Lexicon v2 now has entries for 10k MWEs and 25k words, in addition to the entries in v1. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to examine emotional characteristics of MWEs, including: 1. The degree to which MWEs (idioms, noun compounds, and verb particle constructions) exhibit strong emotionality; 2. The degree of emotional compositionality in MWEs. The lexicon enables a wide variety of research in NLP, Psychology, Public Health, Digital Humanities, and Social Sciences. The NRC VAD Lexicon v2 is freely available through the project webpage: http://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/nrc-vad.html

We developed a robot arm that collaboratively paints with a human artist. The robot has an awareness of the artist's heartbeat through the EmotiBit sensor, which provides the arousal levels of the painter . Given the heartbeat detected, the robot decides to increase proximity to the artist's workspace or retract. If a higher heartbeat is detected, which is associated with increased arousal in human artists, the robot will move away from that area of the canvas. If the artist's heart rate is detected as neutral, indicating the human artist's baseline state, the robot will continue its painting actions across the entire canvas. We also demonstrate and propose alternative robot-artist interactions using natural language and physical touch. This work combines the biometrics of a human artist to inform fluent artistic interactions.