This study develop the Tversky and Kahneman (1973) and Slovic et al (1991), (2004) to assesses the usefulness of heuristics, its objectives, and contingent negative variation (CNV) as they relate to consumer's decision-making in the selection of an item. CNV is one of the event-related components of the brain, which is frequently used in the study of attention and learning, among others. In this study, on CNV measurement, an experiment was arranged where a subject was given the task of selecting a card and finding the pattern in return received a reward. To win lot of rewards, it was necessary for the subject to discover the patterns on the cards and then to quickly turn over the card. It was necessary to solve the problem with the use of heuristics as this was repeated numerous times. This is the first study on the consumer decision-making process under risk, CNV measurements that are selected through the use of heuristics in neuroeconomics.

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Smooth communication between doctors and patients during medical interviews is regarded as a very significant part of successful medical practice. To improve the quality of medical interviews, it is important that doctors correctly grasp the pain symptoms and medical conditions of their patients. However, it is often difficult for doctors to measure the quality of pain symptoms based solely on the verbal expressions patients use because pain is a highly subjective experience. In medical interviews, Japanese patients frequently use onomatopoeia such as “kiri-kiri” or “gaN-gaN” to express their pain symptoms and medical conditions. Doctors try to grasp patients' conditions by using metaphors corresponding to the onomatopoeia being expressed. In our study, therefore, we focused on the relationship between onomatopoeia and metaphors, and developed a system which automatically proposes metaphors corresponding to the onomatopoeia inputted by users. Our system is expected to add support to medical practice interviews.

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This study clarifies the impact that the display method of fabric drapes has on texture evaluation when it is changed dramatically in order to identify an image display method that allows easier judging of drape texture in online shopping environments. A texture evaluation experiment of drapes in three different states (static, rotating, and combination of static and rotating or inverse rotating) was conducted in two different situations: presenting the actual drape and presenting a video of the drape. Results show that, regardless of the presentation method (i.e., actual drape or video), dynamic alterations greatly impact soft-crisp evaluation, one of the primary texture evaluation criteria. In addition, the ideal rotating speed was found to be 1 rps. This study quantitatively shows that altering drapes dynamically is effective in presenting an effective image for evaluation in online shopping environments.

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We designed a healthcare system that focuses on emotional aspects to cope with negative emotions in daily life. Our emotional healthcare system integrates emotion recognition based on facial expressions and ECG signals to identify user emotions to provide appropriate services. Recognizing emotions from facial expressions is sometimes difficult to correctly recognize them when users hide their emotions from their appearance. To solve this, emotion recognition using ECG signals is applied because they cannot be controlled by humans, since they are directly affected by mental states including emotions. This paper focuses on emotion recognition using ECG signals. To recognize emotions from them, we adapted the local binary pattern (LBP) and local ternary pattern (LTP) which are favorable local pattern description methods for emotion recognition by facial expressions. We evaluated the LBP and LTP performances. Our results indicate that they effectively extracted ECG features with high accuracy. In real-time evaluation, we experimentally evaluated its efficiency and effectiveness for recognizing negative emotions. Our results show that the real-time emotion recognition from ECG signal is beneficial and efficient enough for emotional healthcare system to analyze negative emotions to provide assistance.

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Increasing congestion on roads in metropolitan region and increasing usage of private vehicles are the serious issues that affected to the development of the transportation sector. Sri Lanka incurs a huge economic loss of around 40 billion Rupees annually due to road traffic congestion and air pollution with too many vehicles on a limited road network. To provide a productive solution for these massive issues, it is important to identify the factors influencing to choose the mode for traveling by the people. All of the factors are related with the socio economic and service attributes. The objective of this study is trying to identify the factors affecting to select the transportation mode for their regular activities in the aspects of the personal characteristic and the travel- based characteristic. A survey was conducted to Colombo Metropolitan Area in the Western Province of Sri Lanka to conduct the quantitative research method and to find the influencing factor to select the traveling mode. The outcome of the factor analysis shows that. Income, Vehicle ownership, Safety and Comfort become the factors that show up many times compared with others factors.

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It is recognised that in order to maintain the satoyama in Japan, the establishment of a partnership amongst groups and activities caring for the environment will be necessary. This study focuses on Landcare, a nation-wide movement of community based natural resource management in Australia. Landcare has been tackling Australia's serious environmental issues through building partnerships and networking among individuals, local groups, schools, business corporations, and the various levels of governments since 1986. Through the research, which included observations and interviews with people engaged in Landcare, this study shows that designing and implementing local activities have contributed to cultivating a sense of caring for the local environment, and further, that Landcare has a structure of multi-party networking and partnership with systems of natural resource management that facilitates collaboration . These two aspects of Landcare movement have an educational impact and can be considered the educational approach of Landcare.

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This paper aims at proposing a new system to estimate the emotional value content for short sentences. The proposed system utilizes the co-occurrence strength between adjectives and nouns based on similarity measurements and semantic relationships to explore the possibility of finding the semantic association between adjectives and an input sentence. At first, keywords extracted from the input sentence are used to query adjectives from Google N-gram corpus using keywords-based templates. The dataset for the step of association measurement is continually collected using templates created from each keyword. Co-occurrence frequencies of the adjectives and keywords are obtained; however, to improve the efficiency of this task, patterns showing the semantic relationships between them are also considered. The semantic similarity scores computed by several modified computational measurements and the pattern frequencies are used for training not only to classify adjectives into two classes- association and non-association, but also to get the association scores. For each keyword, the lists of adjectives and keyword are then sorted in the decreasing order by their association scores. Finally, a rank aggression method - Borda's method which is used to generate an acceptable ranking for a given set of rankings is considered and the top n_a adjectives (in this paper n_a is 5) are chosen according to the estimated values. The main contribution of this method is to design an effective method for the adjective selection task of the input sentence of the impression estimation system. We evaluated our approach using two tasks: the first one is the quality of the association measurement and the second one is the efficiency of the proposed method. The evaluation for association classification on 4,500 pairs of words shows that the average accuracy is 87.0 %. And for the performance of the proposed method, we carried out subjective experiments and obtained fairly good results.

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In recent years, affective design is found to have great application values in document design that help reduce the load of design works and improve the satisfaction of consumers. However, most research results of affective design are merely used as design guidebooks. A mass of design features make ordinary people confused and incapable to achieve a high quality design scheme. In this paper, an approach is proposed to establish an affective design system that can create a design scheme automatically by a feature combination engine. As a branch of document design, card design is acted as first trial application. In this study, a kansei evaluation experiment was executed and the experiment data was analyzed by factor analysis and quantification theory type I. We also built an ontology-based domain model and established an automatic design system for name card. Moreover, the quality of system output was verified by evaluation experiments.

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Studies reveal the influence of affective factors, emotion, behavior, and attitude on student success in learning. While quantification of student performance in cognitive factors is straightforward; measuring student performance in affective factors is indirect. Affective factors are commonly represented in linguistic and imprecise terms. This study proposes a method to identify student performance based on student affective factors in learning English using Fuzzy Systems. The system is then empirically validated. In this study, affective factors are selected based on student performance in English learning. A questionnaire is developed to collect data on student affective factors. Fuzzy sets are built based on the factors obtained. A fuzzy inference system is built to infer student achievement in English learning based on student affective factors. The result showed an empirically valid model that is useful as a basis to understand student performance in affective factors and to assess students as an additional evaluation.

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Social Commerce Sites has proliferated on the Mobile Web and Mobile App. However, because virtually anyone can publish this type of information on the Web, consumers cannot always rely on traditional credibility cues such as reputation of a journal. Instead, they must rely on a variety of cues, including visual presentation, to determine the veracity of information. This study demonstrates that users make a judgment of mobile sites' credibility not by contents but by user experiences. Most important factor of user experiences is the visual design and the next is information structure. Brand recognition is also one of user experiences, but users are not always depend on a brand recognition when choosing favorite sites.

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In this study, we focused on exemplary cases of product development at type B vocational aid centers (VACs) that aim to enable persons with disabilities, who have difficulty obtaining regular employment, to participate in society and earn an income. We surveyed seven VACs and three prefectural governments to analyze successful methods of product development and design management as well as the effect of support provided by each prefecture. As a result, four common items were identified as factors for success: 1) development of original products that are competitive; 2) ingenious human resource management; 3) ingenious sales and marketing; and 4) strategic incorporation of regional strengths into the business. In addition, we found that even though the government support provided to the VACs generally had an effect to increase the wages, it was not an essential factor for success.

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In this paper, we propose an automatic Waka generation system with custom database, based on texts given by the user. The proposed text-based system has better compatibility with Waka poem, improving consistence and logicality of generated poems. Kansei information is also considered to make poems natural and closer to the emotions the user wants to express. Presented by interactive generation experiments, the proposed system can generate Waka poems reflecting stylistic and grammatical requirements. Meanwhile, the poems are also with related meanings and emotions to the original text and some poeticness.

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Our objective is to imagine and design concepts of tangible communication devices that allow to remotely share emotions. Tangible devices are operated by users' gestures and touch, thus, for usability purpose, it is necessary to investigate what gestures are intuitively performed by users for expressing given patterns of emotions. We conducted an experiment where participants had to perform a gestural and/or tactile interaction with device to express emotions with various levels of arousal and valence. Videos of the gestural interactions were recorded and participants completed questionnaires. The data analysis shows a large variety of gestures across the sample of participants, while there is a low inter-individual variety in the intensity and the location of the gesture used for expressing a given emotion. The results of the study were used as a source of inspiration for designing “EMO”, a gesture-based emotional communication device. The interactive functional prototype and the appearance prototype are described in the paper.

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Olfaction-based interaction is considered as a new frontier in digital communication. There are increasing range of new products attaching scent diffusers to personal electronic devices (personal computer, smartphone, etc.). In stead of enriching the virtual reality experience, we intended to investigate the effects of scents in the experience of using application software that has no correlation or association with scents. By conducting two experiments, it was shown that different scents influenced user experience in different ways on emotion and performance. Stimulating scents (essential oils) influenced emotion both positively and negatively when using different applications such as games and productivity software. On the other hand, relaxing scents (tea leaves) had positive effects on the performance of productivity software. The study suggests that the inclusion of scent in the design process of personal electronic devices will be significant even the specific application software or function has no association or correlation with scents.

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Emotions elicited by the appearance and experience of a product play an important role in its market success, like functionality and usability. There has been a rapid growth in the number of studies related to the characterization of user emotions and issues concerning their measurement. Auditory Parameter Method is a non-verbal emotion assessment tool, which considers a set of auditory stimuli as generic scale. In order to investigate the robustness of this tool in cross-cultural context, a comparative experiment is conducted with Chinese and French participants on the same product samples (eyeglass frames). The statistical results indicate that there are limited intercultural differences in the perception of the proposed auditory stimuli, and the design evaluations are similar for both groups. This empirical study proves that the Auditory Parameter Method is stable and reliable in a cross-cultural context because of its property of language independence.

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The aim of the current study was to investigate personality traits associated with body shape. In a pilot study, 12 pairs of adjectives were selected. In the main study, 91 university students rated pictures of body shape using the semantic differential method. The results show that the normal figures were rated most positively. The very thin figure was least likely to be regarded as favorable or active. Overall, figures farther from normal were rated as less active and less favorable. Thin figures were rated as more reliable than large figures.

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This paper tries to find the possibility of searching respondents capable of giving appropriate answers to a newly posted question in order to eliminate mismatches between the intentions of questioners and respondents of Question and Answer sites. The impressions of sixty questions and their responses posted at Yahoo! Chiebukuro have been experimentally evaluated. By applying factor analysis to the scores of the experiment, the impression of the statements could be captured by nine factors. Factor scores can be estimated by using the features including syntactic information, word imageability, closing sentence expressions, word familiarity, and notation validity. The good overall estimation accuracy has been obtained. The distances between the factor score of a question statement and those of answer statements already posted are calculated. It is shown that the distance and the number of appearance may help us select users who can give appropriate answers to a question. With the consideration of categories of answer statements, users who specialize in certain categories could be regarded to give more appropriate answers.

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Design of water quality monitoring network in a river basin is most necessary when the cost concerns of the process is considered. The most of the methods have followed a set of objectives in the last few decades to find optimized selection of sampling locations. One of the main contributions of this paper is to design an optimized selection of sampling sites network considering the newly identified monitoring sites rather than the points which are available in the current network that exists. This study used four criteria including one urbanization factor which is in the development pressure index (DPI) rather than the factors environmental pressure index (EPI) to evaluate the objectives. Multi objective analysis method and genetic algorithm were applied for find optimal network and three constraints are used to obtain a practical solution. The other main purpose of this study is to compare the efficiency between method of genetic algorithm and the brute-force approach by considering the computation time of fitness functions. Further, the fitness function was defined using the linear combination of the criteria. Both proposed that the optimal water quality monitoring networks are reasonably sufficient to enhance the existing network in Kelani River. The genetic algorithm has a high performance to find the fitness functions even though all possible combinations of monitoring sites are identified by brute-force approach.

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Beyond the conventional playlists organized based on genre, artist, or album, the study attempts to visualize a music library on a 2D plane enabling the users for emotion based navigation. A dataset constructed for this research purpose, comprising of music stimuli which associate Sri Lankan folk melodies has been utilized in the study. Using the method miremotion defined in MATLAB MIRToolbox, the objective predictions for the discrete emotions/emotion dimensions have been obtained. Subjective emotion ratings were collected through a listening experiment. By running a Principal Component Analysis on the data matrix combining subjective and objective measures, music library is mapped on to a 2D plane while identifying the correlations among each measures. Several directions have been identified for extending the research whereas the cultural specificity in emotional expression in music and the subjectivity in emotion perception have made the emotion based music recommendation a challenging task.

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Several studies have focused on the usability of human–machine interfaces (HMIs). To date it remains a challenge to interpret the emotions of users operating them, because many factors that may affect emotion are related to each other. In this paper, we use onomatopoeia to grasp the emotion of HMI users. Japanese has a large number of onomatopoeic words to express sensory experiences. We investigated sound symbolic associations between phonemes of Japanese onomatopoeia and operational feelings of users. We conducted a psychological experiment where respondents used onomatopoeia to express feelings when they used HMIs and evaluated their impressions (comfort/discomfort) regarding use of devices. Results show a certain relationship between the phonemes of the onomatopoeia and the operational feelings. Onomatopoeia is an effective way of quantifying users' operational feelings about HMIs.

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Heart rate variability (HRV) is known to represent the activity of the autonomic nervous system and is used as a measure for stress levels. Generally, HRV is calculated from the heart rate or the pulse wave using an electrocardiogram (ECG) that is physically-taxing. However, for those with psychological strains and disorders, a handy device that can be used at any time is necessary in order to detect mental illness in its early stages and to prevent it from becoming worse. Therefore, we focused on the idea of using a popular device, the smartphone, and we developed a real-time, HRV-calculating application that uses a photoplethysmogram (PPG) obtained with the smartphone's camera. The user-friendly interface of the application was designed for use by a wide range of age groups. We conducted two experiments and compared the HRV data obtained by our application with ECG measurements to verify the application's accuracy. Once a certain level of accuracy was reached, we evaluated the usability of our application among young and elderly users. The results showed that improvements are necessary in terms of the interface, measuring time, and other performance indices.

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Kawaii describes Japanese culture and is used all over the world to express emotional feeling. This study hypothesized that kawaii feelings can be classified as excited and relaxed responses when watching photographs. Heart rate measurements were performed for subjects viewing exciting kawaii, relaxing kawaii, and uninteresting photographs. Statistical tests were conducted to relate heartbeat modulations and photograph conditions. Exciting kawaii photographs enhanced heart rates, while their relaxing counterparts did not increase heart rates to the same levels, validating the initial hypothesis.

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