#emotionrecognition — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #emotionrecognition, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 22, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Maternal stress during pregnancy linked to children’s social communication skills
Children whose mothers experienced high levels of stress during pregnancy and shortly after birth may face lasting challenges with social communication. A recent analysis indicates that early exposure to maternal hardship predicts poorer communication skills as youth progress from childhood into adolescence. The research was published in the journal Development and Psychopathology.
Social cognition is the broad ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to social information. It encompasses several distinct skills, including the capacity to recognize emotions in others and the ability to engage in reciprocal social communication. Emotion recognition typically emerges early in life and stabilizes during late childhood. In contrast, complex social communication abilities continue to mature well into adolescence.
The time before birth and the first few months of life represent a sensitive window for brain maturation. During this period, the developing nervous system is highly responsive to environmental inputs. Elevated maternal stress can lead to changes in fetal neurodevelopment, potentially by increasing the transfer of stress hormones across the placenta. This biological process can influence the growth of brain regions involved in social and emotional processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
Past research has linked early adversity to various emotional and behavioral difficulties, but it has remained uncertain exactly how maternal stress affects specific types of social cognition. Theodora Kokosi, Marta Francesconi, and Eirini Flouri at University College London conducted this study to examine whether prenatal adversity influences distinct social skills differently. They specifically wanted to track these skills across multiple developmental stages, from middle childhood through late adolescence.
The researchers analyzed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. This large study tracks the health and development of youth born in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s. The analytic sample for this investigation included 10,177 participants who had data available for at least one measure of social cognition.
To gauge early adversity, mothers completed established checklists documenting stressful life events they had experienced. These inventories capture a variety of challenging situations, ranging from relationship difficulties to financial strain. The mothers filled out these surveys at 18 weeks of pregnancy and again at eight weeks postpartum. The researchers combined these responses to create a cumulative score of adverse life events spanning the early prenatal period through the first two months of the child’s life.
The first outcome the researchers evaluated was social communication. Parents completed a standardized checklist assessing their child’s social reciprocity and communication behaviors. This assessment occurred at four different time points: when the children were 8, 11, 14, and 17 years old.
The researchers found that higher maternal exposure to stressful life events was associated with poorer offspring social communication. This link held even after adjusting for factors like family socioeconomic status, maternal postpartum depression, and the child’s intelligence scores. The negative association between early adversity and social communication also widened slightly as the children aged from 8 to 17 years old.
The authors suggest that this widening gap might reflect the changing nature of social environments. As teenagers navigate increasingly nuanced social expectations, underlying communication difficulties may become more pronounced. Early disruptions to neural systems involved in social processing could make it harder for youth to keep up with these escalating demands.
The study also examined emotion recognition, which relies on different neurocognitive systems than social communication. At age eight, children completed a task evaluating their ability to identify emotions from static images. They viewed photographs of faces displaying fear, happiness, sadness, or anger, and they were asked to categorize the expression.
Maternal exposure to stressful life events was not related to the children’s performance on this facial emotion recognition test. Early life adversity did not appear to hinder or help a child’s ability to interpret basic facial expressions. The researchers note that static image tests might not always capture subtle changes in emotional processing.
At age 14, the teenagers completed a different type of emotion recognition assessment. This computer-based test required participants to identify emotions based on the movement patterns of abstract geometric shapes. For example, an animated triangle repeatedly jabbing at a circle was intended to convey anger.
In this case, greater maternal exposure to stressful life events from mid-pregnancy to the early postpartum period predicted slightly better performance on the movement-based task. While this result might seem counterintuitive, it aligns with certain developmental theories. Some researchers propose that individuals raised in unpredictable environments develop a heightened sensitivity to dynamic social cues as a way to adapt and survive.
There are a few caveats to consider when interpreting this research. The study relied on parent reports to measure the children’s social communication skills. This method can introduce subjective bias, as parents might interpret their children’s behaviors differently based on their own experiences or stress levels.
The study is also observational, which means it cannot prove that maternal stress directly caused the differences in social cognition. Other unmeasured environmental or genetic factors could contribute to the observed associations. Additionally, some participants dropped out of the longitudinal study over time, and this missing data could influence the statistical estimates of how communication skills change with age.
The measures used in the study also capture only a fraction of the broader concept of social cognition. Social cognition includes other sub-domains, such as the ability to understand different mental states or draw inferences about the causes of actions. It remains unknown if maternal stress influences these other specialized skills in the same way.
Future investigations could benefit from incorporating objective, observer-rated assessments of social communication to supplement parent reports. Researchers might also explore the biological mechanisms linking maternal stress to fetal brain development. Examining specific pathways, such as changes in immune function or stress hormone regulation, could clarify exactly how the early environment shapes lifelong social skills.
The study, “Prenatal exposure to stressful life events and offspring social cognition across childhood and adolescence,” was authored by Theodora Kokosi, Marta Francesconi, and Eirini Flouri.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #MaternalStress #PrenatalStress #SocialCognition #ChildDevelopment #AdolescentDevelopment #EarlyAdversity #SocialCommunication #EmotionRecognition #Neurodevelopment #AvonLongitudinalStudy
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DATE: August 1, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Machine learning and online tests identify autistic adults with 92% accuracy
URL: https://www.psypost.org/machine-learning-and-online-tests-identify-autistic-adults-with-92-accuracy/
A combination of an autism questionnaire and online tests of emotion recognition, perception, and mental skills distinguished autistic from non-autistic adults with 92% accuracy. These findings come from a new study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
Identifying autism in adulthood can be difficult, which is problematic as demand for adult assessments grows. Lengthy waiting lists often delay access to a proper diagnosis and professional support. Autism varies widely between people, and adults may have developed ways of managing or concealing characteristics that would otherwise be noticed. Screening questionnaires can help identify autistic traits, but their results depend on how people understand and report their own experiences.
Meanwhile, studies comparing autistic and non-autistic people on individual mental tasks have often produced small or inconsistent differences. The researchers wanted to examine whether a computer model could recognize a broader pattern across numerous measurements. Rather than looking for one defining difficulty, the model considered how performance across emotion recognition, attention, memory, mental flexibility, and sensory processing might fit together.
Led jointly by Erik Van der Burg and Robert M. Jertberg of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, the team analyzed information from 552 Dutch adults. The group included 332 women and had an average age of about 38 years old. These individuals had participated in three previous online studies. The sample included 286 adults who reported a formal autism diagnosis and 266 without an autism diagnosis.
Participants completed online tasks assessing their ability to recognize emotions in faces and voices, combine information from sight and sound, and control automatic responses. They also completed tests that measured their ability to direct attention, remember spatial information, and switch flexibly between activities. The researchers extracted 54 measurements from these tasks. They then used a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning to classify the participants based on their scores.
The autistic participants were older on average, and the groups contained different proportions of women and men. To account for this, the researchers repeated the analysis using 250 participants closely matched by age and gender. This provided a stricter test to see if task performance alone could predict a diagnosis.
Using the online tasks alone, the model reached 81.8% accuracy in the full sample. However, some of that performance reflected demographic differences like age. Accuracy was 74% in the age and gender matched sample. By comparison, a standard 28-item autism questionnaire alone reached a maximum accuracy of 83.2% in that same matched group.
Combining the questionnaire scores with the task performance produced the strongest result with 92% accuracy. The combined model correctly identified 88% of autistic participants and 96% of non-autistic participants. Reaction times during emotion recognition tasks were especially informative for the computer model. Measures of response control, short-term memory, and mental flexibility also contributed to the high accuracy.
Importantly, the model found useful patterns among measurements that had not shown obvious average differences when examined separately. As the authors noted, many individual test scores did not show statistically significant differences between the two groups. In other words, a single test result might reveal very little by itself. Yet, a person’s overall pattern across several tasks can still predict an autism diagnosis when the data is combined.
Some limitations to the research should be noted. For instance, the autistic group contained individuals with higher overall intelligence and lower support needs than the broader autistic population. The study also compared diagnosed autistic adults with people from the general public. It did not compare them to people referred to a clinic with other possible conditions. This means the computer model has not yet been tested on the type of patients a doctor might evaluate during an initial clinical assessment.
The study, “Finding the forest in the trees: Using machine learning and online cognitive and perceptual measures to predict adult autism diagnosis,” was authored by Erik Van der Burg, Robert M. Jertberg, Hilde M. Geurts, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, and Sander Begeer.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/machine-learning-and-online-tests-identify-autistic-adults-with-92-accuracy/
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutismDiagnosis #MachineLearning #OnlineTesting #AutisticAdults #EmotionRecognition #CognitiveAssessment #MentalFlexibility #PerceptionScience #TranslationalPsychiatry #AIinHealthcare
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Alibaba’s R1-Omni AI Model Expands the Frontier of Emotion Recognition
#AI #AlibabaAI #GenAI #R1Omni #EmotionRecognition #China #OpenSourceAI #RLVR #AIModels
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Alibaba KI weiß, was Du FÜHLST! Emotionale KI mit R1-Omni
- Erste KI mit multimodaler Emotionserkennung
- Verbesserte emotionale Intelligenz
- Einsatz von Reinforcement Learning#ai #ki #artificialintelligence #kuenstlicheintelligenz #Alibaba #EmotionRecognition #ReinforcementLearning #r1omni
Jetzt lesen und folgen!
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The EU’s #AIAct prohibitions are now in effect! But gaps remain. Learn more: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/ai-act-prohibitions-february-2025/
🚫 Now banned in the EU: #ManipulativeAI, AI that exploits people's vulnerabilities, #SocialScoring, #Scraping of facial images on the internet, Live #FaceRecognition in Public Spaces. Others are partially banned, like #PredictivePolicing, #EmotionRecognition, and more.
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"On December 17th, EPIC filed comments with the Dutch data protection authority, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, regarding use of and prohibitions on emotion recognition surveillance. The EU AI Act prohibits the development, deployment, and placement on the EU market of emotion recognition systems intended for use in the workplace and in educational institutions, with limited exceptions where the algorithm is intended for certain medical or safety reasons. Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens opened a consultation requesting feedback on the implementation of this prohibition.
EPIC’s comments discuss some of the common types of emotion recognition, the harms of emotion recognition systems and their inefficacy, common uses and risks in the education and workplace settings, and recommendations. EPIC urges Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens to define emotion recognition systems broadly and either allow for no exemptions or construe the medical and safety exemption narrowly. This recommendation is based the complete lack of scientific evidence that these systems work and the many ways they violate the rights to privacy, data protection, freedom from discrimination, and various other rights enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and other EU regulations."
#EU #Netherlands #Surveillance #DataProtection #Biometrics #EmotionRecognition
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#EmotionRecognition #AI #PseudoScience: "For his part, Keyes is convinced technologists will never get that far. Developing an AI capable of parsing all the many nuances of human emotion, they say, would effectively mean cracking the problem of general AI, probably just after humanity has developed faster-than-light travel and begun settling distant solar systems.
Instead, in Keyes’ view, we’ve been left with a middling technology: one that demonstrates enough capability in applications with low-enough stakes to convince the right people to invest in further development.
It is this misunderstanding that seems to lie at the root of our inflated expectations of emotion recognition. “It works just well enough to be plausible, just well enough to be given an extra length of rope,” says Keyes, “and just poorly enough that it will hang us with that length of rope.”"
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/emerging-technology/emotion-recognition
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Cameras using Amazon AI analyzed emotions of train travelers in the UK
A huge privacy risk https://www.biometricupdate.com/202406/uk-train-stations-trial-amazon-emotion-recognition-on-passengers #ai #cctv #amazon #surveillance #emotionrecognition -
Writing his #MastersThesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was not a given for our Master's student Nektarios Totikos. Learn more about what got him so far and his research on #EmotionRecognition: http://go.tum.de/325709
📷private
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#EU #AI #AIAct #Biometrics #EmotionRecognition: "Despite these concerns, emotion recognition has not been included in Article 5 of the AI Act which defines Prohibited Artificial Intelligence Practices. Instead, emotion recognition is defined as a high-risk AI system and its use is prohibited at the workplace and in educational institutions, with exceptions for safety and medical reasons. Deployers of emotion recognition systems are not required to inform people about the operation of such systems if the system is used to “detect, prevent and investigate criminal offenses,” according to the legislation.
The language of the AI Act adds to the confusion on the legality of emotion recognition: The law states that the fact that an AI system is classified as a high-risk AI system “should not be interpreted as indicating that the use of the system is lawful under other acts of Union law or under national law compatible with Union law.”
At the beginning of February, European lawmakers reached an agreement on the technical details of the AI Act, opening the path to European Parliament committees’ approval in April. Although significant opposition is not expected, lawmakers may still introduce changes that could slow down the timeline of its implementation."
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202402/is-the-eu-ai-act-leaving-a-backdoor-for-emotion-recognition
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Associations between childhood trauma and emotion recognition
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/associations-between-childhood-trauma-and-emotion-recognition/ar-BB1igJxv?cvid=9a9acf99f341441bb3b9e4cfdc5b3bf7&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=9 -
🇬🇧EU governments nod off the #AIAct, paving the way for #biometricmasssurveillance via ubiquitious real-time #facesurveillance in the EU. Read the scathing criticism from civil
society: https://reclaimyourface.eu/eu-ai-act-will-fail-commitment-to-ban-biometric-mass-surveillance/ #emotionrecognition #liedetector #racialprofiling
#Pirates -
AI Act: EU policymakers nail down rules on AI models, butt heads on law enforcement https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/ai-act-eu-policymakers-nail-down-rules-on-ai-models-butt-heads-on-law-enforcement/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #AIOffice #artificialintelligence #emotionrecognition
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Leading MEPs make counter-proposal on AI rulebook’s law enforcement chapter https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/leading-meps-make-counter-proposal-on-ai-rulebooks-law-enforcement-chapter/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #artificialintelligence #emotionrecognition #lawenforcement
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“…walk past a #facialrecognition camera…with pseudo-scientific #emotionrecognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control…to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.”
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Join us #tomorrow at 5pm Berlin time for our new episode on #AI, #FacialRecognition & #EmotionRecognition!
Register and watch on LinkedIn:
https://lnkd.in/ea7ucCrJ
Or YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEGyGX3FuCI -
#EU #Biometrics #EmotionRecognition #BorderControl #CJEU: A"RTICLE 19 is disappointed by today’s judgement of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in a case concerning public access to documents about a controversial European Union-funded emotion recognition project to be deployed at borders. The EU Research Executive Agency (REA) denied access to numerous documents related to the project, citing the protection of the commercial interest. In Breyer v REA, the General Court, in first instance, ruled that the harm to the commercial interests outweighed the public interest in having such information disclosed as the requested documents related to the early stages of the research project. Today, the CJEU upheld this decision."
https://www.article19.org/resources/eu-court-denies-full-transparency-about-emotion-recognition/
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What if employers could gauge the ‘moods’ of workers? A dangerous new tech gains ground in India
Emotion recognition systems are finding growing use, from monitoring customer responses to ads to scanning for ‘distressed’ women in danger.
#AI #labour #EmotionRecognition #privacy #surveillance #technology #india
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#USA #CBP #SocialMedia #Surveillance #DHS #AI #EmotionRecognition: "Customs and Border Protection (CBP), part of the Department of Homeland Security, has bought millions of dollars worth of software from a company that uses artificial intelligence to detect “sentiment and emotion” in online posts, according to a cache of documents obtained by 404 Media.
CBP told 404 Media it is using technology to analyze open source information related to inbound and outbound travelers who the agency believes may threaten public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel. In this case, the specific company called Fivecast also offers “AI-enabled” object recognition in images and video, and detection of “risk terms and phrases” across multiple languages, according to one of the documents.
Marketing materials promote the software’s ability to provide targeted data collection from big social platforms like Facebook and Reddit, but also specifically names smaller communities like 4chan, 8kun, and Gab."
https://www.404media.co/ai-surveillance-tool-dhs-cbp-sentiment-emotion-fivecast/
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(6/n)
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[...is very interesting, as #France's law enforcement had recently been moving towards a #MinorityReport scenario.(4)](4)
https://mastodon.social/@HistoPol/110503083766962766 (scroll down to the 1st link to find the article in English, if you don't speak German)#EmotionRecognition systems in law enforcement, border management, workplace,...
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https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/european-parliament-committees-vote-ai-act/
a massive win for civil society, as EU #AIAct incorporates vital #humanrights safeguards…bans on remote #biometricidentification, #emotionrecognition, racist and discriminatory biometric categorization, #predictivepolicing, and mass biometric #datascraping…"The plenary vote is the Parliament’s last chance to ban dangerous, inherently discriminatory #AIsystems that are used in the migration context, and to counter efforts to exclude migrant people and racialised groups…”
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#Europea Parliament: "#AIAct: a step closer to the first #rules on #ArtificiaLIntelligence
>Once approved, they will be the world’s first rules on Artificial Intelligence
>MEPs include bans on #biometric #surveillance, #EmotionRecognition, #predictivepolicing #AISystems
>Tailor-made regimes for general-purpose #AI and foundation models like #GPT
>The right to make complaints about AI systems https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230505IPR84904/ai-act-a-step-closer-to-the-first-rules-on-artificial-intelligence -
AI Act moves ahead in EU Parliament with key committee vote https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/ai-act-moves-ahead-in-eu-parliament-with-key-committee-vote/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #artificialintelligence #ChatGPT #emotionrecognition
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AI Act moves ahead in EU Parliament with key committee vote https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/ai-act-moves-ahead-in-eu-parliament-with-key-committee-vote/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #artificialintelligence #ChatGPT #emotionrecognition
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CW: Stop the emotion recognition market
Emotion recognition is becoming a big thing in surveillance.
The European Union is about to adopt the Artificial Intelligence Act. The law aims to enable an European AI market which guarantees safety, and puts people at its heart. Good, fine.
But an incredibly dangerous aspect remains largely unaddressed - putting a stop to 'emotion recognition' market.
EDRi fights on: https://edri.org/our-work/emotion-misrecognition/