Resting heart rate, guilt, and sympathy: A developmental psychophysiological study of physical aggression

Development and feasibility of a virtual reality-based exergaming program to enhance cardiopulmonary fitness in children with developmental coordination disorder

Introduction

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by motor skill deficits. Such deficits often limit children's participation in physical activities, further affecting their overall health, including through reduced cardiopulmonary fitness. Because virtual reality (VR) devices offer interactive games and activities that require various movements and coordination, they can serve as motivating and enjoyable means for children to perform physical exercise. In this study, we developed a VR-based exergaming system and tested its ability to enhance the cardiopulmonary fitness of children with DCD.

Materials and methods

A total of 13 children with DCD and 10 young adults were recruited in phase I to examine the test-retest reliability and concurrent validity of our system (including a custom-made heart rate monitor) with a commercial heart rate device. In phase II, we included an additional 13 children with DCD to test the feasibility of the system. We tested the outcomes using the enjoyment rating scale, intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI), and 20-m shuttle run test (20mSRT).

Results

In phase I, test-retest reliability was good to excellent in the static task and moderate to good in the dynamic task. Concurrent validity was excellent in both tasks. In phase II, more than half of the children (18 out of 26) assigned the maximum rating for their enjoyment of the game; they also had high average scores on the IMI. Furthermore, after the 8-week training using the VR program, the average running distance of the 26 children in the 20mSRT had increased significantly from 129.23 m to 176.92 m (p < 0.001).

Conclusion

Our VR-based exergaming program can serve as an alternative intervention for enhancing cardiopulmonary fitness in children with DCD.

Children's sympathy moderates the link between their attentional orientation and ethical guilt

This study examined how children's attentional orientation towards environmental cues, dispositional sympathy and inhibitory control were associated with their ethical guilt. Participants were 4- and 6-year-old children (N = 211; 55% male) from ethnically diverse backgrounds. To assess ethical guilt, children were presented with two vignettes depicting ethical violations and reported how they would feel and why, if they had committed those transgressions. Using eye tracking, we calculated attentional orientation as the percentage of time children attended to other-oriented (i.e., victim) minus self-serving (i.e., object gained by transgressing) cues during these vignettes. Children also reported on their sympathy and completed an observational measure of inhibitory control. Although main effects were not significant, sympathy moderated the link between attentional orientation and ethical guilt: attentional orientation was positively associated with ethical guilt for children with low levels of sympathy but had no effect among those high in sympathy. These findings suggest that practices centred on prompting children to attend to other-oriented cues - and away from self-serving ones - may be effective particularly for children who are generally less sympathetic.

The psychophysiology of guilt in healthy adults

Guilt is a negative emotion, elicited by realizing one has caused actual or perceived harm to another person. Anecdotally, guilt often is described as a visceral and physical experience. However, while the way that the body responds to and contributes to emotions is well known in basic emotions, little is known about the characteristics of guilt as generated by the autonomic nervous system. This study investigated the physiologic signature associated with guilt in adults with no history of psychological or autonomic disorder. Healthy adults completed a novel task, including an initial questionnaire about their habits and attitudes, followed by videos designed to elicit guilt, as well as the comparison emotions of amusement, disgust, sadness, pride, and neutral. During the video task, participants' swallowing rate, electrodermal activity, heart rate, respiration rate, and gastric activity rate were continuously recorded. Guilt was associated with alterations in gastric rhythms, electrodermal activity, and swallowing rate relative to some or all the comparison emotions. These findings suggest that there is a mixed pattern of sympathetic and parasympathetic activation during the experience of guilt. These results highlight potential therapeutic targets for modulation of guilt in neurologic and psychiatric disorders with deficient or elevated levels of guilt, such as frontotemporal dementia, posttraumatic stress disorder, and Obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Autonomic Arousal, Ethical Guilt, and Externalizing Behavior in Childhood: A Clinical Extension and Replication

Lower autonomic arousal is associated with higher externalizing behavior in childhood but the mechanisms explaining this link are still debated. One possibility is that lower autonomic arousal makes it difficult for children to anticipate or express social emotions, such as ethical guilt rooted in concern for others, thereby increasing their likelihood of externalizing behavior. However, evidence for this social-emotional hypothesis has been limited to community samples. The present study included ethnically diverse samples of 150 typically developing children (M_age = 8.01 years; 50% girls) and 62 children referred for clinically elevated externalizing behavior (M_age = 9.16 years; 16% girls; N = 212). Caregivers reported children's externalizing behavior. Children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was measured as an indicator of parasympathetic activity in response to hypothetical vignettes depicting externalizing behavior. Children's ethical guilt was coded from semi-structured interviews following each vignette. Greater RSA increases (indicating a low-arousal, rest-and-digest response) were associated with lower ethical guilt. Lower ethical guilt was associated with higher externalizing behavior. A significant indirect effect showed that RSA increases were associated with higher externalizing behavior through relative lapses in ethical guilt. Results were consistent across and within the community and clinical samples. Theoretical and practical implications for clinically elevated externalizing behavior are discussed.

Attentional Control Moderates the Relation between Sympathy and Ethical Guilt

In response to ethical transgressions, some children respond with ethical guilt (e.g., remorse), while others do not. The affective and cognitive precursors of ethical guilt have been widely studied on their own, however, few studies have looked at the interaction of affective (e.g., sympathy) and cognitive (e.g., attention) precursors on ethical guilt. This study examined the effects of children's sympathy, attentional control, and their interaction on 4 and 6-year-old children's ethical guilt. A sample of 118 children (50% girls, 4-year-olds: M_age = 4.58, SD = .24, n = 57; 6-year-old: M_age = 6.52, SD = .33, n = 61) completed an attentional control task and provided self-reports of dispositional sympathy and ethical guilt in response to hypothetical ethical violations. Sympathy and attentional control were not directly associated with ethical guilt. Attentional control, however, moderated the relation between sympathy and ethical guilt, such that sympathy was more strongly related to ethical guilt at increasing levels of attentional control. This interaction did not differ between 4- and 6-year-olds or boys and girls. These findings illustrate an interaction between emotion and cognitive processes and suggest that promoting children's ethical development may require a focus on both attentional control and sympathy.

Remote Heart Rate Prediction in Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays Using Machine Learning Techniques

Head-mounted displays are virtual reality devices that may be equipped with sensors and cameras to measure a patient's heart rate through facial regions. Heart rate is an essential body signal that can be used to remotely monitor users in a variety of situations. There is currently no study that predicts heart rate using only highlighted facial regions; thus, an adaptation is required for beats per minute predictions. Likewise, there are no datasets containing only the eye and lower face regions, necessitating the development of a simulation mechanism. This work aims to remotely estimate heart rate from facial regions that can be captured by the cameras of a head-mounted display using state-of-the-art EVM-CNN and Meta-rPPG techniques. We developed a region of interest extractor to simulate a dataset from a head-mounted display device using stabilizer and video magnification techniques. Then, we combined support vector machine and FaceMash to determine the regions of interest and adapted photoplethysmography and beats per minute signal predictions to work with the other techniques. We observed an improvement of 188.88% for the EVM and 55.93% for the Meta-rPPG. In addition, both models were able to predict heart rate using only facial regions as input. Moreover, the adapted technique Meta-rPPG outperformed the original work, whereas the EVM adaptation produced comparable results for the photoplethysmography signal.

Machine Learning Models and Videos of Facial Regions for Estimating Heart Rate: A Review on Patents, Datasets, and Literature

Estimating heart rate is important for monitoring users in various situations. Estimates based on facial videos are increasingly being researched because they allow the monitoring of cardiac information in a non-invasive way and because the devices are simpler, as they require only cameras that capture the user’s face. From these videos of the user’s face, machine learning can estimate heart rate. This study investigates the benefits and challenges of using machine learning models to estimate heart rate from facial videos through patents, datasets, and article review. We have searched the Derwent Innovation, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science knowledge bases and identified seven patent filings, eleven datasets, and twenty articles on heart rate, photoplethysmography, or electrocardiogram data. In terms of patents, we note the advantages of inventions related to heart rate estimation, as described by the authors. In terms of datasets, we have discovered that most of them are for academic purposes and with different signs and annotations that allow coverage for subjects other than heartbeat estimation. In terms of articles, we have discovered techniques, such as extracting regions of interest for heart rate reading and using video magnification for small motion extraction, and models, such as EVM-CNN and VGG-16, that extract the observed individual’s heart rate, the best regions of interest for signal extraction, and ways to process them.

The Development of Respect in Children and Adolescents

Respect is an integral part of everyday life. It is a virtue central to the aim of living an ethically good life. Despite its importance, little is known about its emergence, development, correlates, and consequences. In this monograph, we aim to fill this gap by presenting empirical work on children's and adolescents' thinking and feelings about respect. Specifically, we examined the development of respect in ethnically diverse samples of children between the ages of 5 and 15 years (N = 476). Using a narrative and semi-structured interview, as well as self-, caregiver- and teacher-reports, and peer-nominations, we collected information on children's respect conceptions and reasoning, as well as on the social-emotional correlates and prosocial and aggressive behavioral outcomes of respect. We begin with a review of theoretical accounts on respect. This includes a selective overview of the history of respect in philosophy and psychology in Chapter I. Here, we discuss early writings and conceptualizations of respect across the seminal works of Kant and others. We then provide an account of the various ways in which respect is conceptualized across the psychological literature. In Chapter II, we review extant developmental theory and research on respect and its development, correlates, and behavioral consequences. In this chapter, as part of our developmental framework, we discuss how respect is related and distinct from other emotions such as sympathy and admiration. Next, we describe our methodology (Chapter III). This includes a summary of our research aims, samples, and measures used for exploring this novel area of research. Our primary goals were to examine how children and adolescents conceptualize respect, how their conceptualizations differ by age, whether and to what degree children feel respect toward others' "good" behavior (i.e., respect evaluations for behavior rooted in ethical norms of kindness, fairness, and personal achievement goals), and how children's respect is related to other ethical emotions and behaviors. The next three chapters provide a summary of our empirical findings. Chapter IV showcases our prominent results on the development of children's conceptions of respect. Results revealed that children, across age, considered prosociality to be the most important component involved in conceptualizations of respect. We also found age-related increases in children's beliefs about fairness as a core component of respect. Children and adolescents also reported feeling higher levels of respect for behavior in the ethical domain (e.g., sharing fairly and inclusion) than behavior in the personal domain (i.e., achieving high grades in school). Chapter V investigates how sympathy and feelings of sadness over wrongdoing relate to respect conceptions and respect for behavior. Our findings show that sadness over wrongdoing was positively associated with adolescents' fairness conceptions of respect. Sympathy was positively related to children's feelings of respect toward others' ethical behavior. In Chapter VI, we present links between respect and social behavior. Our findings provide some evidence that children's feelings of respect are positively linked with prosocial behavior and children's conceptions of respect (particularly those reflecting themes of fairness and equality) are negatively related to physical aggression. In the last two chapters, we discuss the empirical findings and their implications for practice and policy. In Chapter VII, we draw upon recent work in the field of social-emotional development to interpret our results and provide insight into how our findings extend previous seminal work on the development of respect from early childhood to adolescence. Finally, in Chapter VIII, we conclude by discussing implications for educational and clinical practice with children and adolescents, as well as social policies aimed at reducing discrimination and nurturing children's well-being and positive peer relationships.

A Systematic Review of Instruments to Assess Guilt in Children and Adolescents

Background: Guilt feelings have received considerable attention in past psychological theory and research. Several studies have been conducted that represent a range of views and propose various implications of guilt in children and adolescents. Variations in theoretical definitions of guilt, emphasizing a lack of measurement convergence, make it difficult to derive a comprehensive definition of the construct in childhood and adolescence. Research shows substantial variability in instruments used to measure guilt in children and adolescents. Purpose: The aim is to discuss existing contributions, illustrating the empirical validity of the available instruments used to measure guilt and identifying the nature of their theoretical backgrounds among children and adolescents. Methods: A systematic search was conducted using the following databases: PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed (all years up to February 19, 2020). Search terms were compiled into three concepts for all databases: "measure," "guilt," and "childhood/adolescence." In addition, a search was conducted to detect the gray literature. Results: After removing the duplicates, a total of 1,408 records were screened, resulting in the identification of 166 full-text articles to be further scrutinized. Upon closer examination, there was consensus that 148 of those studies met the study inclusion criteria or were not retrieved. Twenty-five studies were included in the quality assessment. The data were organized on three main categories: (1) interpersonal or prosocial guilt; (2) intrapunitive guilt or that referring to an excessive sense of responsibility; (3) not specifying a theoretical construct. A great heterogeneity in psychometric evaluations and substantial variability in guilt construct emerged. The construct most represented and supported by valid instruments was interpersonal or prosocial guilt. Analysis of the gray literature showed that some instruments were not immediately available to the clinical and scientific communities. Conclusions: The studies analyzed and selected for qualitative review employed various instruments to measure guilt. Results confirmed what is widely documented in the literature about substantial variability in instruments used to measure guilt. We argue the need to develop measures that assess currently overlooked dimensions of guilt and to provide further additional information about the psychometric proprieties of the available developed instruments.