Wearable Neurophysiological Recordings in Middle-School Classroom Correlate With Students' Academic Performance

Emotion beliefs, emotion regulation strategies, and test anxiety of Chinese adolescents in grade 8: Evidence from physiological recordings during an exam

Controllability beliefs and goodness beliefs about emotion are two fundamental emotion beliefs. The present study considered both controllability beliefs and goodness beliefs to examine whether and how the emotion beliefs of adolescents influence their test anxiety. Besides self-reported test anxiety (sr-TA), the present study measured heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin response (GSR) using custom-designed wristbands during an exam as indicators of state test anxiety. The GSR was further decomposed into the tonic skin conductance level and the transient skin conductance response. The results revealed that, after controlling the goodness beliefs about anxiety, the controllability beliefs about emotion were negatively related to sr-TA. This relationship was mediated by suppression. The controllability beliefs about emotion were directly related to the integration of transient skin conductance responses of 5 min before the exam. They were also indirectly related to the integration of transient skin conductance responses of the exam period, whether including the 5 min before the exam or not, and HR during certain periods through suppression. Therefore, adolescents' controllability beliefs about emotion may have important implications for their test anxiety.

Detection of dynamic changes of electrodermal activity to predict the classroom performance of college students

It is emphasized in the Self-regulated learning (SRL) framework that self-monitoring of learning state is vital for students to keep effective in studying. However, it's still challenging to get an accurate and timely understanding of their learning states during classes. In this study, we propose to use electrodermal activity (EDA) signals which are deemed to be associated with physiological arousal state to predict the college student's classroom performance. Twenty college students were recruited to attend eight lectures in the classroom, during which their EDA signals were recorded simultaneously. For each lecture, the students should complete pre- and after-class tests, and a self-reported scale (SRS) on their learning experience. EDA indices were extracted from both time and frequency domains, and they were furtherly mapped to the student's learning efficiency. As a result, the indices relevant to the dynamic changes of EDA had significant positive correlations with the learning efficiency. Furthermore, compared with only using SRS, a combination with EDA indices had significantly higher accuracy in predicting the learning efficiency. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that the EDA dynamics are sensitive to the changes in learning efficiency, suggesting a promising approach to predicting the classroom performance of college students.

Student arousal, engagement, and emotion relative to Physical Education periods in school

BACKGROUND

Exercise has transient effects on cognition and mood, however the impact of Physical Education (PE) on cognitive and affective processes across the school day has not been examined.

METHOD

This study used wearables and questionnaires to track student arousal, engagement, and emotion across school days/periods following PE. Skin conductance, heart rate, heart rate variability, and self-reported engagement, arousal, and valence were analyzed for 23 students (age 15-17 years) on days with and without PE.

RESULTS

Sympathetic arousal was significantly higher for two hours following PE and there were stronger decreases in arousal across other classes relative to days without PE. On days with PE, engagement decreased, whereas valence increased from morning to afternoon.

CONCLUSION

These findings highlight the importance of considering acute effects of PE on learning across the entire school day, and demonstrates the feasibility of wearables to clarify how the timing of PE could positively or negatively affect self-regulation and learning.

Identification of heart rate change during the teaching process

Internet of Things (IoT) technology can be used in many areas of everyday life. The objective of this paper is to obtain physiological functions in a non-invasive manner using commonly available IoT devices. The aim of the research is to point out the possibility of using physiological functions as an identifier of changes in students' level of arousal during the teaching process. The motivation of the work is to find a correlation between the change in heart rate, the student's level of arousal and the student's partial and final learning results. The research was focused on the collection of physiological data, namely heart rate and the evaluation of these data in the context of identification of arousal during individual teaching activities of the teaching process. The experiment was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic via distance learning. During the teaching process, individual activities were recorded in time and HR was assigned to them. The benefit of the research is the proposed methodology of the system, which can identify changes in students' arousal in order to increase the efficiency of the teaching process. Based on the results of the designed system, they could also alert teachers who should be able to modify their teaching style in specific situations so that it is suitable for students and provides a basis for better teaching and understanding of educational materials. The presented methodology will be able to guarantee an increase in the success of the teaching process itself in terms of students' understanding of the teaching materials.

The Synergy Zone: Connecting the Mind, Brain, and Heart for the Ideal Classroom Learning Environment

This paper proposes a new perspective on implementing neuroeducation in the classroom. The pandemic exacerbated the mental health issues of faculty and students, creating a mental health crisis that impairs learning. It is important to get our students back in "the zone", both cognitively and emotionally, by creating an ideal learning environment for capturing our students and keeping them-the Synergy Zone. Research that examines the classroom environment often focuses on the foreground-instructors' organizational and instructional aspects and content. However, the emotional climate of the classroom affects student well-being. This emotional climate would ideally exhibit the brain states of engagement, attention, connection, and enjoyment by addressing the mind, brain, and heart. This ideal learning environment would be achieved by combining proposed practices derived from three areas of research: flow theory, brain synchronization, and positive emotion with heart engagement. Each of these enhances the desired brain states in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. I call this the Synergy Zone. A limitation of this proposed model is that implementation of some aspects may be challenging, and professional development resources might be needed. This essay presenting this perspective provides the relevant scientific research and the educational implications of implementation.

Proposal for Monitoring Students' Self-Efficacy Using Neurophysiological Measures and Self-Report Scales

The role of STEM-science, technology, engineering, mathematics-education is internationally recognized as critical to both the personal development of students and their future contribution to a country's economy as through this education they are equipped with the necessary twenty-first-century skills. As a result, there is a need to study the way in which such education affects students. In particular, the study of the self-efficacy factor is a contribution in this direction. Self-efficacy is a fundamental concept in the learning process as it contributes to shaping learning outcomes. Self-report scales are commonly used to measure self-efficacy; however, concerns in research circles have been raised regarding their limitations. On the other hand, there is a growing research interest in neurophysiological measures in the field of education, which seem to offer promising possibilities for understanding learning. Therefore, to better determine the impact of STEM education on students, a combination of self-report scales and neurophysiological measures is proposed to measure self-efficacy.

Misophonia: Analysis of the neuroanatomic patterns at the basis of psychiatric symptoms and changes of the orthosympathetic/ parasympathetic balance

Background/Aim

Misophonia is a disorder characterized by reduced tolerance to specific sounds or stimuli known as “triggers,” which tend to evoke negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses. In this study, we aimed to better characterize participants with misophonia through the evaluation of the response of the autonomic nervous system to “trigger sounds,” a psychometric assessment, and the analysis of the neurological pathways.

Materials and methods

Participants included 11 adults presenting with misophonic disturbance and 44 sex-matched healthy controls (HCs). Following recently proposed diagnostic criteria, the participants listened to six “trigger sounds” and a “general annoyance” sound (baby crying) during a series of physiological tests. The effects were examined through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), and of galvanic skin conductance (GSC). The fMRI was performed on a 3T Scanner. The HRV was obtained through the analysis of electrocardiogram, whereas the GSC was examined through the positioning of silver-chloride electrodes on fingers. Furthermore, the psychometric assessment included questionnaires focused on misophonia, psychopathology, resilience, anger, and motivation.

Results

Participants with misophonia showed patterns of increased sympathetic activation in response to trigger sounds and a general annoyance sound, the low frequency (LF) component of HRV, the sympathetic index, and the number of significant GSC over the threshold, where the amplitude/phasic response of GSC was higher. The fMRI analysis provided evidence for the activation of the temporal cortex, the limbic area, the ventromedial prefrontal/premotor/cingulate cortex, and the cerebellum in participants with misophonia. In addition, the psychometric assessment seemed to differentiate misophonia as a construct independent from general psychopathology.

Conclusion

These results suggest the activation of a specific auditory-insula-limbic pathway at the basis of the sympathetic activation observed in participants with misophonia in response to “trigger and general annoyance sounds.” Further studies should disentangle the complex issue of whether misophonia represents a new clinical disorder or a non-pathological condition. These results could help to build diagnostic tests to recognize and better classify this disorder. The relevance of this question goes beyond purely theoretical issues, as in the first case, participants with misophonia should receive a diagnosis and a targeted treatment, while in the second case, they should not.

Are Psychophysiological Wearables Suitable for Comparing Pedagogical Teaching Approaches?

This study describes how wearable devices can be used in elementary schools to compare some aspects of different teaching approaches. Upper arm wearables were used as an objective tool to compare three approaches when teaching science: (i) classical frontal teaching, (ii) embodied (kinesthetic) teaching, and (iii) a distance teaching approach. Using the wearables, the approaches were compared in terms of their impact on students' psychological arousal and perceived well-being. In addition, short-term and long-term knowledge gain and physiological synchronization between teacher and students during the lecture were assessed. A synchronization index was defined to estimate the degree of physiological synchronization. During distance teaching, by means of measurements with wearables, students were significantly less physically active and significantly less psychologically aroused. Embodied teaching allowed significantly higher physical activation than during the other two approaches. The synchronization index for all three teaching approaches was positive with the highest values for distance and frontal teaching. Moreover, knowledge gain immediately after the embodied lessons was higher than after frontal lessons. No significant differences in the long-term knowledge retention between the three different teaching methods were found. This pilot study proved that wearables are a useful tool in research in the field of education and have the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in learning, even in complex environments such as an elementary school classroom.

Recent Trends in Non-invasive Neural Recording Based Brain-to-Brain Synchrony Analysis on Multidisciplinary Human Interactions for Understanding Brain Dynamics: A Systematic Review

The study of brain-to-brain synchrony has a burgeoning application in the brain-computer interface (BCI) research, offering valuable insights into the neural underpinnings of interacting human brains using numerous neural recording technologies. The area allows exploring the commonality of brain dynamics by evaluating the neural synchronization among a group of people performing a specified task. The growing number of publications on brain-to-brain synchrony inspired the authors to conduct a systematic review using the PRISMA protocol so that future researchers can get a comprehensive understanding of the paradigms, methodologies, translational algorithms, and challenges in the area of brain-to-brain synchrony research. This review has gone through a systematic search with a specified search string and selected some articles based on pre-specified eligibility criteria. The findings from the review revealed that most of the articles have followed the social psychology paradigm, while 36% of the selected studies have an application in cognitive neuroscience. The most applied approach to determine neural connectivity is a coherence measure utilizing phase-locking value (PLV) in the EEG studies, followed by wavelet transform coherence (WTC) in all of the fNIRS studies. While most of the experiments have control experiments as a part of their setup, a small number implemented algorithmic control, and only one study had interventional or a stimulus-induced control experiment to limit spurious synchronization. Hence, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this systematic review solely contributes to critically evaluating the scopes and technological advances of brain-to-brain synchrony to allow this discipline to produce more effective research outcomes in the remote future.

A Virtual Reality and Online Learning Immersion Experience Evaluation Model Based on SVM and Wearable Recordings

The increasing development in the field of biosensing technologies makes it feasible to monitor students’ physiological signals in natural learning scenarios. With the rise of mobile learning, educators are attaching greater importance to the learning immersion experience of students, especially with the global background of COVID-19. However, traditional methods, such as questionnaires and scales, to evaluate the learning immersion experience are greatly influenced by individuals’ subjective factors. Herein, our research aims to explore the relationship and mechanism between human physiological recordings and learning immersion experiences to eliminate subjectivity as much as possible. We collected electroencephalogram and photoplethysmographic signals, as well as self-reports on the immersive experience of thirty-seven college students during virtual reality and online learning to form the fundamental feature set. Then, we proposed an evaluation model based on a support vector machine and got a precision accuracy of 89.72%. Our research results provide evidence supporting the possibility of predicting students’ learning immersion experience by their EEGs and PPGs.

Validity of electrodermal activity-based measures of sympathetic nervous system activity from a wrist-worn device

Measuring electrodermal activity (EDA) on the wrist with the use of dry electrodes is a promising method to help identify person-specific stressors during prolonged recordings in daily life. While the feasibility of this method has been demonstrated, detailed testing of validity of such ambulatory EDA is scarce. In a controlled laboratory study, we examine SCL and ns.SCR derived from wrist-based dry electrodes (Philips DTI) and palm-based wet electrodes (VU-AMS) in 112 healthy adults (57% females, mean age = 22.3, SD = 3.4) across 26 different conditions involving mental stressors or physical activities. Changes in these EDA measures were compared to changes in the Pre-ejection period (PEP) and stressor-induced changes in affect. Absolute SCL and ns.SCR frequency were lower at the wrist compared to the palm. Wrist-based ns.SCR and palm-based ns.SCR and SCL responded directionally consistent with our experimental manipulation of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. Average within-subject correlations between palm-based and wrist-based EDA were significant but modest (r SCL = 0.31; r ns.SCR = 0.42). Changes in ns.SCR frequency at the palm (r = -0.44) and the wrist (r = -0.36) were correlated with changes in PEP. Both palm-based and wrist based EDA predicted changes in affect (6.5%-14.5%). Our data suggest that wrist-based ns.SCR frequency is a useful addition to the psychophysiologist's toolkit, at least for epidemiology-sized ambulatory studies of changes in sympathetic activity during daily life.

A dataset of daily ambulatory psychological and physiological recording for emotion research

To better understand the psychological and physiological basis of human emotion, increasing interest has been drawn towards ambulatory recordings of emotion-related data beyond the laboratories. By employing smartphones-based ambulatory assessment and wrist-worn physiological recording devices, the Daily Ambulatory Psychological and Physiological recording for Emotion Research (DAPPER) dataset provides momentary self-reports and physiological data of people's emotional experiences in their daily life. The dataset consists of ambulatory psychological recordings from 142 participants and physiological recordings from 88 of them over five days. Both the experience sampling method (ESM) and the day reconstruction method (DRM) were employed to have a comprehensive description of the participants' daily emotional experiences. Heart rate, galvanic skin response, and three-axis acceleration were recorded during the day time. By including multiple types of physiological and self-report data at a scale of five days with 100+ participants, the present dataset is expected to promote emotion researches in real-life, daily settings.

Collaborative Learning Quality Classification Through Physiological Synchrony Recorded by Wearable Biosensors

Interpersonal physiological synchrony has been consistently found during collaborative tasks. However, few studies have applied synchrony to predict collaborative learning quality in real classroom. To explore the relationship between interpersonal physiological synchrony and collaborative learning activities, this study collected electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) during naturalistic class sessions and compared the physiological synchrony between independent task and group discussion task. The students were recruited from a renowned university in China. Since each student learn differently and not everyone prefers collaborative learning, participants were sorted into collaboration and independent dyads based on their collaborative behaviors before data analysis. The result showed that, during group discussions, high collaboration pairs produced significantly higher synchrony than low collaboration dyads (p = 0.010). Given the equivalent engagement level during independent and collaborative tasks, the difference of physiological synchrony between high and low collaboration dyads was triggered by collaboration quality. Building upon this result, the classification analysis was conducted, indicating that EDA synchrony can identify different levels of collaboration quality (AUC = 0.767 and p = 0.015).

Application Experiences Using IoT Devices in Education

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a regular part of our lives. The devices can be used in many sectors, such as education and in the learning process. The article describes the possibilities of using commonly available devices such as smart wristbands (watches) and eye tracking technology, i.e., using existing technical solutions and methods that rely on the application of sensors while maintaining non-invasiveness. By comparing the data from these devices, we observed how the students’ attention affects their results. We looked for a correlation between eye tracking, heart rate, and student attention and how it all impacts their learning outcomes. We evaluate the obtained data in order to determine whether there is a degree of dependence between concentration and heart rate of students.

Subjective Evaluation of Performance in a Collaborative Task Is Better Predicted From Autonomic Response Than From True Achievements

Whereas the fundamental role of the body in social cognition seems to be generally accepted, elucidating the bodily mechanisms associated with non-verbal communication and cooperation between two or more persons is still a challenging endeavor. In this article we propose a fresh approach for investigating the function of the autonomic nervous system that is reflected in parameters of heart rate variability, respiration, and electrodermal activity in a social setting. We analyzed autonomic parameters of dyads solving a target-tracking task together with the partner or individually. A machine classifier was trained to predict the subjects' rating of performance and collaboration either from tracking error data or from the set of autonomic parameters. When subjects collaborated, this classifier could predict the subjective performance ratings better from the autonomic response than from the objective performance of the subjects. However, when they solved the task individually, predictability from autonomic parameters dropped to the level of objective performance, indicating that subjects were more rational in rating their performance in this condition. Moreover, the model captured general knowledge about the population that allows it to predict the performance ratings of an unseen subject significantly better than chance. Our results suggest that, in particular in situations that require collaboration with others, evaluation of performance is shaped by the bodily processes that are quantified by autonomic parameters. Therefore, subjective performance assessments appear to be modulated not only by the output of a rational or discriminative system that tracks the objective performance but to a significant extent also by interoceptive processes.