讲座预告｜12月20日：冯海岚教授与Jennifer C Lay副教授

题目：① The Role of Emotion in Age-related Cognition ② Alone with my thoughts: Using natural language processing to distinguish lonely from calm aloneness

报告人：冯海岚，Jennifer C Lay

时间：2023年12月20日 下午15:00

地点：太阳成集团tyc151cc系楼202

01

The Role of Emotion in Age-related Cognition

Abstract

Although ageing is associated with declines in some physical and cognitive domains, individual older adults can use their gains and strategies in the emotional and social domains to compensate for these declines. In particular, once older individuals find an activity or performance meaningful, they are more motivated to engage in it, attend to it, remember it and may eventually perform better in it. My laboratory has found support for this phenomenon in domains such as social and activity selection, cognitive performance, health and purchase decision making and prosocial behavior.  I will briefly review this line of research and then discuss how they have implications not just for aging, but also for public health, geron-technology and climate change.

Lecturer Introduction

Helene H. Fung is a Professor and the Chairperson of the Dept of Psychology, the Executive Director of the Centre for Positive Social Science and a Deputy Director of the Institute of Ageing, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. She obtained her BS from University of Washington, Seattle, and MA and PhD from Stanford University.

Professor Fung examines socioemotional ageing across cultures. Among her awards include the 2017-18 Anne E. Ofstedal Fellowship on Higher Education Leadership, offered by United Board, the 2010 Margret and Paul Baltes award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America, the 2008 Retirement Research Foundation Mentor Award from Division 20 and the 2016 Henry David International Mentoring Award from Division 52, American Psychological Association. Her students have won international awards, including the Fulbright Junior Scholar award (2007 and 2011), and several research awards offered by the American Psychological Association and the Gerontological Society of America.

She is a senior associate editor for the Australian Journal of Psychology, and an associate editor for Cognition and Emotion. She has been an associate editor for Acta Psychologica Sinica. She was elected a fellow of the Association for the Psychological Science, a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 20 & 52), and a fellow and Member-at-large of the Behavioral and Social Science Division of the Gerontological Society of America.

More information：

https://www.psy.cuhk.edu.hk/index.php/chinese-traditional/component/sppagebuilder/?view=page&id=313

02

Alone with my thoughts:Using natural language processing to distinguish lonely from calm aloneness

Abstract

Time spent alone is common in daily life, and particularly in old age; it may at times be experienced as lonely, and at times as calming (positive solitude). The use of machine learning to interpret human language (e.g., natural language processing or NLP) has been growing in psychology, and NLP has been used to distinguish experiences of loneliness from positive solitude in social media data (e.g., tweets). How effective might such NLP techniques be for classifying naturally-occurring aloneness experiences in older adults’ everyday lives? The present study uses 1,546 thought samples collected from 133 adults aged 18-85 (M = 49.6 years; 73% female) at moments when they were alone over a 1-3 week period; participants reported their current thoughts (open-ended) and affective states (lonely, calm) at each assessment. Support vector machines were then used to classify moments of aloneness as being lonely (vs. not lonely) and calm (vs. not calm) based on the words participants used when describing their thoughts. When compared against participants’ actual reported affective states, these classifications achieved up to 67% accuracy for “lonely” and 79% accuracy for “calm”. “Lonely” thought reports included the word “work” more frequently, whereas “calm” thought reports more frequently included the words “reading” and “think/thought”, suggesting individuals engage in quiet or contemplative activities during positive solitude. Age differences therein are also examined. Findings suggest that NLP may be a useful tool for identifying older adults at risk of loneliness (and its negative health implications) by using brief reports of their everyday though

Lecturer Introduction

Jennifer C Lay (BSc, University of Calgary; BA, MA, PhD, University of British Columbia; Postdoc, Chinese University of Hong Kong) is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Psychology at the University of Exeter. Her research intersects health, social, and cultural psychology, and adult lifespan development. She studies how we navigate and make sense of our social and solitary lives, and how culture and development affect these processes. Her methods-focused research approach centers participants’ lived experiences alongside ecological momentary assessments and passive sensing. Her research has been published in leading scientific journals and has been supported by competitive funding agencies including the British Council and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.