We conclude that the impact of emotional loneliness on sleep quality in older adults is partly because of the stress experienced as a result of feeling lonely.

No abstract

Although the perception of emotion in individuals is an important social skill, very little is known about how emotion is determined from a crowd of individuals. We investigated the perception of emotion in scenes of crowds populated by dynamic characters each expressing an emotion. Facial expressions were masked in these characters and emotion was conveyed using body motion and posture only. We systematically varied the proportion of characters in each scene depicting one of two emotions and participants were required to categorise the overall emotion of the crowd. In Experiment 1, we found that the perception of emotions in a crowd is efficient even with relatively brief exposures of the crowd stimuli. Furthermore, the emotion of a crowd was generally determined by the relative proportions of characters conveying it, although we also found that some emotions dominated perception. In Experiment 2, we found that an increase in crowd size was not associated with a relative decrease in the efficiency with which the emotion was categorised. Our findings suggest that body motion is an important social cue in perceiving the emotion of crowds and have implications for our understanding of how we perceive social information from groups.

Interventions for poor sleep quality may depend on the aspect of sleep affected in the individual, and treatment may be contingent on a number of different psychosocial variables. Future research could focus on developing personalised treatment programs for older adults with sleep complaints.

Exercise reduces the likelihood of psychological distress, but this may be due to incidental socializing. We gathered information on exercise, social support and three aspects of psychological distress from 583 community-dwelling older adults. Exercise and social support from friends were both associated with lower scores of depression, anxiety and perceived stress. For infrequent exercisers, having a low level of social support indicated higher levels of depression, whereas for frequent exercisers, having a low level of social support did not affect depression levels. Both exercise and social support have roles in regulating psychological well-being in older populations and exercisers are less susceptible to effects of low social support on depression.

No abstract

In order to analyze the emotional content of motions portrayed by different characters, we created real and virtual replicas of an actor exhibiting six basic emotions: sadness, happiness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. In addition to the video of the real actor, his actions were applied to five virtual body shapes: a low-and high-resolution virtual counterpart, a cartoon-like character, a wooden mannequin, and a zombie-like character (Figures 1 and 2). In a point light condition, we also tested whether the absence of a body affected the perceived emotion of the movements. Participants were asked to rate the actions based on a list of 41 more complex emotions. We found that the perception of emotional actions is highly robust and to the most part independent of the character's body, so long as form is present. When motion alone is present, emotions were generally perceived as less intense than in the cases where form was present.

We conclude that neuroticism and age may impact upon physical frailty and its progression over time in an ageing population. These findings may reflect the tendency for those with high levels of neuroticism to endorse negative symptoms, or alternatively, neuroticism may result in exhaustion via worry in an older population. Further research is required to further elucidate this relationship.