@inproceedings{bib_What_2025, AUTHOR = {Srivastava, Priyanka and Lahane, Rohan and R, Vivek and Prudhvi, Pulapa }, TITLE = {What Do Head Scans Reveal About Depression? Insights from 360° Psychomotor Assessment}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.}. YEAR = {2025}}

Psychomotor changes, while crucial indicators of depres- sion, remain underrepresented in clinical observations. We examined the relationship between depression and psychomotor behavior by analyzing head-tracking data related to yaw movements made during exploration of 360° emotional videos, alongside valence and arousal ratings on 9-point Likert scale. Symptoms of depres- sion were recorded using the Patient Health Question- naire (PHQ-9). While subjective ratings for valence and arousal showed no differences across depression groups, the head-tracking data revealed novel results. Individu- als with moderate to severe depression exhibited signif- icantly lower scanning speed and standard deviation in yaw movement compared to minimal to mild depression. Although preliminary, these results underscore the im- portance of psychomotor measures in diagnosis, risk as- sessment, and monitoring in psychiatric care, alongside subjective evaluations.

@inproceedings{bib_Psyc_2025, AUTHOR = {JAIN, ADITHYA and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Psychological Flexibility and Coping Strategies Influence Well-Being: The Mediating Role of COVID-19 Related Stressors During the Second Wave Among Indian Students}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.}. YEAR = {2025}}

The detrimental impact of the long-overdue pandemic has been widely acknowledged. However, the varied responses to its unprecedented challenges, particularly among young adults in college, are not well known. This study explores the role of psychological immunity in COVID-related trauma among Indian students. A significant proportion of students reported psychological distress, depression, and stress during the second wave between May and June 2021, with COVID-19 infection and related worries correlating with poorer mental health. Mediation analysis indicated that psychological flexibility negatively predicted distress, depression, and stress, while avoidance coping strategies showed a positive association with these outcomes. These findings suggest that psychological flexibility serves as a protective buffer against the impact of the pandemic, fostering resilience, while avoidant coping exacerbates its adverse effects. Interventions like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may enhance psychological flexibility and mitigate maladaptive coping, improving student mental well-being.

@inproceedings{bib_Lang_2024, AUTHOR = {Binu, Sona and Jose, Jismi and KV, Fathima Shimna and Hans, Alino Luke and Cherian, Reni K and Alex, Starlet Ben and Srivastava, Priyanka and Yarra, Chiranjeevi }, TITLE = {Language-Agnostic Analysis of Speech Depression Detection}, BOOKTITLE = {India Council International Conference}. YEAR = {2024}}

The people with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) exhibit the symptoms of tonal variations in their speech compared to the healthy counterparts. However, these tonal variations not only confine to the state of MDD but also on the language, which has unique tonal patterns. This work analyzes automatic speech-based depression detection across two languages, English and Malayalam, which exhibits distinctive prosodic and phonemic characteristics. We propose an approach that utilizes speech data collected along with self-reported labels from participants reading sentences from IViE corpus, in both English and Malayalam. The IViE corpus consists of five sets of sentences: simple sentences, WH-questions, questions without morphosyntactic markers, inversion questions and coordinations, that can naturally prompt speakers to speak in different tonal patterns. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are employed for detecting depression from speech. The CNN model is trained to identify acoustic features associated with depression in speech, focusing on both languages. The model's performance is evaluated on the collected dataset containing recordings from both depressed and non-depressed speakers, analyzing its effectiveness in detecting depression across the two languages. Our findings and collected data could contribute to the development of language-agnostic speech-based depression detection systems, thereby enhancing accessibility for diverse populations.

@inproceedings{bib_IIIT_2024, AUTHOR = {Thomas, Christa and Vats, Guneesh and Johnson, Aravind and George, Ashin and George, Talit Sara and Cherian, Reni K and Srivastava, Priyanka and Yarra, Chiranjeevi }, TITLE = {IIITSaint-EmoMDB: Carefully Curated Malayalam Speech Corpus with Emotion and Self-Reported Depression Ratings}, BOOKTITLE = {Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA}. YEAR = {2024}}

Mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety are pervasive issues that affect millions of individuals worldwide. Understanding the intricate relationship between emotional perception and mental health is crucial. This work develops a database named IIITSaint-EmoMDB containing Malayalam language speech samples annotated with emotion ratings at valence and arousal scale using three annotators considering four emotion labels: happy, sad, angry and neutral. In addition to emotion ratings, emotional perception is rated from 150 participants according to the circumplex model of va-lence and arousal. The database also consists of self-reported mental health scores of those participants based on PHQ-9 and GAD-7 questionnaire. Our preliminary analysis of comparing the participants' emotional perception based PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores revealed that the depressed category showed the highest improvement.

@inproceedings{bib_InSt_2024, AUTHOR = {Mathew, Anjali and Sanjan, Harsha and Cherian, Reni K and Alex, Starlet Ben and Srivastava, Priyanka and Yarra, Chiranjeevi }, TITLE = {InStant-EMDB: A Multi Model Spontaneous English and Malayalam Speech Corpora for Depression Detection}, BOOKTITLE = {Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA}. YEAR = {2024}}

Depression, a pervasive mental health issue, highlights the critical need for early detection and effective intervention. A database (InStant-EMDB) is developed to analyze varia tions in the spoken responses of individuals with depression compared to healthy counterparts. Spoken responses are ob tained from English and Malayalam bilingual speakers who respond spontaneously to a set of 15 emotionally evocative words. These words are sourced from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) dataset, which includes valence and arousal ratings for each word. The speech in both English and Malayalam is manually transcribed to accurately reflect the spoken content. The dataset also contains self-reported af fective ratings and data from a mental health survey (PHQ-9) collected from the participants to determine their mental state, which we considered the self-reported depression labels. A preliminary analysis is conducted on the collected speech us ing current state-of-the-art deep learning models such as Con volutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Mem ory networks (LSTM) and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory networks (Bi-LSTM). Although distinct linguistic patterns exhibited by individuals struggling with depression are successfully identified by all three models in both Malay alam and English spoken responses, the highest accuracy is achieved by the LSTM models. Our findings and dataset em phasize the potential of linguistic patterns as valuable cues for the early identification and intervention of depression and could contribute to enhancing accessibility for diverse popu lations.

@inproceedings{bib_Pred_2024, AUTHOR = {Kabre, Manas Manoj and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Predisposed Mood and Music in Perceptual Judgement Task}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society}. YEAR = {2024}}

The current study examines the interaction between predis- posed mood, perceptual processing, and induced mood us- ing music. We conducted an experiment in which partici- pants were asked to identify stimuli at global or local (G/L) perceptual levels with four different background music con- ditions, which had different valence and arousal ratings. We used BMIS to assess current mood and PHQ-9 and GAD-7 to assess depression and anxiety, and divided the participants into two groups: distress and no distress (encompassing both disor- ders). We found a main effect of background music on mood. However, the distress group showed an overall low mood. Fur- ther, we observed an overarching effect of predisposed mood, encompassing depression and anxiety, on individuals’ transient mood experience and perceptual task performance. Individuals in the non-distress group showed a larger global-precedence effect. The results are discussed in light of emotional reactiv- ity theories and the theory of positive emotion.

@inproceedings{bib_Pilo_2024, AUTHOR = {Singhal, Pragya and Srivastava, Priyanka and Rajasekhar, Liza }, TITLE = {Pilot Study - Development of digital neuropsychological battery: a pilot use case in indian SLE patients}, BOOKTITLE = {Indian Journal of Rheumatology}. YEAR = {2024}}

@inproceedings{bib_Deve_2024, AUTHOR = {Singhal, Pragya and Srivastava, Priyanka and Rajasekhar, Liza and Samhitha, Nallapothula Sai }, TITLE = {Development of digital neuropsychological battery: a use case in Indian SLE patients}, BOOKTITLE = {British Society for Rheumatology}. YEAR = {2024}}

@inproceedings{bib_Brea_2024, AUTHOR = {Nishanth, Arcot and Srivastava, Priyanka and Jaarsveld, Saskia }, TITLE = {Breaking Domain Barriers: An Inquiry into the Transfer of Induced Creativity}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society}. YEAR = {2024}}

The current study aims to understand whether the constraints in the well-defined problem solving task impacts the ill- defined problem solving task of a different knowledge do- main. We chose variants of Raven’s advanced progressive matrices(APM) for well-defined problem-solving. For the ill- defined problem solving task we have chosen creative reason- ing tasks (CRT) which is of same knowledge domain and al- ternate uses task(Guilford, 1967) of a different knowledge do- main. We have collected a sample of 44 participants. We ob- served a significant effect of the variant of APM on CRT per- formance. Higher number of rules in the CRT was observed when it was preceded by cAPM (Mdn = 2) compared to the classic APM (Mdn = 1). Further, we observed a higher CRT Relationship Score under cAPM (Mdn = 78.5) compared to the classic APM (Mdn = 50.5) puzzle conditions. However, the variant of APM did not show a significant effect on AUT, fluency score(p = 0.8 for independent t-test) and elaboration score (p = 0.48 for Mann-Whitney U test). The current results indicate that creativity is more domain-specific than domain- general.

@inproceedings{bib_Inve_2023, AUTHOR = {K.Vaishnavi, and Prudhvi, Pulapa and Srivastava, Priyanka and Saxena, Raman }, TITLE = {Investigating design of running man in emergency signage}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society}. YEAR = {2023}}

Emergency signages are crucial for safe evacuations but have been challenged by inconsistent and ambiguous designs. We conducted two experiments to evaluate a specific emergency signage design, i.e., running man's pictogram, in ease of conveying the direction to exit an unknown building. We compared the running man's pictogram with traditional arrow signage in exp.1, and in exp. 2, we examined the key features that contribute to the running man's composition. In both conditions, the participant's task was to determine the running man's/ arrow's orientation and press the instructed corresponding keys. We observed a faster and more accurate response for the right arrow than the right running man in experiment 1. Further, in exp. 2, the head/face component showed an advantage in identifying the running man's orientation over the leg/hand. Results suggest running man alone in emergency signage may be risky, especially when it is incomplete without a head and face.

@inproceedings{bib_Can__2023, AUTHOR = {Nishanth, Arcot and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Can induction of creativity from a knowledge domain be transferred to a different knowledge domain?}, BOOKTITLE = {Asian Conference on Cultural Studies}. YEAR = {2023}}

Is creativity domain-specific or domain-general? Significant studies have approached this problem using self-reported personality and domain-specific and general creative ideation surveys and lack cognitive perspectives. Creativity is defined as the generation of original and useful products that have emerged through the applications of basic cognitive processes to existing knowledge structures. The current study investigates its implications while modifying the basic knowledge structure. Further, we examine the role of the knowledge domain in creative task performance. For prior knowledge structure, we used advanced Raven’s matrices and modified its constraints to create a novel creative advanced Raven’s Matrices (cAPM) to induce creativity. For creativity, we asked participants to perform two tasks: create Raven's like matrices using creative reasoning task (CRT) and Guilford's alternative uses task (AUT). Unlike other creativity tasks like AUT, CRT allows to measure both convergent and divergent thinking in a given task. The CRT and AUT are different from APM puzzles in two ways, i.e., the knowledge domain and the involvement of creative thinking. The fixed order of APM followed by creativity tasks allowed us to evaluate the boundaries of induced creative thinking across the knowledge domain

@inproceedings{bib_Do_c_2023, AUTHOR = {Nishanth, Arcot and Srivastava, Priyanka and Jaarsvel, Saskia }, TITLE = {Do constraints in APM solving affect APM-like puzzle creation?}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society}. YEAR = {2023}}

The current study examines the role of constraints in well-defined problem-solving in ill-defined problem-solving. We chose variants of Raven’s advanced progressive matri- ces(APM) for well-defined problem-solving and creative rea- soning tasks (CRT) for ill-defined problem-solving. Using traditional APM, we created a novel version of APM with comparatively lesser constraints available to solve the puzzle, called creative APM(cAPM). The cAPM task was designed to induce divergent thinking along with convergent thinking. It is assumed that the difference in constraints changes the na- ture of the problem space in solving APM and cAPM and may differently affect the following creative reasoning task. We randomly assigned 50 participants to perform APM or cAPM, followed by the CRT, in a fixed order. We observed a sig- nificant effect of constraints available to solve well-defined problems on ill-defined problem-solving. The current result showed higher CRT scores when CRT preceded cAPM (Me- dian = 79.25) than APM (Median = 53.00). The result sug- gests that the flexibility in constraints to solve a well-defined problem induces more divergent thinking alongside convergent thinking and facilitates creative thinking required in ill-defined problem-solving.

@inproceedings{bib_Inte_2023, AUTHOR = {GARG, MADHUR and Garg, Vishal and Srivastava, Priyanka and Agarwal, Rishika }, TITLE = {Interface design for residential energy feedback, in the Indian context}, BOOKTITLE = {Energy Informatics}. YEAR = {2023}}

Global access to electricity has increased from 78.2% to 2000 to 90.5% in 2020, resulting in an increased electricity demand worldwide. Unlike commercial electricity consumption, which is managed by professionals, residential consumption is managed by the householders, who often lack insight into their energy usage. Quality feedback, including detailed energy consumption and tips, can lead to substantial household savings. There are several mediums for providing energy feedback, such as Short Message Service (SMS), postal letter, email, mobile app, and In-Home Display (IHD). Studies suggest that feedback through electronic media can save up to 20% of energy consumption. In this work, we aim to design mobile application interfaces that can maximize energy savings through efective feedback. The level of savings realized is dependent on the user’s preferences and understanding of the information presented. User preferences are subjective of their profle (e.g., age, occupation, income) and the cultural context (e.g., country). The possibility of energy reduction is high when the provided information matches the user preferred information for feedback. Smart homes have recently been included as an annexure in India’s building energy code (Eco Niwas Samhita 2021), indicating a growing demand for quality energy feedback in India. However, there is a lack of research that addresses what feedback information is suitable for Indian users. We conducted two questionnaire-based surveys, one to understand users’ preferences for feedback information and another to validate the designed mobile application interface screens. The surveys were conducted on two age groups, young and middle-aged adults. A Chi-Square Test of Independence was performed to assess the relationship between the user’s preference for feedback information and their age group. Participants identifed total energy consumption, appliance level disaggregated information, energy-saving tips, goals, and historical consumption comparisons as the top fve information types. In contrast, normative comparison was the least preferred information. The follow-up design validations suggest that the interface should be customizable to accommodate the varying preferences of users. The current fndings will help customize the energy feedback display UI design as per the Indian population. Keywords: Energy-feedback, Residential, Interface-design, User centric feedback, In-home-display

@inproceedings{bib_A_re_2023, AUTHOR = {Agarwal, Rishika and GARG, MADHUR and Tejaswini, K Dharani and Garg, Vishal and Srivastava, Priyanka and Mathur, Jyotirmay and Gupta, Rajat }, TITLE = {A review of residential energy feedback studies}, BOOKTITLE = {Energy and Buildings}. YEAR = {2023}}

Residential energy feedback refers to is about providing personalized information on household energy use to consumers to encourage energy savings. This paper conducts a review of field-based studies that have evaluated the impact of energy feedback on residential energy consumption. The review includes studies in real occupied homes that have deployed feedback intervention(s) and measured energy savings. Our study builds a taxonomy for energy feedback studies based on different characteristics of feedback such as frequency, type, presentation style, and methods of access. Energy savings from similar feedback types were found to differ depending on how the study was conducted. The reviewed studies deployed a range of feedback information including energy units, energy cost and tailored information conducted across diverse audiences (ethnicity, geographical positioning), varying experimental

@inproceedings{bib_The__2022, AUTHOR = {JAIN, ADITHYA and Singhal, Rishabh and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {The roles of trait anxiety, psychological flexibility and coping strategies on the mental health impacts of COVID-19 on college students in India}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Conference of Cognitive Science}. YEAR = {2022}}

The roles of trait anxiety, psychological flexibility and coping strategies on the mental health impacts of COVID-19 on college students in India INTRODUCTION The lives of many students had a tremendous impact during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, pandemic woes got extended due to the second wave when everyone was expecting an end to a year long-suffering in India. Schools, universities and institutes were shut down, resulting in the online culture again. Further, uncertainty over the exam dates apart from the competition itself loomed the distress and added misery for those transitioning to college. Recent studies suggest that COVID-19 increases psychological stress. More specifically, quarantine is associated with emotional stress, depression, irritation, adverse changes in sleep patterns and emotional tiredness. Despite the devastating psychosocial and cognitive impact of COVID-19 on individuals suffering from COVID-19 or not, some individuals did not get affected as much as others. In this study, we evaluate the individual coping strategies and psychological flexibility, and their association with trait anxiety to explain these individual differences in psychological health (generalized anxiety, depression, and stress) and cognitive health using cognitive tasks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Such analysis would not only help to shed more light on the underlying nature of the effects of pandemic stressors but would also enable healthcare professionals to design particular interventions at the individual level. METHOD Total 254 college students (75 women, 176 men, 1 trans woman, 2 did not specify; mean age=20.57, median age=20) were recruited for this study and were provided monetary incentives. The data collection lasted for 3.5 weeks, starting from 22 September 2021, while the second wave was declining. The study consisted of a general demographics survey, COVID-19 specific impact variables (such as living conditions, unhealthy behaviours, impact on academic life), and delirium questions. Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) for measuring the severity of depressive symptoms, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire (GAD-7) to assess anxiety disorder, Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) for evaluating the degree to which the student perceives life as unpredictable and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-10) for measuring potentiality as well as the actuality of anxiety. To assess the coping style and psychological flexibility, Brief COPE-28 and Multidimensional Psychological Flexibility Inventory (MPFI-24) were employed, respectively. Further, Stroop Task and Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) were used as objective measures to assess the individual's ability to inhibit cognitive interference and attention, respectively. RESULTS Among 254 college students who participated in this study, 73.6% reported having a close one infected with the virus, among which 19.7% passed away, showing the significant prevalence of COVID-19 in India during the time of the study. Further, 26.7% of the participants reported being self infected by the virus, among which 2.9% were put on a ventilator. Among these covid infected participants, 17.6% reported experiencing strange things that they could not explain, 16.2% felt people were talking about them behind their back, and 2.9% heard or saw things that others could not, which corroborates recent findings on delirium in COVID-19 patients. On a scale of 1-5, among the sample, the mean academic stress was found to be 4.07 (median=4) and stress due to social isolation 3.93 (median=4). Three major analyses: correlational, regression and mediation, were performed to evaluate the relation of COVID-19 impact variables and psychological health. We observed a strong negative correlation (p<0.01) between the measures such as perception of mental space, proper sleep, managing academics, social isolation during the pandemic with at least three out of the four mental health variables: PHQ, GAD, PSS and STAI-S (state) suggesting that poorer the student's ability to manage his/her/their life effectively the worse is the overall anxiety levels and depressive symptoms. For further analysis, these measures were collated into a single index called COVID-19 Impact Index, as they describe the overall impact on the lives of college students during the pandemic. The COVID-19 Impact Index was significantly positively correlated (p<0.01) with the measures such as PHQ [ρ=0.54], GAD [ρ=0.51] and PSS [ρ=0.48], suggesting a high level of distress and depressive symptoms among students most impacted by COVID-19. For investigating the relationship between dependent variables (PSS, PHQ, GAD and STAI-S) with the variables such as COVID-19 Impact Index, coping strategies, psychological flexibility and STAI-T, a multilinear regression model was trained for each dependent variable individually. The individual models trained for the outcome as PSS, PHQ, GAD, and STAI-S accounted for a significant portion of the variance by predicting 62.8%, 60.3%, 58.8%, and 47.5% of the variance, respectively. Significant contributors in the variance of all the models were found to be trait anxiety (STAI-T) and COVID-19 Impact Index, which suggests that the student's predisposition to experience negative emotions such as worries, fears, and anxiety is among other factors a relatively significant predictor of the negative experience during the pandemic time. Avoidant coping strategy and psychological inflexibility were also significant predictors in most of the models, suggesting that the students who chose to avoid rather than deal with the stressors posed by the COVID-19 situation were more likely to develop depressive symptoms, stress and anxiety. The central role of STAI-T is further confirmed with the mediational analysis of the direct effect of the COVID-19 Impact Index on psychological health variables (PSS, PHQ, GAD and STAI-S). STAI-T is found to be most significantly positively mediating the direct effect in all the models compared to other parallel mediators: psychological flexibility and coping strategies, suggesting a higher increase in overall worsening of psychological health due to COVID-19 impact when a student has a predisposition of anxiety as compared to other students. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This study showed the severe impact of COVID-19 amongst the students after the second wave ended, corroborating recent worldwide studies. Further, it helped to identify specific factors that result in individual differences while dealing with the pandemic's stressors due to its uncertain nature. Predisposition to anxiety (STAI-T), among other factors, was crucial when predicting the propensity to depression, stress and anxiety; thus, such individuals could be identified early on. Health professionals can further employ approaches that promote psychological flexibility, such as Acceptance Commitment Therapy and educate about different coping styles promoting active coping.

@inproceedings{bib_The__2022, AUTHOR = {JAIN, ADITHYA and Singhal, Rishabh and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {The impact of the second wave of COVID-19 on Indian students and the mediating roles of psychological flexibility and coping strategies on this impact}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Conference of Cognitive Science}. YEAR = {2022}}

The impact of the second wave of COVID-19 on Indian students and the mediating roles of psychological flexibility and coping strategies on this impact INTRODUCTION India was hit severely by the second wave of COVID-19 from April to June 2021, with daily cases rising exponentially and imposed mandatory lockdown. With schools and colleges closed, students were forced to deal with online schooling, social isolation, close ones getting infected, and uncertainty regarding personal goals since major exams and job offers were cancelled. Previous studies have found detrimental effects of the pandemic imposed environment, but not many studies have been done in India, especially with a focus on students. We aimed to detect the specific environmental factors created by the pandemic that impact these students' mental health and attention capacity and understand the psychological mechanisms that exacerbate or mitigate this impact. In this study, we looked at two mechanisms, the first being psychological flexibility: recognizing and adapting to various situational demands. In the context of COVID-19, it is one of the key resilience variables in the fights against mental health issues. The second was coping strategies, which can be categorized into two styles: approach coping, where individual attempts to handle a problem by actively taking steps towards a solution, and avoidant coping, where an individual attempts to retreat from or deny the problem. METHOD 290 students were recruited for the study via mail and snowball sampling. The study took thirty minutes, and participants were provided monetary incentives. The experiment consisted of Demographics: age, gender and intermediate or college student; COVID-19 environment variables such as length of lockdown, perceived personal space, verbal/physical fights at home and infection among family; General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) to measure psychological distress; Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) to screen for depression; COVID-19 Student Stress Questionnaire-7 (CSSQ-7) to measure stress; CompACT-8 to measure psychological flexibility; Brief COPE-28 to assess coping styles; Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) to measure sustained attention and Stroop task to measure selective attention. The data collection started on 30 May 2021 with the last data collected on 22 June 2021. RESULTS Participants' profile 71% of the participants were male [average age=18.8], and 48% were college students. Coming to the effects of COVID-19, 30.7% were infected with the virus. Moreover, almost 90% of the participants were either themselves infected or had a close one infected with COVID-19, and 32.4% had a death of a close one, which shows how far-reaching and severe the virus was in India during the second wave. Participants gave an average rating of 3.5 out of 5 when asked how much they worried about the effect of COVID-19 on their lives. 65.5% of the participants were distressed, 37.9% were screened for depression, and 68.6% were moderate to highly stressed. These results reflect the severity of the pandemic's mental health and personal life impacts. Our sample had significantly higher GHQ scores than those seen in general population samples in India during the same period, indicating that students were impacted more within the context of the second wave than the general population. Environmental Factors and psychological health variables When looking at the correlational analysis, we detected six environmental factors (length of lockdown, self getting infected, close ones getting infected, lack of personal space, increase in fights at home and COVID-19 worry) that were significantly associated with the outcome health variables (distress, depression and stress) and were used to form the COVID-19 Impact Index. This index had moderate positive correlations (p<0.01) with GHQ [ρ=0.36], CSSQ [ρ=0.37] and avoidant coping [ρ=0.3] and negative correlations (p<0.01) with flexibility [ρ=-0.31]. Psychological Flexibility had significant negative correlations (p<0.01) with GHQ-12 [ρ=-0.51], PHQ-2 [ρ=-0.25] and CSSQ-7 [ρ=-0.32] whereas avoidant coping had significant positive correlations (p<0.01) with GHQ-12 [ρ=0.54], PHQ-2 [ρ=0.27] and CSSQ-7 [ρ=0.39]. This suggests that flexibility correlated significantly with better overall psychological health while COVID-19 Impact Index and avoidant coping correlated with worse overall health. Cognitive health and psychological health variables Unlike previous studies, none of the predictor variables (COVID-19 Impact Index, psychological flexibility, coping strategies) correlated with either attention measure. Within the outcome variables, sustained attention correlated negatively with stress and selective attention correlated negatively with distress and depression. Regression analysis was done to see how well the predictor variables could predict the outcome variables. We only ran models for the outcome health variables since the attention measures did not correlate with the predictors. The final model for distress accounted for 42.5% of the variance, the final model for depression accounted for 14.4% of the variance, and the final model for stress accounted for 28% of the variance. Results show that the predictors account for a moderate portion of the variance among distress and stress. The prediction for depression was low since we used a screener questionnaire instead of the entire questionnaire. Since GHQ-12 and CSSQ-7 correlated with COVID-19 Impact Index, we conducted mediation analysis for both relations with three parallel mediators (flexibility, avoidant and approach coping). Results showed that flexibility mediated a decrease in the effects of the index on distress while avoidant coping mediated an increase in the effects of the index on distress and stress. CONCLUSION To summarize, this study showed the severe impact of COVID-19 on students in India. It detected factors like length of lockdown, lack of personal space, increased fights at home, infection of self and close ones, and general worry about COVID-19 as detrimental to mental health. It also showed psychological flexibility as a resilience mechanism that mitigates this detrimental impact, while avoidant coping strategies exacerbate the impact. These results support interventions and approaches that promote flexibility, like Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Knowing the specific factors of the environment that affect mental health may also contribute to the development and testing of these approaches.

@inproceedings{bib_Obje_2022, AUTHOR = {SRIJA, BHUPATHIRAJU KRISHNA and Agrawal, Ayushi Kumari and Srivastava, Priyanka and Vemuri, Kavita }, TITLE = {Objectifying gaze: An empirical study with non sexualized images.}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Societ}. YEAR = {2022}}

1 Introduction Recent studies show that sexually-objectified women are not only treated as sex objects but also visually processed similar to objects (local processing)[1,2]. However, Sexual objectification(SO) research has predominantly studied western society's perceptions, with few empirical studies examining other cultures. In this study, we explore SO of women in an Asian-Indian cultural/social setting using a novel design and stimuli representative of the culture. We conduct an eye tracking study that uses Navon local/global and body inversion[3] paradigms to investigate the gaze behavior and underlying visual processing when looking at non-sexualized male and female images. 2 Methods The study sample consists of Ninety-four (24 women, 70 men, age=18-27, mean=21, stdev=±2.1) undergraduate and graduate students. There are 20 trial blocks. Each trial block consists of a male/female image in upright/inverted orientation, off-centre to the screen for 7 seconds followed by a plus sign for 1 second, followed by a Navon letter identification task. The priming condition and Navon task are randomised to minimise confounding effects. The Navon image is a large letter made of small letters. The participants press 'B' if they identify either one of the target letters ('H'/‘O') either as a contour or a feature (the letter itself) otherwise press ‘N’. The classification of local/global recognition is implicit as the participants press the same key ‘B’ for both local and global images. We selected black and white male images(MI) and female images(FI) wearing casual attires like jeans/pant and top/shirt. The experiment is designed using Tobii Studio. Tobiix120 eye tracker is used to capture the gaze. We mark face, chest, hip as our Areas of Interest(AoIs) and calculate the fixation duration(FD), revisit frequency(RF), first fixation duration(FFD) for the AoIs. We define sexual body(SB) parts as sum of hip and chest AoIs. For gaze analysis, 5 participants data with poor sampling rate (below 40%) are excluded. We use Tukey Fence outlier detection method to remove outliers and removed 10 participants data for first fixation duration analysis. We measure Response Time(RT) as the time taken to press the key from the onset of the Navon image presentation. For RT analysis, we consider only the data points with at least one correct response in each priming condition, reducing our data to 59 participants. The alpha level for p-value is set to 0.05 in all tests. 3 Results There is a main effect of target (priming stimulus) gender and orientation on the FD and RF. • FD: Face FD of upright > inverted and SB parts FD of upright < inverted for both MI and FI. Face FD of FI < MI and SB parts FD of FI > MI in both upright and inverted orientation. Face FD > SB parts FD for all target images. • RF: Face RF of upright > inverted for both MI and FI. SB parts RF of inverted > upright for FI. Importantly, SB parts RF of FI > MI in upright and inverted orien-tation. Face RF < SB parts RF for all target images. • FFD: There is significant effect of orientation for FI but not for MI. Face FFD of upright FI > inverted FI and SB parts FFD of inverted FI > upright FI. • RT: Global recognition is faster in female priming for both orientations. Local recognition is faster in male priming, but the significance is found only for inverted image. The participant gender effect on RT is not significant. There is no significant correlation between local/global RT and FD. 4 Discussion Objectification theory states that women have a greater propensity to be sexually objectified than men do. This is evident from our data, female sexual body parts received greater attention than male sexual body parts and vice versa for face. However the visual attention is still greatest on the face for both male and female images, in line with [4,5,6,7,8]. As for global/local perception, non-sexualized males are processed similar to objects more than females. This is in contrast to[3,1,6] but find support in a study on Chinese population [9]. We can attribute our findings to the choice of the stimuli being personalised as against sexualized. There is a strong inversion effect on gaze, both gender images are more objectified in inverted than upright position but this doesn’t affect the underlying cognitive processing implying that the difference in the visual processing between objectified and non-objectified is more quantitative than qualitative. References 3) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., & Klein, O. (2018). Objectifying objectification: When and why people are cognitively reduced to their parts akin to objects. European Review of So-cial Psychology, 29(1), 82–121. 4) Bernard, P., Rizzo, T., Hoonhorst, I., Deliens, G., Gervais, S., B, Bayard, C., Deltenre, P., Colin, C., & Klein, O. (2018). The Neural Correlates of Cognitive Objectification. So-cial Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 550–559. 2) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2012). Integrating Sexual Objectification with Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 23(5), 469–471. 1) Bareket, O., Shnabel, N., Abeles, D., Gervais, S., & Yuval-Greenberg, S. (2019). Evi-dence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women. Sex Roles, 81(3–4), 245–256. 5) Cogoni, C., Carnaghi, A., Mitrovic, A., Leder, H., Fantoni, C., & Silani, G. (2018). Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases. PLOS ONE

@inproceedings{bib_What_2022, AUTHOR = {Sinha, Nidhi and Arora, Swasti and Srivastava, Priyanka and Klein, Raymond M. }, TITLE = {What networks of attention are affected by depression? A meta-analysis of studies that used the attention network test}, BOOKTITLE = {Journal of Affective Disorders Reports}. YEAR = {2022}}

Background Depression is an all-too-common mood disorder that has been linked in various ways to the cognitive concept of attention. The Attention Network Test, based on the influential taxonomy of attention originally proposed by Posner, can be used to measure the efficacy of three components or networks of attention: Alerting, Orienting and Executive Control. Our focus here is to discover how depression might affect these networks. Methods Studies related to attention and depression were selected for this meta-analytic review using the online Attention Network Test (ANT) Database (Arora, Lawrence & Klein, 2020) resource. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 5 publications were analyzed with a Bayesian hierarchical model to compare participants with and without a diagnosis of depression. Results The posterior distribution of our model revealed no credible differences in the Alerting and Orienting networks but showed credible non-zero values for Executive Control. This suggests that Executive Control is less efficient in individuals suffering from depression. Limitations As literature using the ANT with depressed participants is limited, the methodological variability between studies in this meta-analysis should be considered when interpreting these results. Conclusion This meta-analysis review is the first quantitative review that aimed to address the ANT-depression literature. A consistent finding of no alerting and no orienting deficit but a deficit in the executive control suggests that some, but not all, components of attention are impaired in depression.

@inproceedings{bib_Self_2022, AUTHOR = {, Himansh Sheoran and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Self-Reported Depression Is Associated With Aberration in Emotional Reactivity and Emotional Concept Coding}, BOOKTITLE = {Frontiers in psychology}. YEAR = {2022}}

Cognitive impairment, alterations in mood, emotion dysregulation are just a few of the consequences of depression. Despite depression being reported as the most common mental disorder worldwide, examining depression or risks of depression is still challenging. Emotional reactivity has been observed to predict the risk of depression, but the results have been mixed for negative emotional reactivity (NER). To better understand the emotional response conflict, we asked our participants to describe their feeling in meaningful sentences alongside reporting their reactions to the emotionally evocative words. We presented a word on the screen and asked participants to perform two tasks, rate their feeling after reading the word using the self-assessment manikin (SAM) scale, and describe their feeling using the property generation task. The emotional content was analyzed using a novel machine-learning algorithm approach. We performed these two tasks in blocks and

@inproceedings{bib_Is_C_2021, AUTHOR = {Choudhary, Mukund and Srivatsa, K V Aditya and Upadhyay, Ishan Sanjeev and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Is Convenient Secure? Exploring the impact of Metacognitive beliefs in password selection}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.}. YEAR = {2021}}

Recently, there has been research on what factors influence a user’s password setting practices, which include various types of emotions such as anger, risk-taking tendencies, etc. How- ever, research has shown that factors such as memorability and perceived memorability have a greater influence on password choice. Some recent research has shown a negative correlation between the perceived memorability and the perceived secu- rity of passwords, particularly passphrases (that are technically more secure). However, it is unclear whether this effect can be extended to groups with good experiences with digital spaces (IT professionals, entrepreneurs, etc.). Furthermore, it has not been determined whether random, uncommonly-worded, or complex structure passphrases would also maintain the cor- relation, as opposed to relatively less secure, common/simple passphrases. This study examines this problem using a diverse demographic and different categories of passphrases. Keywords: Metacognition; Passwords; Perception; Memora- bility; Security

@inproceedings{bib_Is_c_2021, AUTHOR = {Choudhary, Mukund and Srivatsa, K V Aditya and Upadhyay, Ishan Sanjeev and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Is convenient secure? Exploring the impact of imetacognitive beliefs in password selection}, BOOKTITLE = {Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society}. YEAR = {2021}}

Recently, there has been research on what factors influence a user’s password setting practices, which include various types of emotions such as anger, risk-taking tendencies, etc. However, research has shown that factors such as memorability and perceived memorability have a greater influence on password choice. Some recent research has shown a negative correlation between the perceived memorability and the perceived security of passwords, particularly passphrases (that are technically more secure). However, it is unclear whether this effect can be extended to groups with good experiences with digital spaces (IT professionals, entrepreneurs, etc.). Furthermore, it has not been determined whether random, uncommonly-worded, or complex structure passphrases would also maintain the correlation, as opposed to relatively less secure, common/simple passphrases. This study examines this problem using a diverse demographic and different categories of passphrases. Keywords: Metacognition; Passwords; Perception; Memorability; Security

@inproceedings{bib_Head_2021, AUTHOR = {Goel, Minaxi and Srivastava, Priyanka and AGRAWAL, MAYANK and Singhal, Rishabh and Chand, Runa and B, Arayil Ramesh }, TITLE = {Head-Movement Analysis of 360° Affective Experience}, BOOKTITLE = {International Conference on Virtual Reality}. YEAR = {2021}}

The current study aims to analyse VR measures in correspondence with 360° virtual affective experiences to understand the underlying spatio-temporal attention processes. We selected extreme pleasant and extreme unpleasant emotional videos from the Stanford affective database and displayed to participants on HMD VR. The participants’ task was to explore the video and report their affective experience using the Self- Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale. The exploration behaviour was analysed using head-tracking parameters, such as standard deviation of all the three head-rotation axes (yaw, pitch and roll), angular speed and region-wise analysis. We observed a positive correlation between standard deviation of yaw and valence, and angular speed and valence. The result suggests that affective experience not only increases the scope of attention spatially (wide scanning), it also motivates to seek more information that leads to more head-movement during exploration. In region- wise analysis, we observed front field-of-view was primarily explored, and rear field-of-view was least explored, showing natural responses similar to real environments. In addition, we used Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI) to assess participants’ emotional state, specifically depression symptoms. The relation between virtual affective experience and 360° exploration be- haviour is discussed in light of the BDI categories. The study findings broaden the scope for VR affective research by enabling psychomotor assessment in more ecologically valid settings. Index Terms—Emotion, Depression, Affective State, 360° Ex- ploration, Head-Tracking

@inproceedings{bib_Anal_2019, AUTHOR = {SRAVYA, VATSAVAYI and Srivastava, Priyanka and Vemuri, Kavita }, TITLE = {Analyzing Performance Differences in Artists and Engineers- An RPM Study}, BOOKTITLE = {Cognitive Science}. YEAR = {2019}}

Analytic reasoning differences, as gauged from intelligence metrics, in students engaged in streams requiring a predominantly divergent (arts) or convergent thinking (science and engineering) is a topic of interest. In this paper we have examined this difference by a modified sequence of two sections (D & E) of the Standard Ravens Progressive matrices (RPM). The scan path gaze behavior was analyzed with an eye tracker. The 30 engineering students (half of them are also trained in fine arts) scored higher than the 15 fine arts students. In the former cohort, the artistic and the non-artistic set show no difference in performance but the scan path, fixation count and time taken indicate possible differences in visual strategies for pattern identification. From the detailed analysis, we argue that intelligence as measured by RPM is enhanced by training in reasoning and logic as in engineering streams and might not reflect an innate ability

@inproceedings{bib_Indi_2019, AUTHOR = {Soujanya, Kodavalla Surya and Goel, Minaxi and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Indian Virtual reality affective database with self-report measures and EDA.}, BOOKTITLE = {Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology}. YEAR = {2019}}

The current work assesses the physiological and psychological responses to the Stanford virtual reality (VR) affective database [1] of 360° emotional videos presented using head-mounted display (HMD). Participants were asked to rate the videos on arousal and valence using SAM scale after every video. The electro-dermal activity(EDA) was recorded while watching the videos. The current pilot study shows highest skin conductance response (SCR) for high arousal, and moderate arousal and moderate valence videos., and lowest SCR for high valence videos. Self-report on valence and arousal shows a difference between Stanford VR affective database and corresponding Indian population psychological responses, suggesting a role of social context in emotion perception and experience.

@inproceedings{bib_Desk_2019, AUTHOR = {Srivastava, Priyanka and Rimzhim, Anurag and VIJAY, PALASH and Chandra, Sushil }, TITLE = {Desktop VR is Better Than Nonambulatory HMD VR for Spatial Learning}, BOOKTITLE = {Frontiers in Robotics and AI}. YEAR = {2019}}

Use of virtual reality (VR) technology is proliferating for designing and upgrading entertainment devices, and creating virtual environments that could be used for research and training. VR is becoming a strong research tool by providing a tighter control on the experimental environment and by allowing almost limitless possibilities of creating ecologically valid stimuli. However, the enhanced fidelity between the real and virtual worlds that VR provides does not always benefit human performance. For a better understanding, and increasing VR’s usability, we need to identify the relevant constituent components of immersive technologies, and differentiate their roles, for example, how visual and interaction fidelity differentially improves human performance. We conducted an experiment to examine how two common VR display modes, head mounted display (HMD) and desktop (DT), would affect spatial learning when we restrict ambulatory locomotion in HMD. This manipulation allowed examining the role of varying visual fidelity with low interaction fidelity. We used a between-group design with 40 naïve participants. They explored a virtual environment and later drew its sketch-map. Our results showed participants spent more time and perceived less motion-sickness and task effort using desktop than HMD VR. With reduced interaction fidelity, the high visual fidelity of HMD as compared to desktop resulted in similar or poorer performance on different spatial learning tasks after accounting for motion-sickness and workload effort. Participants were better in recalling spatial components related to junction and cyclic order of the navigated virtual space in …

@inproceedings{bib_Do_P_2018, AUTHOR = {SINGHAL, PULKIT and Agarwala, Aditya and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Do Pitch and Space Share Common Code?: Role of feedback in SPARC effect.}, BOOKTITLE = {Cognitive Science}. YEAR = {2018}}

Previous research shows that performance is better when a high pitch is responded with up or right responses and a low pitch is responded with down or left responses, called the spatial-pitch association of response codes (SPARC) effect. Despite the intuitive coupling of perception-action, studies investigating the SPARC effect have, however, used feedback to manipulate the stimulus-response mapping. Feedback contradicts the purpose of intuitive stimulus-response mapping by enabling short-term learning. This study primarily investigates the role of feedback on SPARC effect. We believe that feedback can facilitate incongruent mapping and can, therefore, reduce the cost between incongruent and congruent mapping resulting in a diminished SPARC effect. Our results, however, show that feedback has no influence on the SPARC effect indicating that long-term associations can not be overcome by short-term learning due to robust perception-action coupling. Further, unlike previous studies, we observed a strong horizontal SPARC effect in nonmusicians as well.

@inproceedings{bib_Scan_2018, AUTHOR = {BHARATKUMAR, RANGREJ SAMRUDHDHI and Sivaswamy, Jayanthi and Srivastava, Priyanka }, TITLE = {Scan, dwell, decide: Strategies for detecting abnormalities in diabetic retinopathy}, BOOKTITLE = {Plos One}. YEAR = {2018}}

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease which is widely diagnosed using (colour fundus) images. Efficiency and accuracy are critical in diagnosing DR as lack of timely intervention can lead to irreversible visual impairment. In this paper, we examine strategies for scrutinizing images which affect diagnostic performance of medical practitioners via an eye-tracking study. A total of 56 subjects with 0 to 18 years of experience participated in the study. Every subject was asked to detect DR from 40 images. The findings indicate that practitioners use mainly two types of strategies characterized by either higher dwell duration or longer track length. The main findings of the study are that higher dwell-based strategy led to higher average accuracy (> 85%) in diagnosis, irrespective of the expertise of practitioner; whereas, the average obtained accuracy with a long-track length-based strategy was dependent on the expertise of the practitioner. In the second part of the paper, we use the experimental findings to recommend a scanning strategy for fast and accurate diagnosis of DR that can be potentially used by image readers. This is derived by combining the eyetracking gaze maps of medical experts in a novel manner based on a set of rules. This strategy requires scrutiny of images in a manner which is consistent with spatial preferences found in human perception in general and in the domain of fundus images in particular. The Levenshtein distance-based assessment of gaze patterns also establish the effectiveness of the derived scanning pattern and is thus recommended for image readers.

@inproceedings{bib_Sign_2014, AUTHOR = {POTLURI, VENKATESH and KRISHNA, R SAI and Srivastava, Priyanka and Prahallad, Kishore Sunkeshwari }, TITLE = {Significance of Paralinguistic Cues in the Synthesis of Mathematical Equations}, BOOKTITLE = {International Conference on Natural Language Processing.}. YEAR = {2014}}

Text to speech (TTS) systems hold promise as an information access tool for literate and illiterate including visually challenged. Current TTS systems can convert a typical text into a natural sounding speech. However, auditory rendering of mathematical content, specifically equation reading is not a trivial task. Mathematical equations have to be read so that appropriate bracketing such as parentheses, superscripts and subscripts are conveyed to the listener in an accurate way. Earlier works have attempted to use pauses as acoustic cues to indicate some of the semantics associated with the mathematical symbols. In this paper, we first analyse the acoustic cues which human-beings employ while speaking the mathematical content to (visually challenged) listeners and then propose four techniques which render the observed patterns in a text-tospeech system. The evaluation considered eight aspects such as listening effort, content familiarity, accentuation, intonation, etc. Our objective metrics show that a combination of the proposed techniques could render the mathematical equations using a TTS system as good as that of a human-being.