Niklas Ravaja
Biographic Data
| ID | 1141809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Niklas Ravaja |
| GIVEN NAMES | Niklas |
| FAMILY NAME | Ravaja |
| SIGNATURE | RAVAJA N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1876-8731 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Time to think of love, leisure, terror, and despair: Emotional imagery affects temporal cognition
Meditating in a neurofeedback virtual reality: Effects on sense of presence, meditation depth and brain oscillations
With the advent of consumer-grade electroencephalography (EEG) and virtual reality (VR) devices, the use of human cognitive processes directly as means for user-adapted interaction in immersive virtual environments has become increasingly relevant. In this study (N = 43), we investigate electroencephalography-based neurofeedback interaction in virtual reality (VR). Particularly, we investigate this phenomenon in the context of meditation which en…
Voicing experiences of ageist nonrecognition in performance appraisal interaction: Complexities in constructing stories that counteract organisational ignorance
A growing line of research aims to give voice to employees’ experiences of ageism at work. This article complements this body of research by demonstrating how voicing experiences of ageism, and hence counteracting organisational ignorance towards ageism, can be a complex discursive endeavour. Ageist experiences can be based on subtle interactional exchanges at the workplace, including other workers’ nonrecognition (e.g. ostracism). We suggest tha…
Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal: Problems of documentation, tellability, and failed authority
Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a do…
Time to imagine moving: Simulated motor activity affects time perception
Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experi…
Anticipation of aversive visual stimuli lengthens perceived temporal duration
Subjective estimates of elapsed time are sensitive to the fluctuations in an emotional state. While it is well known that dangerous and threatening situations, such as electric shocks or loud noises, are perceived as lasting longer than safe events, it remains unclear whether anticipating a threatening event speeds up or slows down subjective time and what defines the direction of the distortion. We examined whether the anticipation of uncertain …
Empathizing with the End User: Effect of Empathy and Emotional Intelligence on Ideation
Trait emotional intelligence and evoked empathy may help in a task where emotion-evoking source material is utilized to ideate solutions and services for the end-user. Participants of the current study read life stories of different persons, with perspective-taking instruction to evoke either high or low empathy. The reading was followed with ideation tasks, first identifying problems that the person of the story is facing, and then creating init…
Moral foundations and political orientation: Systematic review and meta-analysis
We investigate the relationship of morality and political orientation by focusing on the influential results showing that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typical measure of political orientation, a political self-placement item. We used a predefined process fo…
Type 1 long QT syndrome and psychological stress in a laboratory setting
Trait-like sensitivity to stress in long QT syndrome patients has been documented previously. In addition, mental stress has been associated with symptomatic status of long QT syndrome. We examined whether the symptomatic type 1 long QT syndrome patients would be more sensitive to mental stress compared to asymptomatic patients and whether there would be differences in task-related physiological stress reactions between type 1 long QT syndrome pa…
Complaining About Others at Work
The article investigates the interactional work required to launch a complaint about nonpresent third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain, and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilitate entry into complaining by means of building joint epistemic access and affective stance toward th…
Empathy, Challenge, and Psychophysiological Activation in Therapist-Client Interaction
Two central dimensions in psychotherapeutic work are a therapist's empathy with clients and challenging their judgments. We investigated how they influence psychophysiological responses in the participants. Data were from psychodynamic therapy sessions, 24 sessions from 5 dyads, from which 694 therapist's interventions were coded. Heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA) of the participants were used to index emotional arousal. Facial muscle a…
Relationship of Moral Foundations to Political Liberalism-Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in a Finnish Representative Sample
In moral foundations research, two single-item measures of political orientation - with anchors labeled "liberal-conservative" or "left-right" - have been alternatively used. Using a Finnish representative sample, we employed both measures. High conservatism was associated with binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity), while the associations with the individualizing foundations (harm and fairness) were practically zero. By contrast,…
The Spatial Presence Experience Scale (SPES): A Short Self-Report Measure for Diverse Media Settings
The study of spatial presence is currently receiving increased attention in both media psychology and communication research. The present paper introduces the Spatial Presence Experience Scale (SPES), a short eight-item self-report measure. The SPES is derived from a process model of spatial presence ( Wirth et al., 2007 , Media Psychology, 9, 493–525), and assesses spatial presence as a two-dimensional construct that comprises a user’s self-loca…
Emotional–motivational responses predicting choices: The role of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity
Sharing the Emotional Load: Recipient Affiliation Calms Down the Storyteller
In conversational storytelling, the recipients are expected to show affiliation with the emotional stance displayed by the storytellers. We investigated emotional arousal-related autonomic nervous system responses in tellers and recipients of conversational stories. The data consist of 20 recordings of 45- to 60-minute dyadic conversations between female university and polytechnic students. Conversations were videotaped and analyzed by means of c…
Affective stance, ambivalence, and psychophysiological responses during conversational storytelling
Gender differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ temperament, educational competence, and teachability
Background. Student's temperament plays a significant role in teacher's perception of the student's learning style, educational competence (EC), and teachability. Hence, temperament contributes to student's academic achievement and teacher's subjective ratings of school grades. However, little is known about the effect of gender and teacher's age on this association. Aims. We examined the effect of teacher's and student's gender and teacher's age…
Associations of student temperament and educational competence with academic achievement: The role of teacher age and teacher and student gender
Enactive Systems and Enactive Media: Embodied Human-Machine Coupling beyond Interfaces
This paper proposes the concept of enactive system as an alternative to the standard human-computer system and elaborates the idea of content mediation as enactive media. The authors' system consists of the two elements coupled in a holistic manner by means of bodily and spatial involvement, or enactment. Such a system is recursive by nature, involving the impact of the technology on the human agent as well as the effect of the human experience o…
Chronic Stress and the Development of Early Atherosclerosis: Moderating Effect of Endothelial Dysfunction and Impaired Arterial Elasticity
This study aims to explore the interactive effect of vital exhaustion (VE) and endothelial dysfunction on preclinical atherosclerosis, assessed by carotid intima-media thickness (IMT). Furthermore, interaction between VE and carotid elasticity is examined. Participants were 1,596 young healthy adults from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study. Endothelial dysfunction was measured by brachial flow-mediated dilatation (FMD), and carotid elas…
The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events
The authors examined emotional valence- and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychotic…
Prepartum and Postpartum Open-Field Behavior and Maternal Responsiveness in Mice Bidirectionally Selected for Open-Field Thigmotaxis
The authors examined pre- and postpartum open-field (OF) behavior and maternal responsiveness in mice that they bidirectionally selected for OF thigmotaxis. The authors tested 40 female mice under 3 conditions: prepartum OF, postpartum OF, and a pup retrieval test. In both OF conditions, the high OF thigmotaxis (HOFT) mice were more thigmotactic but explored and reared less than the low OF thigmotaxis (LOFT) mice, indicating that the HOFT mice we…
A Process Model of the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences
In order to bridge interdisciplinary differences in Presence research and to establish connections between Presence and “older” concepts of psychology and communication, a theoretical model of the formation of Spatial Presence is proposed. It is applicable to the exposure to different media and intended to unify the existing efforts to develop a theory of Presence. The model includes assumptions about attention allocation, mental models, and invo…
Emotion perceived and emotion felt: Same and different
The goal of the present study was to examine the relationships and differences between emotion perceived ( i.e., the emotional quality expressed by music) and emotion felt ( i.e., the individual's emotional response to music). Thirty-two participants listened to 12 music pieces differing in terms of a priori basic emotional quality, and rated the music from two points of view ( i.e., emotion felt and emotion perceived) using 16 adjectives from di…
Cloninger's Temperament Dimensions and Threat, Stress, and Performance Appraisals During Different Challenges Among Young Adults
We examined the relationship of Cloninger's temperament factors—Novelty Seeking, Harm Avoidance, Reward Dependence, and Persistence—to perceived threat and stress and performance appraisals during different challenges, i.e., mental arithmetic, the reaction time task, and three public speaking tasks, among 97 young adult men and women. Temperament was measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory. The results showed that, although some of th…
Complaining About Others at Work
The article investigates the interactional work required to launch a complaint about nonpresent third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain, and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilitate entry into complaining by means of building joint epistemic access and affective stance toward th…
Affective stance, ambivalence, and psychophysiological responses during conversational storytelling
Sharing the Emotional Load: Recipient Affiliation Calms Down the Storyteller
In conversational storytelling, the recipients are expected to show affiliation with the emotional stance displayed by the storytellers. We investigated emotional arousal-related autonomic nervous system responses in tellers and recipients of conversational stories. The data consist of 20 recordings of 45- to 60-minute dyadic conversations between female university and polytechnic students. Conversations were videotaped and analyzed by means of c…
Empathy, Challenge, and Psychophysiological Activation in Therapist-Client Interaction
Two central dimensions in psychotherapeutic work are a therapist's empathy with clients and challenging their judgments. We investigated how they influence psychophysiological responses in the participants. Data were from psychodynamic therapy sessions, 24 sessions from 5 dyads, from which 694 therapist's interventions were coded. Heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA) of the participants were used to index emotional arousal. Facial muscle a…
Gender differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ temperament, educational competence, and teachability
Background. Student's temperament plays a significant role in teacher's perception of the student's learning style, educational competence (EC), and teachability. Hence, temperament contributes to student's academic achievement and teacher's subjective ratings of school grades. However, little is known about the effect of gender and teacher's age on this association. Aims. We examined the effect of teacher's and student's gender and teacher's age…
Voicing experiences of ageist nonrecognition in performance appraisal interaction: Complexities in constructing stories that counteract organisational ignorance
A growing line of research aims to give voice to employees’ experiences of ageism at work. This article complements this body of research by demonstrating how voicing experiences of ageism, and hence counteracting organisational ignorance towards ageism, can be a complex discursive endeavour. Ageist experiences can be based on subtle interactional exchanges at the workplace, including other workers’ nonrecognition (e.g. ostracism). We suggest tha…
Telling a supervisor about experiences of gendered dismissal: Problems of documentation, tellability, and failed authority
Difficulties of documentation characterize many problematic experiences of social interaction. Here, we study such difficulties by analyzing a case in which an employee tells her supervisor about the gendered dismissal that she has experienced at work. Using video‐recorded performance appraisal interviews as data and conversation analysis and positioning analysis as methods, we examine how the experience of gendered dismissal lends itself to a do…
Relationship of Moral Foundations to Political Liberalism-Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in a Finnish Representative Sample
In moral foundations research, two single-item measures of political orientation - with anchors labeled "liberal-conservative" or "left-right" - have been alternatively used. Using a Finnish representative sample, we employed both measures. High conservatism was associated with binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity), while the associations with the individualizing foundations (harm and fairness) were practically zero. By contrast,…
Associations of student temperament and educational competence with academic achievement: The role of teacher age and teacher and student gender
Emotional–motivational responses predicting choices: The role of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity
Perceived Social Support and Abdominal Fat Distribution in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Structural Equation Analysis of Prospective Data
Life changes, locus of control and metabolic syndrome precursors in adolescents and young adults: A three-year follow-up
Perceived Social Support and Abdominal Fat Distribution in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Structural Equation Analysis of Prospective Data
Emotion-Related Responses to Audio News with Rising versus Falling Background Tone Sequences
We examined the emotional effects of (a) a rising versus a falling chromatic tone sequence in the background of audio news and (b) foreground versus background diatonic and chromatic tone sequences. In experiment one, 26 participants rated audio news messages with rising and falling chromatic background tone sequences on the valence and arousal dimensions. Cardiac activity, electrodermal activity (EDA), and facial muscle activity were also record…
Contributions of Psychophysiology to Media Research: Review and Recommendations
Despite the increasing use of psychophysiological measures in various research areas, there is a relative paucity of studies on communication, media, and media interfaces that have taken advantage of this approach. This article provides an overview of the use of psychophysiological measures of attention and emotion in media research with the focus on 3 most commonly used measures: heart rate, facial electromyography, and electrodermal activity. S…
The Role of Personality in Emotional Responses to Music: Verbal, Electrocortical and Cardiovascular Measures
We examined whether personality, defined in terms of behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivities (Gray, 1982, 1991) and the Alternative Five personality dimensions (Zuckerman et al., 1993), moderates the influence of a music listening session comprising 12 music pieces, on the emotional state of an individual as assessed by self-report and psychophysiological measures in 32 participants. Electroencephal…
Emotion perceived and emotion felt: Same and different
The goal of the present study was to examine the relationships and differences between emotion perceived ( i.e., the emotional quality expressed by music) and emotion felt ( i.e., the individual's emotional response to music). Thirty-two participants listened to 12 music pieces differing in terms of a priori basic emotional quality, and rated the music from two points of view ( i.e., emotion felt and emotion perceived) using 16 adjectives from di…
Cloninger's Temperament Dimensions and Threat, Stress, and Performance Appraisals During Different Challenges Among Young Adults
We examined the relationship of Cloninger's temperament factors—Novelty Seeking, Harm Avoidance, Reward Dependence, and Persistence—to perceived threat and stress and performance appraisals during different challenges, i.e., mental arithmetic, the reaction time task, and three public speaking tasks, among 97 young adult men and women. Temperament was measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory. The results showed that, although some of th…
A Process Model of the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences
In order to bridge interdisciplinary differences in Presence research and to establish connections between Presence and “older” concepts of psychology and communication, a theoretical model of the formation of Spatial Presence is proposed. It is applicable to the exposure to different media and intended to unify the existing efforts to develop a theory of Presence. The model includes assumptions about attention allocation, mental models, and invo…
The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events
The authors examined emotional valence- and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychotic…
Prepartum and Postpartum Open-Field Behavior and Maternal Responsiveness in Mice Bidirectionally Selected for Open-Field Thigmotaxis
The authors examined pre- and postpartum open-field (OF) behavior and maternal responsiveness in mice that they bidirectionally selected for OF thigmotaxis. The authors tested 40 female mice under 3 conditions: prepartum OF, postpartum OF, and a pup retrieval test. In both OF conditions, the high OF thigmotaxis (HOFT) mice were more thigmotactic but explored and reared less than the low OF thigmotaxis (LOFT) mice, indicating that the HOFT mice we…
Chronic Stress and the Development of Early Atherosclerosis: Moderating Effect of Endothelial Dysfunction and Impaired Arterial Elasticity
This study aims to explore the interactive effect of vital exhaustion (VE) and endothelial dysfunction on preclinical atherosclerosis, assessed by carotid intima-media thickness (IMT). Furthermore, interaction between VE and carotid elasticity is examined. Participants were 1,596 young healthy adults from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study. Endothelial dysfunction was measured by brachial flow-mediated dilatation (FMD), and carotid elas…
Associations of student temperament and educational competence with academic achievement: The role of teacher age and teacher and student gender
Enactive Systems and Enactive Media: Embodied Human-Machine Coupling beyond Interfaces
This paper proposes the concept of enactive system as an alternative to the standard human-computer system and elaborates the idea of content mediation as enactive media. The authors' system consists of the two elements coupled in a holistic manner by means of bodily and spatial involvement, or enactment. Such a system is recursive by nature, involving the impact of the technology on the human agent as well as the effect of the human experience o…
Gender differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ temperament, educational competence, and teachability
Background. Student's temperament plays a significant role in teacher's perception of the student's learning style, educational competence (EC), and teachability. Hence, temperament contributes to student's academic achievement and teacher's subjective ratings of school grades. However, little is known about the effect of gender and teacher's age on this association. Aims. We examined the effect of teacher's and student's gender and teacher's age…
Affective stance, ambivalence, and psychophysiological responses during conversational storytelling
Sharing the Emotional Load: Recipient Affiliation Calms Down the Storyteller
In conversational storytelling, the recipients are expected to show affiliation with the emotional stance displayed by the storytellers. We investigated emotional arousal-related autonomic nervous system responses in tellers and recipients of conversational stories. The data consist of 20 recordings of 45- to 60-minute dyadic conversations between female university and polytechnic students. Conversations were videotaped and analyzed by means of c…
The Spatial Presence Experience Scale (SPES): A Short Self-Report Measure for Diverse Media Settings
The study of spatial presence is currently receiving increased attention in both media psychology and communication research. The present paper introduces the Spatial Presence Experience Scale (SPES), a short eight-item self-report measure. The SPES is derived from a process model of spatial presence ( Wirth et al., 2007 , Media Psychology, 9, 493–525), and assesses spatial presence as a two-dimensional construct that comprises a user’s self-loca…
Emotional–motivational responses predicting choices: The role of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity
Relationship of Moral Foundations to Political Liberalism-Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in a Finnish Representative Sample
In moral foundations research, two single-item measures of political orientation - with anchors labeled "liberal-conservative" or "left-right" - have been alternatively used. Using a Finnish representative sample, we employed both measures. High conservatism was associated with binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity), while the associations with the individualizing foundations (harm and fairness) were practically zero. By contrast,…
Empathy, Challenge, and Psychophysiological Activation in Therapist-Client Interaction
Two central dimensions in psychotherapeutic work are a therapist's empathy with clients and challenging their judgments. We investigated how they influence psychophysiological responses in the participants. Data were from psychodynamic therapy sessions, 24 sessions from 5 dyads, from which 694 therapist's interventions were coded. Heart rate and electrodermal activity (EDA) of the participants were used to index emotional arousal. Facial muscle a…
Complaining About Others at Work
The article investigates the interactional work required to launch a complaint about nonpresent third parties in discussions between employees and their manager. The study shows how the complaint recipient (the manager) creates opportunities for the complainer (the employee) to complain, and how the recipient and complainer collaboratively facilitate entry into complaining by means of building joint epistemic access and affective stance toward th…
Type 1 long QT syndrome and psychological stress in a laboratory setting
Trait-like sensitivity to stress in long QT syndrome patients has been documented previously. In addition, mental stress has been associated with symptomatic status of long QT syndrome. We examined whether the symptomatic type 1 long QT syndrome patients would be more sensitive to mental stress compared to asymptomatic patients and whether there would be differences in task-related physiological stress reactions between type 1 long QT syndrome pa…
Empathizing with the End User: Effect of Empathy and Emotional Intelligence on Ideation
Trait emotional intelligence and evoked empathy may help in a task where emotion-evoking source material is utilized to ideate solutions and services for the end-user. Participants of the current study read life stories of different persons, with perspective-taking instruction to evoke either high or low empathy. The reading was followed with ideation tasks, first identifying problems that the person of the story is facing, and then creating init…
Moral foundations and political orientation: Systematic review and meta-analysis
We investigate the relationship of morality and political orientation by focusing on the influential results showing that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typical measure of political orientation, a political self-placement item. We used a predefined process fo…
Time to imagine moving: Simulated motor activity affects time perception
Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experi…
Psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · Developmental psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Arousal (6 works) · Communication (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works)