Formerly Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry of Old Age, Imperial College, London, UKDown with Gloom! or How to Defeat Depression . In it, as elsewhere in his writing, he was open about his personal experience of depression.Brice Pitt, who died aged 89 on 16 January 2021, was a highly significant pioneer of old age psychiatry, as well as a colourful personality. In 1971, he was a founder member of the informal ‘coffee house’ group of psychogeriatricians, which preceded the RCPsych's Special Interest Group (now a Faculty) for Old Age Psychiatry. He was the group's first secretary (1973–1978). As the chair of the subsequent Section (1986–1990), he led old age psychiatry through turbulent debate to achieve government recognition as a distinct medical specialty in 1989. He also chaired the College's Public Education Committee and, associated with this role, wrote Psychogeriatrics: An Introduction to Psychiatry of Old Age (1974). About this book, he said: ‘I wrote down everything I knew off the top of my head. It was a doddle’. His turn of phrase was often vivid and insightful: psychogeriatricians were ‘a happy band of pilgrims’ who needed ‘occasional militancy […] to gain a fair share of scant resources, to put them to best use, to make do with too little while wheeling, dealing, and fighting for more’. Psychogeriatrics was followed by other books, including Feelings about Childbirth (1978), which was based on his MD thesis on post-partum depression  and Mid-Life Crisis: Its Cause and How to Overcome It (1980), and they all received international acclaim. These volumes were variously translated into Japanese, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, French, Croatian, Afrikaans and other languages.Brice's passion for his subject was evident in Spellbound (1945), he decided that if medicine was to be his destiny, he would be a psychiatrist.Brice was born on 19 December 1931, the son of Norman Pitt, a surgeon, and Emily (née Crawford), a nurse. Brought up in Surrey, he attended Epsom College. In the immediate post-war years, children perhaps conformed more to parental direction than they do today. Brice wanted to be an actor, but his father told him he would have to study medicine. He was unsure how to reconcile this direction with his wishes, but when watching Alfred Hitchcock's psychiatric melodrama Like his father, Brice went to Guy's Hospital Medical School in London. David Stafford-Clark, psychiatrist, television personality and author of books on psychiatry for a lay readership, was his teacher. After house jobs came National Service in the Army, first at The Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, then Singapore and Hong Kong. In 1960, Major Brice Pitt moved back into civilian medicine. He opted for psychiatry training at Springfield Hospital in south-west London. There, he treated his ‘first proper old person’. He was ‘perplexed by the richness of the symptomatology’ and perturbed by the attitude that the hospital was ‘like a castle, a good registrar would fend off the elderly, as those who got in were bound to stay […] dumped by their family’. He objected to excluding people on account of age. Perhaps a childhood memory haunted him: ‘My sainted grandmother had a stroke and threw a knife at me in a tantrum: this affected me profoundly and left me wondering why’.As a senior registrar, Brice worked with Ford Robinson, who had a ward and day hospital for functionally ill older people at St Clements Hospital, Mile End, London. It was rare in those days to have any dedicated psychogeriatric training. Brice also trained at Claybury, a large psychiatric hospital also in London. It had a ‘tremendous atmosphere emanating from the therapeutic community approach’ nurtured by the ‘superb’ physician superintendent Denis Martin. Brice called Claybury ‘Camelot’, after the mythical fellowship of King Arthur, with all participants equal at the Round Table.Appointed consultant psychogeriatrician at Claybury in 1966, Brice inherited 400 occupied beds, a catchment area of about 65 000 over-65s, a social worker, a senior house officer and some general practitioner sessions. Local geriatrician Malcolm Hodkinson said to him: ‘You don't want a waiting list, you never admit for continuing care, and you don't want to run a sleepy service’, and he thought: ‘My God, the one thing I do not want ever to be accused of by Malcolm is running a sleepy service’. And he never did. He started by establishing a mixed-sex ward at Claybury, risqué in a gender-segregated hospital. He also introduced routine home assessments for older people, a practice that became widespread. Camelot fell when Martin died. New-style district general hospital psychiatry beckoned, and a prize post at the brand-new Princess Alexandra Hospital, Harlow, lured Brice back to general psychiatry. But in 1971 he returned to psychogeriatrics in Tower Hamlets, where innovation included a collaborative psychiatric–geriatric unit with geriatrician Chris Silver.In the early 1980s, Brice moved to Barts (City and Hackney), to join psychogeriatrician Alan Gardner, ‘a very obsessional serious fellow, while there is something a bit flighty about me some of the time’, he said. In 1986, he moved again, to St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, as the UK's fourth professor of old age psychiatry. While there, he established the Hammersmith Hospital memory clinic, one of the first in the country. This led to him being dubbed ‘Memory Man’ in a local newspaper, for his pioneering work.The Wind in the Willows. He directed plays and wrote some, including Anatomy of Melancholy and The Memory Clinic. In 2005, under the pseudonym Beric Norman, he wrote a novel, Mordred's Version, rooted in the original Camelot.Brice also fulfilled his dream to be an actor. With the Tower Theatre Company, he played royalty, noblemen, judges, bishops and Badger in In March, when Spring is nigh, but strong winds blowThe Faculty of Old Age Shrinken blithely goOn Pilgrimage, to venues academicAnd each and every one a well trained medicTo discourse on derangements of the mindOf older persons, troubled with all kindStates of confusion, madness, melancholy –Yet to my mind the meeting was full jolly […]His presence at the gathering, to receive meantHis peers’ award for his Lifetime Achievement! […]Brice was delighted to be offered this award1Which he never knew existed: Thank you, Lord!Chaucer would have appreciated his words and humour at the RCPsych's Old Age Faculty meeting in 2013, when he was presented with its lifetime achievement award:Brice had a large family. Married three times, he was father of Gareth, Caroline, Tristram and Rosalind, grandfather of Shem, Fiona, Helen and Joshua, and stepfather to children from the marriage of his third wife, Judy. They all survive him.


Overweight and obesity present health risks for mothers and their children. Reaching women during the key life stages of preconception and pregnancy in community settings, such as workplaces, is an ideal opportunity to enable health behavior change. We conducted five focus groups with 25 women aged between 25 and 62 years in order to investigate the determinants of healthy lifestyle behaviors, weight management, and wellbeing needs during the preconception and pregnancy periods in an Australian university workplace. Discussions explored women’s health and wellbeing needs with specific reference to workplace impact. An abductive analytical approach incorporated the capability, opportunity, and motivation of behavior (COM-B) model, and four themes were identified: hierarchy of needs and values, social interactions, a support scaffold, and control. Findings highlight the requirement for greater organization-level support, including top-down coordination of wellbeing opportunities and facilitation of education and support for preconception healthy lifestyle behaviors in the workplace. Interventionists and organizational policy makers could incorporate these higher-level changes into workplace processes and intervention development, which may increase intervention capacity for success. Approximately 50% of women from high-income countries enter pregnancy with overweight or obesity  and womeThe workplace presents specific challenges to the health and wellbeing of employees, manifested in the form of physical  and social opportunities . We know work factors can contribute to ill health, poor lifestyle behaviors, and psychosocial risks ,11. HoweTo date, intervention development has largely neglected systematic processes that link target behaviors  with the behavioral system . To overcome this limitation, and improve our understanding of workplace HLB, we used an overarching framework, namely the capability, opportunity, and motivation of behavior (COM-B) model . The COMThis qualitative study was a part of a pragmatic mixed-methods approach to investigate the needs of working women within their university workplace, specifically health and wellbeing during the preconception and pregnancy periods. The researchers considered their respective backgrounds in health science, public health, psychology, and social science in determining the chosen research approach. A pragmatic approach allowed the researchers to derive knowledge from absolute constructs, for example the working environment or workplace policies, and abstract constructs, such as beliefs or identity. The present study utilized focus group (FG) data, informed by the COM-B model, to contribute to a contextualized needs assessment. The needs assessment also includes survey and environmental assessment research and, thus, allowed us to assess the consistency of our findings by triangulating the data (not reported here). The research approach informed how the HLB and wellbeing needs of working women were interpreted and situated the women as experts in their own lives and behaviors. Ethics approval was provided by the Tasmanian Health and Medical Human Research Ethics Committee (H0017313).Women employed at a university workplace were eligible to participate, regardless of their age or position. In order to generate a full and detailed understanding of our target population, we purposively sampled participants who may have had a personal or professional interest in our research by manually searching public staff profiles. Following the search, a personalized email invitation was sent to potential FG participants working as health and safety representatives; members of the “Work, Health and Wellbeing Network”; human resources team members; academic staff within health sciences, psychology, and medical research with specializations or interests in general health, midwifery, mental health, chronic disease, or public health; professional staff specializing in student wellbeing, support, counseling, engagement, retention, and advocacy; and staff with a background in digital communication and online platforms, such as social media and mobile-health. Women of all disciplines and backgrounds were also invited via the Work and Wellbeing Survey, previously circulated to all women aged 18–45 at the university, and via advertisements on the staff intranet and in staff newsletters. While these advertisements targeted a wider audience than the personalized emails, FG context was provided by framing the purpose and rationale behind the research . ExplanaInformation was collected from 25 women employees during 5 face-to-face FG sessions across 2 university locations in Tasmania, Australia. Sessions were led by one facilitator  and were guided according to the semi-structured question schedule . QuestioPhase 1: Preliminary organization and planning. Two researchers  met to discuss the underpinning COM-B model  it’s just, like, 45 min to an hour, particularly if the weather was good…(FG2)When asked about workplace wellbeing activity facilitators, women responded that they were more likely to engage if they knew other participants; the social aspect of the group wellbeing activities seemed to be as important as the participation in these activities. Women also reflected how having someone to ‘take the initiative’ (workplace wellbeing champions) supported opportunities for health promotion, including facilitating access to healthier food at meetings and encouraging participation in walking meetings, standing desk usage, and engagement in wellbeing activities. Further, work relationships enabled women to foster social capital and belonging. Women spoke of how some departments regularly took morning tea or lunch together, celebrated birthdays, or attended start of semester drinks. Women said that colleagues were often the driving force that enabled them to take breaks from work or go for a walk.They really understand connectivity… like every month they celebrate somebody’s birthday. They’ll celebrate…they’ll connect, they come out and have lunch together…those kinds of things.(FG4)Women discussed learnings from their female colleagues about workplace pregnancy or parenting entitlements, such as leave entitlements or conference attendance support; shared information based on lived experience of the preconception, pregnancy, or postpartum periods; and received help, particularly in the absence of a supportive work culture or appropriate physical supports.It was really tricky early on…to find somewhere to, to breastfeed on this campus, and my success in continuing to breastfeed was because I had a boss who…as we got to know each other a bit better… She had a tiny office, and we would sit back-to-back, while I was doing it.(FG3)In contrast, women also identified how their manager or colleagues could make them feel burdensome, when balancing their caring responsibilities. Consequently, women spoke of a massive variation in experiences across the organization, attributable to the relationships women had with their supervisors and colleagues. Women who had positive experiences with their transition to pregnancy and parenting at the university acknowledged that they were likely in the minority.I think there’s an incredible variety of experiences of this here, there’s such a vast organization and there are so many decision makers and so much depends on your immediate supervisor. And I hear stories that are really positive, and you just think, ‘that’s fantastic’, and then you hear other stories and you just think, ‘What decade are we in?’(FG5)Ultimately, women described their colleagues as a source of motivation to engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors, take breaks from work, and learn about parenting- or pregnancy-related workplace supports. Conversely, women acknowledged that managers or colleagues could also make women with children feel like a burden, when balancing their caring responsibilities.Women discussed a genuine need for workplace managers and peers to embody the HLB and wellbeing focus that were frequently promoted at an organizational level. That is, they needed to observe their colleagues and managers adopting the behaviors themselves. Women said this would create a legitimizing effect and, thus, would enable and empower them to participate, and prioritize their health.I do have a boss and the next boss up as well who are very, like, big on lunch breaks and will… be seen even when they’re busy going and taking a lunch break and they will encourage you to take a lunch break.(FG3)However, women in management positions did acknowledge that although they encouraged their team to take breaks or exercise, some did not partake themselves, citing workloads or resourcing  as main barriers.I’m in a middle management position and I would say that I’m a really bad example to my staff… like most people definitely get a lunch, a lot of people are able to go for walks and things like that. So, I would encourage and support that… But yeah, I work all day, I go home and…still work and I work on the weekends to do…my job. But that’s life.(FG2)On the other hand, flexibility was highly valued among participants. It seemed to be accessible to most women and there appeared to be a cultural norm around flexibility at work. Women with children seemed to use flexible working arrangements to coordinate caring and work responsibilities, whereas women without children were better placed to integrate physical activity into their workday.[It] can be a very flexible working environment as well, like working around your children and there’s a lot of people where I work, there’s hardly anyone that actually works nine to five, five days a week. They’re all starting early, finishing early or staying late, or just not working that day or doing all sorts of hours or working from home and school pickups and it’s… really supportive.(FG2)Workplace cultural norms also served to highlight receptiveness to pregnancy in the workplace. Women looked to their pregnant colleagues to inform their expectations around workplace pregnancy or parenting experiences. However, one woman spoke of how she was unable to form clear expectations in the absence of viable role models in her department.There was one girl who was pregnant a few years ago. I don’t really know… Probably not anyone who’s in a management role like me, rather [those who] already have had children or a lot of them are males to be honest.(FG3)Conversely, in female-dominated areas, pregnancy was perceived as a recurring inconvenience, where replacement staff were continuously sought to fill in for women taking parental leave. Consequently, although women getting pregnant and having children was very commonplace, there appeared to be a negative cultural undercurrent to pregnancy in the workplace.We had probably a higher number of women and young women, so it was always a bit of a running…you know, oh gosh, trying to replace the person that’s having the baby, so rather than see that as a problem because they’re like, oh my God, like now you know, who’s going to do that job?(FG2)To summarize, although participants felt it was important that management and colleagues exemplified health-promoting behaviors at work, those in management positions often felt unable to do this due to resourcing or workload issues. Normalization of parenting and pregnancy at work, for example by providing ready access to flexible working arrangements, was important for helping women set expectations for subsequent pregnancy and parenting experiences at work.A support scaffold describes the importance of physical influences, including policies or organization-level supports, on women’s HLB and wellbeing at the workplace. The theme is divided into three subthemes, which align with the physical opportunity COM-B subcomponent.Many women discussed the need for a strategic and genuine focus on staff wellbeing, integrated across all facets of workplace operations. Several women mentioned that although there were many physical opportunities for HLB at work, activities seemed to be organized in an “ad-hoc” or uncoordinated manner that was not sustained over time.[The workplace] does a lot of ‘ad-hockery’, so you have things that [are] offered and it’s someone who’s got passionate and made it happen. And you don’t know if it’s going to carry on, it’s just…you don’t know if it’s consistent.(FG5)Women stated that healthy lifestyle or wellbeing activities were often poorly advertised and that formal information dissemination pathways were absent or unnecessarily complicated. Similar confusion existed around women’s leave and contract entitlements, with many women being unclear as to where to source such information.Yeah, so I think it’s probably something that needs to be broadcast a bit more and there’s a lot of things, like, that I think on this campus that are just not well organized and communicated.(FG4)It was evident that women experienced disparate access to workplace wellbeing opportunities relative to workplace location , affordability , relevance, choice, regularity, and quality. Availability of staff resources to share workloads or provide ‘cover’, also influenced whether women performed HLB at work. Additionally, although most women felt that their workplace had a responsibility to not negatively impact their health, many initiatives seemed to be individually driven by workplace wellbeing champions. One woman noted there were no appointed staff positions to coordinate health and wellbeing for employees. There seemed to be an expectation that individuals would step in to fill this gap.It comes down to the… whose responsibility is it though? Like we don’t have a health and wellbeing full-time staff member that runs all these things…(FG4)Women also highlighted how barriers to physical wellbeing opportunities extended to a lack of policy focus and coordinated action plans around employee wellbeing. Women remarked that there were no explicit policies around wellbeing and felt policy development was typically ‘reactive’ rather than ‘proactive’. For example, women spoke of a recently implemented campus-wide smoking ban that sought to align the workplace with current legislation. The women expressed disappointment regarding the absence of complementary smoking cessation programs, enforcement, compliance, and signage. The disjointed approach to wellbeing created a foundation for negative social culture to become established, thus impacting wellbeing opportunities. Women felt the workplace culture was not ‘people-centered’ and gave rise to excessive workloads and increased stress levels.We are working in a culture, in an environment that hasn’t been people-centered for a long time and stress is just considered a normal part of doing business, and people’s stress levels… there’s a reason they stopped doing the staff surveys. They don’t want to know…(FG5)One woman suggested that the issues around culture and organizational commitment to wellbeing also had a flow-on effect for women who were pregnant or already parents.If you are seeing pregnancy or parenting as a challenging situation to manage at work, then that says something about the place that you’re working in. If you are having to figure out how I can make this incredible life event have the minimal impact on my workplace and my career, the way I do my job…(FG5)Overall, women observed that there was varying access to workplace wellbeing opportunities, such as standing desks and showers, and that employee health and wellbeing were typically uncoordinated and individually driven.Some women discussed their lack of opportunity to participate in workplace wellbeing activities offered outside their immediate department or area . There seemed to be a quasi-physical barrier produced by ‘siloing’ that deterred or prevented women from outside the silo availing of healthy lifestyle and wellbeing opportunities. Women spoke of how this barrier was reinforced by their perceived lack of belonging within other work areas, a lack of positive social interactions during silo ‘infiltration’, resource guarding, segregated department mailing lists, and social cliques. These perceptions also accentuated how healthy lifestyle opportunities and wellbeing supports were not universally available to all employees within their immediate silo.Yeah, having facilities and feeling like you can use them away from your desk because… I’m not a part of the school, I’m employed centrally and sometimes when you look into the team and you, you get funny looks…(FG1)In short, the separation of the workplace into different buildings and departments created a real barrier to social and workplace wellbeing opportunities.Women felt the physical environment impacted their HLB and wellbeing opportunities. Women were critical of the food landscape at their workplace. Healthy options had declined over time and were often unavailable, particularly for women who were time-poor or preconception women trying to lose weight. Discretionary foods were typically provided at meetings and work functions, and as office snacks. Food options at cafés were lacking in nutritional information; were not conducive to ethical, sustainable , or culturally appropriate eating; and many ‘healthier’ options were often accompanied by fried foods. One woman remarked that while she did not bring unhealthy foods into her home, it was impossible to avoid them at work.I think the food offerings on this campus are abysmal, have been for many years, getting worse and they don’t support healthy eating. They make it very hard to eat… Especially if you are just pushed for time and you just need a quick something, it’s very hard to choose healthy if you are grabbing something and going back to your desk. They need to make it much easier.(FG5)Further, some women felt that there were few spaces to sit outside and eat lunch away from their desk, and that tearoom fridges were too small to store homemade staff lunches. Some women mentioned that food cost and choice varied according to their workplace location, although others reflected that future campus redevelopment and relocation may provide more alternatives.These little bar fridges, everyone brings their lunch and they’re packed in there, and it’s not really accommodated in some areas for people to all bring their lunch and have a fridge.(FG4)Incorporation of active design elements, including stairs access, campus layout or size, and campus location allowed some women to benefit from incidental exercise as a part of their typical workday. However, access to this physical opportunity was unequal among participants. Women discussed how certain work settings, for example a city-center versus suburb location, could facilitate variable opportunities for active transport, exercise, and community engagement.I have to move around a bit as my stakeholders are located in many places and this campus being on a hill, I get to walk up that hill quite a lot and stairs, three flights.(FG1)Many women said physical workplace parenting supports were inconsistent or absent . Further, information or policies to guide or protect preconception and pregnant women within laboratory settings was notably lacking, thus potentiating risk to women during this life stage.There’s nothing available, you have to physically talk to someone. And sometimes you won’t want to talk to your supervisor to say, ‘hey, I’m thinking about becoming pregnant. Is there somewhere that I shouldn’t be going in the lab?’(FG2)In brief, participants critiqued the lack of healthy food options, social spaces for staff to sit and eat, and the inconsistency of access to physical parenting supports  at their workplace. Women observed how building design  and their workplace setting  could facilitate incidental exercise.The final theme, control, related to factors that impacted women’s ability to manage their HLB, weight, or wellbeing needs, such as health status or self-efficacy. The theme branched into three subthemes and aligns with four of the six COM-B subcomponents: physical opportunity, physical capability, psychological capability, and reflective motivation.Some women spoke of how their health or PPP status impacted their wellbeing, preconception preparation, or ability to engage in HLB. Health status, including injury, sickness during pregnancy, autoimmunity, and age acted as barriers to health, wellbeing, and/or weight maintenance. For example, one woman recounted how an injury, combined with dietary behaviors, led to weight gain.I had a dodgy ankle and I tend to like food for comfort, and I wasn’t able to do as much exercise. Um, so you know, put a bit of weight on and formed lots of bad habits like eating chocolate after meals and eating chocolate all day long really.(FG2)With regards to weight, participants indicated that achievement of preconception weight loss could improve IVF success, offspring outcomes, or alleviate chronic conditions , albeit prolonging the preconception period. Perhaps worryingly, given the tendency of those in academia to delay pregnancy, older first-time mothers felt they had less time to improve their health behaviors or health status during the preconception or interconception periods.For some people, if it is hard to get pregnant, the main thing you worry about is whether it works or not… But yeah, the idea of waiting until you are healthier, I hadn’t been in a position to think of that and I think it’s great that you can.(FG3)In sum, factors such as health status  and age acted as barriers to health, wellbeing, and/or weight maintenance of women. While participants felt that weight loss could improve certain outcomes , some felt older mothers were under greater time pressure to conceive and, therefore, felt unable to make positive health behavior changes.Women discussed how modifiable attributes of their work role, such as having control over their work scheduling, allowed them to accommodate their non-work needs, including taking breaks, having lunch, exercising, caring responsibilities, prioritizing mental health, and attending appointments  or events. However, women in academic roles also felt control over how and when their classes were organized had been replaced by top-down directives. This loss of autonomy prevented several women from engaging in physical activity at work and for some women, for example those with small children, this could be their only opportunity to incorporate exercise into their day.So many times, you can be doing two-hour practical tutorials in the… lab, four of them in a row, back-to-back…You’re supposed to have 10 min, but of course all the students were desperate to talk to you.(FG4)Some women indicated that access to flexibility entitlements  depended on manager discretion. Others discussed the prevailing notion that flexibility was only required for parents or women with children. Further, some women remarked how working in a reduced-hours position would likely still result in a full-time workload.But someone who I know does work kind of reduced hours and is in a position which is kind of a similar level to mine. And she kind of leaves early, which is a bad way of phrasing it, but… I feel like you’d just end up doing the same amount of work anyway.(FG3)Part-time or flexible working also instilled guilt in some women when day-to-day work activities were scheduled outside their working hours.So, all our committee meetings are on a Friday and I’m not working on a Friday at the moment, so I’m on committees, but it’s meaningless because I can’t come the meetings… You’re an apology, but I actually feel like I’m apologizing for not being there. I feel bad. I’m letting them down, how can I be on a committee and not turn up? And I’m not paid to be there.(FG3)In addition, part-time or flexible worker status hindered some women’s self-determination to attend the gym, take their lunch, or participate in workplace wellbeing activities during work time. These women felt they could not ‘ask for more’ from their employer.In a way I already feel so compromised working part time and not just working part time but consistently working just slightly shorter hours on every day than I really should or would like to… It feels like I can’t ask anything more of [my workplace] like that, like I’m squeezing from them as much as I can simply by coming back part time and working those shorter hours. So, the idea for example, of going to the gym at lunch time… It’s almost incomprehensible to me because I work through lunch because I’m going to be leaving at quarter to four to pick up the kids and I might spend 10 min eating a sandwich…(FG3)Women also discussed how core aspects of work roles could present a challenge, for example front-facing reception roles or roles without staff cover limit one’s ability to manage sick children or engage in HLB during the workday. Also, women in low-autonomy roles may not have the same access to flexibility as other staff.There are people, like, who are in relatively low, like, frontline roles like call centers or reception type roles where if they go out for the day, like kid gets sick you have to go pick them up, it actually does cause a challenge. It’s a management challenge…(FG5)Many women expressed concern regarding the increasingly sedentary nature of their work. It was felt that academic staff frequently skipped morning tea breaks, typically ate at their desks, and had less opportunities to partake in incidental exercise or in-person contact with colleagues following the introduction of communications technology such as Skype.But it’s more than food for me, it’s also the sedentary nature of my job, it’s extremely sedentary and more so every year as we become more efficient and the job requires more just sitting at your desk and powering through the work, less opportunity to move during the day. That’s a really a big thing for me, is that the work itself is unhealthy.(FG5)Additionally, several women in academic roles felt that academic culture was not conducive to parenting responsibilities, given the high workloads and irregular hours. It seemed that excessive working hours were the norm within academia, and this was coupled with the belief that many hours were needed to advance your career. Although many women felt heavy workloads encroached on their personal time, this extra work was never acknowledged within the workplace to be unusual as to do so would concede the work was excessive and, thus, capable of impacting wellbeing. One woman recounted a former colleague’s frustrations:She said, ‘the reason I quit [was] because they used to message me every single night asking me to look at things at nine, ten o’clock at night’. And she goes, ‘I wanted to be at home with my kids’ or just, ‘that was my downtime’.(FG2)Summing up, several women remarked that modifiable aspects of their work role  acted as a barrier to participation in workplace wellbeing activities, or even taking a break. Further, women felt they had little ability to improve core aspects of their work roles .Finally, women discussed how their confidence to perform HLB or attain goals was affected by a number of barriers including: (1) not being aware of essential information or knowing where to access it, such as parental leave entitlements; (2) not setting goals or timeframes in relation to the PPP periods , thus precluding improvements to HLB; (3) the physical and social workplace environment, including ease of access to unhealthy foods like chocolates in the office or stigma associated with mental health support; (4) long workdays and sedentary roles; (5) having alternative priorities not focused on health, such as work responsibilities; (6) experiencing failure when trying to meet physical activity or weight goals; and (7) believing that lots of time is required to perform physical activity behaviors or engage with health technology, such as apps.I definitely think sometimes, as someone who would’ve liked to have kids at some point, I do feel like a real pressure around the fact…I’ve probably got more time to do things in my life right now… I feel quite busy as it is… I have recently gotten more back into exercising and I do it before work because I find I don’t have time during the day and I can just talk myself out of it if I have the whole day. It’s, like, five reasons by the end of the day why I shouldn’t go, and it just makes sense to go straight home and sit on the couch.(FG1)Conversely, women identified a number of facilitators to self-efficacy including: (1) having the capacity to identify health concerns requiring improvement and potential solutions, for example, overcoming workplace sedentary behaviors with a standing desk; (2) perceiving that activities or behaviors are valuable, for example mental health is as important as physical activity or diet for health and wellbeing; (3) social support and encouragement; (4) goal setting and tracking (technology such as apps and fitness watches can support this); (5) practicing mindfulness; (6) scheduling breaks into the workday; (7) breaking physical activity down into smaller, manageable blocks to accommodate work; (8) prior positive and successful experiences, for example, asserting entitlement to work flexibly during a second pregnancy; (9) planning and preparation, including bringing your own lunch or snacks to work ; and (10) believing that weight and health behaviors require self-management.I brought my gym to my office because I have room, my office just has three desks and I’m in the corner and I put everything over there for my exercise so that bench is not huge… And I just make myself go there every two hours and do exercise.”(FG2)In summary, barriers to women performing HLB or achieving their goals included the physical and social working environment, having alternative priorities not related to health, and failing to meet physical activity or weight goals. Facilitators to HLB or attending to pregnancy or parenting needs included being able to identify health concerns and potential solutions, goals setting and tracking, and having prior successful experiences.This study drew on the insight and experience of women of all ages to illustrate the experiences and challenges of working women of reproductive age, with respect to their health and wellbeing specific to the preconception and pregnancy periods at their university workplace. By highlighting the multi-level behavioral influences on working women of reproductive age, application of the COM-B model has helped identify the shape and complexities of behavioral systems, relative to context and individual needs. The barriers and facilitators to the HLB and wellbeing needs of the women included: high workloads, caring responsibilities, workplace support and understanding, job insecurity, discrimination, colleague relationships, workplace norms and academic culture, policy, information dissemination and availability, siloed departments, the food landscape, active design and workplace setting, age and health status, control over work scheduling, access to flexibility, part-time or flexible worker status, and self-efficacy.In the current study, themes mapped onto all six COM-B subcomponents; however, opportunity  seemed to have greater relevance to the participants . This inWhile capability was less prominent in the themes, relevant discussions tended to center on women’s capacity for physical activity. Women placed comparatively little emphasis on their capability to engage in healthy eating or other wellbeing-related behaviors. Women may have felt that healthy eating or wellbeing-related behaviors did not require the same skills or ability as physical activity participation, for example fitness levels. We found that women wanted workplace healthy lifestyle opportunities that corresponded with their individual capability levels and tailored to their fitness, health, or pregnancy status. Recently updated physical activity guidelines have stressed the importance of regular movement for pregnant and postpartum women (unless contraindicated) within their work, home, pedagogical, and community settings .Previous lifestyle interventions to improve the health and weight outcomes of pregnant women with overweight and obesity in antenatal settings have been hindered by women’s pre-existing health conditions or low preconception fitness . ConversPhysical and social opportunity were prominently represented across the themes. Regarding opportunities for wellbeing and engagement in HLB, women discussed how lack of support and autonomy were important barriers within the workplace. Women needed greater vocalization and demonstration of workplace support for their parenting, pregnancy, and wellbeing needs to enable access and engagement with health and wellbeing opportunities. Consistent with other studies conducted at university and hospital workplace settings, participants repeatedly spoke of the importance of top-down support for employee wellbeing ,21. FurtPrevious research has iterated the need to consider whether the effort to improve employee HLB is of greater benefit to workers than addressing workplace factors that cause distress, for example, negative workplace culture . CertainWe found that women frequently downgraded their health and wellbeing needs to prioritize their work or caring responsibilities, which resulted in reduced motivation to achieve personal health outcomes. This hierarchy of needs and values may derive from prevailing environmental and social cues that project a lesser value on the needs of women . FurtherInformation on ‘the consequences of behavior’ and women’s beliefs about their capability and mindset could be important facilitators of HLB during pregnancy ,26. InteStrengths of this study include applying the COM-B model, an overarching framework used to conceptualize behavioral influences. Abductive analysis ensured that key concepts and participant experiences were explored. However, limitations include the fact that we did not solely recruit women of reproductive age and this may be construed that the participants did not have the authority to speak about the challenges faced by this population. However, we would argue that the inclusion of a diverse age range lends credibility and richness of experience from women who have lived through this life stage. Member checking was not conducted to improve the validation of participant responses. However, as the current study is part of a larger needs assessment for the target population, this project-level limitation has been minimized through data triangulation. Lastly, study participants were not recruited from all campus locations operated by the university.The importance of exploring the contextual barriers and enablers unique to women during the preconception and pregnancy periods is clear. Our findings suggest that future workplace interventions should explore women’s needs using holistic frameworks, such as the COM-B model, to expand understanding and application of behavior change techniques. However, subsequent steps should apply the current findings to increase intervention capacity for success. Specifically, the subsequent multi-pronged intervention must seek to improve: (1) education and support for preconception healthy lifestyle behaviors (capability and opportunity); (2) equity of access to opportunities, according to individual capacity (capability and opportunity); (3) top-down coordination and support of healthy lifestyle activities and programs (opportunity); and (4) the atypical factors impacting the physical, emotional, psychological, or social wellbeing of working women, for example discrimination, parenting supports, workplace culture, and policy (opportunity and motivation).Finally, while this study investigated the preconception and pregnancy periods, many women discussed their needs in relation to postpartum or parenting. Evidently, these needs were also an important part of women’s experiences during this life stage and highly applicable to the workplace. Thus, intervention development should broaden its scope and increase its relevance, according to the needs of working women.Working women can experience workplace-specific barriers and enablers to their HLB, wellbeing, and weight maintenance during the preconception and pregnancy periods. Our findings highlight the importance of conducting a contextualized investigation into the disparate needs of working women of reproductive age, prior to intervention development. A multi-pronged approach to improve women’s capability, opportunity, and motivation to engage in HLB—targeting aspects such as preconception healthy lifestyle behaviors, workplace endorsement of preconception and pregnancy health, and facilitation of equitable access to wellbeing opportunities—is likely to have the greatest impact on women in this setting.


For any enquiry about usage or installation feel free to contact the corresponding author, a Python module specifically designed for the visualisation of Plutchik’s emotions in texts or in corpora. PyPlutchik draws the Plutchik’s flower with each emotion petal sized after how much that emotion is detected or annotated in the corpus, also representing three degrees of intensity for each of them. Notably, PyPlutchik allows users to display also primary, secondary, tertiary and opposite dyads in a compact, intuitive way. We substantiate our claim that PyPlutchik outperforms other classic visualisations when displaying Plutchik emotions and we showcase a few examples that display our module’s most compelling features.The increasing availability of textual corpora and data fetched from social networks is fuelling a huge production of works based on the model proposed by psychologist Robert Plutchik, often referred simply as the “Plutchik Wheel”. Related researches range from annotation tasks description to emotions detection tools. Visualisation of such emotions is traditionally carried out using the most popular layouts, as bar plots or tables, which are however sub-optimal. The classic representation of the Plutchik’s wheel follows the principles of proximity and opposition between pairs of emotions: spatial proximity in this model is also a semantic proximity, as adjacent emotions elicit a complex emotion (a primary dyad) when triggered together; spatial opposition is a semantic opposition as well, as positive emotions are opposite to negative emotions. The most common layouts fail to preserve both features, not to mention the need of visually allowing comparisons between different corpora in a blink of an eye, that is hard with basic design solutions. We introduce PyPlutchik the Pyplutchik package is available as a Github repository ( Please note that, since the same text cannot express two different degrees of the same emotion, the sum of all the scores of the emotions belonging to the same branch must be less than or equal to 1. Each emotion petal is then sized according to this score. In Joy, Trust and Sadness have been detected; in (ii) for each emotion, the percentage of pseudo-texts in a pseudo-corpus that show that emotion; finally (iii) contains a detail of (ii), where the three degrees of intensity have been annotated separately.PyPlutchik is built on top of Python data visualisation library tplotlib , and it Most importantly, PyPlutchik is respectful of the original spatial and aesthetic features of the wheel of emotions intended by its author. The colour code has been hard-coded in the module, as it is a distinctive feature of the wheel that belongs to collective imagination. Spatial distribution of the emotion is also a standard, non customisable feature, as the displacement of each petal of the flower is non arbitrary, because it reflects a semantic proximity of close emotions, and a semantic contrariety of opposite emotions (see Sec. 2).Representing emotions detected in texts can be hard without a proper tool, but it is a need for the many scientists that work on text and emotions. A great variety of newly available digital text has been explored in order to uncover emotional patterns; the necessity of a handy instrument to easily display such information is still unsatisfied.In the following sections, after introducing the reader to the topic of emotion models and their applications in corpora annotation, we will focus on the Plutchik’s emotion model and the current state of the art of its representations. A detailed technical explanation of the PyPlutchik module will follow, with several use cases on a wide range of datasets to help substantiating our claim that PyPlutchik outperforms other classic visualisations.the categorical nature of text and its high dimensionality, that makes it very challenging to display graphically” , while in case of intensity degrees they must be presented as an iterable of length three, whose entries must sum to maximum 1. Figs dict into the module to obtain the visualisation. Furthermore, PyPlutchik can be used to display the occurrences of primary, secondary, and tertiary dyads in our corpora. This more advanced feature will be described in Sect. 4.PyPlutchik is designed to be integrated in data visualisation with the Python library matplotlib. It spans the printable area in a range of  inches on both axes, taking the space to represent a petal of maximum length 1, plus the outer labels and the inner white circle. Each petal overlaps on one of the 8 axis of the polar coordinate system. Four transversal minor grid lines cross each axis, spaced of 0.2 inches each, making it a visual reference for a quick evaluation of the petal size and for a comparison between non adjacent petals. Outside the range , corresponding to each petal, two labels represent the emotion and the associated numerical score. Colour code is strictly hard-coded, following Plutchik’s wheel of emotions classic representation. PyPlutchik can be used either to plot only the 8 basic emotions, or to show the full intensity spectrum of each emotion, assigning three scores for the three intensity levels. In the latter case, each petal is divided into three sections, with colour intensity decreasing from the centre. In both cases PyPlutchik accepts as input a https://github.com/alfonsosemeraro/pyplutchik/blob/master/Documentation.md for a comprehensive and always up-to-date explanation of parameters and features of the module). These features can be also changed with standard matplotlib syntax. The polar coordinates beneath petals and the labels outside can be hidden: this feature leaves only the flower on screen, improving visibility of small flowers in small-multiple plots. Also the petals aspect can be modified, by making them thinner or thicker. Due to the easy integration with Python basic data structures and the matplotlib library, PyPlutchik is also completely scriptable to display several plots side by side as small-multiple. Default font family is sans-serif, and text is printed with light weight and size 15 by default. However, it is possible to modify these features by the means of the corresponding parameters , an additional circular layer has been added in order to visualise the labels and the colours of the primary emotions that define each dyad.dict containing primary dyads instead of emotions. PyPlutchik automatically checks for the kind of input wheel and for its coherence: specifically, the module retrieves an error if the input dictionary contains a mix of emotions from different kind of dyads, as they cannot be displayed on the same plot. In This last feature is particularly useful to give the user an immediate sense of the primary emotions involved in the formation of the dyad. We now showcase some useful examples of data visualisation using PyPlutchik. We argue that PyPlutchik is more suitable than any other graphical tool to narrate the stories of these examples, because it is the natural conversion of the original qualitative model to a quantitative akin, tailored to visually represent occurrences of emotions and dyads in an annotated corpus.As a further use case we exploit a dataset of products review on Amazon . This daFear, Anger and Disgust.In This visualisation is effective in communicating the increasing satisfaction of the customers; nevertheless, this improvement is very gradual and can hardly be noticed by comparing to subsequent steps. As we can see from In Disgust. The figure aside represents the Biography genre, and it is immediately distinctive for the high Trust score, other than higher Fear, Sadness and Anger scores. While high Trust represents the high admiration for the subject of the biopic, the other scores are in line with Propp’s narration scheme Reviewers' comments:Reviewer's Responses to QuestionsComments to the Author1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes**********2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know**********3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.The Reviewer #1: Yes**********4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.Reviewer #1: Yes**********5. Review Comments to the AuthorPlease use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. Reviewer #1: Summary:The authors introduce a Python module called PyPlutchik, which is built on top of popular plotting library MatPlotLib and provides an array of functions for visual representation of emotions in a circumplex, inspired by the infographic design by Robert Plutchik often cited in textual affect research. The authors provide ample evidence of the need within the Natural Language Processing community for a code implementation of this historically important graphical representation of affect, and include additional features to their module which show promise for more advanced and novel incarnations of the Plutchik wheel of emotions. In particular, the authors highlight the spatial relationships of the circumplex as integral to representation of semantic adjacencies and dichotomies; expand upon the notion of complex multi-faceted emotional affect, which greatly improves representation of nuance over singular categorizations for large corpora; and provide users with a range of options from simplistic representation to much more complex representations and small multiples, indicating that the authors have anticipated a range of research use cases. The authors demonstrate a steadfast commitment to the legacy of the original Plutchik Wheel , but could perhaps benefit from a deeper acknowledgement of the critiques to the circumplex model in the broader research community since its inception. The graphics generated by the module demonstrate a careful attention to detail and commitment to visual clarity by the authors. Overall, the paper excels in its presentation and substance of scientific contribution, but there are a few necessary areas for revision that should be addressed before publication, particularly with the accompanying code and the implementation of dyadic visualization; and some minor suggestions that will likely be addressed during proofreading or are simply recommendations to possibly benefit from rewording for clarity.Necessary areas for revision:The introduction should include more context on the circumplex model of emotion cited in [52], specifically introducing the phrasing of a ‘circumplex’ to the paper rather than leaving that verbage in the bibliography. “Emotion circumplex” is a very common bigram in this area of research.p.3: Citing the number of Google Scholar results is inappropriate for a scholarly journal, as word/phrase frequency is not indicative of importance on its own, and documents included on Google scholar extend beyond peer-reviewed scholarly research. This reviewer is in agreement that this tool is a meaningful and useful contribution to the scientific community, and the specific cited papers’ usage of alternative plots in section 2 is a convincing display of need, but the mention of the search method for finding those papers is unnecessary and the total paper count is an unreliable measure.Github repository should include:dependencies.txtExample code shown on p.7-8Some descriptions of implementation detailed in the paper should be removed from the paper and instead included in the module documentation, giving priority to discussion of the visual representation and affect model, rather than minutiae of implementation Document line 269 (page 7 code line 2):from matplotlib.pyplot import pltshould be import matplotlib.pyplot as pltthis is a discrepancy between Python 2 and Python 3 wherein Python 3 no longer supports implicit importshttps://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.subplots.htmlcode line 3: ‘nrow’/‘ncol’ should be pluralized (‘nrows’/‘ncols’) per matplotlib documentation here: It should be noted that other NLP methods such as the “valence/arousal” measure do not align precisely with the Plutchik categories. It would appear, then, that using NLP libraries which categorize emotions based on the valence/arousal axes would be visually skewed by PyPlutchik not because of their content, but because of the measure used. This is a critical point to note in the paper and address explicitly.Fig 13 / SemEval discussion: Please include code for these plots in the GitHub repository. In particular, the data pipeline from SemEval to the dyad plots is unclear, and makes it difficult to answer this reviewer’s question: Why are all the dyad values so negligibly small? It seems increasingly challenging to evaluate minute differences in affect between Plutchik plots when the maximum value, for example in Fig. 13 (v), is 0.03 and the corresponding plot area takes up only a few pixels. This appears to demonstrate either an issue in the data processing, a need to reconsider scaling when all values are miniscule , or some combination of both.Suggestions:https://dev.to/hamza/framework-vs-library-vs-package-vs-module-the-debate-3jppIt seems that “module” would be a more appropriate term than “library” for all instances of “PyPlutchik Library” in the abstract and paper: line 49: “This score can be interpreted as a binary flag that represents if emotion i was detected or not” - if i is in a range between 0 and 1, this is not a binary flag. Binary flags are booleans: 0 OR 1, not a float between 0 and 1. This language should be changed such that i corresponds to 8 emotions and Σ ia,b,c  is less than or equal to one. From the code, it does not appear true that “all emotions in a branch must sum to 1”, only that their sum must be less than or equal to 1.Line 62: “for instance, it is respected also in user interfaces displaying Plutchik’s emotions” please citeLine 91: “the exploitation of relationships among different artworks” - the phrasing here is confusing. By exploitation do you mean exploration? What is meant by ‘artworks’?https://boostlabs.com/blog/ibms-many-eyes-online-data-visualization-tool/Line 93: Is it true that ManyEyes supported interactive visualization? This reviewer had not personally used the tool before its discontinuation, but this article specifically mentions lack of interactivity support: General question for section 2: Is the inclusion of ManyEyes relevant, given its discontinuation? What about other existing tools for visualization such as Tableau, Plotly, MatPlotLib, Bokeh, Shiny, D3, or DataWrapper, to name a few? Tools currently in use seem like more relevant STAR benchmarks for discussion.https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gerardo-Maupome/publication/258313558/figure/fig1/AS:297350959517696@1447905401049/Plutchiks-wheel-of-emotions-with-basic-emotions-and-derivative-emotions-and-cone-like.pngSection 2: Table 1 would benefit from accompanying representation of the original Plutchik emotion circumplex, e.g. Line 141: Simplistic visual representation of variant dyad types would aid reading comprehensionThere is no mention of cultural variation of emotion within the paper; however, the introduction of dyads does in part mitigate this oversight from a technical standpoint, by providing for a more complex description of emotion. Nonetheless, some acknowledgement/discussion of cultural differences in emotion should be included for context.Please review citations carefully. A few examples:Citation 22: “a ective” → affectiveCitation 5: “Nrclex” → “NRClex” (please include URL)Citation 24: “Imdb” → “IMDB” and “kaggle” → “Kaggle”29: “fmcg” capitalize“facebook”, “twitter”, “Italian” - brands & languages/countries should always be title cased66: “Manyeyes” → “ManyEyes”etc.**********what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article  digital diagnostic tool,  29 Jul 2021Turin, 26/07/2021We are sincerely grateful to the reviewer for such a thorough and spot-on review. Their observations on our work have been deeply appreciated, as they pointed out many mistakes we needed to fix that survived our passes, and gave us a few useful insights that we discussed among us during the revision process. After this round of review, we feel that the overall quality of the manuscript has significantly improved. We also thank the reviewer for the careful checking of the code and for their suggestions. In the following pages we address every remark made by the reviewer, hoping that every answer is on point and clear enough. Of course we are always available for any further discussion or clarification.With our best regards,Alfonso SemeraroSalvatore VilellaGiancarlo RuffoNecessary areas for revision:-The introduction should include more context on the circumplex model of emotion cited in [52], specifically introducing the phrasing of a ‘circumplex’ to the paper rather than leaving that verbage in the bibliography. “Emotion circumplex” is a very common bigram in this area of research.We modified the introduction following the reviewer’s advice: we gave more space to Russel’s circumplex model, as well as to the circular representation of emotions (emotions circumplex) which is typical of many emotional models. Specifically, we added the following sentences:“One of the most famous dimensional models is Russel's circumplex model of emotions [54]. Russel's model posits that affect states are defined by dimensions that are not independent: emotions can be represented as points in a space whose main orthogonal axes represent their degree of arousal and of pleasure/displeasure. According to Russel, the full spectrum of emotions can be meaningfully placed along the resulting circumference. Russel is not the first scholar to use a circular layout to represent emotions : indeed, this kind of circumplex representation became very popular over time, since it is suitable to spatially represent emotions on a continuous space.“ We also highlighted that Plutchik’s model adopts a circumplex-like representation: even though it is not a continuous model, it makes use of a circular disposition of emotions.-p.3: Citing the number of Google Scholar results is inappropriate for a scholarly journal, as word/phrase frequency is not indicative of importance on its own, and documents included on Google scholar extend beyond peer-reviewed scholarly research. This reviewer is in agreement that this tool is a meaningful and useful contribution to the scientific community, and the specific cited papers’ usage of alternative plots in section 2 is a convincing display of need, but the mention of the search method for finding those papers is unnecessary and the total paper count is an unreliable measure.Following the reviewer’s suggestion, we removed “As of today, the query "Plutchik wheel" produces 3480 results on Google Scholar, of which 1620 publications have been submitted after 2017.” from the introduction. We also replaced“the first 100 publications after 2017 retrieved by the aforementioned query, we notice that 25 over 100 papers” in Section 2 (line 188) with the less specific“the related literature, we notice that many papers”.-Github repository should include:dependencies.txtExample code shown on p.7-8Some descriptions of implementation detailed in the paper should be removed from the paper and instead included in the module documentation, giving priority to discussion of the visual representation and affect model, rather than minutiae of implementation We added the requirements.txt file to GitHub repository, as requested. We also wrote a README.md, where we explained the main features of our module, and we displayed code examples and the corresponding plots.We agree with the reviewer that most of the implementation details can be hidden from the paper, and moved elsewhere, as they are susceptible to changes in the future.We removed the code listing and all the references to any parameter, which are now available in the code documentation, leaving in the paper only a qualitative description of the main features of the module. Documentation is available athttps://github.com/alfonsosemeraro/pyplutchik/blob/master/Documentation.mdWe did not remove the references to the Python dict format as an input for the module, and we also kept Fig. 2, Fig. 3 and Fig. 6 , including their small code listing that show the dict as the input data. We believe that part to be robust to changes in future implementations. It also advocates for the simplicity of the tool, as it features a familiar data structure and “how straightforward it is to plug a dict into the module to obtain the visualisation”, as we claim on line 291.-Document line 269 (page 7 code line 2):from matplotlib.pyplot import pltshould be import matplotlib.pyplot as pltthis is a discrepancy between Python 2 and Python 3 wherein Python 3 no longer supports implicit importshttps://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.subplots.htmlcode line 3: ‘nrow’/‘ncol’ should be pluralized (‘nrows’/‘ncols’) per matplotlib documentation here: We are really grateful to the reviewer for such a thorough review also of the code snippets, as in this case this one was definitely wrong. We fixed it into the documentation, and removed it from the paper, as per the previous reviewer’s observation. -It should be noted that other NLP methods such as the “valence/arousal” measure do not align precisely with the Plutchik categories. It would appear, then, that using NLP libraries which categorize emotions based on the valence/arousal axes would be visually skewed by PyPlutchik not because of their content, but because of the measure used. This is a critical point to note in the paper and address explicitly.This is indeed a very important point to address. We designed PyPlutchik to work only with data annotated following Plutchik’s scheme - we never thought about the possibility to use it with other data. We addressed this in the conclusions, by adding the following sentences:“It should be noted that the PyPlutchik module is meant to work only with data that was classified - manually or automatically - according to the Plutchik's model of emotions. In general, it is never advisable to represent data on a different scheme from the one used for its classification. Most of the models are radically different from each other, both in the underlying assumptions as well as in the categories scheme; even when they are somewhat similar, there might be key differences that should be kept into account. As for the Plutchik model in particular, to the best of our knowledge it does not exist a one-to-one correspondence with any other discrete emotional model, as well as no methods to go from a continuous emotional space to a discrete one. For these reasons, PyPlutchik should be used only with data annotated following the Plutchik's scheme of annotation.”-Fig 13 / SemEval discussion: Please include code for these plots in the GitHub repository. In particular, the data pipeline from SemEval to the dyad plots is unclear, and makes it difficult to answer this reviewer’s question: Why are all the dyad values so negligibly small? It seems increasingly challenging to evaluate minute differences in affect between Plutchik plots when the maximum value, for example in Fig. 13 (v), is 0.03 and the corresponding plot area takes up only a few pixels. This appears to demonstrate either an issue in the data processing, a need to reconsider scaling when all values are miniscule , or some combination of both. The pipeline from the SemEval data to the dyad plots in Fig. 12 and 13  is pretty straightforward: we flagged a dyad to be present in one row of the dataset if both the two basic emotions that compose such a dyad are flagged as present. The reason for such small scores relies on the data itself. Our guess is that this corpus was annotated considering the 8 basic emotions only, and no dyads, as they did not appear in the data. This makes the dyads more rare, because they were not specifically intended by the annotators. We experienced this effect in several projects we worked on, where we annotated emotions in texts: when we did not consider dyads in the annotation interface, then dyads happened to be rare in the annotated data. When dyads were encompassed by the annotation interface, annotators used to click on them more often.As per the visualization, a parameter for rescaling the petal length on a given maximum is actually present in our module: it is the “normalize” parameter. We used it for both plots, but setting for all subplots the same maximum value (0.65) for consistency reasons: the high scores of the leftmost subplot made the other scores in the other subplots very small, in comparison. We now rescaled the dyads subplots with different scales (0.4 and 0.3). Due to the loss of consistency, Fig. 14 and Fig. 15 are not intended to be read for a comparison between subplots, but rather for a better comparison of petals within the same plot. We acknowledge that in most of the subplots a single outlier stands clear above all the other petals, despite our efforts to rescale the figure. However, we believe that the outstanding difference between dyads with high scores and dyads with close-to-zero scores must be preserved and highlighted by the visualization, as it is exactly the message this representation is designed to convey. For instance, petals in Fig. 14 (iv) are barely readable, but we kept the same scale of Fig. 14 (iii), as it serves as a visual comparison between dyads very frequent in the corpus (like hope) and dyads barely detected.We added the following disclaimer in line 461:“For this reason we resized the petal lengths in Fig. 14 (ii - v) and (vii - x) with a different scale than (i) and (v), and the same applies for Fig. 15. For instance, Trust petal in Fig. 14 (i) is almost to the maximum length, with a score equal to 0.63; Hope petal in (iii) is also almost at the maximum length, but with a score equal to 0.37. Both figures are therefore designed for a visual comparison of the petals within the same subplot, but not between two different subplots, due to the lack of consistency in the scale. However”...Suggestions:https://dev.to/hamza/framework-vs-library-vs-package-vs-module-the-debate-3jpp-It seems that “module” would be a more appropriate term than “library” for all instances of “PyPlutchik Library” in the abstract and paper: We replaced every occurrence of “library” with “module”, when talking about PyPlutchik. We kept the definition of “library” for matplotlib and NRCLex, whose software suite is remarkably bigger than ours.-line 49: “This score can be interpreted as a binary flag that represents if emotion i was detected or not” - if i is in a range between 0 and 1, this is not a binary flag. Binary flags are booleans: 0 OR 1, not a float between 0 and 1. This language should be changed such that i corresponds to 8 emotions and Σ ia,b,c  is less than or equal to one. From the code, it does not appear true that “all emotions in a branch must sum to 1”, only that their sum must be less than or equal to 1.The reviewer is right, the actual statement is incorrect. 0 and 1 can be considered binary flags only for a binary annotation of a single text, i.e. if that emotion has been detected or not in a text. When talking about average amounts of an emotion in a corpus, the score is indeed not binary anymore. We simply removed that consideration (line 49), as we think it can only contribute to confusion.Also, we replaced “all the scores of emotions belonging to the same branch must sum to 1” in line 71 with “the sum of all the scores of the emotions belonging to the same branch must be less than or equal to 1”-Line 62: “for instance, it is respected also in user interfaces displaying Plutchik’s emotions” please cite When we wrote this part, we had in mind two interfaces we used in two projects we worked on, where we annotated Plutchik’s emotions in tweets. The first interface appears like a series of colored buttons, with the classic Plutchik’s color-code. The second interface looks like a clickable Plutchik’s flower. Unfortunately, we realized that none of them is currently published.We then removed the sentence in line 62, as we are not aware of further annotation interfaces that reproduce such a graphic detail.-Line 91: “the exploitation of relationships among different artworks” - the phrasing here is confusing. By exploitation do you mean exploration? What is meant by ‘artworks’?We clarified this sentence by changing it to: “ManyEyes was designed as a web based community where users  could upload their data to establish conversations with other users.”https://boostlabs.com/blog/ibms-many-eyes-online-data-visualization-tool/-Line 93: Is it true that ManyEyes supported interactive visualization? This reviewer had not personally used the tool before its discontinuation, but this article specifically mentions lack of interactivity support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAYDBZt7Xk0 ManyEyes allowed interactivity to some extent: it was possible to highlight parts of the figures, to scroll on maps, to refine the visualization. However, the link reported by the reviewer clearly states that interactive visualizations with ManyEyes were not possible.  As explained in this video: We removed such a controversial comment, as we believe it would not add any relevant contribution to the discussion of the current paper.-General question for section 2: Is the inclusion of ManyEyes relevant, given its discontinuation? What about other existing tools for visualization such as Tableau, Plotly, MatPlotLib, Bokeh, Shiny, D3, or DataWrapper, to name a few? Tools currently in use seem like more relevant STAR benchmarks for discussion.We believe it is not strictly necessary to include ManyEyes: at this point we are not so sure how relevant it is in the community since when it has been included in IBM Watson. We can leave it there for good measure, and we follow the suggestion of the reviewer by mentioning many other tools that are probably highly used by scientists in this research area. We added the following sentence:“nowadays, it exists a good number of software suites - such as Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI or Datawrapper, just to mention a few - that give the user a chance to create very interesting, eye-catching and often complex visualizations. They all adopt a graphical user interface, with all the pros and cons that usually come with it: an intuitive and fast way to realise the majority of the most common layouts, but likely less flexibility when it comes to create a more personalised visualisation. On the other hand, programming libraries and modules - such as Python's Matplotlib [25], Plotly [79] and Bokeh [77], or D3.js [78] in Javascript allow the users to create freely their own visualisations, though with a much steeper learning curve for those who are not familiar with these technologies.”https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gerardo-Maupome/publication/258313558/figure/fig1/AS:297350959517696@1447905401049/Plutchiks-wheel-of-emotions-with-basic-emotions-and-derivative-emotions-and-cone-like.png-Section 2: Table 1 would benefit from accompanying representation of the original Plutchik emotion circumplex, e.g.  We added what is now Fig. 2, a reproduction of the figure suggested by the reviewer, which we could not claim authorship for.-Line 141: Simplistic visual representation of variant dyad types would aid reading comprehensionWe added what is now Fig. 3. We made up this picture in the same fashion of the many diagrams that display Plutchik’s dyads available online. Combination of emotions one, two, three or four petals away into primary, secondary, tertiary and opposite dyads are explained by a small visual example.-There is no mention of cultural variation of emotion within the paper; however, the introduction of dyads does in part mitigate this oversight from a technical standpoint, by providing for a more complex description of emotion. Nonetheless, some acknowledgement/discussion of cultural differences in emotion should be included for context.We sincerely thank the reviewer for this comment: indeed this is a very important factor that we forgot to mention. We added in the introduction the following sentences to discuss how cultural variation can impact emotion modeling in general:“The cultural variation of emotions has also been studied. This is a crucial factor to take into account when classifying emotions: intuitively, the categories themselves can radically change depending on the cultural background [82]. This is also valid with respect to how the annotator perceives the emotions in a text and, if the annotated data is then used to train a classifier, it can introduce a bias in the model. The nomenclature of emotions, their meanings and the relations of words to emotion concepts depend on the social frameworks in which we are born and raised: therefore, cultural variation can significantly impact this kind of analysis. In this regard, in [81] the authors estimate emotion semantics across a sample of almost 2500 spoken languages, finding high variability in the meaning of emotion terms, but also evidence of a universal structure in the categorization of emotions. Following different methodological approaches, similar results were previously obtained in [83]”and we also stated that, as the reviewer correctly points out, the presence of dyads in Plutchik’s model partially makes up for this matter. At the beginning of Section 4, we added the sentences:“This feature dramatically enriches the spectrum of emotions, beyond the primary ones; enriching the spectrum increases the complexity of the models, also contributing to mitigate, at least partially, the phenomenon of cultural variation discussed in Section 1.”-Please review citations carefully. A few examples:Citation 22: “a ective” → affectiveCitation 5: “Nrclex” → “NRClex” (please include URL)Citation 24: “Imdb” → “IMDB” and “kaggle” → “Kaggle”29: “fmcg” capitalize“facebook”, “twitter”, “Italian” - brands & languages/countries should always be title cased66: “Manyeyes” → “ManyEyes”etc.We fixed all the typos and errors reported by the reviewer.AttachmentResponse to Reviewers.pdfSubmitted filename: Click here for additional data file. 9 Aug 2021PyPlutchik: visualising and comparing emotion-annotated corporaPONE-D-21-18896R1Dear Dr. Vilella,We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at onepress@plos.org.If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact Kind regards,Christopher M. DanforthAcademic EditorPLOS ONEAdditional Editor Comments :Reviewers' comments: 23 Aug 2021PONE-D-21-18896R1 PyPlutchik: visualising and comparing emotion-annotated corpora Dear Dr. Vilella:I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. onepress@plos.org.If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact plosone@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. 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That’s it. We face a mixture of facts, reasons and feelings, science and emotion. Each day brings us reflection and decision-making. Today’s data shows 2,589,638 global deaths, 681,703 among our REDLARA’s countries . These aHistorically the “Black Death” plague was responsible for widespread pandemic with high mortality during the fourteenth century, causing more than 50 million deaths throughout Europe . Today, At the same time, how to continue living in this moment without a horizon of normalcy, how to seek safe expectations? How to welcome our patients who wish to begin their families? We can quote Churchill, who said, “even if we are going through hell, we shall keep on going”. Our resilience is being tested, we resist, or to keep on with the prime minister’s words: “We shall never surrender”. Initiatives from world reproductive societies, such as REDLARA and SBRA, have enabled the spread of knowledge and a broad strengthening of scientific ties among peers.In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, IVF clinics stopped patient treatment cycles to minimize the risk of disease transmission. Infertility does not wait, and during the pandemic, there has been a sharp increase in the prevalence of stress and depression among infertile patients (At this moment, we do not have a clear understanding about the length and implications of the pandemic. Meanwhile we experience different waves of dissemination, it is clear that treatments should consider specific local conditions and that our patients will not give up easily.It is also time to focus on prevention and psychological care, not only for patients but also for all team members exposed to distress, tiredness and burnout. Although we are living in a globally connected world where lots of support applications and Internet technologies appear all the time, it seems that the “new needs” for the healthcare team and patients are nothing more than the well-known “old needs” - to listen and care!


During the last decades, ayahuasca gained much popularity among non-Indigenous and out-of-Amazonia based populations. In popular culture, it has been advertised as a natural remedy that was discovered by Indigenous peoples ante millennia and that has been used for shamanic healing of all kinds of ailments. This “neo-shamanic,” and often recreational, use of ayahuasca, however, has to be distinguished from traditional Indigenous praxes on the one hand, and, on the other hand, from medical investigation in the modern world. The former, Indigenous use mainly understands ayahuasca as an amplifying power for interacting with non-human beings in the animal, plant, or spirit realms. Within this paradigm, efficacy is not dependent on the drug, but on the correct communication between the healer (or sorcerer) and the non-human powers that are considered real and powerful also without resorting to ayahuasca. The latter, modern mode of understanding, contrastingly treats the neurochemical processes of MAO inhibition and dimethyltryptamine activity as trigger mechanisms for a series of psychological as well as somatic responses, including positive outcomes in the treatment of various mental conditions. I argue that there is an ontological incommensurability occurring especially between the Indigenous and medicinal concepts of ayahuasca use . Modern medical applications of ayahuasca are so fundamentally different from Indigenous concepts that the latter cannot be used to legitimate or confirm the former (and vice versa). Finally, the deep coloniality in the process of appropriation of the Indigenous by the modern has to be questioned and resolved in any case of ayahuasca application. In recent times, ayahuasca has been in use by at least three large and overlapping groups: traditional Indigenous and Mestizo people within their communities, neo-shamanic and recreational users all over the world, and patients of mental health facilities in the realm of modern medicine and psychiatry. In this perspective paper, I will show that although all these forms of use are legitimate and meaningful, they are still situated in a deep colonial structure of power relations and appropriation. For example, in neo-shamanic and medical use, traditional healers are often employed, who are then missed in their original communities. In addition, it seems that the efficacy of ayahuasca in both neo-shamanic and medical use draws primarily from ascriptions of alterity to the substance: why do modern users so often resort to constructed images of Indigeneity, naturalness, and ritual when drinking or administering ayahuasca, while at the same time its efficacy is ascribed to its pharmacology, or to “doing ayahuasca”? In order to answer this question, I will compare traditional Indigenous concepts with neo-shamanic or recreational, and modern medical concepts of attributing efficacy to this substance.From the first half of the 20th Century on, reports of Westerners concerning ayahuasca placed it as a “medicine” within the construction of “ayahuasca shamanism,” that is a health-related use of this substance, although Indigenous or Mestizo people then mainly used ayahuasca for divination, (counter-)witchcraft, warfare, and communal religious rituals . The ideDespite the constructed quality of “ayahuasca shamanism,” it seems impossible to shed off implicit assumptions in contemporary Western or “modern” applications about ayahuasca’s “mythical,” “spiritual,” “shamanic,” “ritual,” “Indigenous,” “entheogenic,” “ecological,” and similar qualities that are ascribed to this complex see ,b. Especdiscourse about a specific item, in this case, ayahuasca, and what it is assumed to do to its users.1 Different forms of discourse shape differing opinions about the item and thus inform different certainties about its qualities. In all cases discussed here, ayahuasca as a substance is constituted by basically the same, or similar, human pharmacology, but the qualities that are attributed to this substance show significant variation.I use the term ‘‘social attribution’’ to denote the In the following, I will describe three modes in which ayahuasca is used. Quite naturally, when one constructs categories, exceptions from the rule will be found: there are many instances where the three modes overlap and interact, and in addition, though very rarely, some people may use ayahuasca in other modalities than described here.médicos) who in the early 2000s worked among their communities, but not (yet) with tourists or visitors.It is difficult to present Indigenous concepts around ayahuasca in a nutshell, so I will exemplarily explain traditional ayahuasca use among the Peruvian Shipibo-Konibo. This is where I conducted systematic fieldwork from 2000 to 2006, continued through visits until 2019. I describe the healing-sorcery practices as observed among Shipibo-Konibo healers  or ‘‘spirits’’ (yoshin), in dreams or wake-state visions. From these, the disciple obtains their powers which often take the forms of songs. Between ‘‘diets,’’ the apprentice would accompany his2 teacher in curing sessions and thereby practice working with him and learn to apply what he obtained from his “diet.” There was no formal initiation, so at some point the apprentice would start conducting healing or sorcery sessions on his own, thus stepping into the competitive ring of healer-sorcerers. Illness was understood as a reciprocal process, stemming from a source, which, in order to heal, has to be tricked, seduced, or overthrown. In cases when a competing specialist would be held to be the original causer of an illness, from the others’ perspective, “my healer” is “his sorcerer”  socially restricted to healthy, psychologically and socially established well-trained individuals, because, as indicated above, only they would drink the brew, while patients or laypeople would never touch it – “why should I drink this, I am not a healer!”nete kepenti). They would retain control of their condition in order to channel their songs’ power toward the patient. Finally, vomiting was not a topic. During around 100 ayahuasca sessions I witnessed among traditional Shipibo healers, no single one would ever vomit. Ayahuasca was considered a delicate tool to more easily reach the spirit world, nothing more, nothing less.Among all the Indigenous healers I worked with, high-intensity hallucinations were avoided. Most healers would drink fairly low doses in order to only “open up the world” , or they are recommended because the brew would cause stronger hallucinogenic effects after fasting. In the latter cases, the diet has to be held before the ayahuasca session, while in Indigenous use, it should follow the treatment. For “becoming a shaman,” the diet is usually prescribed very much in the Indigenous sense, but most often “mixed” with ayahuasca ingestion, or thought to “strengthen” one’s control of ayahuasca hallucinations. Diets are rarely considered important for anything beyond the ayahuasca complex.Another main distinction is a certain “white-washing” of the practice: “shamans” are considered “good,” and ayahuasca use is by definition beneficial. Sorcery is not considered inherent see , and notThis results in a very different kind of people drinking ayahuasca compared to Indigenous traditions: mainly people with a background of experience-seeking, of spiritual, psychological, ecological, or socio-economic discontent, or with diagnosed health problems tend to attend such ceremonies . The attI could also observe that many White shaman apprentices in Peru were surprisingly uninterested in the lived world of the “non-ayahuasca-drinking” locals, who still constitute the vast majority of Indigenous or Mestizo populations, and their situation of marginalization and often extreme and illness-causing poverty. One shaman apprentice even believed that “they are happy living in that way.” There are many people who do care, of course, but I was harshly surprised that this attitude occurred among all (randomly selected) White shaman apprentices I interviewed in hostels and “albergues” during my fieldwork in 2019.There is strong and growing support for a general efficacy of so-called “psychedelic,” hallucinogenic drugs including LSD, MDMA, mescalin, psilocybin, ketamine, and others, in the context of treating a variety of non-psychotic mental conditions including, for example, recurrent depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, and drug addiction. Ayahuasca, too, seems beneficial in therapies of various mental disorders  psychologically and socially stable therapist, on the contrary, does not drink the brew together with the client. In most countries, healthy individuals are not allowed to drink ayahuasca while ill people may obtain a legal exception.In sum, I do not doubt that ayahuasca, along with other hallucinogens despite some counterindications may be very useful in treating certain mental disorders. However, the power of social attributions remains un-attended in many studies  believe that ayahuasca has intrinsic natural, medical, spiritual, ecological powers that had been suppressed through the Western world’s  secular, disenchanted life-world history. People with such a general belief are then seeking and creating situations that trigger certain experiences, which in turn enable them to form a personal (or scientific) account, including mental states and personal development, that strengthens the general belief .This should not be misunderstood as a generalizing critique on the use and study of ayahuasca and other hallucinogens for therapeutic applications. I do suggest, however, that there are more contextual  and psychological  factors to be understood than hitherto recognized. Furthermore, I think that the three modes of ayahuasca use I briefly presented here are ontologically different. Social attributions of efficacy range from interaction with spirits (requiring an animist ontology, see Finally, the implicit coloniality in virtually all forms of ayahuasca use should largely be recognized, and strategies have to be developed to find a way of fair use of ayahuasca in an anti-colonial sense. Those regions where ayahuasca originated and where most ayahuasca centers are located are among those hardest hit by COVID-19 death tolls. How can this be?The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.BB was the sole author and responsible for all the content and manuscript redaction.The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.