Multimodal language models (MLMs) are designed to process and integrate information from multiple sources, such as text, speech, images, and videos. Despite its success in language understanding, it is critical to evaluate the performance of downstream tasks for better human-centric applications. This paper assesses the application of MLMs with 5 crucial abilities for affective computing, spanning from visual affective tasks and reasoning tasks. The results show that GPT4 has high accuracy in facial action unit recognition and micro-expression detection while its general facial expression recognition performance is not accurate. We also highlight the challenges of achieving fine-grained micro-expression recognition and the potential for further study and demonstrate the versatility and potential of GPT4 for handling advanced tasks in emotion recognition and related fields by integrating with task-related agents for more complex tasks, such as heart rate estimation through signal processing. In conclusion, this paper provides valuable insights into the potential applications and challenges of MLMs in human-centric computing. The interesting samples are available at \url{https://github.com/LuPaoPao/GPT4Affectivity}.
Insufficiency of training data is a persistent issue in medical image analysis, especially for task-based functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) with spatio-temporal imaging data acquired using specific cognitive tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach for generating synthetic fMRI sequences that can then be used to create augmented training datasets in downstream learning tasks. To synthesize high-resolution task-specific fMRI, we adapt the $\alpha$-GAN structure, leveraging advantages of both GAN and variational autoencoder models, and propose different alternatives in aggregating temporal information. The synthetic images are evaluated from multiple perspectives including visualizations and an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) classification task. The results show that the synthetic task-based fMRI can provide effective data augmentation in learning the ASD classification task.