Papers about Emotion

Numerous studies have tested the effects of pedagogical agents on learning and the influence of their specific appearance. What has not been analyzed, however, is whether an agent can have indirect effects when it is employed as a tutor for learning strategies rather than directly teaching the relevant learning material. In a between-subjects design (N = 45) we compared two different kinds of pedagogical agents – a cartoon-like rabbit and a realistic anthropomorphic agent –... Read more

For centuries artists have been exploring color to express emotions. Following this insight, the paper describes an approach to learn how to use color to influence the perception of emotions in virtual humans. First, a model of lighting and filters inspired on the visual arts is integrated with a virtual human platform to manipulate color. Next, an evolutionary model, based on genetic algorithms, is created to evolve mappings between emotions and lighting and filter parameters.... Read more

Robots and agents are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, taking on a variety of roles, including helpers, coaches, and even social companions. A core requirement for these social agents is the ability to establish and maintain long-term trusting and engaging relationship with their human users. Much research has already been done on the prerequisites for these types of social agents and robots, in affective computing, social computing and affective HCI. A number of disciplines... Read more

This paper investigates the impact of contradictory emotional content on people’s ability to identify the emotion expressed on avatar faces as compared to human faces. Participants saw emotional faces (human or avatar) coupled with emotional texts. The face and text could either display the same or different emotions. Participants were asked to identify the emotion on the face and in the text. While they correctly identified the emotion on human faces more often than on... Read more

The area of animated interface agents is related to the development of applications that aim to improve humancomputer interaction process using software agents represented by characters or human figures. Although several projects are being developed in this area, there isn’t a method to describe criteria that ought to be considered to evaluate animated interface agents. This paper proposes basic guidelines for animated agents evaluation based on concepts provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We... Read more

In this paper, we present some initial thoughts on the occurrence of verbal abuse in human-chatterbot interaction within the framework of social-cognition. This thinking is an important step towards the understanding of virtual relationships and the design of socially adept technology. Read more

How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. At a recent meeting on this subject, the above authors participated in a several day discussion on the question of virtual human... Read more

The Affective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, offering the user with an affective multimodal interaction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an ‘affective guide with attitude’ that links its memories and visitor’s interest to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen. This paper presents a review of related work, the system in detail, challenges and the... Read more

Imagine a future world where humans and machines will be involved in joint activities requiring social skills. This paper presents an overview of the dawnings of this world, concentrating on chatterbots – computer programs which engage the user in written conversation – and their users. Driving upon Clark’s theory of Language and the psychological theory of self-categorisation by Turner, it presents an analysis of social reactions to chatterbots and a taxonomy of the technology. The... Read more

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of verbal abuse in spontaneous human-chatterbot conversations. An ethnographic study suggested that abuse is pervasive and may reflect an asymmetrical power distribution, where the user is the master, and the chatterbot the slave. We propose that verbal aggression in this setting may be a social norm applied by users to differentiate themselves from the machine in what can be regarded as a form of interspecies conflict. The findings stress... Read more