Emotional Silence: Are 3D Animated Female Characters' Emotive Expressions Designed to Fit Stereotypes?

In this thesis, I analyzed the depictions and emotive expressions of female characters by con-ducting a content analysis in two popular contemporary 3D animations. I studied the design of feminine coded appearance and movement using simplified drawings. Based on this study, I claim that female characters and their emotive expressions are still designed to fit stereotypes in contemporary 3D animated children’s movies. My findings are the following: 1. The percentage of female characters in contemporary 3D animated children’s movies is the same as the percentage of females in human society; 2. On the other hand, those female characters did not demonstrate human diversity; and 3. Moreover, their emotions did not demonstrate the diversity of human emotions in terms of how female characters visually express their emotions. This thesis also establishes a methodology to conduct content analyses on character depiction in 3D animated children’s movies

Emotional Silence: Are 3D Animated Female Characters' Emotive Expressions Designed to Fit Stereotypes?

In this thesis, I analyzed the depictions and emotive expressions of female characters by con-ducting a content analysis in two popular contemporary 3D animations. I studied the design of feminine coded appearance and movement using simplified drawings. Based on this study, I claim that female characters and their emotive expressions are still designed to fit stereotypes in contemporary 3D animated children’s movies. My findings are the following: 1. The percentage of female characters in contemporary 3D animated children’s movies is the same as the percentage of females in human society; 2. On the other hand, those female characters did not demonstrate human diversity; and 3. Moreover, their emotions did not demonstrate the diversity of human emotions in terms of how female characters visually express their emotions. This thesis also establishes a methodology to conduct content analyses on character depiction in 3D animated children’s movies

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Perceived vs Induced Sentiments

Social media has created a global network where people can easily access and exchange vast information. This information gives rise to a variety of opinions, reflecting both positive and negative viewpoints. GIFs stand out as a multimedia format offering a visually engaging way for users to communicate. In this research, we propose a multimodal framework that integrates visual and textual features to predict the GIF sentiment. It also incorporates attributes including face emotion detection and OCR generated captions to capture the semantic aspects of the GIF. The developed classifier achieves an accuracy of 82.7% on Twitter GIFs, which is an improvement over state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we have based our research on the ReactionGIF dataset, analysing the variance in sentiment perceived by the author and sentiment induced in the reade

Training Effects of Adaptive Emotive Responses From Animated Agents in Simulated Environments

Humans are distinct from machines in their capacity to emote, stimulate, and express emotions. Because emotions play such an important role in human interactions, human-like agents used in pedagogical roles for simulation-based training should properly reflect emotions. Currently, research concerning the development of this type of agent focuses on basic agent interface characteristics, as well as character building qualities. However, human-like agents should provide emotion-like qualities that are clearly expressed, properly synchronized, and that simulate complex, real-time interactions through adaptive emotion systems. The research conducted for this dissertation was a quantitative investigation using 3 (within) x 2 (between) x 3 (within) factorial design. A total of 56 paid participants consented to complete the study. Independent variables included emotion intensity (i.e., low, moderate, and high emotion), levels of expertise (novice participant versus experienced participant), and number of trials. Dependent measures included visual attention, emotional response towards the animated agents, simulation performance score, and learners\u27 perception of the pedagogical agent persona while participants interacted with a pain assessment and management simulation. While no relationships were indicated between the levels of emotion intensity portrayed by the animated agents and the participants\u27 visual attention, emotional response towards the animated agent, and simulation performance score, there were significant relationships between the level of expertise of the participant and the visual attention, emotional responses, and performance outcomes. The results indicated that nursing students had higher visual attention during their interaction with the animated agents. Additionally, nursing students expressed more neutral facial expression whereas experienced nurses expressed more emotional facial expressions towards the animated agents. The results of the simulation performance scores indicated that nursing students obtained higher performance scores in the pain assessment and management task than experienced nurses. Both groups of participants had a positive perception of the animated agents persona

An Actor-Centric Approach to Facial Animation Control by Neural Networks For Non-Player Characters in Video Games

Game developers increasingly consider the degree to which character animation emulates facial expressions found in cinema. Employing animators and actors to produce cinematic facial animation by mixing motion capture and hand-crafted animation is labor intensive and therefore expensive. Emotion corpora and neural network controllers have shown promise toward developing autonomous animation that does not rely on motion capture. Previous research and practice in disciplines of Computer Science, Psychology and the Performing Arts have provided frameworks on which to build a workflow toward creating an emotion AI system that can animate the facial mesh of a 3d non-player character deploying a combination of related theories and methods. However, past investigations and their resulting production methods largely ignore the emotion generation systems that have evolved in the performing arts for more than a century. We find very little research that embraces the intellectual process of trained actors as complex collaborators from which to understand and model the training of a neural network for character animation. This investigation demonstrates a workflow design that integrates knowledge from the performing arts and the affective branches of the social and biological sciences. Our workflow begins at the stage of developing and annotating a fictional scenario with actors, to producing a video emotion corpus, to designing training and validating a neural network, to analyzing the emotion data annotation of the corpus and neural network, and finally to determining resemblant behavior of its autonomous animation control of a 3d character facial mesh. The resulting workflow includes a method for the development of a neural network architecture whose initial efficacy as a facial emotion expression simulator has been tested and validated as substantially resemblant to the character behavior developed by a human actor

Seeing more than human: Autism and anthropomorphic theory of mind

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the process of taking another’s perspective. Anthropomorphism can be seen as the extension of ToM to non-human entities. This review examines the literature concerning ToM and anthropomorphism in relation to individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), specifically addressing the questions of how and why those on the spectrum both show an increased interest for anthropomorphism and may even show improved ToM abilities when judging the mental states of anthropomorphic characters. This review highlights that while individuals with ASD traditionally show deficits on a wide range of ToM tests, such as recognizing facial emotions, such ToM deficits may be ameliorated if the stimuli presented is cartoon or animal-like rather than human form. Individuals with ASD show a greater interest in anthropomorphic characters and process the features of these characters using methods typically reserved for human stimuli. Personal accounts of individuals with ASD also suggest they may identify more closely with animals than other humans. It is shown how the social motivations hypothesized to underlie the anthropomorphizing of non-human targets may lead those on the spectrum to seek social connections and therefore gain ToM experience and expertise amongst unlikely sources

An Uneasy Terrain: An Immersive and Speculative Research-Creation

This thesis contemplates the “politicization of vision” by exploring contemporary visualizing technologies that use body and facial recognition to map data in physical and virtual spaces. Through a technological review, this thesis analyzes the emergence of the “social media filter” and examines how this technology not only allows users to morph, alter and extend their digital bodies, but also creates data. Through the literature review I argue that this data contributes to “knowledge creation” for artificial intelligence systems, hence politicizing technologies of vision. Informed by my role as an “active subject” living in a surveilled urban environment, I pay attention to emotions as a guide throughout my creative process. Methodologically, this research-creation renders an immersive and speculative installation engaging bodies in physical space, whereby the audience-participant is materially and virtually present in the projected and captured data. This research-creation contains two pieces that work in tandem; the written document and the installation together make up “An Uneasy Terrain”