Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

Expressing social attitudes in virtual agents for social training games

The use of virtual agents in social coaching has increased rapidly in the last decade. In order to train the user in different situations than can occur in real life, the virtual agent should be able to express different social attitudes. In this paper, we propose a model of social attitudes that enables a virtual agent to reason on the appropriate social attitude to express during the interaction with a user given the course of the interaction, but also the emotions, mood and personality of the agent. Moreover, the model enables the virtual agent to display its social attitude through its non-verbal behaviour. The proposed model has been developed in the context of job interview simulation. The methodology used to develop such a model combined a theoretical and an empirical approach. Indeed, the model is based both on the literature in Human and Social Sciences on social attitudes but also on the analysis of an audiovisual corpus of job interviews and on post-hoc interviews with the recruiters on their expressed attitudes during the job interview

Emotions in business-to-business service relationships

Emotion in business-to-business service relationships regarding cargo services is explored. The service relationship is characterised by mutual trust and cooperation. Contact is mainly via telephone or e-mail with some face-to-face interactions and participants providing a complex, multi-skilled seamless service. Experience rather than training plays a vital role with long-term service relationships built up and maintained. Emotional sensitivity is acquired partly by experience and a repeat customer base but mainly through a genuine desire to help and get to know others. In contrast to the view of emotional labour bringing managerial control or adverse affects to service staff, the emotion engendered by this work is authentic expression bringing personal satisfaction

Short-term serotonergic but not noradrenergic antidepressant administration reduces attentional vigilance to threat in healthy volunteers

Anxiety is associated with threat-related biases in information processing such as heightened attentional vigilance to potential threat. Such biases are an important focus of psychological treatments for anxiety disorders. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are effective in the treatment of a range of anxiety disorders. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of an SSRI on the processing of threat in healthy volunteers. A selective noradrenergic reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), which is not generally used in the treatment of anxiety, was used as a contrast to assess the specificity of SSRI effects on threat processing. Forty-two healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to 7 d double-blind intervention with the SSRI citalopram (20 mg/d), the SNRI reboxetine (8 mg/d), or placebo. On the final day, attentional and interpretative bias to threat was assessed using the attentional probe and the homograph primed lexical decision tasks. Citalopram reduced attentional vigilance towards fearful faces but did not affect the interpretation of ambiguous homographs as threatening. Reboxetine had no significant effect on either of these measures. Citalopram reduces attentional orienting to threatening stimuli, which is potentially relevant to its clinical use in the treatment of anxiety disorders. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that an important mechanism through which pharmacological agents may exert their effects on mood is by reversing the cognitive biases that characterize the disorders that they treat. Future studies are needed to clarify the neural mechanisms through which these effects on threat processing are mediated

Addressing neuroticism in psychological treatment

Neuroticism has long been associated with psychopathology and there is increasing evidence that this trait represents a shared vulnerability responsible for the development and maintenance of a range of common mental disorders. Given that neuroticism may be more malleable than previously thought, targeting this trait in treatment, rather than its specific manifestations (e.g., anxiety, mood, and personality disorders), may represent a more efficient and cost-effective approach to psychological treatment. The goals of the current manuscript are to (a) review the role of neuroticism in the development of common mental disorders, (b) describe the evidence of its malleability, and (c) review interventions that have been explicitly developed to target this trait in treatment. Implications for shifting the focus of psychological treatment to underlying vulnerabilities, such as neuroticism, rather than on the manifest symptoms of mental health conditions, are also discussed.First author draf

Factors Influencing Innovative Behaviour of Teachers in Secondary Schools in the North East of Nigeria

Innovative behaviour (IB) refers to the process of developing, generating, applying or promoting new ideas by employees to increase job performance. Today, the rapid social and technological changes in our environment highlight the significance of IB of employees and especially for teachers. Thus, this paper aimed to develop a conceptual framework of factors influencing innovative behaviour of teachers in secondary schools. The research was explored through critical related literature analysis. Findings were presented in form of descriptive analysis, which shows that workplace happiness (WP), organisational climate (OC), affective commitment (AF) and transformational leadership (TFL) play a direct role in affecting innovative behaviour. The paper concludes that WP, OC, AF and TL have a positive impact in creating the essential conditions to encourage teachers to show IB in schools

Generation of multi-modal dialogue for a net environment

In this paper an architecture and special purpose markup language for simulated affective face-to-face communication is presented. In systems based on this architecture, users will be able to watch embodied conversational agents interact with each other in virtual locations on the internet. The markup language, or Rich Representation Language (RRL), has been designed to provide an integrated representation of speech, gesture, posture and facial animation

Emotions Management within Organizations

Emotions management in organizations is meant to habilitate the employees in administrating the emotional resources aiming at the correct adaptation to the organizational environment and the necessities in the work activity. The study of emotions in organizations has the purpose to know and optimize the employees’ emotional condition. The efficient leaders are interested in administrating the emotions, being aware of and capable to revaluate the factors which positively activate the employees emotional life. Emotions management is accomplished at two more important levels: personal level or subjective (represented by the person’s self-control capacity, the emotional intelligence, the ability to administrate the positive and negative emotions) and an interpersonal or social level, centered upon settling the emotional changes between employees and leaders, between employees and clients. From their settling into the practice point of view, the increase in the work performance and the benefits brought to the organizational environment, the concepts by which emotions management is accomplished/operate (positive emotions and negative emotions, emotional intelligence, emotional self-control, emotional labour etc.), this issue presents greater interest both for theorists and for the real doers/practitioners.emotions management, emotional labour, emotional contagion, emotional intelligence, organizational group