The Influence of Emotion Expression on Perceptions of Trustworthiness in Negotiation

When interacting with computer agents, people make inferences about various characteristics of these agents, such as their reliability and trustworthiness. These perceptions are significant, as they influence people’s behavior towards the agents, and may foster or inhibit repeated interactions between them. In this paper we investigate whether computer agents can use the expression of emotion to influence human perceptions of trustworthiness. In particular, we study human-computer interactions within the context of a negotiation game, in which players make alternating offers to decide on how to divide a set of resources. A series of negotiation games between a human and several agents is then followed by a “trust game.” In this game people have to choose one among several agents to interact with, as well as how much of their resources they will trust to it. Our results indicate that, among those agents that displayed emotion, those whose expression was in accord with their actions (strategy) during the negotiation game were generally preferred as partners in the trust game over those whose emotion expressions and actions did not mesh. Moreover, we observed that when emotion does not carry useful new information, it fails to strongly influence human decision-making behavior in a negotiation setting.Engineering and Applied Science

Human-Agent Negotiations: The Impact Agents’ Concession Schedule and Task Complexity on Agreements

Employment of software agents for conducting negotiations with online customers promises to increase the flexibility and reach of the exchange mechanism and reduce transaction costs. Past research had suggested different negotiation tactics for the agents, and had used them in experimental settings against human negotiators. This work explores the interaction between negotiation strategies and the complexity of the negotiation task as represented by the number of negotiation issues. Including more issues in a negotiation potentially allows the parties more space to maneuver and, thus, promises higher likelihood of agreement. In practice, the consideration of more issues requires higher cognitive effort, which could have a negative effect on reaching an agreement. The results of human–agent negotiation experiments conducted at a major Canadian university revealed that there is an interaction between chosen strategy and task complexity. Also, when competitive strategy was employed, the agents\u27 utility was the highest. Because competitive strategy resulted in fewer agreements the average utility per agent was the highest in the compromising–competitive strategy

Can a Negotiator Build a Tough Impression Without Chatting? —— Implicit Power and its Influence on Human-Computer Negotiation

In this paper, we studied the influence of implicit power in an e-commerce setting where humans negotiated with computer agents. Implicit power is defined as a kind of perceived power gained indirectly through offer exchange. In much of the past research, power was always considered to be expressed directly through chat or natural language communications during negotiation. We suggest that there is another mode of expressing power other than chat: implicitly influencing. Specifically, we designed an experiment where several aspects of implicit power were studied: anchoring, agent profile image, and experiment subjects’ personality. In our experiment, the subjects negotiated the purchase of a laptop with computer agents acting as sellers. The result suggested that implicit power indeed influenced the negotiation result

Total immersion : Designing for affective symbiosis in a virtual reality game with haptics, biosensors, and emotive agents

Peer reviewe

Virtual character facial expressions influence human brain and facial EMG activity in a decision-making game

We examined the effects of the emotional facial expressions of a virtual character (VC) on human frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) asymmetry (putatively indexing approach/withdrawal motivation), facial electromyographic (EMG) activity (emotional expressions), and social decision making (cooperation/defection). In a within-subjects design, the participants played the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game with VCs with different dynamic facial expressions (predefined or dependent on the participant's electrodermal and facial EMG activity). In general, VC facial expressions elicited congruent facial muscle activity. However, both frontal EEG asymmetry and facial EMG activity elicited by an angry VC facial expression varied as a function of preceding interactional events (human collaboration/defection). Pre-decision inner emotional-motivational processes and emotional facial expressions were dissociated, suggesting that human goals influence pre-decision frontal asymmetry, whereas display rules may affect (pre-decision) emotional expressions in human-VC interaction. An angry VC facial expression, high pre-decision corrugator EMG activity, and relatively greater left frontal activation predicted the participant's decision to defect. Both post-decision frontal asymmetry and facial EMG activity were related to reciprocal cooperation. The results suggest that the justifiability of VC emotional expressions and the perceived fairness of VC actions influence human emotional responses.Peer reviewe