How Our Personality Shapes Our Interactions with Virtual Characters - Implications for Research and Development

Abstract. There is a general lack of awareness for the influence of users´ personality traits on human-agent-interaction (HAI). Numerous studies do not even consider explanatory variables like age and gender although they are easily accessible. The present study focuses on explaining the occurrence of social effects in HAI. Apart from the original manipulation of the study we assessed the users ́personality traits. Results show that participants ´ personality traits influenced their subjective feeling after the interaction, as well as their evaluation of the virtual character and their actual behavior. From the various personality traits those traits which relate to persistent behavioral patterns in social contact (agreeableness, extraversion, approach avoidance, self-efficacy in monitoring others, shyness, public self-consciousness) were found to be predictive, whereas other personality traits and gender and age did not affect the evaluation. Results suggest that personality traits are better predictors for the evaluation outcome than the actual behavior of the agent as it has been manipulated in the experiment. Implications for research on and development of virtual agents are discussed

Empirical investigation of the temporal relations between speech and facial expressions of emotion

Lien vers l'article original : http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12193-010-0050-4Behavior models implemented within Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) require nonverbal communication to be tightly coordinated with speech. In this paper we present an empirical study seeking to explore the influence of the temporal coordination between speech and facial expressions of emotions on the perception of these emotions by users (measuring their performance in this task, the perceived realism of behavior, and user preferences).We generated five different conditions of temporal coordination between facial expression and speech: facial expression displayed before a speech utterance, at the beginning of the utterance, throughout, at the end of, or following the utterance. 23 subjects participated in the experiment and saw these 5 conditions applied to the display of 6 emotions (fear, joy, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness). Subjects recognized emotions most efficiently when facial expressions were displayed at the end of the spoken sentence. However, the combination users viewed as most realistic, preferred over others, was the display of the facial expression throughout speech utterance. We review existing literature to position our work and discuss the relationship between realism and communication performance. We also provide animation guidelines and draw some avenues for future work