The Attribution of Emotional State - How Embodiment Features and Social Traits Affect the Perception of an Artificial Agent

Understanding emotional states is a challenging task which frequently leads to misinterpretation even in human observers. While the perception of emotions has been studied extensively in human psychology, little is known about what factors influence the human perception of emotions in robots and virtual characters. In this paper, we build on the Brunswik lens model to investigate the influence of (a) the agent's embodiment using a 2D virtual character, a 3D blended embodiment, a recording of the 3D platform and a recording of a human, as well as (b) the level of human-likeness on people's ability to interpret emotional facial expressions in an agent. In addition, we measure social traits of the human observers and analyze how they correlate to the success in recognizing emotional expressions. We find that interpersonal differences play a minor role in the perception of emotional states. However, both embodiment and human-likeness as well as related perceptual dimensions such as perceiv...

Understanding emotional states is a challenging task which frequently leads to misinterpretation even in human observers. While the perception of emotions has been studied extensively in human psychology, little is known about what factors influence the human perception of emotions in robots and virtual characters. In this paper, we build on the Brunswik lens model to investigate the influence of (a) the agent's embodiment using a 2D virtual character, a 3D blended embodiment, a recording of the 3D platform and a recording of a human, as well as (b) the level of human-likeness on people's ability to interpret emotional facial expressions in an agent. In addition, we measure social traits of the human observers and analyze how they correlate to the success in recognizing emotional expressions. We find that interpersonal differences play a minor role in the perception of emotional states. However, both embodiment and human-likeness as well as related perceptual dimensions such as perceived social presence and uncanniness have an effect on the attribution of emotional states.