Using an Interactive Avatar's Facial Expressiveness to Increase Persuasiveness and Socialness

Research indicates that the facial expressions of animated characters and agents can influence people's perceptions and interactions with these entities. We designed an experiment to examine how an interactive animated avatar's facial expressiveness influences dyadic conversations between adults and the avatar. We animated the avatar in realtime using the tracked facial motion of a confederate. To adjust facial expressiveness, we damped and exaggerated the avatar's facial motion. We found that ratings of the avatar's extroversion were positively related to its expressiveness. However, impressions of the avatar's realism and naturalness worsened with increased expressiveness. We also found that the confederate was more influential when she appeared as the damped or exaggerated avatar. Adjusting the expressiveness of interactive animated avatars may be a simple way to influence people's social judgments and willingness to collaborate with animated avatars. These results have implications for using avatar facial expressiveness to improve the effectiveness of avatars in various contexts. Adjusting the expressiveness of interactive animated avatars may be a simple way to influence people's social judgments and willingness to collaborate with animated avatars.

[1]  Gray Hodgkinson.  The seduction of realism , 2009, SIGGRAPH ASIA '09.

[2]  Narasimhaiah Gorla,et al.  Who should work with whom?: building effective software project teams , 2004, CACM.

[3]  Timothy F. Cootes,et al.  Active Appearance Models , 1998, ECCV.

[4]  Suzanne Young,et al.  Profiles of Effective College and University Teachers , 1999 .

[5]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[6]  J. Bailenson,et al.  The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Learning Sciences: Digital Transformations of Teachers, Students, and Social Context , 2008 .

[7]  F. Thomas,et al.  The illusion of life : Disney animation , 1981 .

[8]  Ulrich Schroeders,et al.  Computer usage questionnaire: Structure, correlates, and gender differences , 2011, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[9]  Simon Baker,et al.  Active Appearance Models Revisited , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[10]  F. Thomas,et al.  Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life , 1981 .

[11]  Bilge Mutlu,et al.  One of the gang: supporting in-group behavior for embodied mediated communication , 2012, CHI.

[12]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Computers as persuasive social actors , 2003 .

[13]  Jeffrey R. Spies,et al.  Effects of damping head movement and facial expression in dyadic conversation using real–time facial expression tracking and synthesized avatars , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[14]  Jeremy N. Bailenson,et al.  Effects of facial similarity on user responses to embodied agents , 2010, TCHI.

[15]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches , 1981 .

[16]  Costas Panagopoulos,et al.  Big Five Personality Traits and Responses to Persuasive Appeals: Results from Voter Turnout Experiments , 2013 .

[17]  M. Sherif,et al.  The psychology of attitudes. , 1946, Psychological review.

[18]  S. Chaiken.  Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. , 1980 .

[19]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Assessing naturalness and emotional intensity: a perceptual study of animated facial motion , 2014, SAP.

[20]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Can computer personalities be human personalities? , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[21]  Sean Andrist,et al.  Conversational Gaze Aversion for Virtual Agents , 2013, IVA.

[22]  S. Ackerman,et al.  A review of therapist characteristics and techniques positively impacting the therapeutic alliance. , 2003, Clinical psychology review.

[23]  Jeffrey R. Spies,et al.  Mapping and Manipulating Facial Expression , 2009, Language and speech.

[24]  P. Costa,et al.  The five-factor theory of personality. , 2008 .

[25]  Timothy F. Cootes,et al.  View-based active appearance models , 2000, Proceedings Fourth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (Cat. No. PR00580).

[26]  S. Gosling,et al.  A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains , 2003 .

[27]  Karl F. MacDorman,et al.  Revisiting the uncanny valley theory: Developing and validating an alternative to the Godspeed indices , 2010, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[28]  Shaul Oreg,et al.  Source personality and persuasiveness: big five predispositions to being persuasive and the role of message involvement. , 2014, Journal of personality.

[29]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Conversing with children: cartoon and video people elicit similar conversational behaviors , 2014, CHI.

[30]  C. Nass,et al.  Does computer-synthesized speech manifest personality? Experimental tests of recognition, similarity-attraction, and consistency-attraction. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[31]  E. Thoma.  Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality , 1965 .

[32]  J. Burgoon,et al.  Nonverbal Behaviors, Persuasion, and Credibility , 1990 .

[33]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do , 2002, UBIQ.

[34]  H. S. Sullivan.  The interpersonal theory of psychiatry , 1953 .

[35]  R. Moreno,et al.  Students' choice of animated pedagogical agents in science learning: A test of the similarity-attraction hypothesis on gender and ethnicity , 2006 .

[36]  Amy J. C. Cuddy,et al.  A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[37]  D. Funder,et al.  Predicting personality and behavior: a boundary on the acquaintanceship effect. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[38]  Daniel C. Krawczyk,et al.  Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training for Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism , 2012, Journal of autism and developmental disorders.

[39]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Consistency of personality in interactive characters: verbal cues, non-verbal cues, and user characteristics , 2000, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[40]  Joseph Bates,et al.  The role of emotion in believable agents , 1994, CACM.

[41]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Perceptual effects of damped and exaggerated facial motion in animated characters , 2013, 2013 10th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG).

[42]  Tera D. Letzring.  The Good Judge of Personality: Characteristics, Behaviors, and Observer Accuracy. , 2008, Journal of research in personality.