Analysis of Human Physiological Responses and Multimodal Emotional Signals to an Interactive Computer

New theories on emotion emphasize the tight boundaries among emotion, motivation and cognition: according to them people are motivated to respond to events differently depending on how they have been appraised. The present study tries to examine what kind of emotional responses the subject is motivated to express while interacting with an artificial agent if he/she believes that this agent is able to understand his/her emotional states. For this purpose different kind of computer games were projected to elicit specific emotional appraisals and two different conditions were used: in one condition the avatar provided a simulated intelligent feedback, while in the second only guided the subject across the different tasks. Multimodal synchronized data were captured. All video tapes were codified frame by frame using The Observer 5.0 and THEME Software. This is an in-progress study and data are still under elaboration. This paper includes initial results of the analysis of non-verbal communicative signals.