"I Know That You Know How I Feel”: Behavioral and Physiological Signals Demonstrate Emotional Attunement While Interacting with a Computer Simulating Emotional Intelligence

Human-human communication studies have suggested that within communicative interactions, individualsacknowledge each other as intentional agents and adjust theiremotion nonverbal behavior according to the other.This process has been defined as emotional attunement. In this study, weexamine the emotional attunement process in the context of affective human-computer interactions. To this purpose,participantswere exposed to one of two conditions. In one case, they played with a computer that simulated understanding of their emotional reactions while guiding them across four different game-like activities; in the other, the computer guided participants across the activities without mentioning any ability to understand emotional responses. Face movements, gaze direction, posture, vocal behavior, ECG and EDA were simultaneously recorded during the experimental sessions. Results showedthat ifparticipants were aware of interacting with an agent able to recognize their emotions, they reported that the computer was able to “understand” them and showed a higher number of nonverbal behaviors during the most interactive activity. The implications are discussed.