Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
Emotion and coordinated movement complimentarily depicts our social experiences.
How is motion colored? This study investigates variations in emotional responses during social
coordination. Subjects were instructed to coordinate their finger movement with a Virtual Partner
(VP), whose homologous movement was displayed as a video on the computer screen. The
partner was driven by the Haken-Kelso-Bunz equations, an empirically validated model that
captures behavioral and social coordination. It has been shown that people perceive VP as an
intentional human agent. In each of 80 trials, subjects coordinated for 8 sec inphase or antiphase
with VP, and then rated the partner’s intention (cooperation -VP intend same coordination
pattern as human-, or competition) and subjective response to a Turing test of partners’
humanness. VP cooperated for half of the time, and could change its intention in the middle of a
trial. Skin potential response (SPR) quantified the intensity of emotional responses. After
validating the SPR measurements, we compared emotional responses by coordination pattern,
cooperative~competitiveness, and humanness attribution. Subjects experienced higher emotional
responses when they believed that their partner was human. This was observed both during
coordination (ANOVA, p=0.020), and during rating (p=0.012). Furthermore during the rating
period, higher emotional responses were found for cooperative behavior (p=0.012), modulated
by VP’s change of intention and coordination pattern. This study suggests that emotional
responses are strongly influenced by features of the partner’s behavior associated with
humanness, cooperation and change of intention. Implications for mental health (e.g. autism) and
design of socially cooperative machines will be discussed.
How is motion colored? This study investigates variations in emotional responses during social
coordination. Subjects were instructed to coordinate their finger movement with a Virtual Partner
(VP), whose homologous movement was displayed as a video on the computer screen. The
partner was driven by the Haken-Kelso-Bunz equations, an empirically validated model that
captures behavioral and social coordination. It has been shown that people perceive VP as an
intentional human agent. In each of 80 trials, subjects coordinated for 8 sec inphase or antiphase
with VP, and then rated the partner’s intention (cooperation -VP intend same coordination
pattern as human-, or competition) and subjective response to a Turing test of partners’
humanness. VP cooperated for half of the time, and could change its intention in the middle of a
trial. Skin potential response (SPR) quantified the intensity of emotional responses. After
validating the SPR measurements, we compared emotional responses by coordination pattern,
cooperative~competitiveness, and humanness attribution. Subjects experienced higher emotional
responses when they believed that their partner was human. This was observed both during
coordination (ANOVA, p=0.020), and during rating (p=0.012). Furthermore during the rating
period, higher emotional responses were found for cooperative behavior (p=0.012), modulated
by VP’s change of intention and coordination pattern. This study suggests that emotional
responses are strongly influenced by features of the partner’s behavior associated with
humanness, cooperation and change of intention. Implications for mental health (e.g. autism) and
design of socially cooperative machines will be discussed.
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