Arvid Kappas

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Verified

Arvid verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Dipl. Psych., PhD
• Professor of Psychology at Constructor University

A huge number of informal messages are posted every day in social network sites, blogs and discussion forums. Emotions seem to be frequently important in these texts for expressing friendship, showing social support or as part of online arguments. Algorithms to identify sentiment and sentiment strength are needed to help understand the role of emot...

Emotions are evolved systems of intra- and interpersonal processes that are regulatory in nature, dealing mostly with issues of personal or social concern. They regulate social interaction and in extension, the social sphere. In turn, processes in the social sphere regulate emotions of individuals and groups. In other words, intrapersonal processes...

Emotions are foremost self-regulating processes that permit rapid responses and adaptations to situations of personal concern. They have biological bases and are shaped ontogenetically via learning and experience. Many situations and events of personal concern are social in nature. Thus, social exchanges play an important role in learning about rul...

E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information--how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important...

Recent research suggests that attributions of aliveness and mental capacities to faces are influenced by social group membership. In this article, we investigated group related biases in mind perception in participants from a Western and Eastern culture, employing faces of varying ethnic groups. In Experiment 1, Caucasian faces that ranged on a con...

Humans show a consistent tendency to anthropomorphize or attribute aspects of selfhood to nonhuman agents. In a previous study, we found that people (over-)generalize from the presence of a single behavioral selfhood cue (like equifinality or efficiency) to the presence of other (actually absent) cues, suggesting that a small aspect of selfhood suf...

People often engage in self-disclosure and social sharing when trying to cope with emotional distress. This study introduces a novel long-term intervention designed to help informal caregivers cope with emotional distress by self-disclosing towards a social robot. Research indicates that informal caregivers frequently face challenges in handling th...

In the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest in extending the communication between humans and machines from textual/verbal to nonverbal. Initially, interest has focused on facial behavior. However, there is now also considerable research on “body language,” such as gestures, posture, or proxemics. Research areas such as affective...

In recent years, there has been a growing trend of integrating robots into various dimensions of daily life, to improve user experiences and offer a range of services. This study explores the interactions of robots showing social behavior towards other robots and their impact on human perceptions. We focus on three types of social behavior: social...

As society witnesses an increasing presence of robots in domains such as healthcare, education, and service industries, understanding user perceptions and acceptance becomes essential. This research investigates the connection between the perception of robot behavior and user experience, emphasizing the role of social characteristics in shaping per...

While the necessity of a concept of "self" for understanding human behavior remains subject to debate, it evidently has significance in everyday life: Lay individuals ascribe selves to humans but also to animals and technical systems, shaping their interactions accordingly. The literature suggests that there are distal behavioral cues eliciting thi...

While interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people’s behavioural and emotional engagement might be sustained across time, since during initial interactions with a robot, its novelty is especially salient. This challenge is particularly noteworthy when considering interactions desi...

Self-disclosing to others can benefit emotional well-being, but socio-emotional barriers can limit people’s ability to do so. Self-disclosing towards social robots can help overcome these obstacles as robots lack judgment and can establish rapport. To further understand the influence of affective factors on people’s self-disclosure to social robots...

AI research focused on interactions with humans, particularly in the form of robots or virtual agents, has expanded in the last two decades to include concepts related to affective processes. Affective computing is an emerging field that deals with issues such as how the diagnosis of affective states of users can be used to improve such interaction...

People often engage in various forms of self-disclosure and social sharing with others when trying to regulate the impact of emotional distress. Here we introduce a novel long-term mediated intervention aimed at supporting informal caregivers to cope with emotional distress via self-disclosing their emotions and needs to a social robot. Research ha...

Since interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people's behavioural and emotional engagement with robots might develop from initial interactions with a robot, when a robot's novelty is especially salient, and sustained over time. This challenge is particularly noticeable in interacti...

Since interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people's behavioural and emotional engagement with robots might develop from initial interactions with a robot, when a robot's novelty is especially salient, and sustained over time. This challenge is particularly noticeable in interacti...

Since interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people’s behavioural and emotional engagement with robots might develop from initial interactions with a robot, when a robot’s novelty is especially salient, and sustained over time. This challenge is particularly noticeable in interacti...

Since interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one particular concern in this specific area of human-robot interaction (HRI) is the extent to which human users will experience the interactions positively over time, when the robot’s novelty is particularly salient. In the current paper, we investigated users’ experienc...

We comment on an article by Sheldon et al. from a previous issue of Perspectives (May 2021). They argued that the presence of positive emotion (Hypothesis 1), the intensity of positive emotion (Hypothesis 2), and chronic positive mood (Hypothesis 3) are reliably signaled by the Duchenne smile (DS). We reexamined the cited literature in support of e...

Multi-modal behavior for social robots is crucial for the robot’s perceived social intelligence, ability to communicate nonverbally, and the extent to which the robot can be trusted. However, most of the research conducted so far has been with only one modality, thus there is still a lack of understanding of the effect of each modality when perform...

Informal caregivers often struggle in managing to cope with both the stress and the practical demands of the caregiving situation. It has been suggested that digital solutions might be useful to monitor caregivers’ health and well-being, by providing early intervention and support. Given the importance of self-disclosure for psychological health, h...

The paper by Sheldon and colleagues is part of the body of literature that tries to disambiguate the function of a particular facial movement regarding emotional and social processes in humans: the concurrent activation of the zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi muscle. The resulting visible change in facial appearance is often referred to as D...

Although research on children's trust in social robots is increasingly growing in popularity, a systematic understanding of the factors which influence children's trust in robots is lacking. In addition, meta-analyses in child-robot-interaction (cHRI) have yet to be popularly adopted as a method for synthesising results. We therefore conducted a me...

One major challenge faced by human-robot interaction (HRI) researchers is replicating and extending new findings, to better understand how short, constrained laboratory manipulations might translate to real-world scenarios. Since interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one particular concern is the extent to which pe...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

John Cacioppo passed away in 2018, leaving a legacy of profound methodological, theoretical, and inferential contributions to social neuroscience. This paper serves as an introduction to the nine articles that comprise this special issue in honor of John Cacioppo’s work in social neuroscience. Although he made many contributions to psychology, here...

Mind perception in robots has been an understudied construct in human-robot interaction (HRI) compared to similar concepts such as anthropomorphism and the intentional stance. In a series of three experiments, we identify two factors that could potentially influence mind perception and moral concern in robots: how the robot is introduced (framing),...

Artificial agents, be they virtual agents, or physically embodied devices, such as robots, often require interaction and communication with humans. In addition to the challenge of analyzing human interaction, communication researchers, psychologists, and others are now confronted with new paradigms. Human behavior is not only analyzed, but machines...

Society's increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. Pe...

Agents (virtual/physical) in a learning environment can be introduced in different roles, such as a tutor, mentor, motivator, expert, peer student etc. Each agent type brings an expertise, creating a unique social relationship with students. Depending on their role, agents have specific goals and beliefs, as well as attitudes towards the learners,...

This article describes how studies in the area of decision-making suggest clear differences in behavioral responses to humans versus computers. The current objective was to investigate decision-making in an economic game played only with computer partners. In Experiment 1, participants were engaged in the ultimatum game with computer agents and reg...

As increasingly more research efforts are geared towards creating robots that can teach and interact with children in educational contexts, it has been speculated that endowing robots with artificial empathy may facilitate learning. In this paper, we provide a background to the concept of empathy, and how it factors into learning. We then present o...

In this paper, we describe our approach for the OMG- Emotion Challenge 2018. The goal is to produce utterance-level valence and arousal estimations for videos of approximately 1 minute length. We tackle this problem by first extracting facial expressions features of videos as time series data, and then using Recurrent Neural Networks of the Echo St...

Trust begins with our first impression of others. But which matters most in forming the first impression that others possess stereotypically trustworthy facial features, that they look like us, or that they belong to our social group? This study explored the interaction among stereotypical trustworthiness, kinship (based on facial resemblance), and...

Flexible working time arrangements are becoming increasingly popular around the globe – but do they really work? In Europe, up to 40 per cent of employees may schedule their working hours at their discretion. This ‘flextime’ is thought to help meet ever-increasing job demands and strike a balance between work and life. Yet, researchers know surpris...

Emotions are bodily and social processes, shaped by cultural influences and biological constraints, that are best understood in an evolutionary context. The scientific study of emotions goes back more than a century, but has been consistently hampered by a lack of consensus regarding how to define and how to measure emotion. I will address the issu...

Affective computing (AC) adopts a computational approach to study affect. We highlight the AC approach towards automated affect measures that jointly model machine-readable physiological/behavioral signals with affect estimates as reported by humans or experimentally elicited. We describe the conceptual and computational foundations of the approach...

The perception (decoding) of facial trustworthiness is closely linked to the perception of emotion expressions (e.g., Oosterhof & Todorov, 2009). Here we explored the possibility that trustworthiness and emotion are also linked on the encoding level. More precisely, we tested whether emotional intelligence was associated with the capacity to encode...

This paper investigates the effects of relative position and proxemics in the engagement process involved in Human-Robot collaboration. We evaluate the differences between two experimental placement conditions (frontal vs. lateral) for an autonomous robot in a collaborative task with a user across two different types of robot behaviours (helpful vs...

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a highly multidisciplinary endeavor. However, it often still appears to be an effort driven primarily by technical aims and concerns. We outline some of the major challenges for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration in HRI, arguing for an improved integration of psychology and applied social sciences and their ge...

Human and robot tutors alike have to give careful consideration as to how feedback is delivered to students to provide a motivating yet clear learning context. Here, we performed a perception study to investigate attitudes towards negative and positive robot feedback in terms of perceived emotional valence on the dimensions of ‘Pleasantness’, ‘Poli...

Cyberemotions refer to emotions in networks that are a complex function of emotional states in individuals. Thus, measuring cyberemotions frequently involves attempts to estimate emotional states in individuals. Yet, this is not easy, as emotions in individuals are characterized by limited cohesion of the components of response, such as expression...

Facial activity has been of interest to emotion scholars since centuries. Particularly since Darwin, there been the notion that there are universal facial activation patterns associated with a variety of mental states. In the last decades, emotion research has been relying of manual coding of facial movements with standardized tools such as Ekman a...

Flexible working time arrangements are becoming increasingly popular around the globe, but do they actually benefit employees? To address this question, we take a differentiated look at employees’ day-specific use of flextime and its effect on the intersection of work and nonwork life. Specifically, we examined whether links between day-specific fl...

We study the changes in emotional states induced by reading and participating in online discussions, empirically testing a computational model of online emotional interaction. Using principles of dynamical systems, we quantify changes in valence and arousal through subjective reports, as recorded in three independent studies including 207 participa...

We study the changes in emotional states induced by reading and participating in online discussions, empirically testing a computational model of online emotional interaction. Using principles of dynamical systems, we quantify changes in valence and arousal through subjective reports, as recorded in three independent studies including 207 participa...

Abstract: Trustworthiness judgments are highly efficient and occur in as little as 100 ms (Willis & Todorov, 2006). However, research so far has focused almost exclusively on trustworthiness judgments obtained for full frontal views of faces. In real life we are often presented with side views, i.e., partially obscured, faces but we still make judg...

Facial texture has typically been studied as an umbrella phenomenon comprising several properties, such as skin tone and smoothness. Furthermore, texture has normally been addressed within complex models including also structural and dynamic properties and focusing on the extraction of perceptual dimensions from large numbers of physical and person...

In this article, we describe a paradigm using text-based vignettes for the study of social and cultural norm violation. Towards this aim, a range of scenarios depicting instances of norm violations was generated and tested with respect to their ability in evoking subjective and physiological responses. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated 29 vig...

High frequency psychophysiological data create a challenge for quantitative modeling based on Big Data tools since they reflect the complexity of processes taking place in human body and its responses to external events. Here we present studies of fluctuations in facial electromyography (fEMG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) massive time series an...

High frequency psychophysiological data create a challenge for quantitative modeling based on Big Data tools since they reflect the complexity of processes taking place in human body and its responses to external events. Here we present studies of fluctuations in facial electromyography (fEMG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) massive time series an...

This paper discusses the design and implementation of an Empathic Robot Tutor, applied to topics in the school Geography curriculum, and using a multi-touch table. It explains the motivation and objectives, introduces the two application domains, Mapskills and Enercities2, and describes the technology that has been developed. It discusses a study u...

Within any learning process, the formation of a socio-emotional relationship between learner and teacher is paramount to facilitating a good learning experience. The ability to form this relationship may come naturally to an attentive teacher; but how do we endow an unemotional robot with this ability? In this paper, we extend upon insights from th...

This study is an exploratory data-driven classification of movement features produced during a sound-generation process. We compare the results of various unsupervised classification algorithms. Besides the stability of the results across different algorithms, we aim in identifying optimal classification rules for automatic processing of the moveme...

Most past work on trustworthiness perception has focused on the structural features of the human face. The present study investigates the interplay of dynamic information from two channels – the face and the voice. By systematically varying the level of trustworthiness in each channel, 49 participants were presented with either facial or vocal info...

While most interface agents have been designed from an adult perspective, the present paper compares adults' and children's views of agents that vary in their degree of humanness. Four synthetic characters ranging in appearance from non-human to very human (blob, cat, cartoon, human) were presented to adult and children perceivers and were evaluate...

Digital intercultural training tools play an important role in helping people to mediate cultural misunderstandings. In recent years, these tools were made to teach about specific cultures, but there has been little attention for the design of a tool to teach about differences across a wide range of cultures. In this work, we take the first steps t...

Previous research, e.g., from vignette studies, has demonstrated that people readily imbue non-living entities with human qualities, including a mind capable of agency and experience, which thus renders these entities worthy of moral consideration. This effect is magnified by harm inflicted upon a victim, as suggested by the harm-made mind hypothes...

We interact increasingly via information and communication technology (ICT). As technology advances, the ‘other’ might not even be human. In fact, we progressively interact with autonomous agents in virtual or physical form, and treat such technology as though it were an ‘equal’ in common interaction (Krämer et al., 2012). The Media Equation (Reeve...

Providing opportunities for children to engage with intercultural learning has frequently focused on exposure to the ritual, celebrations and festivals of cultures, with the view that such experiences will result in greater acceptance of cultural differences. Intercultural conflict is often avoided, bringing as it does particular pedagogical, ethic...

The creation of a set of short synthetic sounds is described that were rated regarding valence, arousal, discrete emotions, and how well they would fit specific speech acts. Sounds were designed to provide nonverbal signals, for example, in the context of human robot interaction, or emotional qualifiers to synthetic speech.

We show how the perceived pleasantness of basic sine waves as well as slightly more complex sounds may be modulated by contextual factors, such as whether sounds are presented at home vs. the laboratory. Implications are discussed in respect to conducting emotion perception studies on the Internet.

The creation of a set of short synthetic sounds is described that were rated regarding valence, arousal, discrete emotions, and how well they would fit specific speech acts. Sounds were designed to provide nonverbal signals, for example, in the context of human robot interaction, or emotional qualifiers to synthetic speech.

The creation of a set of short synthetic sounds is described that were rated regarding valence, arousal, discrete emotions, and how well they would fit specific speech acts. Sounds were designed to provide nonverbal signals, for example, in the context of human robot interaction, or emotional qualifiers to synthetic speech.

We show that engaging in active play with a toy robot compared to general play does not significantly change physiological responses to human and artificial entity stimuli. Our findings suggest that simple interaction with imagined sentient beings is not enough to notably modify empathic responses to artificial entities.

Computer-related anger is compared with driving-related anger in the context of considering whether the concept of ethopoeia can help in explaining computer-related anger and to test whether appraisal theory applies to human–computer interactions to the same extent as it does to interactions between humans. Using retrospective self-report questionn...

We show that the perception of avatars’ trustworthiness depends on vocal characteristics in addition to emotional expression (smile vs. frown) and relative realism. Our findings suggest a multi-modal nature to trustworthiness perception and a compensatory mechanism in which the voice can balance the visual channel to improve first impressions.

If someone picks up a book on nonverbal behavior, the reader is likely to expect topics relating to the emotions, intentions, or beliefs of people in interaction. Often readers are particularly keen to learn whether it is possible to detect deception from bodily or facial cues. Interest in skills not only addresses the decoding of nonverbal message...

Do we respond emotionally to artificial entities as if they were human? Research has suggested that humans treat artificial entities in a social way and assign common social interaction rules. What if people are just confronted with emotional still images of artificial entities, do they spontaneously react, assigning emotions, with the same intensi...

In the context of a project on technology enhanced education in cultural understanding, we developed a non-reactive text-based vignette paradigm of sensitivity to cultural norm violations. To correct for plausible social desirability effects in the self-report for the vignette paradigm, the present experiment obtained indirect measures of affective...

This chapter analyzes patterns in messages posted to several Internet discussion forums from the perspective of the sentiment expressed in them and the collective character of observed emotions. A large set of records describing comments expressed in diverse cyber communities—blogs, forums, IRC channels, and the Digg community—was collected, and se...

This workshop aims to exchange experiences with issues surrounding Child-Robot Interaction. More specifically, the main aims are to discuss how social bonding between children and robots can be evaluated, how robots can be used to aid children in their learning process, but also what ethical issues arise when children learn from and bond with a rob...

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of the system MIXER (Moderating Interactions for Cross-Cultural Empathic Relationships), which applies a novel approach to the education of children in cultural sensitivity. MIXER incorporates intelligent affective and interactive characters, including a model of a Theory of Mind mechanism, in a simula...

This article presents two studies conducted with an affective dialogue system in which text-based system-user communication was used to model, generate, and present different affective and social interaction scenarios. We specifically investigated the influence of interaction context and roles assigned to the system and the participants, as well as...

In our work we explore the development of a computational model capable of automatically detecting engagement in social human-robot interactions from real-time sensory and contextual input. However, to train the model we need to establish ground truths of engagement from a large corpus of data collected from a study involving task and social-task e...

Humans are extremely efficient in interacting with each other. They not only follow goals to exchange information, but modulate the interaction based on nonverbal cues, knowledge about situational context, and person information in real time. What comes so easy to humans poses a formidable challenge for artificial systems, such as social robots. Pr...

In the last decades, much progress has been made regarding the measurement of emotions in the laboratory. However, this research has often been criticized as dealing with artificial situations that have little ecological validity. The Internet affords an interesting challenge. There is no doubt that millions of people experience and express emotion...

Significant work has been devoted to the design of artificial tutors with human capabilities with the aim of helping increase the efficiency achieved with a human instructor. Yet, these systems still lack the personal, empathic and human elements that characterise a traditional teacher and fail to engage and motivate students in the same way a huma...

This article provides a sketch of the theoretical framework of German Expression Psychology (GEP) and discusses the forms and functions of bodily and verbal types of communication that express inner states. Starting with a brief historical overview, we discuss general concepts of the German Expression Psychology framework, in particular with respec...

In this paper, we describe a cultural training system based on an interactive storytelling approach and a culturally-adaptive agent architecture, for which a user-defined gesture set was created. 251 full body gestures by 22 users were analyzed to find intuitive gestures for the in-game actions in our system. After the analysis we integrated the ge...