Uncharted Passions: User Displays of Positive Affect with an Adaptive Affective System

Affective technologies have potential to enhance human-computer interaction (HCI). The problem is that much development is technically, rather than user driven, raising many unanswered questions about user preferences and opening new areas for research. People naturally incorporate emotional messages during interpersonal communication with other people, but their use of holistic communication including emotional displays during HCI has not been widely reported. Using Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) methods, experimental design and methods of sequential analysis from the social sciences, we have recorded, analyzed and compared emotional displays of participants during interaction with an apparently affective system and a standard, non-affective version. During interaction, participants portray extremely varied, sometimes intense, ever-changing displays of emotions and these are rated as significantly more positive in the affective computer condition and as significantly more intense in the told affective condition. We also discuss behavioural responses to the different conditions. These results are relevant to the design of future affective systems.