Group A↵ective Tone Awareness and Regulation through Virtual Agents

It happens increasingly often that experts need to collaborate in order to exchange ideas, views and opinions on their path towards understanding. However, every collaboration process is inherently fragile and involves a large set of human subjective aspects, including social interaction, personality, and emotions. In this paper we present Pogat, an a↵ective virtual agent designed to support the collaboration process around displays by increasing user awareness of the group a↵ective tone. A positive group a↵ective tone, where all the participants of a group experience emotions of a positive valence, has been linked to fostering creativity in groups and supporting the entire collaboration process. At the same time, a negative or inexistent group a↵ective tone can suggest negative emotions in some of the group members, emotions that can lead to an ine cient or even obstructed collaboration. A study of our approach suggests that Pogat can increase the awareness of the overall a↵ective state of the group as well as positively a↵ect the e ciency of groups in collaborative scenarios.