Children's Emotional Interpretation of Synthetic Character Interactions

Using synthetic characters to support children’s personal, social and emotional education requires that the emotional response elicited from the children is that desired by educators and stakeholders. This paper discusses an approach to understanding children’s emotional interpretation of character’s behaviour in a complex social situation. We outline this approach based on Theory of Mind concepts, that we have developed to enable us to understand and analyse children’s emotional interpretation of synthetic characters involved in bullying scenarios in a virtual school. We discuss an empirical study of 345 children, aged 8-11 years, and concluded that our approach enabled us to gain a greater understanding of children’s emotional interpretations. Results from the study identified that overall children did make appropriate emotional interpretations of characters and story, highlighting the potential of synthetic characters for exploring personal, social and emotional issues.