Emotions in interpersonal life: Computer mediation, modeling, and simulation

This chapter discusses how emotions operate between people in the social world, how computer mediation might affect emotional communication and co-ordination, and the challenges that socially situated emotions present for computer simulation and modeling. The first section reviews psychological literature addressing causes, effects, and functions of interpersonally communicated emotions, focusing on both informational and embodied influences, before addressing group and cultural influences on emotions. The second section compares computer-mediated emotion communication with face-to-face interaction, exploring their distinctive characteristics and possibilities. The final section chapter discusses challenges in implementing affective computing systems designed to encode and/or decode emotional signals, as well as virtual agents and robots intended to interact emotionally with humans in real time. Keywords/keyphrases Emotion communication; social appraisal; emotion contagion; empathy; mimicry; relation alignment; computer-mediated communication. 1. Emotions in Social Life How do emotions relate to their social context? They may be caused by social events (someone punching or praising us) and their expression may bring effects on other people present (my angry face and clenched fists may lead you either to back off or intensify your own antagonistic stance). For some theorists, a central function of many emotions is precisely to achieve social effects of this kind (Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Parkinson, 1996; Van Kleef, 2009). Whether or not this is true, the interpersonal orientation of emotions clearly needs to be addressed by computer 3 scientists seeking to simulate the operation of realistic emotions or to provide tools for interpreting them or modifying their operation. This section provides a brief introduction to psychological theory and research concerning the interpersonal causes and effects of emotion, and presents a relationalignment approach (e.g., Parkinson, 2008). From this perspective, emotions adjust to and operate on other people’s orientations to (real or imagined) objects in the shared environment, rather than being separable causes or effects of interpersonal events (stimuli or responses, inputs or outputs). However, because most research separates out the different aspects of the relation-alignment process, for now interpersonal causes and effects will be considered in turn. The section concludes with discussion of broader social factors relating to group and cultural life. 1.1 Interpersonal causes What causes emotions? According to some appraisal theorists (e.g., Lazarus, 1991, and see chapter 5, this volume), the proximal determinant of all emotions is the (implicit or explicit) mental apprehension of the specific personal significance of the current transaction. At some level, we must recognize that what is happening matters to us before becoming emotional about it. For example, if I trip over your foot, I will not get angry unless I somehow perceive you as personally accountable for it being in my way. There are issues here about whether my perception of your otheraccountability precedes, accompanies, or follows my anger (e.g., Frijda, 1993), but in any case, a social object (your foot) is at one level part of the cause of the emotion, and the appraisal of you as accountable (by whatever process) probably makes some difference to how the emotional reaction unfolds.