An Architecture for Emotional Facial Expressions as Social Signals

Aylett, Ruth; Ritter, Christopher; Lim, Mei Yii; Broz, Frank; McKenna, Peter E.; Keller, Ingo; Rajendran, Gnanathusharan

doi:10.1109/taffc.2019.2906200

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Fourth, musculoskeletal mechanisms can -to a great extent -be controlled in a voluntary manner, and are frequently used intentionally as social signals. For this reason, facial expressions may or may not reflect actual emotional states [3], and indeed may run counter to them: for example, smiling in a social context when one is actually sad [30], or engaging in deliberate deception as in various games [31].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Simple approaches, whether based on cognitive appraisal and other psychologically-inspired [29] models, or on annotation of a conversation stream [36] may generate a specific expression for a single modelled affective state [3]. This suffers from being a static approach (using graphical melding to move between expressions), and single-level, using linguistically-labelled categorical emotions (often relying heavily on the idea of a small set of basic emotions).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This suffers from being a static approach (using graphical melding to move between expressions), and single-level, using linguistically-labelled categorical emotions (often relying heavily on the idea of a small set of basic emotions). It also assumes emotional transparency, a direct mapping between modelled state and expressive behaviour, though we know that this is frequently not the case in human-human interaction [3]. This research, both for non-verbal social communication on the agent side and emotion recognition on the user side, has largely focused on musculoskeletal features, for instance through Action Units (AU) control [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real-time simulation of virtual humans' emotional facial expressions, harnessing autonomic physiological and musculoskeletal control

Tisserand

Aylett

Mortillaro

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Emotion expressions and communication involve involuntary and voluntary processes that may not always operate consistently. Expressive behaviour involving physiological changes may carry information about hidden aspects of emotional experience important for accurate emotion recognition and social cognition. In this paper, we describe a principled approach to simulating Virtual Human physiological facial features related to the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Our approach is based on typical synergies within the two branches of the ANS. It covers both parasympathetic tone and sympathetic tone, and their impact on skin tone, pupil diameter and sweat. We also present the triggering of tears. We discuss the implementation of the approach as part of a 3D toolkit. This work is aimed at supporting the development of affective features for realtime intelligent artificial agents, and the study of the perception of mixed emotion and emotion regulation. We demonstrate how varying ANS parameters impacts facial behaviour, contrasting emotionally consistent vs inconsistent musculoskeletal and ANS-related features.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real-time simulation of virtual humans' emotional facial expressions, harnessing autonomic physiological and musculoskeletal control

Tisserand

Aylett

Mortillaro

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Self Cite

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“…Also, listening is an active task where a character does mental actions with back-channel feedback while appraising stimuli through filters of goals and beliefs. Computational emotion modelers have considered these mediated performance distinctions (Bates 1994, Gratch 2008, Paiva and Aylett 2012, Aylett et al 2019. Meisner (1987) and his mentor, Clurman (1972) dissect a role into Appraisal Theory -like components that trigger physicality.…”

Section: Related Work In Performance Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Actors Can Animate Game Characters: Integrating Performance Theory in the Emotion Model of a Game Character

Schiffer

2019

AIIDE

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Despite the development of sophisticated emotion models, game character facial animation is still often completed with laborious hand-controlled key framing, only marginally assisted by automation. Behavior trees and animation state machines are used mostly to manage animation transitions of physical business, like walking or lifting objects. Attempts at automated facial animation rely on discrete facial iconic emotion poses, thus resulting in mechanical “acting”. The techniques of acting instructor and theorist Sanford Meisner reveal a process of role development whose character model resembles components of Appraisal Theory. The similarity conjures an experiment to discover if an “emotion engine” and workflow method can model the emotions of an autonomous animated character using actor-centric techniques. Success would allow an animation director to autonomously animate a character’s face with the subtlety of gradient expressions. Using a head-shot video stream of one of two actors performing a structured Meisner-esque improvisation as the primary data source, this research demonstrates the viability of an actor-centric workflow to create an autonomous facial animation system.

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“…However, despite fruitful findings on emotional intelligence and its various dimensions, expressive behaviors (especially facial expressions), as a specific emotional expression dimension have been relatively understudied and remain poorly understood. As more than half of all expressive behaviors are Zhang et al 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1185820 Frontiers in Psychology 02 frontiersin.org considered to be associated with the face (Aylett et al, 2021), there is a need to investigate the regulation of facial expressions in greater depth. As a mirror of the internal affective state, the display of emotions has been considered to reflect emotions accurately.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age and gender differences in expressive flexibility and the association with depressive symptoms in adolescents

et al. 2023

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ObjectiveThis study investigated age and gender differences in the ability to flexibly enhance and suppress facial expressions according to situational demands, known as expressive flexibility (EF), as well as its relationship with depressive symptoms in adolescents.MethodsThe participants included 766 Chinese high school students aged between 12 and 18 years (mean age = 14.96 years, standard deviation = 2.04; 52.2% female). Data on EF and depressive symptoms were collected using self-report questionnaires.ResultsGirls scored higher on enhancement abilities than boys, but with no significant gender difference in suppression abilities. There were also no significant age-related differences in enhancement and suppression abilities. Only enhancement ability was negatively associated with depressive symptoms.ConclusionThe development of EF abilities was stable among adolescents, with varying effects in terms of gender, and the importance of EF and enhancement abilities in reducing depressive symptoms in adolescents was highlighted.

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An Architecture for Emotional Facial Expressions as Social Signals

Cited by 6 publications

References 51 publications

Real-time simulation of virtual humans' emotional facial expressions, harnessing autonomic physiological and musculoskeletal control

Real-time simulation of virtual humans' emotional facial expressions, harnessing autonomic physiological and musculoskeletal control

How Actors Can Animate Game Characters: Integrating Performance Theory in the Emotion Model of a Game Character

Age and gender differences in expressive flexibility and the association with depressive symptoms in adolescents

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