Evaluating the Effect of Gesture and Language on Personality Perception in Conversational Agents

Neff, Michael; Wang, Yingying; Abbott, Rob; Walker, Marilyn A.

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15892-6_24

Cited by 111 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Recently, Neff et al [26] examined the combined effect of linguistic and nonverbal expression of personality for the Extraversion trait of the Big Five. Previously, Isbister & Nass [19] presented the only other work we are aware of to explore the combined gestural and linguistic expression of personality, also focusing on extraversion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet it remains an open challenge as to how to imbue an agent with these qualities and how to organize the underlying range of expressive variation. The "Big Five" or "OCEAN" model of personality represents an appealing organizing framework [5,23,22,26]. The model has emerged as a standard in psychology, with research over the last fifty years systematically documenting correlatons between a wide range of behaviors and the Big Five traits (extraversion, neuroticism/emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience) [24,30,33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Don’t Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability

Neff

Toothman

Bowmani

et al. 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. A key goal in agent research is to be able to generate multimodal characters that can reflect a particular personality. The Big Five model of personality provides a framework for codifying personality variation. This paper reviews findings in the psychology literature to understand how the Big Five trait of emotional stability correlates with changes in verbal and nonverbal behavior. Agent behavior was modified based on these findings and a perceptual study was completed to determine if these changes lead to the controllable perception of emotional stability in virtual agents. The results reveal how language variation and the use of self-adaptors can be used to increase or decrease the perceived emotional stability of an agent. Self-adaptors are movements that often involve self-touch, such as scratching or bending one's fingers backwards in an unnatural brace. These results provide guidance on how agent designers can create particular characters, including indicating that for particular personality types, it is important to also produce typically non-communicative gestural behavior, such as the self-adaptors studied.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don’t Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability

Neff

Toothman

Bowmani

et al. 2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Salem et al [5] found that a robot is evaluated more positively when non-verbal behaviors such as hand and arm gestures accompany speech. Neff et al [9,10] conducted experiments to understand how the Big Five traits of emotional stability and extraversion correlate with changes in verbal and nonverbal behavior. The perception of these traits is varied by adjusting a virtual agent's gesture rate, whether self-adaptors are present and movement style parameters.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Examination of Whether People Prefer Agents Whose Gestures Mimic Their Own

Luo

Ng-Thow-Hing

Neff

2013

Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Abstract. Do people prefer gestures that are similar to their own? There is evidence that in conversation, people will tend to adopt the postures, gestures and mannerisms of their interaction partners [1]. This mirroring, sometimes called the "chameleon effect", is associated with affiliation, rapport and liking. It may be that a useful way to build rapport in human-agent/robot interaction is to have the agent/robot perform gestures similar to the human. As a step towards that, this study explores if people prefer gestures similar to their own over gestures similar to those of other people. Participants were asked to evaluate a series of agent motions, some of which mimic their own gestures, and rate their preference. A second study first showed participants videos of their own gesturing to see if self-awareness would impact their preference. Different scenarios for soliciting gesture behavior were also explored. Evidence suggests people do have some preference for motions similar to their own, but self-awareness has no effect.

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“…Their gestures are also more frequent and animated than the gestures of introverts [11]. Findings such as these have been applied to agents designed to portray extraversion [15].…”

Section: Seeing Personalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging IVA Personality Using an Open-Ended Question

Liu

Tolins

Tree

et al. 2013

Intelligent Virtual Agents

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Abstract. Judgments of personality typically employ ratings of Big Five scale items such as "How emotionally stable is this person?" with choices from 1 (least) to 5 (most). Such questions focus raters' attention on an experimenter's dimensions of interest. We show that the personality traits provided as a result of open-ended questions such as "What personality does this animated character convey to you?" can differ from those observed when raters are given scale questions. Using IVAs that gesture in ways associated with emotionally stable and unstable people, we showed that participants were more likely to describe the unstable agent as disagreeable and the stable agent as extraverted; emotional stability was not usually mentioned. However, a Big Five inventory showed that these agents differed on agreeableness and emotional stability. An open-ended question method of assessing what personality an IVA conveys can potentially be more informative than using scale-item inventories alone.

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Evaluating the Effect of Gesture and Language on Personality Perception in Conversational Agents

Cited by 111 publications

References 27 publications

Don’t Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability

Don’t Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability

An Examination of Whether People Prefer Agents Whose Gestures Mimic Their Own

Judging IVA Personality Using an Open-Ended Question

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