Relations between facial display, eye gaze and head tilt: Dominance perception variations of virtual agents

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on facial displays, eye gaze and head tilts to express social dominance. In particular, we are interested in the interaction of different non-verbal cues. We present a study which systematically varies eye gaze and head tilts for five basic emotions and a neutral state using our own graphics and animation engine. The resulting images are then presented to a large number of subjects via a web-based interface who are asked to attribute dominance values to the character shown in the images. First, we analyze how dominance ratings are influenced by the conveyed emotional facial expression. Further, we investigate how gaze direction and head pose influence dominance perception depending on the displayed emotional state.

Bossy or Wimpy: Expressing Social Dominance by Combining Gaze and Linguistic Behaviors

“…The submissive gaze behavior was set to a mean duration of 500 ms, randomly changing between gazing at the user and averting the gaze. Further, we bowed Alfreds head according to the findings of [9,16,2]. In order to model the dominant eye gaze behavior, Alfred stares at the user when speaking the restaurant recommendation.…”

“…We also use the Alfred IVA with facial and gaze behaviors shown to affect perceptions of social dominance [2,5]. Our generation engine for nonverbal behaviors was Alfred, a butler-like virtual character [2].…”

“…In order to model the dominant eye gaze behavior, Alfred stares at the user when speaking the restaurant recommendation. We used Alfred's neutral facial expression [2]. For verbal behaviors, we use the Personage generator of Mairesse and Walker, along with parameter models that were shown in their work to generate utterances reliably perceived as either highly introverted or extraverted, or highly disagreeable or agreeable [10,11].…”

“…Bee and colleagues use the Alfred IVA, that we also use in our experiments (See Fig. 1), to investigate the effects on dominance of varying facial expression, and head and eye gaze direction [2]. They found that a lowered head was perceived as less dominant than a raised head, and that facial expressions defined as joy, disgust, anger and neutral all had a significantly positive influence on dominance perceptions.…”

“…Our results are of immediate practical value in understanding the issues involved in designing IVAs for various applications; appropriately parametrized IVAs can communicate social dominance by head movement and gaze behaviors [2,5], enthusiasm and friendliness by gesture [6], and Big Five personality traits by linguistic behaviors [11]. Therefore, we should be able to construct IVAs to communicate combinations of these different traits in order to achieve various conversational goals [1].…”