Laughing with a virtual agent
Professor Catherine Pelachaud
Socially Interactive Agents are more and more frequent in our daily life. We communicate with others through speech, gestures, facial expressions…. Particular care is given to social signals, specially smile and laughter. I will present research we conducted in endowing agents with these social signals. But can we laugh with an agent? How do we perceive a laughing agent? Do we accept to laugh with them?
Where does laughter fit into the emotion debate ?
Professor Gary McKeown
There is an enduring debate around the nature of emotions; on one side, the Basic Emotions Theory suggests strong specificity and a direct relationship between emotion and expressive behaviour. The Behavioural Ecology View and the Theory of Constructed Emotions take a contrary position and emphasise the variation inherent in the use of expressive non-verbal behaviour. Laughter presents an interesting non-verbal social signal within this debate. It is inherently dynamic; it can produce strong acoustic, postural, and facial behaviour. It also interacts with linguistic behaviour in intriguing ways and appears more often in social interactions than people suspect. This talk will ask the question of laughter’s place within the emotions debate. Is laughter a well placed social signal to inform us about the relationship between social signals and emotions?