Filipe Joaquim - Agents and Artificial Intelligence 8th International Conference, ICAART 2016, Rome, Italy, February 24-26, 2016, Revised Selected Papers

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Agents

Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Jaap van den Herik and Joaquim Filipe (eds.) Agents and Artificial Intelligence Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10162 10.1007/978-3-319-53354-4_1

Perception of Masculinity and Femininity of Agents Appearance and Self-adaptors

Tomoko Koda 1 , Takafumi Watanabe 2 and Yoshihiko Kubo 2

(1)

Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan

(2)

Department of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan

Tomoko Koda (Corresponding author)

Email:

Takuto Ishioh

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Abstract

This paper reports how our perception of virtual agents differ by the combination of the gender of their appearances and gestures. We examined how we perceive masculinity and femininity of agents and how our perception of agents gender affect our impression of the agent. Human-human interactions among Japanese undergraduate students were analyzed with respect to usage of gender-specific self-adaptors in a pre-experiment. Based on the results, a male and a female agent were animated to show these extracted self-adaptors. Evaluation of the interactions with the agents that exhibit self-adaptors typically exhibited by Japanese human male and female indicated that there are cross gender interactions between participants gender and agents gender. Male participants showed more favorable impressions on agents that display feminine self-adaptors than masculine ones performed by the female agent, while female participants showed rigorous impressions toward feminine self-adaptors. Although the obtained results were limited to one culture and narrow age range, these results implies there is a possibility that the combination of male appearance and masculine gestures is safer in order to facilitate neutral impressions and avoid any cross gender interactions made by the gender of human users. Designers of virtual agents should consider gender of appearance and gesture animations of virtual agents, and make them customizable according to the users gender and preferences.

Keywords

Conversational agents Intelligent virtual agents IVA Gesture Self-adaptors Non-verbal behavior Gender Evaluation

Introduction

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) that interact face-to-face with humans are beginning to spread to general users, and IVA research is being actively pursued. IVAs require both verbal and nonverbal communication abilities. Among those non-verbal communications, Ekman classifies gestures into five categories: emblems, illustrators, affect displays, adapters, and regulators [].

Because self-adaptors have low message content and are low in relevancy to the contents of conversations, they are believed to be actions that are easily ignored during a conversation. Thus, there has not been much IVA research done on self-adaptors, compared with nonverbal communication with high message content, such as facial expressions and gazes. Among few research that has dealt with an IVA with self-adaptors, Neff et al. reported that an agent performing self-adaptors (repetitive quick motion with a combination of scratching its face and head, touching its body, and rubbing its head, etc.), was perceived as having low emotional stability. Although showing emotional unstableness might not be appropriate in some social interactions, their finding suggests the importance of self-adaptors in conveying a personality of an agent [].

However, self-adaptors are not always the sign of emotional unstableness or stress. Blacking states self-adaptors also occur in casual conversations, where conversants are very relaxed [].

We focus on these relaxed self-adaptors performed in a casual conversation in this study. If those relaxed self-adaptors occur with a conversant that one feels friendliness, one can be induced to feel friendliness toward a conversant that displays self-adaptors. We apply this to the case of agent conversant, and hypothesize that users can be induced to feel friendliness toward the agent by adding self-adaptors to the body motions of an agent, and conducted two experiments.

The first experiment evaluated continuous interactions between an agent that exhibits self-adaptors and without []. People with HSS are able to read nonverbal behaviors of their conversants and tend to use a great amount of nonverbal behaviors themselves in order to makes smooth interactions. We focused on this characteristic of social skills and considered that it could have the same effect when applied to non-verbal behavior of an agent. The results of the first experiment indicated people with HSS harbour a higher perceived friendliness with agents that exhibited relaxed self-adaptors than people with LSS. Moreover, HSSs friendliness feeling toward the agent with self-adaptors increased over time, while LSS felt higher friendliness toward the agent that does not exhibit self-adaptors. The dichotomy between the uses social skills suggests that it is possible to continually improve users sense of friendliness toward IVAs by combining the presence of self-adaptors with the users level of social skills during continued interactions with agents.

The second experiment evaluated interactions with agents that exhibit either relaxed self-adaptors or stressful self-adaptors in a desert survival task []. The results indicated that the exhibiting of any types of self-adaptors in interactions that exchange serious opinions, such as a desert survival task, caused deterioration in the agents perceived friendliness and empathy, although such deterioration does not occur during a casual conversation with the agent displays self-adaptors. This results suggests that users unconsciously expect agents to behave in a manner that is appropriate to the topic of conversation as we do with humans. Thus non-verbal behaviors of agents should adapt to the conversational topics. Taken together with the results of previous research, the results shows that it will be necessary to make the non-verbal behavior of an agent, at least, self-adaptors, adapt to the social skills of the other person in an interaction, and to the conversational content.

This paper reports a result of our consecutive experiment of self-adaptors that deals with gender issues. As Cassell points out in [], considering gender effect is essential for successful and comfortable human-computer interaction, so as for human-agent interaction.

Related Research on Gender and Virtual Agents

Social psychology studies have indicated gender stereotypes and roles. Men are regarded as more dominant, influential and more effective leaders than women, while women are submissive, supportive, and better listeners than men [).

Fig. 1.

Female virtual agents used for commercial purpose.

However, it is still an open question whether female appearance is adequate for any virtual agent applications and domains. Zanbaka et al. examined the role of gender in an application where virtual agents act as persuasive speakers, and found cross gender interactions between the agents gender and the participants gender. The male participants were more persuaded by the female agent than the male agent, and female participants are more persuaded by the male agent than the female agent [].

Our two previous experiments used a female agent only and did not consider the effects of appearance of the agents gender. Moreover, as some self-adaptors are gender-specific [], i.e., crossing arms self-adaptors are more frequently found in males, and covering mouth self-adaptors are mostly found in Japanese females, we need to consider gender of the agent, gender-specific self-adaptors, and gender of participants.

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