Social Emotions in Nature and Artifact

Motion profoundly shapes human social interactions. Researchers across a surprising diversity of scientific and technical fields are attempting to measure, understand and possibly harness the impact emotion’s role in shaping interactions between people and between people and technology. Concepts like rapport, emotional contagion or emergent emotions presuppose people rapidly detect nonverbal affective cues, make inferences about the other party’s mental state, and respond in ways that jointly shape the success or failure of social interactions. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are allowing computer systems to engage in this nonverbal dance, on the one hand opening a wealth of possibilities for human-machine systems, and on the other, creating powerful new tools for behavioral science research. This book reports on the state-of-the-art in both social science theory and computational methods, and illustrates how these two fields, together, can both facilitate and illuminate human social processes. The book has several aims: • Present current social science theories of social emotions from cognitive, biological, social and developmental perspectives • Strengthen the theoretical foundation for building computational systems that co-construct emotional trajectories with human participants • Discuss computational models of social cognition that can represent and reason about the evolving relationship between interaction partners • Present the current and future potential of sensing technology to reliably detect and classify affective nonverbal cues • Discuss the potential of computational methods as tools for empirical research into human transactional processes • Consider methodological approaches for assessing the social consequences of socio-emotional systems