Affective Presence

Paper

May 8, 2012 @ 09:30, Room: 17AB

Chair: Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart, Germany
Group Hedonic Balance and Pair Programming Performance: Affective Interaction Dynamics as indicators of Performance - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Study examining the relationship between affective interaction dynamics and performance in pair-programming teams. Presents researchers with new methods and theory regarding the role of emotions in team interaction.
Abstract » Inspired by research on the role of affect in marital interactions, the authors examined whether affective interaction dynamics occurring within a 5-minute slice can predict pair programming performance. In a laboratory experiment with professional programmers, Group Hedonic Balance, a measure of the balance between positive and negative expressed affect, accounted for up to 35% of the variance in not only subjective but also objective pair programming performance. Implications include a new set of methods to study pair programming interactions and recommendations to improve pair programming performance.
ACM
Learning How to Feel Again: Towards Affective Workplace Presence and Communication Technologies - Paper
Community: engineeringCommunity: management
Contribution & Benefit: Describes a technique for estimating affective state and communication preferences. The technique uses non-invasive data from a presence state stream and provides more accurate predictions than humans who work together.
Abstract » Affect influences workplace collaboration and thereby impacts a workplace's productivity. Participants in face-to-face interactions have many cues to each other's affect, but work is increasingly carried out via computer-mediated channels that lack many of these cues. Current presence systems enable users to estimate the availability of other users, but not their affective states or communication preferences. This work demonstrates the feasibility of estimating affective state and communication preferences from a stream of presence states that are already being shared in a deployed presence system.
ACM
AffectAura: An Intelligent System for Emotional Memory - Paper
Community: user experience
Contribution & Benefit: We present AffectAura, an emotional prosthetic, that combines a multi-modal sensor system for continuously predicting user affective states with an interface for user reflection.
Abstract » We present AffectAura, an emotional prosthetic that allows users to reflect on their emotional states over long periods of time. We designed a multimodal sensor set-up for continuous logging of audio, visual, physiological and contextual data, a classification scheme for predicting user affective state and an interface for user reflection. The system continuously predicts a user's valence, arousal and engage-ment, and correlates this with information on events, communications and data interactions. We evaluate the interface through a user study consisting of six users and over 240 hours of data, and demonstrate the utility of such a reflection tool. We show that users could reason forward and backward in time about their emotional experiences using the interface, and found this useful.
ACM
Understanding Heart Rate Sharing: Towards Unpacking Physiosocial Space - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Explores how people make sense of interpersonal heart rate feedback in everyday social settings through a technology probe deployment. Identifies two categories of effects, with implications for supporting social connectedness.
Abstract » Advances in biosensing make it possible to include heart rate monitoring in applications and several studies have suggested that heart rate communication has potential for improving social connectedness. However, it is not known how people understand heart rate feedback, or what issues need to be taken into account when designing technologies including heart rate feedback. To explore this, we created a heart rate communication probe that was used in two qualitative in-lab studies and a two-week field trial in participants' homes. Results show that heart rate feedback is a strong connectedness cue that affects the interaction in various ways, depending on a number of interrelated factors. In particular, we found two distinct categories of effects: heart rate as information and heart rate as connection. We propose two mechanisms that could explain these observations and draw out the implications they have for future use of heartbeat communication to support social connectedness or other aspects of social interaction.
ACM