Evaluating the Communication of Emotion via Expressive Gesture Copying Behaviour in an Embodied Humanoid Agent

We present an evaluation of copying behaviour in an embodied agent capable of processing expressivity characteristics of a user’s movement and conveying aspects of it in real-time. The agent responds to affective cues from gestures performed by actors, producing synthesised gestures that exhibit similar expressive qualities. Thus, copying is performed only at the expressive level and information about other aspects of the gesture, such as the shape, is not retained. This research is significant to social interaction between agents and humans, for example, in cases where an agent wishes to show empathy with a conversational partner without an exact copying of their motions.