Measuring Learners' Co-Occurring Emotional Responses during Their Interaction with a Pedagogical Agent in MetaTutor

This paper extends upon traditional emotional measurement frameworks used by ITSs in which emotions are analyzed as single, discrete psychological experiences by examining co-occurring emotions (COEs) (e.g., Conati) through a novel methodological approach. In this paper we examined the occurrence of students’ embodiment of basic single discrete emotions (SDEs) and COEs (in addition to neutral) using an automatic facial expression recognition program, FaceReader 4.0. This analysis focuses on the sub goal setting task of learners’ (N = 50) interaction with MetaTutor, during which a pedagogical agent assisted students to set three relevant sub goals for their learning session. Results indicated that neutral and sadness were the SDEs experienced most by students and also the most represented emotions in COE pairs. COEs represented nearly a quarter of students’ embodied emotions.