Krisnawan K. Rahardja

Face to interface: facial affect in (hu)man and machine

Facial expression of emotion (or “facial affect”) is rapidly becoming an area of intense interest in the computer science and interaction design communities. Ironically, this interest comes at a time when the classic findings on perception of human facial affect are being challenged in the psychological research literature, largely on methodological grounds. This paper presents two studies on perception of facial affect. Experiment 1 provides new data on the recognition of human facial expressions, using experimental methods and analyses designed to systematically address the criticisms and help resolve this controversy. Experiment 2 is a user study on affect in a prototype robot face; the results are compared to the human data of Experiment 1. Together they provide a demonstration of how basic and more applied research can mutually contribute to this rapidly developing field.