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Non-verbal Persuasion and Communication in an Affective Agent

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Emotion-Oriented Systems

Part of the book series: Cognitive Technologies ((COGTECH))

Abstract

This chapter deals with the communication of persuasion. Only a small percentage of communication involves words: as the old saying goes, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”. While this likely underestimates the importance of good verbal persuasion techniques, it is accurate in underlining the critical role of non-verbal behaviour during face-to-face communication. In this chapter we restrict the discussion to body language. We also consider embodied virtual agents. As is the case with humans, there are a number of fundamental factors to be considered when constructing persuasive agents. In particular, one who wishes to persuade must appear credible, trustworthy, confident, and non-threatening. Knowing how not to behave is also a vital basis for effective persuasion. This includes resolving task constraints or other factors with the social perception considerations. These social virtual agents face many of the same problems as humans have in controlling and expressing themselves in an appropriate manner so as to establish and maintain persuasive interaction. All along the chapter, much of our discussion will handle concepts applicable both to agent and to human behaviour.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A question looked at by Heylen and op den Akker (2007) was whether it is possible to distinguish an utterance containing “yeah” which expresses a stance (of partial agreement, i.e. an assessment in terms of the AMI annotation scheme) from an utterance that is simply meant as a backchannel. They achieved correct classification only for 60% of the cases when not taking into account the speech act of the previous utterance and 80% if they did.

  2. 2.

    We avoid the use of the term ambiguity here as the distinction between the various categories is not strict and acknowledgements can easily shift into an assessment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Elisabeth André

  2. University of Paris 8, now at CNRS, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris, France

    Elisabetta Bevacqua

  3. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Dirk Heylen

  4. CNRS, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris, France

    Radoslaw Niewiadomski

  5. CNRS-LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech, Paris, France

    Catherine Pelachaud

  6. Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Christopher Peters

  7. University of Rome 3, Rome, Italy

    Isabella Poggi

  8. University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Matthias Rehm

Authors
  1. Elisabeth André
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  2. Elisabetta Bevacqua
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  3. Dirk Heylen
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  4. Radoslaw Niewiadomski
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  5. Catherine Pelachaud
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  6. Christopher Peters
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  7. Isabella Poggi
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  8. Matthias Rehm
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elisabeth André .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom

    Roddy Cowie

  2. TELECOM ParisTech, CNRS - LTCI, rue Dareau 37, Paris, 75014, France

    Catherine Pelachaud

  3. for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Austrian Research Institute, Freyung 6/6, Vienna, 1010, Austria

    Paolo Petta

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André, E. et al. (2011). Non-verbal Persuasion and Communication in an Affective Agent. In: Cowie, R., Pelachaud, C., Petta, P. (eds) Emotion-Oriented Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15184-2_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15184-2_30

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15184-2

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