Zooming in: Studying Collective Emotions with Interactive Affective Systems

Abstract

Computer-mediated communication between humans is at the center of the formation of collective emotions on the Internet. This chapter presents how interactive affective systems can be applied in order to study the role of emotion in online communication at the micro-scale, i.e. between individual users or between users and artificial communication partners. Specifically, we report on the effect of a simulated conversational partner’s affective profile, the use of fine-grained communication scenarios and social interaction context on changes in emotional states and expressed affect of users as well as their communication patterns. Based on these findings, we propose applications for such systems focused on supporting different e-communities with real-time information and discuss ethical implications of such systems.