Investigation of gender-emotion stereotypes on emotional communication of affective agents

With the rapid advancement of affective agents, there is an increasing interest in enhancing agent's emotional communication and maximizing social response from users. This thesis investigates the influence of gender-emotion stereotypes on the communicating of emotional events by affective agents. One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduates with equal number of males and females, successfully participated in a 2 (affective agent's gender: male vs. female) x 2 (participant's gender: male and female) between-subjects experiment with twenty emotional events conveying four gender-stereotypic emotions presented by affective agents as within-subject factors. Significant main effects demonstrated that participants perceived affective agents to be exhibiting greater emotional intensity in stereotypic emotional events that were gender-consistent compared to those that were gender-inconsistent. On the other hand, participants experienced a higher level of message involvement and perceived affective agents to be exhibiting greater social presence and trustworthiness in stereotypic emotional events that were gender- inconsistent compared to those that were gender-consistent. In addition, female participants were found to possess greater sensitivity in the perception of emotional intensity and social pre sence than male participants in all stereotypic emotional events communicated by affective agents. The findings of the thesis suggest that appropriate matching of affective agent's gender with the stereotypic emotional events that it is communicating is critical in enhancing human-agent communication.