Affective interface – toward a machine that exhibits its state emotionally

Abstract

In the field of human-machine interaction, it is generally agreed that emotion may affect the users’ response behavior. With this consensus, interfaces of the machine are developed, among which a kind of interface that shows the machine state with human emotions is less studied. This kind of machine interface is called emotional or affective interface. This thesis studied affective interfaces. Two research questions were identified in the study: (1) how an affective interface is built and (2) whether an affective interface of a consumer device (e.g., personal digit assistant, personal computer, cellular phone, etc.) would significantly affect human’s emotion, judgment and decision making behavior?

Corresponding to the two research questions, this research consisted of three works along with their respective objectives: (1) developed a general design approach to affective interfaces; (2) constructed an affective interface test-bed with high fidelity, which is a laptop computer with an attention to its internal temperature state, by using the developed approach in (1); (3) conducted experiments to show that the affective interface of the test-bed has a significant effect on human emotion, judgment and decision making.

This research concluded (1) the general interface design approach, as developed, is valid to all interfaces including the affective element in human-machine interactions, (2) the human judgment and decision making behaviour will be significantly affected by the affective interface (with the confidence interval being 95%), and (3) affective interfaces significantly change human emotions.