In this short paper we present findings from a recent study on the use of multimedia presentations to communicate emotion content in otherwise ambiguous statements. In the broader scope of our research these presentations are used by ``emotionally intelligent'' autonomous agents as some of the ways of expressing their internal states to human users. The background context in which these agents operate is covered elsewhere and will only be minimally discussed here (c.f. [, , , , , , , ]). These works also cover background on the area (see [, , , , , , , , , , , ] for interesting approaches to related problems).
Briefly, the Affective Reasoner is a collection of (mostly Common Lisp) programs embodying a theory of emotion proposed by Ortony, Clore, and Collins in their 1988 book, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions []. As manifested in the Affective Reasoner, this theory has twenty-four distinct emotion categories (from the original twenty-two) each of which contains many different actual emotions, a frame-based appraisal mechanism, an action-expression component, a set of intensity variables for each of the categories, and so forth. Agents operate in real time, perform appraisals of the world according to their own dispositional personality characteristics, respond to their internal states according to their temperaments, and perform rudimentary case-based, and logical, reasoning about other agents and the world around them.
To communicate with users the agents use music, text-to-speech, a set of approximately seventy faces (which are morphed in real time), and speech recognition. Children as young as two years old have been able to manipulate story-telling applications based on the system.
The study discussed here does not actually make use of the ``intelligent'' components of the agents per se. Nonetheless it does make a specific case for the usefulness of such agents as they develop, and lend some credence to the theory underlying the agents' development. That is, in this case we showed that static, pre-programmed social/emotion content can be effectively communicated by the presentations these agents have at their (real-time) disposal. Since our larger body of work establishes a relatively robust coverage of the emotion categories used in this study, and since these categories can be directly manipulated by our autonomous agents, the conclusion we hope will be drawn is that communication from ``emotionally intelligent'' computer agents (whatever form they ultimately take) to human users is both practical, and plausible.