With the advancements in social robotics and virtual avatars, it becomes increasingly important that these agents adapt their behavior to the mood, feelings and personality of their users. One such aspect of the user is empathy. Whereas many studies measure empathy through offline measures that are collected after empathic stimulation (e.g. post-hoc questionnaires), the current study aimed to measure empathy online, using brain activity collected during the experience. Participants watched an affective 360 video of a child experiencing domestic violence in a virtual reality headset while their EEG signals were recorded. Results showed a significant attenuation of alpha, theta and delta asymmetry in the frontal and central areas of the brain. Moreover, a significant relationship between participants' empathy scores and their frontal alpha asymmetry at baseline was found. These results demonstrate specific brain activity alterations when participants are exposed to an affective virtual reality environment, with the level of empathy as a personality trait being visible in brain activity during a baseline measurement. These findings suggest the potential of EEG measurements for development of passive brain-computer interfaces that assess the user's affective responses in real-time and consequently adapt the behavior of socially intelligent agents for a personalized interaction.
Human affects are complex paradox and an active research domain in affective computing. Affects are traditionally determined through a self-report based psychometric questionnaire or through facial expression recognition. However, few state-of-the-arts pieces of research have shown the possibilities of recognizing human affects from psychophysiological and neurological signals. In this article, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are used to recognize human affects. The electroencephalogram (EEG) of 100 participants are collected where they are given to watch one-minute video stimuli to induce …
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Processing human affective behavior is important for developing intelligent agents that interact with humans in complex interaction scenarios. A large number of current approaches that address this problem focus on classifying emotion expressions by grouping them into known categories. Such strategies neglect, among other aspects, the impact of the affective responses from an individual on their interaction partner thus ignoring how people empathize towards each other. This is also reflected in the datasets used to train models for affective processing tasks. Most of the recent datasets, in pa…
PeakFlow: Peak-Guided Coarse-to-Refined Modeling for EEG-Based Dynamic Affective Trajectory Prediction
School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学电子信息学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Medical Research, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学医学研究院）
From Segments to Trajectories: Evolving Affective Graphs with Evidence Retrieval for Continuous EEG Emotion Recognition
College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Intelligent Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）智能科学与工程学院）；School of Public Health, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学公共卫生学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Humans constantly interact with digital devices that disregard their feelings. However, the synergy between human and technology can be strengthened if the technology is able to distinguish and react to human emotions. Models that rely on unconscious indications of human emotions, such as (neuro)physiological signals, hold promise in personalization of feedback and adaptation of the interaction. The current study elaborated on adopting a predictive approach in studying human emotional processing based on brain activity. More specifically, we investigated the proposition of predicting self-repo…
Affective brain-computer interfaces based on electroencephalography (EEG) is an important branch in the field of affective computing. However, individual differences and noisy labels seriously limit the effectiveness and generalizability of EEG-based emotion recognition models. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning framework with Prototypical Representation based Pairwise Learning (PR-PL) to learn discriminative and generalized prototypical representations for emotion revealing across individuals and formulate emotion recognition as pairwise learning for alleviating the reliance …
With the development of the artificial intelligence (AI), the AI applications have influenced and changed people's daily life greatly. Here, a wearable affective robot that integrates the affective robot, social robot, brain wearable, and wearable 2.0 is proposed for the first time. The proposed wearable affective robot is intended for a wide population, and we believe that it can improve the human health on the spirit level, meeting the fashion requirements at the same time. In this paper, the architecture and design of an innovative wearable affective robot, which is dubbed as Fitbot, are in…
Throughout the past decade, many studies have classified human emotions using only a single sensing modality such as face video, electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), etc. The results of these studies are constrained by the limitations of these modalities such as the absence of physiological biomarkers in the face-video analysis, poor spatial resolution in EEG, poor temporal resolution of the GSR etc. Scant research has been conducted to compare the merits of these modalities and understand how to best use them individually and jointly. Using multi-…
Empathy Detection from Text, Audiovisual, Audio or Physiological Signals: A Systematic Review of Task Formulations and Machine Learning Methods
School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Curtin University（电气工程、计算与数学科学学院，科廷大学）；BRAC University（布拉克大学）；The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of ÓBuda（布达佩斯大学）
How does empathy influence creative problem solving? We introduce a computational empathy intervention based on context-specific affective mimicry and perspective taking by a virtual agent appearing in the form of a well-dressed polar bear. In an online experiment with 1,006 participants randomly assigned to an emotion elicitation intervention (with a control elicitation condition and anger elicitation condition) and a computational empathy intervention (with a control virtual agent and an empathic virtual agent), we examine how anger and empathy influence participants' performance in solving …
REFS: Robust EEG feature selection with missing multi-dimensional annotation for emotion recognition
School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China（信息科学与技术学院，北京理工大学，北京）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, Beijing 100124, China（人工智能学院，安徽大学，北京）
Mindfulness is the state of paying attention to the present moment on purpose and meditation is the technique to obtain this state. This study aims to develop a robot assistant that facilitates mindfulness training by means of a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system. To achieve this goal, we collected EEG signals from two groups of subjects engaging in a meditative vs. nonmeditative human robot interaction (HRI) and evaluated cerebral hemispheric asymmetry, which is recognized as a well defined indicator of emotional states. Moreover, using self reported affective states, we strived to explain…
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）
Technique of emotion recognition enables computers to classify human affective states into discrete categories. However, the emotion may fluctuate instead of maintaining a stable state even within a short time interval. There is also a difficulty to take the full use of the EEG spatial distribution due to its 3-D topology structure. To tackle the above issues, we proposed a locally temporal-spatial pattern learning graph attention network (LTS-GAT) in the present study. In the LTS-GAT, a divide-and-conquer scheme was used to examine local information on temporal and spatial dimensions of EEG p…
Halmstad University（哈尔姆斯塔德大学）；Ulster University Belfast（贝尔法斯特阿尔斯特大学）
One of the challenges in virtual environments is the difficulty users have in interacting with these increasingly complex systems. Ultimately, endowing machines with the ability to perceive users emotions will enable a more intuitive and reliable interaction. Consequently, using the electroencephalogram as a bio-signal sensor, the affective state of a user can be modelled and subsequently utilised in order to achieve a system that can recognise and react to the user's emotions. This paper investigates features extracted from electroencephalogram signals for the purpose of affective state model…
Imperial College（帝国理工学院）；University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore（班加罗尔印度科学学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Advanced Digital Sciences Center（高级数字科学中心）；A*STAR Singapore（新加坡科技研究局）
Advertisements (ads) often contain strong affective content to capture viewer attention and convey an effective message to the audience. However, most computational affect recognition (AR) approaches examine ads via the text modality, and only limited work has been devoted to decoding ad emotions from audiovisual or user cues. This work (1) compiles an affective ad dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users; (2) explores the efficacy of content-centric convolutional neural network (CNN) features for AR vis-ã-vis handcrafted audio-visual descriptors; (3) examines user-centric ad …
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学电子计算学系）
The data scarcity problem in Electroencephalography (EEG) based affective computing results into difficulty in building an effective model with high accuracy and stability using machine learning algorithms especially deep learning models. Data augmentation has recently achieved considerable performance improvement for deep learning models: increased accuracy, stability, and reduced over-fitting. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation framework, namely Generative Adversarial Network-based Self-supervised Data Augmentation (GANSER). As the first to combine adversarial training with …
School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology（信息科学与技术学院，北京理工大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（人工智能学院，安徽大学）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables a user to communicate with a computer directly using brain signals. The most common non-invasive BCI modality, electroencephalogram (EEG), is sensitive to noise/artifact and suffers between-subject/within-subject non-stationarity. Therefore, it is difficult to build a generic pattern recognition model in an EEG-based BCI system that is optimal for different subjects, during different sessions, for different devices and tasks. Usually, a calibration session is needed to collect some training data for a new subject, which is time-consuming and user unfrie…
Recording Brain Activity While Listening to Music Using Wearable EEG Devices Combined with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks
School of Music, Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学音乐学院）；School of Electronic Information, HuZhou College（湖州学院电子信息学院）；San Francisco State University（旧金山州立大学）
Interpretable Dual-Filter Fuzzy Neural Networks for Affective Brain-Computer Interfaces
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Australian AI Institute（澳大利亚人工智能研究所）；Henan University（河南大学）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
For several decades, electroencephalography (EEG) has featured as one of the most commonly used tools in emotional state recognition via monitoring of distinctive brain activities. An array of datasets have been generated with the use of diverse emotion-eliciting stimuli and the resulting brainwave responses conventionally captured with high-end EEG devices. However, the applicability of these devices is to some extent limited by practical constraints and may prove difficult to be deployed in highly mobile context omnipresent in everyday happenings. In this study, we evaluate the potential of …
