You make me happy: Using an adaptive affective interface to investigate the effect of social presence on positive emotion induction

Abstract

Affective user interfaces are usually characterized as interfaces that try to recognize, interpret and respond to human emotions. In this paper, we take a different perspective and investigate if and how a digital, interactive adaptive mirror, which is a game-like affective interface, can induce positive emotions in participants and how the social presence of a friend affects the emotion induction. Results show that participants systematically feel more positive after an affective mirror session and co-presence of a friend is shown to boost this effect.