Creating emotional communication with interactive artwork

Abstract

This pilot study contributes to the building of an art installation that aims to build an emotional communication loop with the audience. It will do so by reacting to or mimicking the audience's changes in emotional expressions according to emotional contagion dynamics. The study aims to inform the project by gaining a better understanding of emotional contagion patterns and the factors that may affect how people emotionally engage in this art context. The analysis of our early experiments shows reflex mechanisms of facial expression mimicry and counter-mimicry that follow patterns similar to those reported in the psychology literature. In fact, automatic mimicry and counter-mimicry correlated to some extent to whether or not the audience felt to be interacting with a real person. Furthermore, the results indicate that individual differences play a role in the way people can emotionally engage with this type of artwork. However, irrespective of these differences, the interaction led the audience to introspect and reflect about emotions.