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This paper reports on a study conducted as part of the EU EMPATHIC project, whose goal is to develop an empathic virtual coach capable of enhancing seniors' well-being, focusing on user requirements and expectations with respect to participants' age and technology experiences (i.e. participants' familiarity with technological devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets). The data shows that seniors' favorite technological device is the smartphone, and this device was also the one that scored the highest in terms of easiness to use. We found statistically significant differences on the preferences expressed by seniors toward the gender of the agents. Seniors (independently from their gender) prefer to interact with female humanoid agents on both the pragmatic and hedonic dimensions of an interactive system and are more in favor to commit themselves in a long-lasting interaction with them. In addition, we found statistically significant effects of the seniors' technology savviness on the hedonic qualities of the proposed interactive systems. Seniors with technological experience felt less motivated and judged the proposed agents less captivating, exciting, and appealing., 14 pages

This paper investigates the acoustical and perceptual speech features that differentiate a depressed individual from a healthy one. The speech data gathered was a collection from both healthy and depressed subjects in the Italian language, each comprising of a read and spontaneous narrative. The pre-processing of this dataset was done using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC). The speech samples were further processed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for correlation and dimensionality reduction. It was found that both groups differed with respect to the extracted speech features. To distinguish the depressed group from the healthy one on the basis the proposed speech processing algorithm the Self Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm was used. The clustering accuracy given by SOM’s was 80.67%.

The systematic study of biological basis of behavior and of the process involved in economical choices has outlined a new paradigm of research: neuroeconomics. Now the intersection between neuroscience, psychology and economics, neuroeconomics presents itself as an alternative to the neoclassical vision on economics, according to which the homo oeconomicus acts within the bonds of a formalizing rationality tending to the maximization of the anticipated utility. Brain imagining methods have shown that the decision-making processes activate the frontal lobe and the limbic system above all, a big circonvolution running through the callous body on the medial surface of the hemispheres, extending itself down, responsible for the regulation of emotional phenomena. Reinforcing such a tendency, we find the injury paradigm. It was observed that frontal lobe injuries harm the capacity of making advantageous decisions either in one’s own behalf or in others, as well as decisions according to the social conventions. In this paper, we will try to show that if, by the one hand, the neuro visual methods have given us a great amount of data, on the other hand, using them uncritically, with the recurrent confusion between “correlation” and “causal relation”—contemporary microevents indicate only simple correlations, and no cause-effect relation—risks to stress the relevant explanatory gap regarding the abstract ideal of understanding the nature of the brain.

Humans have very high requirements and expectations when communicating through speech, other than simplicity, flexibility and easiness of interaction . This is because voice interactions do not require cognitive efforts, attention, and memory resources. Voice technologies are however still constrained to use cases and scenarios giving the existing limitations of speech synthesis and recognition systems. Which is the status of nonlinear speech processing techniques and the steps made for cross-fertilization among disciplines? This chapter will provide a short overview trying to answer the above question.

An effective change in Human Computer Interaction requires to account of how communication practices are transformed in different contexts, how users sense the interaction with a machine, and an efficient machine sensitivity in interpreting users' communicative signals, and activities. To this aims, the present paper investigates on whether and how positive and negative visual scenes may alter listeners' ability to decode emotional melodies. Emotional tunes were played alone and with, either positive, or negative, or neutral emotional scenes. Afterword, subjects (8 groups, each of 38 subjects, equally balanced by gender) were asked to decode the emotional feeling aroused by melodies ascribing them either emotional valences (positive, negative, I don't know) or emotional labels (happy, sad, fear, anger, another emotion, I don't know). It was found that dimensional emotional features rather than emotional labels strongly affect cognitive judgements of emotional melodies. Musical emotional information is most effectively retained when the task is to assign labels rather than valence values to melodies. In addition, significant misperception effects are observed when happy or positively judged melodies are concurrently played with negative scenes.

This paper investigates whether and how depressive disorders affect speech and in particular timing strategies for speech pauses (empty and filled pauses, as well as, phoneme lengthening). The investigation is made exploiting read and spontaneous narratives . The collected data are from 24 subjects, divided into two groups (depressed and control) asked to read a tale, as well as, spontaneously report on their daily activities. Ten different frequency and duration measures for pauses and clauses are proposed and have been collected using the PRAAT software on the speech recordings produced by the participants. A T-Student test for independent samples was applied on the collected frequency and duration measures in order to ascertain whether significant differences between healthy and depressed speech measures are observed. In the “spontaneous narrative” condition, depressed patients exhibited significant differences in: the average duration of their empty pauses, the average frequency, and the average duration of their clauses. In the read narratives, only the average pause’s frequency of the clauses was significantly lower in the depressed subjects with respect to the healthy ones. The results suggest that depressive disorders affect speech quality and speech production through pause and clause durations, as well as, clause quantities. In particular, the significant differences in clause quantities (observed both in the read and spontaneous narratives), suggest a strong general effect of depressive symptoms on cognitive and psychomotor functions. Depressive symptoms produce changes in the planned timing of pauses, even when reading, modifying the timing of pausing strategies.

This paper aims at investigating on whether and how semantic information conveyed by gestures supports communication effectiveness. The research hypothesis was operationalized as a word retrieval task. To this aim, 140 subjects (73 males, 67 females) aged between 18 and 35 years were recruited at the University of Salerno (Italy). They underwent a memory task after being requested to watch video-clips explicating 15 every-day words through 4 different presentation modes: a) only audio, b) only gestures, c) audio and articulatory (complex auditory) information, and d) audio, gestures, and articulatory (multimodal) information. It was found that semantic information is most effectively retained when conveyed through the multimodal mode, and that the only gestures outperforms the only audio and complex auditory mode. It was also found that females have higher significant recall ability than males, no matter the experimental condition.

This work reports on a series of experiments involving 960 participants (aged between 20-30 years and equally balanced by gender), asked to play the receiver role in a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, where together with information on the offer's fairness (e.g. 40 (fair) vs 10 (unfair) of 100 euros), a photo depicted the trader's appearance (trustworthy vs. untrustworthy) and a text provided his moral description (honest vs. dishonest). Receivers were asked to motivate their decision in connection with the appearance, moral judgment, and fairness of the offer, and report on how these variables affected their emotional feelings. Data analysis shows that, in all conditions containing a fair offer, the trader's appearance plays a significant role in the receivers' decisions in terms of acceptance rate. Moral descriptions play a significant role only in conditions containing an unfair offer. However, when asked to motivate their choices, subjects do not feel the interference of the social appearance, rather they provide more or less equal number of motivations with reference to the amount of offers and moral judgments. As for the emotions driving their decisions, non-converging feelings are observed both at intra and inter group level.

This paper presents two examples of how nonverbal commu- nication can be automatically detected and interpreted in terms of social phenomena. In particular, the presented approaches use simple prosodic features to distinguish between journalists and non-journalists in media, and extract social networks from turn-taking to recognize roles in dif- ferent interaction settings (broadcast data and meetings). Furthermore, the article outlines some of the most interesting perspectives in this line of research.