The use of virtual agents in social coaching has increased rapidly in the last decade. In order to train the user in different situations than can occur in real life, the virtual agent should be able to express different social attitudes. In this paper, we propose a model of social attitudes that enables a virtual agent to reason on the appropriate social attitude to express during the interaction with a user given the course of the interaction, but also the emotions, mood and personality of the agent. Moreover, the model enables the virtual agent to display its social attitude through its non-verbal behaviour. The proposed model has been developed in the context of job interview simulation. The methodology used to develop such a model combined a theoretical and an empirical approach. Indeed, the model is based both on the literature in Human and Social Sciences on social attitudes but also on the analysis of an audiovisual corpus of job interviews and on post-hoc interviews with the recruiters on their expressed attitudes during the job interview.
Based on the assumptions that relational messages are multidimensional and that they are frequently communicated by nonverbal cues, this experiment manipulated five nonverbal cues -eye contact, proximity, body lean, smiling, and touch - to determine what meanings they convey along four relational message dimensions. Subjects (N= 150) observed 2 out of 40 videotaped conversational segments in which a male-female dyad presented various combinations of the nonverbal cues. High eye contact, close proximity, forward body lean, and smiling all conveyed greater intimacy, attraction, and trust. Low eye contact, a distal position, backward body lean, and the absence of smiling and touch communicated greater detachment. High eye contact, close proximity, and smiling also communicated less emotional arousal and greater composure, while high eye contact and close proximity alone conveyed greater dominance and control. Effects of combinations of cues and sex-differences are also reported. According to appeasement hypotheses, embarrassment should have a distinct nonverbal display that is more readily perceived when displayed by individuals from lower status groups. The evidence from 5 studies supported these two claims. The nonverbal behavior of embarrassment was distinct from a related emotion (amusement), resembled the temporal pattern of facial expressions of emotion, was uniquely related to self-reports of embarrassment, and was accurately identified by observers who judged the spontaneous displays of various emotions. Across the judgment studies, observers were more accurate and attributed more emotion to the embarrassment displays of female and AfricanAmerican targets than those of male and Caucasian targets. Discussion focused on the universality and appeasement function of the embarrassment display. Since universal facial expressions of a limited set of emotions were first documented (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971), sparse attention has been given to facial expressions of other emotions. The resulting lacuna in the field—that the emotions with identified displays are fewer (7 to 10) than the states that lay people (Fehr & Russell, 1984) and emotion theorists (Ekman, 1992; Izard, 1977; Tomkins, 1963, 1984) label as emotions—presents intriguing possibilities. Displays of other emotions may be blends of other emotional displays, unidentifiable, or may await discovery. In two vignette studies we examined beliefs about the nonverbal behavior and communication skills associated with high and low social power. Power was defined as both a trait (personality dominance) and a role (rank within an organization). Seventy nonverbal behaviors and skills were examined. Both Study 1 (a within-participants design) and Study 2 (a between-participants design) yielded highly similar results. Significant differences emerged for 35 of the 70 behaviors. The gender of the target individuals did not moderate beliefs about the relation of nonverbal behavior and power.