The effect of expression of anger and happiness in computer agents on negotiations with humans

There is now considerable evidence in social psychology, economics, and related disciplines that emotion plays an important role in negotiation. For example, humans make greater concessions in negotiation to an opposing human who expresses anger, and they make fewer concessions to an opponent who expresses happiness, compared to a no-emotion-expression control. However, in AI, despite the wide interest in negotiation as a means to resolve differences between agents and humans, emotion has been largely ignored. This paper explores whether expression of anger or happiness by computer agents, in a multiissue negotiation task, can produce effects that resemble effects seen in human-human negotiation. The paper presents an experiment where participants play with agents that express emotions (anger vs. happiness vs. control) through different modalities (text vs. facial displays). An important distinction in our experiment is that participants are aware that they negotiate with computer age...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Celso M. de Melo, Peter Carnevale, Jonathan Gratch
• Keywords: ATAL 2011, Emotion Effects, Engineering Design Tools, Intelligent Agents, Software Engineering Design