On the Influence of Emotional Feedback on Emotion Awareness and Gaze Behavior

This paper examines how emotion feedback influences emotion awareness and gaze behavior. Simulating a videoconference setup, 36 participants watched 12 emotional video sequences that were selected from the SEMAINE database. All participants wore an eye-tracker to measure gaze behavior and were asked to rate the perceived emotion for each video sequence. 3 conditions were tested: (c1) no feedback, i.e., the original video-sequences, (c2) correct feedback, i.e., an emoticon is integrated in the video to show the emotion depicted by the person in the video and (c3) random feedback, i.e., the emoticon displays at random an emotional state that may or may not correspond to the one of the person. The results showed that emotion feedback had a significant influence on gaze behavior, e.g., over time random feedback led to a decrease in the frequency of episodes of gaze. No effect of emotion display was observed for emotion recognition. However, experiments on the automatic emotion recognition using gaze behavior provided good performance, with better score on arousal than valence, and a very good performance was obtained in the automatic recognition of the correctness of the emotion feedback.