The Effect of Gender-Emotion Stereotypes in Communicating Emotion through Affective Agents

Affective agents are new and emerging technology that enables computer systems to communicate affects and socialize with human. Studies have shown that human interact with affective agents as if they are social actors. Recent researches suggest that affective agents exhibiting greater social presence and message involvement promote emotional communication. This paper examines the influence of gender-emotion stereotypes on user´s message involvement and perceived social presence of affective agents. The experimental results suggest that affective agents communicating emotional events that are gender- inconsistent exhibit greater social presence and higher user´s message involvement.