Reproduction Materials for: Despite Appearances: Comparing Emotion Recognition in Abstract and Humanoid Avatars Using Nonverbal Behavior in Social Virtual Reality

<p>The ability to perceive emotional states is a critical part of social interactions, shaping how people understand and respond to each other. In face-to-face communication, people perceive others’ emotions through observing their appearance and behavior. In virtual reality, how appearance and behavior are rendered must be designed. In this study, we asked whether people conversing in immersive virtual reality (VR) would perceive emotion more accurately depending on whether they and their partner were presented by realistic or abstract avatars. In both cases, participants got similar information about the tracked movement of their partner’s heads and hands, though how this information was expressed varied. We collected participants’ self-reported emotional state ratings of themselves and their ratings of their conversational partners’ emotional states after a conversation in VR. Participants’ ratings of their partners’ emotional states correlated to their partners’ self-reported ratings regardless of which of the avatar conditions they experienced. We then explored how these states were reflected in their nonverbal behavior, using a dyadic measure of nonverbal behavior (proximity between conversational partners) and an individual measure (expansiveness of gesture). We discuss how this relates to measures of social presence and social closeness.</p>

PI提供的摘要：许多发展中国家的小农部门普遍存在贫困问题。大量文献表明，订单农业（contract farming）——即农民与买家之间的收获前协议——能够促进小农参与市场、改善家庭福利并推动农村发展。这些研究结果影响了发展政策辩论，但现有证据的外部有效性有限。现有研究通常聚焦于单一合同方案或某一国家内的小地理区域。我们利用来自六个国家的全国代表性调查数据，生成了可推广至特定合同方案、作物或国家之外的证据。我们重点研究了订单农业对家庭收入和劳动力需求的影响，发现仅在部分国家，参与订单农业的农民比未参与的同行获得更高收入。大多数国家的订单农业农民对雇佣劳动力的需求增加，这表明订单农业能刺激就业，但我们未发现社区层面的溢出效应证据。我们的结果挑战了订单农业明确改善福利的观点。我们讨论了为何我们的结果可能与先前研究不同，并提出了能提高内部和外部有效性的研究设计。这些结果对政策和研究的启示超出了订单农业的范畴。