3. ► People communicate not only for info. but
also for emotion conveyance.
► Three modalities
dominate:
Audio
Text
Video
► Touch is largely ignored
4. ► Touch is essential for human
development and communication
► Touch is unique
► Touch is immediate (i.e., conveys affect
directly without symbolic interpretation)
5. ► Touchis important to
development
The wire-mother-fed monkeys
appeared to be pathological
violent and aggressive, while
the terry-cloth-fed monkeys
(though not completely
normal) did not express such
characteristics.
Harlow, H.F.: The Nature of Love. American Psychologist 13 (1958) 673-685
6. ► Touch is an important component of intimacy
Register et.al.: non-verbal communication is
critical in the experience of intimacy, in ways
that words alone cannot convey
They write: “It seems that there is an element of
intimacy that is more accurately expressed via other
sensory modalities, such as sight and touch, …”
* Register, L.M., Henley, T.B.: The Phenomenology of Intimacy J. Soc. &
Pers. Relationships 9 (1992) 467-481
7. ► Ina discussion of the physiological
perspectives of touch, Collier* concludes
that
“Touch should not be broken down into
separate features which are then used
independently, or divorced from the total
context in which it occurs.”
► Touch is a rich and unique form of human
interaction that may not be easily
expressed in its logical constituent parts.
Collier, G.: Touch. Emotional Expression. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1985)
8.
9. ► The difference is not trivial:
If touch is immediate, it holds a unique place
that is not easily subsumed by some other
modality.
If it is mediated through symbol, it could be
otherwise mediated.
We argue that it is this immediacy that
makes the exploration of digitally conveyed
touch important.
10. ► The meaning of touch is significantly
shaped by context.
► Jones and Yarborough (1985):
There is no one-to-one correspondence
between meanings and touch
behaviors.
The same touch may have different
meanings
Different touches may share similar
meanings
Jones, S.E., Yarbrough, A.E.: A naturalistic study of the meanings of
touch. Comm. monographs 52 (1985)
11. 1986 White & Back Telephonic arm wrestling
1996 Strong & Gaver Shaker
1997 Dodge The Bed
1997 Brave & Dahley inTouch
2001 Nilsen & Vrana Vibrobod
2001 Chang et al LumiTouch
2001 Hansson & Skog LoveBomb
2002 Oakley & O’Modhrain Contact IM
2007 Motamedi Fabric screen
2005 Mueller & DiSalvo The Hug
2006 Bonanni et al TapTap
2002 Chang et al ComTouch
2007 Brown & Williamson Shake2Talk
2008 Chan et al Tactile mouse for turn-taking
2007 Adcock et al Tug n’ Talk
2001 Alhalabi etal Tele-Handshake
1998 Fogg et al HandJive
12. ► Either through explicit design or user
choice, previous systems were used to
convey symbolic messages
► We argue that haptic touch applied
without context reduces to low-bit-rate
signaling channels
► Our study explores how context
empowers remote touch to retain its
privileged position of immediate
affective conveyance
14. ► Subjects listen to an emotive story recording
which is told by a professional actress
► Inpre-study, another pool of subjects ranked
key points in the story for affective meaning
and emphasis
Emotional High Point
25
20
15
10
5
0
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29
15. ► Measure subjects‟ emotional state before
and after the story session under 2
conditions
With-Touch
Without-Touch
► Goal:To find out whether remote touch
channel can make any difference to
subjects in emotional state
16. ► 16 subjects (6 females, 10 males)
14 are native English-speakers
2 have spoken English for more than 8 years
i.e., subjects have no language problems
► Recruited via SONA system maintained by
Psychology Department and CS graduate
student mail-list.
Study balanced participants from both sources
► The average age is 23.6
17. ► Pre/Post PANAS (Positive Affect Negative
Affect Schedules)
consists of 60 words of feelings and emotion
participants are asked to mark each word,
using a scale, according to how they are
feeling right now.
Cheerfully (Not At All) (Extremely)
1 7
20. ► remote touch reduces sadness significantly.
It suggests that the touch amplified the
effect of the story over the non-touch
condition.
► a trend to reduce general negative mood
and to reinforce joviality
► positive affect measures have more to do
with excitement, alertness, attentiveness
etc. – all of which relate to „positive energy‟
rather than the emotions in our story.
Good morning, everyone.My presentation is “Touch & Talk: Contexutalizing Remote Touch for Affective Interaction”I am Rongrong Wang from virginia tech. Prof. Francis Quek is my advisor. If you have questions that I can’t answer, he may help.
Let’s begin with a scenario that illustrates what we mean by remote touch. Some of you might have seen it in the madness session. But my husband and I made this, so I will just show you anyway!
The video you just saw is a bit contrived, but it illustrates remote touch as an affective medium.My husband’s touch was intended to encourage me, and I received it as such.In current communication milieu, three modalities dominate: audio, text and video. We find them in twitter, skype, facebook, youtube and etal. However, touch, is largely ignored. Well, Apple will release its Touch Tablet in a couple of days. It might provide touch to convey affect, but I doubt it.
Psychological studies have shown that touch is important. The next few slides, we will show touch is essential for human development and communication,Touch is unique and touch is immediate, in sense that it conveys affect directly without symbolic interpretation.
If Harlow’s experiment was only dealt with monkeys, later experiments demonstrated the same principles in humans.Register’s phenomenology study shows ..
Second, touch is unique.
This brings to the key idea of our paper. In our model shown above, touch conveys affect and meaning directly. Originator and recipient share in the same moment. Our model contains that this is only possible with context. This is A departure from the typical model shown below. Touch is modeled in communication theory with encode-transmit-decode circle.Restate chainImmediate model seems obvious. When a child hugs his parents, he doesn’t mean to pass a message. He hugs just because he wants to and needs to. When lovers kiss, they are not making a statement, they just kiss. In video you saw earlier, my husband touched my arm and encouraged me. This is only meaningful when it is accompanied with what he said. That’s what I mean by context.
Our previous discussion on touch as immediate or symbolically mediated channel is not trivial:
Picking up on the idea of context, Jones and Yarborough finds that …Giving the complexity of meaning, context plays a critial role in shaping the meaning of touch.
Our paper did an extensive literature review in previous research effort. We list some of them here.
We find that…
To test our idea, we developed our haptic device. It consists of an armband which is embedded with shape memory alloy. When the current goes through the memory alloy, it will contract and be able to cause a squeeze sensation. The input device has a force sensor inside and can detect whether a force is applied to it or not.The device is demostrated in the video you saw earlier. When my husband squeezed the input object, I will feel the force on my arm applied by armband
It is a feel-good story that begins sad but has a happy endingWe use the study to decide where and when to apply haptic squeeze during the story play back.
In our main study, subjects listen to the story under 2 conditions: with and without touch.We measure subjects’ emotional state before and after the story session.
PANAS allow us to measure 4 classes of affect
In this slides we show the results of reduction in negative, gain in positive emotion, reduction in sadness and gain in joviality in two conditions. The left bar is with-touch, the right bar is without-touch. For reduction in negative emotion, with-touch group showed larger reduction in negative than without-touch group, from 1.2 to 0.2 though no statistical significance was found. For gain in positive emotion, both groups has values less than 0.5, so not much changes in positive emotionFor gain in joviality, with-touch group showed larger gain than without-touch group, though no statistical significance was found. The place we found statistical significance is sadness emotion, where with-touch participants experienced reduction in sadness while the without-touch participants didn’t showed so.
