Affective tactile interaction constitutes a fundamental component of human communication. In natural human-human encounters, touch is seldom experienced in isolation; rather, it is inherently multisensory. Individuals not only perceive the physical sensation of touch but also register the accompanying auditory cues generated through contact. The integration of haptic and auditory information forms a rich and nuanced channel for emotional expression. While extensive research has examined how robots convey emotions through facial expressions and speech, their capacity to communicate social gestures and emotions via touch remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we developed a multimodal interaction system incorporating a 5*5 grid of 25 vibration motors synchronized with audio playback, enabling robots to deliver combined haptic-audio stimuli. In an experiment involving 32 Chinese participants, ten emotions and six social gestures were presented through vibration, sound, or their combination. Participants rated each stimulus on arousal and valence scales. The results revealed that (1) the combined haptic-audio modality significantly enhanced decoding accuracy compared to single modalities; (2) each individual channel-vibration or sound-effectively supported certain emotions recognition, with distinct advantages depending on the emotional expression; and (3) gestures alone were generally insufficient for conveying clearly distinguishable emotions. These findings underscore the importance of multisensory integration in affective human-robot interaction and highlight the complementary roles of haptic and auditory cues in enhancing emotional communication.

Emotions exert an immense influence over human behavior and cognition in both commonplace and high-stress tasks. Discussions of whether or how to integrate large language models (LLMs) into everyday life (e.g., acting as proxies for, or interacting with, human agents), should be informed by an understanding of how these tools evaluate emotionally loaded stimuli or situations. A model's alignment with human behavior in these cases can inform the effectiveness of LLMs for certain roles or interactions. To help build this understanding, we elicited ratings from multiple popular LLMs for datasets of words and images that were previously rated for their emotional content by humans. We found that when performing the same rating tasks, GPT-4o responded very similarly to human participants across modalities, stimuli and most rating scales (r = 0.9 or higher in many cases). However, arousal ratings were less well aligned between human and LLM raters, while happiness ratings were most highly aligned. Overall LLMs aligned better within a five-category (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust) emotion framework than within a two-dimensional (arousal and valence) organization. Finally, LLM ratings were substantially more homogenous than human ratings. Together these results begin to describe how LLM agents interpret emotional stimuli and highlight similarities and differences among biological and artificial intelligence in key behavioral domains.

Understanding how humans express and synchronize emotions across multiple communication channels particularly facial expressions and speech has significant implications for emotion recognition systems and human computer interaction. Motivated by the notion that non-overlapping speech promotes clearer emotional coordination, while overlapping speech disrupts synchrony, this study examines how these conversational dynamics shape the spatial and temporal alignment of arousal and valence across facial and vocal modalities. Using dyadic interactions from the IEMOCAP dataset, we extracted continuous emotion estimates via EmoNet (facial video) and a Wav2Vec2-based model (speech audio). Segments were categorized based on speech overlap, and emotional alignment was assessed using Pearson correlation, lag adjusted analysis, and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Across analyses, non overlapping speech was associated with more stable and predictable emotional synchrony than overlapping speech. While zero-lag correlations were low and not statistically different, non overlapping speech showed reduced variability, especially for arousal. Lag adjusted correlations and best-lag distributions revealed clearer, more consistent temporal alignment in these segments. In contrast, overlapping speech exhibited higher variability and flatter lag profiles, though DTW indicated unexpectedly tighter alignment suggesting distinct coordination strategies. Notably, directionality patterns showed that facial expressions more often preceded speech during turn-taking, while speech led during simultaneous vocalizations. These findings underscore the importance of conversational structure in regulating emotional communication and provide new insight into the spatial and temporal dynamics of multimodal affective alignment in real world interaction.

Humans use multiple communication channels to interact with each other. For instance, body gestures or facial expressions are commonly used to convey an intent. The use of such non-verbal cues has motivated the development of prediction models. One such approach is predicting arousal and valence (AV) from facial expressions. However, making these models accurate for human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is challenging as it requires handling multiple subjects, challenging conditions, and a wide range of facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation (DA) technique to improve the performance of AV predictors using 3D morphable models (3DMM). We then utilize this approach in an HRI setting with a mediator robot and a group of three humans. Our augmentation method creates synthetic sequences for underrepresented values in the AV space of the SEWA dataset, which is the most comprehensive dataset with continuous AV labels. Results show that using our DA method improves the accuracy and robustness of AV prediction in real-time applications. The accuracy of our models on the SEWA dataset is 0.793 for arousal and valence.

There has been a significant focus on modelling emotion ambiguity in recent years, with advancements made in representing emotions as distributions to capture ambiguity. However, there has been comparatively less effort devoted to the consideration of temporal dependencies in emotion distributions which encodes ambiguity in perceived emotions that evolve smoothly over time. Recognizing the benefits of using constrained dynamical neural ordinary differential equations (CD-NODE) to model time series as dynamic processes, we propose an ambiguity-aware dual-constrained Neural ODE approach to model the dynamics of emotion distributions on arousal and valence. In our approach, we utilize ODEs parameterised by neural networks to estimate the distribution parameters, and we integrate additional constraints to restrict the range of the system outputs to ensure the validity of predicted distributions. We evaluated our proposed system on the publicly available RECOLA dataset and observed very promising performance across a range of evaluation metrics.

Sentiment analysis is a continuously explored area of text processing that deals with the computational analysis of opinions, sentiments, and subjectivity of text. However, this idea is not limited to text and speech, in fact, it could be applied to other modalities. In reality, humans do not express themselves in text as deeply as they do in music. The ability of a computational model to interpret musical emotions is largely unexplored and could have implications and uses in therapy and musical queuing. In this paper, two individual tasks are addressed. This study seeks to (1) predict the emotion of a musical clip over time and (2) determine the next emotion value after the music in a time series to ensure seamless transitions. Utilizing data from the Emotions in Music Database, which contains clips of songs selected from the Free Music Archive annotated with levels of valence and arousal as reported on Russel's circumplex model of affect by multiple volunteers, models are trained for both tasks. Overall, the performance of these models reflected that they were able to perform the tasks they were designed for effectively and accurately.

The congruence between affective experiences and physiological changes has been a debated topic for centuries. Recent technological advances in measurement and data analysis provide hope to solve this epic challenge. Open science and open data practices, together with data analysis challenges open to the academic community, are also promising tools for solving this problem. In this entry to the Emotion Physiology and Experience Collaboration (EPiC) challenge, we propose a data analysis solution that combines theoretical assumptions with data-driven methodologies. We used feature engineering and ensemble selection. Each predictor was trained on subsets of the training data that would maximize the information available for training. Late fusion was used with an averaging step. We chose to average considering a ``wisdom of crowds'' strategy. This strategy yielded an overall RMSE of 1.19 in the test set. Future work should carefully explore if our assumptions are correct and the potential of weighted fusion.

Fluent human-robot collaboration requires a robot teammate to understand, learn, and adapt to the human's psycho-physiological state. Such collaborations require a computing system that monitors human physiological signals during human-robot collaboration (HRC) to quantitatively estimate a human's level of comfort, which we have termed in this research as comfortability index (CI) and uncomfortability index (unCI). Subjective metrics (surprise, anxiety, boredom, calmness, and comfortability) and physiological signals were collected during a human-robot collaboration experiment that varied robot behavior. The emotion circumplex model is adapted to calculate the CI from the participant's quantitative data as well as physiological data. To estimate CI/unCI from physiological signals, time features were extracted from electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and pupillometry signals. In this research, we successfully adapt the circumplex model to find the location (axis) of 'comfortability' and 'uncomfortability' on the circumplex model, and its location match with the closest emotions on the circumplex model. Finally, the study showed that the proposed approach can estimate human comfortability/uncomfortability from physiological signals.

This work introduces a new music generation system, called AffectMachine-Classical, that is capable of generating affective Classic music in real-time. AffectMachine was designed to be incorporated into biofeedback systems (such as brain-computer-interfaces) to help users become aware of, and ultimately mediate, their own dynamic affective states. That is, this system was developed for music-based MedTech to support real-time emotion self-regulation in users. We provide an overview of the rule-based, probabilistic system architecture, describing the main aspects of the system and how they are novel. We then present the results of a listener study that was conducted to validate the ability of the system to reliably convey target emotions to listeners. The findings indicate that AffectMachine-Classical is very effective in communicating various levels of Arousal ($R^2 = .96$) to listeners, and is also quite convincing in terms of Valence (R^2 = .90). Future work will embed AffectMachine-Classical into biofeedback systems, to leverage the efficacy of the affective music for emotional well-being in listeners.

We introduce AVCAffe, the first Audio-Visual dataset consisting of Cognitive load and Affect attributes. We record AVCAffe by simulating remote work scenarios over a video-conferencing platform, where subjects collaborate to complete a number of cognitively engaging tasks. AVCAffe is the largest originally collected (not collected from the Internet) affective dataset in English language. We recruit 106 participants from 18 different countries of origin, spanning an age range of 18 to 57 years old, with a balanced male-female ratio. AVCAffe comprises a total of 108 hours of video, equivalent to more than 58,000 clips along with task-based self-reported ground truth labels for arousal, valence, and cognitive load attributes such as mental demand, temporal demand, effort, and a few others. We believe AVCAffe would be a challenging benchmark for the deep learning research community given the inherent difficulty of classifying affect and cognitive load in particular. Moreover, our dataset fills an existing timely gap by facilitating the creation of learning systems for better self-management of remote work meetings, and further study of hypotheses regarding the impact of remote work on cognitive load and affective states.