"How Did They Come Across?" Lessons Learned from Continuous Affective Ratings

Abstract: Social distance, or perception of the other, is recognized as a dynamic dimension of an interaction, but yet to be widely explored or understood. Through CORAE, a novel web-based open-source tool for COntinuous Retrospective Affect Evaluation, we collected retrospective ratings of interpersonal perceptions between 12 participant dyads. In this work, we explore how different aspects of these interactions reflect on the ratings collected, through a discourse analysis of individual and social behavior of the interactants. We found that different events observed in the ratings can be mapped to complex interaction phenomena, shedding light on relevant interaction features that may play a role in interpersonal understanding and grounding. This paves the way for better, more seamless human-robot interactions, where affect is interpreted as highly dynamic and contingent on interaction history.