While multiple studies suggest that social skills are considered as essential in promoting employment, literature highlights a deficit in these skills among workers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) for whom difficulties in communication and social interaction are often reported. In this article, we explain how we used a User-Centered Design to identify and define in detail the work-related social skills that need to be trained. The aim was to develop social scenarios to train work-related social skills relevant for people with ASD using a digital app on a tablet. Participatory Design in our study included a needs analysis with questionnaires and interviews, as well as focus-groups and workshops with professionals of several disability employment services and workers or job seekers with ASD. Sixty-six social scenarios were written and 28 social skills were identified as relevant. This approach allowed us to design a tablet-based intervention which is an intelligent system by design since its content and structure target the social skills which require training for users with ASD.

Managing a medical team in emergency situations requires not only technical but also non-technical skills. Leaders must train to manage different types of subordinates, and how these subordinates will respond to orders and stressful events. Before designing virtual training environments for these leaders, it is necessary to understand how leaders perceive the nonverbal behaviors of virtual characters playing the role of subordinates. In this article, we describe a study we conducted to explore how leaders categorize virtual subordinates from the non-verbal expressions they display (i.e., facial expressions, torso orientation, gaze direction). We analyze how these multimodal behaviors impact the perception of follower style (proactive vs. passive, insubordination), interpersonal attitudes (dominance vs. submission) and stress. Our results suggest that leaders categorize virtual subordinates via nonverbal behaviors that are also perceived as signs of stress and interpersonal attitudes.

Health care delivery in military conflict, in peacekeeping missions or in the aftermath of disaster, implies high stress environments with danger exposures, life-threatening events and high levels of work demand. Crisis and emergency risk communication remains a real challenge. The rapid response of emergency medical teams has an important role to play in preventing serious adverse events. During critical events, medical errors can be related to human or system factors, including ineffective team leadership, non-standardized team communication, a lack of global situation awareness, poor use of resources and inappropriate triage and prioritization. The VICTEAMS project aims at building a virtual environment for training rescue team leaders to non-technical skills. Depending on the leader abilities, the virtual characters playing the subordinates (e.g. nurses) reproduce a variety of behaviors like erroneous actions, followership attitudes or stress-based behaviors. A pedagogical director tailors the difficulty according to the dynamic profile of the learner.

This paper deals with the haptic affective social interaction during a greeting handshaking between a human and a humanoid robot. The goal of this work is to study how the haptic interaction conveys emotions, and more precisely, how it in'uences the perception of the dimensions of emotions expressed through the facial expressions of the robot. Moreover, we examine the bene'ts of the multimodality (i.e., visuo-haptic) over the monomodality (i.e., visual-only and haptic-only). The experimental results with Meka robot show that the multimodal condition presenting high values for grasping force and joint stiffness are evaluated with higher values for the arousal and dominance dimensions than during the visual condition. Furthermore, the results corresponding to the monomodal haptic condition showed that participants discriminate well the dominance and the arousal dimensions of the haptic behaviours presenting low and high values for grasping force and joint stiffness.

Virtual sport coaches guide users through their physical activity and provide motivational support. Users’ motivation can rapidly decay if the movements of the virtual coach are too stereotyped. Kinematic patterns generated while performing a predefined fitness movement can elicit and help to prolong users’ interaction and interest in training. Human body kinematics has been shown to convey various social attributes such as gender, identity, and acted emotions. To date, no study provides information regarding how spontaneous emotions and personality traits together are perceived from full-body movements. In this article, we study how people make reliable inferences regarding spontaneous emotional dimensions and personality traits of human coaches from kinematic patterns they produced when performing a fitness sequence. Movements were presented to participants via a virtual mannequin to isolate the influence of kinematics on perception. Kinematic patterns of biological movement were analyzed in terms of movement qualities according to the effort-shape [Dell 1977] notation proposed by Laban [1950]. Three studies were performed to provide an analysis of the process leading to perception: from coaches’ states and traits through bodily movements to observers’ social perception. Thirty-two participants (i.e., observers) were asked to rate the movements of the virtual mannequin in terms of conveyed emotion dimensions, personality traits (five-factor model of personality), and perceived movement qualities (effort-shape) from 56 fitness movement sequences. The results showed high reliability for most of the evaluated dimensions, confirming interobserver agreement from kinematics at zero acquaintance. A large expressive halo merging emotional (e.g., perceived intensity) and personality aspects (e.g., extraversion) was found, driven by perceived kinematic impulsivity and energy. Observers’ perceptions were partially accurate for emotion dimensions and were not accurate for personality traits. Together, these results contribute to both the understanding of dimensions of social perception through movement and the design of expressive virtual sport coaches.