Measures of emotion should accurately characterize the nature of an emotional experience and determine whether that experience is universal or unique to a subgroup or culture. We investigated the value of assessing emotion through skin conductance (an easy-to-interpret physiological measure) and sliders (frequently used and direct measures of perceived emotion). This paper describes findings from two experiments. The first evaluated various slider configurations and found that measured emotions successfully characterized the emotional nature of short videos. The second experiment collected the slider and skin conductance measures of emotion while one sample of Japanese participants and another sample of Canadian participants viewed longer videos. The measures were sensitive enough to identify cultural differences consistent with existing literature and were also able to identify parts of the experience where members from different cultures reacted consistently, pinpointing content that provoked a universal experience. We offer a toolkit of data interpretation techniques to gain more insight into the implicit and explicit emotion data: analyses for expressiveness and agreement that can infer states such as engagement and fatigue. We summarize the aspects of our measurement approach and toolkit in a model: the ability to distinguish the emotional nature of stimuli, individuals, and affective interaction.

Tapping-based selection methods for handheld devices may need to be supplemented with other approaches as increasingly complex tasks are carried out using those devices. Circling selection methods (such as the Lasso) allow users to select objects on a touch screen by circling with a pen. An experimental comparison of the selection time and accuracy between a circling method and a traditional tapping style of selection was carried out. The experiment used a two dimensional grid (varying in terms of the sizes and the distances of the targets). Analysis of variance showed that tapping selection time differed significantly depending on the size and spacing of the targets. In contrast, circling selection times differed significantly for different levels of target cohesiveness and shape complexity. The results are discussed in terms of implications for design of new pen-based selection methods for handheld devices, and also in terms of evaluation methodology for input selection methods.

This paper reports on the development of Chatako-AID, a communication aid for non-vocal people using corpus-based cocatenative speech synthesis by creating a speech corpus especially designed for such use. The concept of Chatako-AID; synthesis with the user’s voice, which makes use of precomposed texts, is highly appreciated by the target user. This confirms that the recording of a minimum set of phonetically balanced sentences is insufficient for speech synthesis in the proposed method and that a combination of the above recording and a recording of well-read continuous-text material produces more natural sounded synthesised speech.

This paper proposes three corpora of emotional speech in Japanese that maximize the expression of each emotion (expressing joy, anger, and sadness) for use with CHATR, the concatenative speech synthesis system being developed at ATR. A perceptual experiment was conducted using the synthesized speech generated from each emotion corpus and the results proved to be significantly identifiable. Authors’ current work is to identify the local acoustic features relevant for specifying a particular emotion type. F0 and duration showed significant differences among emotion types. AV (amplitude of voicing source) and GN (glottal noise) also showed differences. This paper reports on the corpus design, the perceptual experiment, and the results of the acoustic analysis.