English

Mirror Ritual: An Affective Interface for Emotional Self-Reflection

Human-Computer Interaction 2020-04-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This paper introduces a new form of real-time affective interface that engages the user in a process of conceptualisation of their emotional state. Inspired by Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotion, `Mirror Ritual' aims to expand upon the user's accessible emotion concepts, and to ultimately provoke emotional reflection and regulation. The interface uses classified emotions -- obtained through facial expression recognition -- as a basis for dynamically generating poetry. The perceived emotion is used to seed a poetry generation system based on OpenAI's GPT-2 model, fine-tuned on a specially curated corpus. We evaluate the device's ability to foster a personalised, meaningful experience for individual users over a sustained period. A qualitative analysis revealed that participants were able to affectively engage with the mirror, with each participant developing a unique interpretation of its poetry in the context of their own emotional landscape.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.09685,
  title  = {Mirror Ritual: An Affective Interface for Emotional Self-Reflection},
  author = {Nina Rajcic and Jon McCormack},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.09685},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Paper presented at ACM CHI2020: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, April 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:59:02.760Z