Human and Virtual Agent Expressive Gesture Quality Analysis and Synthesis - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 269

CHAPTER 11
Human and Virtual Agent
Expressive Gesture Quality
Analysis and Synthesis
Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Maurizio Mancini
and Stefano Piana
1. Introduction
Nonverbal communication is an essential element of human-
human communication, equally important as the verbal message. It
consists of bodily nonverbal signals , including facial expressions , hand/
arm gestures , posture shifts , and so on (Argyle, 1998). In particular,
the communicative meaning of gestures usually depends on two
components: shape and expressive quality . While the role of the former,
for instance the configurations of the hand in time, is well known
(McNeill, 1996), studies about the latter, i.e., how a particular mental
intention is communicated through a gesture's expressive quality,
are quite recent. Nevertheless it has been experimentally shown that
a gesture's expressive quality may communicate social relations and
communicative intentions, such as: emotional states (Castellano et al.,
2007), affiliation (Lakens and Stel, 2011), cultural background (Rehm,
2010), dominance (Varni et al., 2009; Jayagopi et al., 2009), agreement
(Bousmalis et al., 2009) or group cohesion (Hung and Gatica-Perez,