Towards Empathic TV Interaction using Body Postures

Abstract

Empathy is usually associated with detection of someones feelings and acting appropriately upon this. This act creates a feeling that the empathic person understands you. In this paper we explore whether postures, which people use to detect affective state, can be used to detect feelings of someone watching TV. We report on an initial experiment in this regard that replicated a study found in literature. In this experiment we were unable to detect a correlation between postures and emotions felt while watching a short series of video fragments. We discuss potential applications of the detected postures as such and reflect on situations that might trigger emotion-related posture change.