Socially Situated Affective Systems

For a socially situated agent, the world is populated by other agents with which it interacts in the true sense of the word, in that the action-reaction sequence typical of the physical world is replaced by mutual acting-with and acting-upon the other. This chapter first introduces the sociological bottom line of emotion as the glue and regulatory system of social relationships both at the individual and at the collective level. It then focuses on language as the pre-eminent medium of social interaction and discusses, by way of examples, the functioning of conversation beyond information exchange as both norm-following and norm-building human social behaviour. We conclude that, for the design of socially situated affective systems, more research on the often overlooked because seemingly trivial aspects of interaction is needed, and we present methods for the uncovering and analysis of the workings of human-machine interaction.