Affective Interactions: Toward a New Generation of Computer Interfaces? -- Listen to Your Heart Rate: Counting the Cost of Media Quality -- Effective Affective in Intelligent Systems – Building on Evidence of Empathy in Teaching and Learning -- The Communication of Meaningful Emotional Information for Children Interacting with Virtual Actors -- Emotion and Facial Expression -- A Cognitive Approach to Affective User Modeling -- Affective Appraisal versus Cognitive Evaluation in Social Emotions and Interactions -- An Emotion-Based “Conscious” Software Agent Architecture -- Redesigning the Agents’ Decision Machinery -- Artificial Emotion and Emotion Learning: Emotions as Value Judgements -- Integrating Models of Personality and Emotions into Lifelike Characters -- Why Should Agents Be Emotional for Entertaining Users? A Critical Analysis -- Emotional Meaning and Expression in Animated Faces -- Relating Personality and Behavior: Posture and Gestures -- Affective Natural Language Generation.

Affective computing is a fascinating new area of research emerging in computer science. It dwells on problems where "computing is related to, arises from or deliberately influences emotions" (Picard 1997). Following this new research direction and considering the human element as crucial in designing and implementing interactive intelligent interfaces, affective computing is now influencing the way we shape, design, construct, and evaluate human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communcation. This book originates from a workshop devoted to affective interactions. It presents revised full versions of several papers accepted in preliminary version for the workshop and various selectively solicited papers by key people as well as an introductory survey by the volume editor and interview with Rosaling Picard, a pioneer researcher in the field. The book competently assesses the state of the art in this fascinating new field.