Measuring Affect in HCI - Going Beyond The Individual

The measurement of affect in HCI research is a challenging and complex issue. Although a number of techniques for measuring affect have been developed, a systematic discussion of their effectiveness and applicability in different contexts remains lacking, especially in social contexts with multiple users. As computing shifts to increasingly collaborative and ubiquitous models, it is important to discuss affect measurement beyond the individual level.  This workshop will provide a forum where designers, practitioners, and researchers can 1) introduce novel methods of affect measurement that go beyond physiological and self-report measures, 2) advance our understanding of existing measurement methods and how they can be expanded, and 3) critically evaluate issues of affect measurement.

CONTRIBUTIONS
We welcome submissions that address our workshop theme.  Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Yours, mine or ours
Is "group affect" merely a summary of individual group member affect or do we need measurement methods beyond the individual? How is affect transferred from one group member to another through emotional contagion, behavioral entrainment and interaction synchrony? How do we measure such transfer processes?

Implicit measures
A method that overcomes many of the criticisms of self-report and physiological measures of affect measurement are implicit measures such as analysis of linguistic cues.  What other implicit measures can the HCI community utilize?

Objective and subjective measures
In what contexts are objective measures of emotion and more subjective measures of emotion useful? Can there be a common ground between the two? A structured conversation between researchers using these different measures holds great promise for the community.

Mild emotions, mixed emotions and single emotions
Majority of measurement techniques focus on single emotions or an umbrella of emotions generally referred to as positive or negative affect.  Is there measurement techniques that can measure subtle (low intensity) emotions or different emotions experienced simultaneously?

Cross cultural applicability
What are the cross-cultural issues associated with affect measurement?  Are there measurement techniques that can be reasonably applied across cultures?

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Workshop submissions should be a maximum of 4 pages in length and formatted in the extended abstracts format (download the template from the CHI web site).

Submissions should be sent as a PDF file by email to sadat at cornell dot edu.  Accepted submissions will be published in the workshop proceedings with an ISBN. We are in negotiations with Springer to publish an edited book with revised and longer versions of workshop submissions.

UPON ACCEPTANCE

All accepted submissions will be posted to the web site, enabling preliminary exchanges among workshop participants before the conference. Participants will be instructed to create posters of their submissions for demonstration during the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for paper submissions: 3 October 2007, 5PM (PDT)
Notification of acceptance: 28 November, 2007.
Workshop: 5 April, 2008.


ORGANIZERS

N. Sadat Shami, Cornell University, USA.
Jeffrey T. Hancock, Cornell University, USA.
Christian Peter, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Germany.
Michael Muller, IBM Research, USA.
Yanghee Kim, Utah State University, USA.
Regan Mandryk, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.