Resumen
This paper presents an experimental study on modeling machine emotion elicitation in a socially intelligent service, the typing tutor. The aim of the study is to evaluate the extent to which the machine emotion elicitation can influence the affective state (valence and arousal) of the learner during a tutoring session. The tutor provides continuous real-time emotion elicitation via graphically rendered emoticons, as an emotional feedback to learner?s performance. Good performance is rewarded by the positive emoticon, based on the notion of positive reinforcement. Facial emotion recognition software is used to analyze the affective state of the learner for later evaluation. Experimental results show the correlation between the positive emoticon and the learner?s affective state is significant for all 13 (100%) test participants on the arousal dimension and for 9 (69%) test participants on both affective dimensions. The results also confirm our hypothesis and show that the machine emotion elicitation is significant for 11 (85%) of 13 test participants. We conclude that the machine emotion elicitation with simple graphical emoticons has a promising potential for the future development of the tutor.