Modeling interpersonal perception in dyadic interactions: towards robot-assisted social mediation in the real world

Social mediator robots have shown potential in facilitating human interactions by improving communication, fostering relationships, providing support, and promoting inclusivity. However, for these robots to effectively shape human interactions, they must understand the intricacies of interpersonal dynamics. This necessitates models of human understanding that capture interpersonal states and the relational affect arising from interactions. Traditional affect recognition methods, primarily focus on individual affect, and may fall short in capturing interpersonal dynamics crucial for social mediation. To address this gap, we propose a multimodal, multi-perspective model of relational affect, utilizing a conversational dataset collected in uncontrolled settings. Our model extracts features from audiovisual data to capture affective behaviors indicative of relational affect. By considering the interpersonal perspectives of both interactants, our model predicts relational affect, enabling real-time understanding of evolving interpersonal dynamics. We discuss our model's utility for social mediation applications and compare it with existing approaches, highlighting its advantages for real-world applicability. Despite the complexity of human interactions and subjective nature of affect ratings, our model demonstrates early capabilities to enable proactive intervention in negative interactions, enhancing neutral exchanges, and respecting positive dialogues. We discuss implications for real-world deployment and highlight the limitations of current work. Our work represents a step towards developing computational models of relational affect tailored for real-world social mediation, offering insights into effective mediation strategies for social mediator robots.