Creating physical personalities for agents with faces

[abstract]

There are both physical and psychological aspects to personality. Psychological personality origi-nates from within and is expressed through a variety of physical behaviors. Another aspect of personality, which has less to do with expressiveness than with perception, concerns what might be called the physical personality. Physical personality comprises those aspects of appear-ance, which, at zero acquaintance, give rise to an initial impression of personality and a concomitant set of re-actions and expectations in others.

With the goal of understanding how embodied agents, specifically those with faces, can best utilize the perception of physical personality, the psychological literature on the person perception of the face is reviewed. It will be seen that modeling the person perception of the face would provide agents with a rudimentary sense of social self-awareness that would enable them to alter their faces so as to better advertise their intentions, legitimize their roles, and elicit or prohibit specific responses. A brief discussion of the ways in which the trait impressions of the face can be modeled is also presented.