Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

16 results found in Affective Computing.

Affective Congruency
The degree to which a system's sensory outputs, interactions, and feedback align emotionally with the user's current affective state and the emotional meaning the user attaches to the experience. Dist…
Affective Haptics (Emotional Haptics)
A subfield of haptic interaction design concerned with using tactile and kinaesthetic feedback — vibration, pressure, temperature, squeezing, stroking, heartbeat-like pulsation — to communicate, evoke…
Affective Touch (Social Touch, Emotional Touch)
The emotional and social dimension of touch, distinct from discriminative touch that identifies object properties. Affective touch is mediated primarily by C-tactile (CT) afferents in hairy skin and p…
Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN, Temporal Bayesian Network)
A probabilistic graphical model that represents sequences of variables over time, extending standard Bayesian networks to handle temporal relationships. In accessibility and affective computing contex…
Ekman Basic Emotions (Basic Emotions, Ekman's Six Basic Emotions)
A taxonomy proposed by psychologist Paul Ekman that identifies six cross-culturally recognisable emotional expressions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise — as the building blocks…
Emotional Mediation Hypothesis
A theoretical account, originating in work by Palmer and colleagues, that explains cross-modal associations between sensory attributes (such as colors and musical timbres) as being mediated by shared …
FaceReader (Noldus FaceReader)
A commercial facial-expression recognition software (developed by Noldus) that uses computer vision and deep learning to automatically classify faces into basic emotions (neutral, happy, sad, angry, s…
Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
A comprehensive, anatomically based system for describing all visually discernible facial movements, originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1977. FACS decomposes facial expressions …
Facial Affect (Facial Expression of Emotion, Emotional Facial Expression)
The display of emotion through facial movements, including changes in the position of the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and other facial features that communicate a person's emotional or mental state. Facial…
Frisson (Aesthetic Chills, Musical Chills, Piloerection)
A psychophysiological response to music, art, or other aesthetic stimuli characterised by a pleasurable shiver or chills sensation accompanied by piloerection (goosebumps) and transient increases in h…
Mediated Social Touch (Remote Touch, Tele-touch, Haptic Telepresence)
The use of haptic technology to simulate or communicate social touch gestures — such as stroking, squeezing, patting, or hugging — between people who are physically separated. Mediated social touch sy…
Mood (Affect, Affective State)
In affective computing and music research, the emotional quality a stimulus evokes in a listener or viewer, commonly characterized along dimensions such as valence (pleasant–unpleasant) and arousal (c…
Musical Emotion (Music-Induced Emotion, Emotional Response to Music)
The emotional content perceived in, or felt in response to, a piece of music, typically analysed along dimensions such as valence and arousal or via categorical labels (cheerful, tense, calm, sad, ene…
PrEmo (Product Emotion Measurement Instrument)
A non-verbal self-report tool for measuring emotional responses, developed by Pieter Desmet. PrEmo presents users with 14 cartoon-like icons representing seven positive emotions (joy, admiration, prid…
Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM)
A nonverbal pictorial instrument developed by Bradley and Lang (1994) for measuring the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Respondents select from a row of stylised manikin figur…
Valence-Arousal Model (VA Model, Circumplex Model, Valence-Arousal Space)
A two-dimensional model of affect, introduced by Russell (1980), that represents emotional states along two orthogonal axes: valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) and arousal (activated versus deactiva…