What Kinds of Facial Self-Touches Strengthen Expressed Emotions?

As virtual spaces continue to attract more and more attention, the development of virtual agents is also gaining momentum. Agents capable of expressing emotions are being developed, and various methods exist through which they express such feelings. Although much research has focused on the implementation of human actions in agents, no research has yet implemented facial self-touch for agents used in emotional expressions, even though such transmission of human emotions is a critical tool for them. In this study, we developed a system that enriches agents' emotional expressions by implementing self-touches in virtual agents. From an evaluation of our system, we found that it enhances the emotions of virtual agents. The naturalness of their emotional expressions varied depending on the emotion.