The machine can say it but cannot hear it. Designed affective patterns and the expressive-sensing asymmetry in human-machine communication

Abstract

Affect-adaptive systems increasingly act as communicators that sense a user's emotion and respond with events meant to change it, closing an affective loop. This vision assumes both that a machine's affective messages are received and that the bodily channel it monitors carries an intelligible reply-assumptions rarely tested together. In a within-subjects virtual-reality study (N = 20), an autonomous system delivered six empirically derived affective patterns-scripted emotional events distilled from 104 practitioners' (first responders') critical incidents-while we recorded the human reply across felt emotion, felt arousal, and autonomic (electrodermal and cardiac) activity. Acting only as an author of designed messages, the machine reliably evoked strong, differentiated emotions: valence fell sharply for every pattern (|dz| = 1.1-1.7), and the patterns produced distinguishable, individually classifiable signatures of anger, fear, and sadness, functioning as a vocabulary of machine-to-human affective messages. Yet the channel the machine would read stayed largely silent. Self-reported arousal did not change, with Bayesian and equivalence evidence for no effect; sympathetic and cardiac arousal moved only for the most perceptually salient events, not for the messages experienced as most powerful; and within individuals, felt valence was decoupled from both bodily registers. This valence-arousal dissociation reveals an expressive-sensing asymmetry: machine agency extends to expression but not perception, and closed-loop designs regulate on a variable their messages neither reliably move nor are legible in. We draw out implications for theories of machine agency and for affect-adaptive design.