Two story-morphs were presented by three Affective Reasoner agents -- a Rick agent, an Elliot agent, and a narrator agent. For each of these, subjects wrote long-hand responses describing what they felt might be true of each of the two characters in the story, gave a general description of the scenarios, and rated the quality of the story-morph as a narrative. We analyzed these free-form answers using three coders to assess the data. Some of the coded data is presented here.
The current round of observations should be catagorized as formalized exercises. While we are reporting results, the interpretation of these results is necessarily limited. For example, on the one hand, because the coding process was rather extensive, we were only able to select two story-morphs from the many possible versions created from the Bike Race story. In fact, we randomly selected ten and then ad hoc chose the two least likely to seem plausible as the basis for our presentation. Nonetheless, since we only fully looked at two of the many story-morphs possible, we cannot reliably claim that these results will hold for all of the Bike Race morphs, and even less can we claim that such results will hold for other story-morph sets.
On the other hand, partially based on the work done here, and also on less formal trials with a number of other sets of story-morphs, we are comfortable saying that preliminary indications are that this mechanism is widely applicable, and that it will likely show similar results for other story bases treated in the same manner.
Additionally, we considered using a control story-morph that was explicitly not consistent with a theoretically-based set of emotions. Although this would have been useful, we did not devote resources to this for the following reasons. First, our less formal experience has suggested that such presentations do in fact appear somewhat nonsensical. Second, and most importantly, if such non-theory-based presentations were still strongly perceived as stories, this would not diminish the usefulness of story-morphing. On the contrary it would suggest an even greater likelihood of success in many applications.