This study examines whether characteristics of a car voice can affect driver performance and affect. In a 2 (driver emotion: happy or upset) x 2 (car voice emotion: energetic vs. subdued) experimental study, participants (N=40) had emotion induced through watching one of two sets of 5-minute video clips. Participants then spent 20 minutes in a driving simulator where a voice in the car spoke 36 questions (e.g., "How do you think that the car is performing?") and comments ("My favorite part of this drive is the lighthouse.") in either an energetic or subdued voice. Participants were invited to interact with the car voice. When user emotion matched car voice emotion (happy/energetic and upset/subdued), drivers had fewer accidents, attended more to the road (actual and perceived), and spoke more to the car. Implications for car design and voice user interface design are discussed.

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To examine the expression of personality in virtual worlds (VWs), the authors tracked the behavioral and linguistic output of 76 students continuously over a 6-week period in the VW Second Life (SL). Behavioral metrics in SL were consistent over time, but low stabilities were observed for linguistic metrics. To examine the ways in which personality manifested in SL, participant's Big Five scores were correlated with their virtual behavioral and linguistic metrics. For example, Conscientiousness was correlated with many metrics related to geographical movement; however, there was low overlap with findings from previous studies. The authors provide some reasons for this low concordance. Their study hints at the potential of leveraging VWs to understand the link not only between personality and behavior but also among other social and psychological phenomena as well.