Emphatic agents to reduce user frustration: The effects of varying agent characteristics

There is now growing interest in the development of computer systems which respond to users’ emotion and affect. We report three small scale studies (with a total of 42 participants) which investigate the extent to which affective agents, using strategies derived from human-human interaction, can reduce user frustration within human-computer interaction. The results confirm the previous findings of Klein et al (2002) that such interventions can be effective. We also obtained results that suggest that embodied agents can be more effective at reducing frustration than non-embodied agents, and that female embodied agents may be more effective than male embodied agents. These results are discussed in light of the existing research literature

Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions

Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe

I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction

Boukricha H, Nguyen N, Wachsmuth I. Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction. In: Kopp S, Marsella S, Thorisson K, Vilhjalmsson HH, eds. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2011). LNAI. Vol 6895. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 350-362.Empathy is believed to play a major role as a basis for humans’ cooperative behavior. Recent research shows that humans empathize with each other to different degrees depending on several modulation factors including, among others, their social relationships, their mood, and the situational context. In human spatial interaction, partners share and sustain a space that is equally and exclusively reachable to them, the so-called interaction space. In a cooperative interaction scenario of relocating objects in interaction space, we introduce an approach for triggering and modulating a virtual humans cooperative spatial behavior by its degree of empathy with its interaction partner. That is, spatial distances like object distances as well as distances of arm and body movements while relocating objects in interaction space are modulated by the virtual human’s degree of empathy. In this scenario, the virtual human’s empathic emotion is generated as a hypothesis about the partner’s emotional state as related to the physical effort needed to perform a goal directed spatial behavior

Out of sight out of mind: Perceived physical distance between the observer and someone in pain shapes observer's neural empathic reactions

Social and affective relations may shape empathy to others' affective states. Previous studies also revealed that people tend to form very different mental representations of stimuli on the basis of their physical distance. In this regard, embodied cognition and embodied simulation propose that different physical distances between individuals activate different interpersonal processing modes, such that close physical distance tends to activate the interpersonal processing mode typical of socially and affectively close relationships. In Experiment 1, two groups of participants were administered a pain decision task involving upright and inverted face stimuli painfully or neutrally stimulated, and we monitored their neural empathic reactions by means of event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Crucially, participants were presented with face stimuli of one of two possible sizes in order to manipulate retinal size and perceived physical distance, roughly corresponding to the close and far portions of social distance. ERPs modulations compatible with an empathic reaction were observed only for the group exposed to face stimuli appearing to be at a close social distance from the participants. This reaction was absent in the group exposed to smaller stimuli corresponding to face stimuli observed from a far social distance. In Experiment 2, one different group of participants was engaged in a match-to-sample task involving the two-size upright face stimuli of Experiment 1 to test whether the modulation of neural empathic reaction observed in Experiment 1 could be ascribable to differences in the ability to identify faces of the two different sizes. Results suggested that face stimuli of the two sizes could be equally identifiable. In line with the Construal Level and Embodied Simulation theoretical frameworks, we conclude that perceived physical distance may shape empathy as well as social and affective distance

Empathic Agent Technology (EAT)

A new view on empathic agents is introduced, named: Empathic Agent Technology (EAT). It incorporates a speech analysis, which provides an indication for the amount of tension present in people. It is founded on an indirect physiological measure for the amount of experienced stress, defined as the variability of the fundamental frequency of the human voice. A thorough review of literature is provided on which the EAT is founded. In addition, the complete processing line of this measure is introduced. Hence, the first generally applicable, completely automated technique is introduced that enables the development of truly empathic agents

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents