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

Empathy and its modulation in a virtual human

Boukricha H, Wachsmuth I, Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. Empathy and its modulation in a virtual human. In: Timm IJ, Thimm M, eds. KI 2013: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. LNAI. Vol 8077. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2013: 25-36.Endowing artificial agents with the ability to empathize is believed to enhance their social behavior and to make them more likable, trustworthy, and caring. Neuropsychological findings substantiate that empathy occurs to different degrees depending on several factors including, among others, a person’s mood, personality, and social relationships with others. Although there is increasing interest in endowing artificial agents with affect, personality, and the ability to build social relationships, little attention has been devoted to the role of such factors in influencing their empathic behavior. In this paper, we present a computational model of empathy which allows a virtual human to exhibit different degrees of empathy. The presented model is based on psychological models of empathy and is applied and evaluated in the context of a conversational agent scenario