The use of virtual agents in social coaching has increased rapidly in the
last decade. In order to train the user in different situations than can occur
in real life, the virtual agent should be able to express different social
attitudes. In this paper, we propose a model of social attitudes that enables a
virtual agent to reason on the appropriate social attitude to express during
the interaction with a user given the course of the interaction, but also the
emotions, mood and personality of the agent. Moreover, the model enables the
virtual agent to display its social attitude through its non-verbal behaviour.
The proposed model has been developed in the context of job interview
simulation. The methodology used to develop such a model combined a theoretical
and an empirical approach. Indeed, the model is based both on the literature in
Human and Social Sciences on social attitudes but also on the analysis of an
audiovisual corpus of job interviews and on post-hoc interviews with the
recruiters on their expressed attitudes during the job interview