Paper Info
Title
SARA: social affective relational agent: a study on the role of empathy in artificial social agents
Abstract
Over the last decade extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational agents focusing in many different aspects of these agents. In this research, and aiming at building agents that maintain a social connection with users, empathy has been one of those areas, as it plays a leading role in the establishment of social relationships. In this paper we present a relationship model of empathy that takes advantage of Social Penetration Theory's concepts for relationship building. This model has been implemented into an agent that attempts to establish a relationship with the user, expressing empathy both verbally and visually. The visual expression of empathy consists of facial expression and physical proximity representation. The user tests performed showed that while users were able to develop a simple relationship with the agents, they however developed stronger relationships with a version of the agent that is most visually expressive and takes advantage of the proximity element, confirming the significance of our model based on social penetration theory may have and, consequently, the importance of the visual representation of empathic responses.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/978-3-642-24600-5_54
ACII (1)
Keywords
Field
DocType
social affective relational agent,social connection,simple relationship,conversational agent,relationship building,relationship model,facial expression,social relationship,social penetration theory,extensive research,stronger relationship,artificial social agent,affective computing
Social psychology,Empathy,Communication,Social penetration theory,Psychology,Facial expression,Social agents,Dialog system,Affective computing,Affect (psychology),Simulation theory of empathy
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6974
0302-9743
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
6
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sandra Gama1658.52
Gabriel Barata2676.27
Daniel Gonçalves3413.67
Rui Prada456184.02
Ana Paiva52618287.01