A Study of Emotional Contagion with Virtual Characters
In social psychology, emotional contagion describes the widely observed phenomenon of one person’s emotions mimicking surrounding people’s emotions [10]. In this paper, we perform a battery of experiments to explore the existence of agent-human emotional contagion. The first study is a between-subje...
Saved in:
Published in | Intelligent Virtual Agents pp. 81 - 88 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Book Chapter |
Language | English |
Published |
Berlin, Heidelberg
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
|
Series | Lecture Notes in Computer Science |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | In social psychology, emotional contagion describes the widely observed phenomenon of one person’s emotions mimicking surrounding people’s emotions [10]. In this paper, we perform a battery of experiments to explore the existence of agent-human emotional contagion. The first study is a between-subjects design, wherein subjects were shown an image of a character’s face with either a neutral or happy expression. Findings indicate that even a still image induces a very strong increase in self-reported happiness between Neutral and Happy conditions with all characters tested.
In a second study, we examine the effect of a virtual character’s presence in a strategic decision by presenting subjects with a modernized Stag Hunt game. Our experiments show that the contagion effect is substantially dampened and does not cause a consistent impact on behavior. A third study explores the impact of the strategic situation within the Stag Hunt and conducts the same experiment using a description of the same strategic situation with the decision already made. We find that the emotional impact returns, implying that the contagion effect is substantially lessened in the presence of a strategic decision. |
---|---|
ISBN: | 3642331963 9783642331961 |
ISSN: | 0302-9743 1611-3349 |
DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_8 |