Negative Feedback In Your Face: Examining the Effects of Proxemics and Gender on Learning
While applications of virtual agents in training and pedagogy have largely concentrated on positive valenced environments and interactions, human-human interactions certainly also involve a fair share of negativity that is worth exploring in virtual environments. Further, in natural human interactio...
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Published in | Intelligent Virtual Agents Vol. 10498; pp. 170 - 183 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Book Chapter |
Language | English |
Published |
Switzerland
Springer International Publishing AG
01.01.2017
Springer International Publishing |
Series | Lecture Notes in Computer Science |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | While applications of virtual agents in training and pedagogy have largely concentrated on positive valenced environments and interactions, human-human interactions certainly also involve a fair share of negativity that is worth exploring in virtual environments. Further, in natural human interaction as well as in virtual spaces, physical actions arguably account for a great deal of variance in our representations of social concepts (e.g., emotions, attitudes). Proxemics, specifically, is a physical cue that can elicit varying perceptions of a social interaction. In the current paper, we explore the combined and individual effects of proxemic distance and gender in a specifically negative feedback educational context. We pursue this with a 2 (Proxemic Distance) \documentclass[12pt]{minimal}
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\begin{document}$$\times $$\end{document} 2 (Virtual Instructor Gender) between subject design, where participants actively engage in a learning task with a virtual instructor that provides harsh, negative feedback. While this study demonstrates some anticipated negative reactions to negative feedback from a close distance, such as external attribution of failure, we also observe some unexpected positive outcomes to this negative feedback. Specifically, negative feedback from a close distance has raises positive affect and effort, particularly among male participants interacting with a male virtual professor. Objective measures (head movement data) corroborate these same-gender effects as participants demonstrate more engagement when interacting with a virtual professor of their same gender. The results of the present study have broad implications for the design of intelligent virtual agents for pedagogy and mental health outcomes. |
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ISBN: | 9783319674001 3319674005 |
ISSN: | 0302-9743 1611-3349 |
DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_19 |