A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot that conducts experience sampling in an empathetic manner. We evaluate it through a human-subject experiment with N=39 participants over the course of a week. Our results show that extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot significantly more than introverts. Also, participants reported a higher percentage of positive mood reports when interacting with the empathetic bot. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of emotion-aware chatbots for potential use in mHealth contexts.
@cite_9: Recent research has established the potential for virtual characters to establish rapport with humans through simple contingent nonverbal behaviors. We hypothesized that the contingency, not just the frequency of positive feedback is crucial when it comes to creating rapport. The primary goal in this study was evaluative: can an agent generate behavior that engenders feelings of rapport in human speakers and how does this compare to human generated feedback? A secondary goal was to answer the question: Is contingency (as opposed to frequency) of agent feedback crucial when it comes to creating feelings of rapport? Results suggest that contingency matters when it comes to creating rapport and that agent generated behavior was as good as human listeners in creating rapport. A "virtual human listener" condition performed worse than other conditions.
@cite_26: We provide empirical evidence that virtual humans increase willingness to disclose.We frame a virtual human interviewer as computer or human during health screenings.Framing the interviewer as computer lowers evaluation fears and impression management.Framing as a computer increases expressed sadness and objectively-rated disclosure. Research has begun to explore the use of virtual humans (VHs) in clinical interviews (Bickmore, Gruber, & Picard, 2005). When designed as supportive and "safe" interaction partners, VHs may improve such screenings by increasing willingness to disclose information (Gratch, Wang, Gerten, & Fast, 2007). In health and mental health contexts, patients are often reluctant to respond honestly. In the context of health-screening interviews, we report a study in which participants interacted with a VH interviewer and were led to believe that the VH was controlled by either humans or automation. As predicted, compared to those who believed they were interacting with a human operator, participants who believed they were interacting with a computer reported lower fear of self-disclosure, lower impression management, displayed their sadness more intensely, and were rated by observers as more willing to disclose. These results suggest that automated VHs can help overcome a significant barrier to obtaining truthful patient information.
@cite_22: Building trust with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as financial transactions, and some minimal degree of trust is required in all applications to even initiate and maintain an interaction with a user. Humans use a variety of relational conversational strategies, including small talk, to establish trusting relationships with each other. We argue that such strategies can also be used by interface agents, and that embodied conversational agents are ideally suited for this task given the myriad cues available to them for signaling trustworthiness. We describe a model of social dialogue, an implementation in an embodied conversation agent, and an experiment in which social dialogue was demonstrated to have an effect on trust, for users with a disposition to be extroverts.
In health and mental health contexts, patients are sometimes reluctant to respond honestly. Extensive research on VAs shows that people are more comfortable disclosing health symptoms to VAs when they know they are automated and there is no human behind the scenes @cite_26 . Interestingly, when VAs exhibit human qualities, they could further improve the relationship with the user. VAs are better at creating rapport when contingent on the human's responses @cite_9 . Also, they are more successful in establishing trust when using relational conversational strategies @cite_22 . It remains an open question how emotional-awareness and empathy in an agent which conducts mood experience sampling is perceived by users, if it is mediated by the user's personality, and if it affects the user's mood.