Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that autonomous artificial entities elicit social behavior on the part of the human interlocutor. Various theoretical approaches have tried to explain this phenomenon. The agency assumption states that the social influence of human interaction partners (represented by avatars) will always be higher than the influence of artificial entities (represented by embodied conversational agents). Conversely, the Ethopoeia concept predicts that automatic social reactions are triggered by situations as soon as they include social cues. Both theories have been challenged in a 2 × 2 between subjects design with two levels of agency (low: agent, high: avatar) and two interfaces with different degrees of social cues (low: textchat, high: virtual human). The results show that participants in the virtual human condition reported a stronger sense of mutual awareness, imputed more positive characteristics, and allocated more attention to the virtual human than participants in the text chat conditions. Only one result supports the agency assumption; participants who believed to interact with a human reported a stronger feeling of social presence than participants who believed to interact with an artificial entity. It is discussed to what extent these results support the social cue assumption made in the Ethopoeia approach.

Both meaning violations (i.e., discrepancies between individuals' global meaning system and appraised meaning of events) and religious/spiritual (r/s) struggles (i.e., spiritual tensions often arising due to stressful life events) have been related to post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. While both constructs represent strain on an individual's meaning system, their interrelations and their independent relationships with PTS symptoms are not well understood. The aim of the current study was to explore those relations and investigate whether a sense of meaning in life (MIL) attenuates the hypothesized links. One-hundred-eighty-nine college students (78.3% female) who could identify a stressful life event that they had not yet resolved completed self-report measures of PTS symptoms, r/s struggles, meaning violations, and MIL. First, bivariate Pearson correlations indicated that all facets of r/s struggle and goal-(but not belief) violations, were significantly and positively related to PTS symptoms. Further, the association between goal and belief violations and r/s struggles differed based on the specific facet of struggle measured. Second, multiple regression analysis showed that both r/s struggles and goal violations were independently associated with PTS symptoms. Third, moderation analyses demonstrated that a sense of MIL attenuated the association between goal violations and symptomatology but only buffered the correlates of low and medium levels of r/s struggle. Promoting people's general sense of MIL thus seems to have the potential to buffer the negative sequelae of both goal violations and certain levels of r/s struggle.