Can Virtual Humans Be More Engaging Than Real Ones?

Abstract

Emotional bonds don't arise from a simple exchange of facial displays, but often emerge through the dynamic give and take of face-to-face interactions. This article explores the phenomenon of rapport, a feeling of connectedness that seems to arise from rapid and contingent positive feedback between partners and is often associated with socio-emotional processes. Rapport has been argued to lead to communicative efficiency, better learning outcomes, improved acceptance of medical advice and successful negotiations. We provide experimental evidence that a simple virtual character that provides positive listening feedback can induce stronger rapport-like effects than face-to-face communication between human partners. Specifically, this interaction can be more engaging to storytellers than speaking to a human audience, as measured by the length and content of their stories.

Does Humanity Matter? Analyzing the Importance of Social Cues and Perceived Agency of a Computer System for the Emergence of Social Reactions during Human-Computer Interaction

“…The agent displays listening behaviors that correspond to the verbal and nonverbal behavior of a human speaker. The Rapport Agent has been evaluated in several studies [16][17][18] and has proven to be capable of creating the experience of rapport comparable with face-to-face conditions in certain contexts (e.g., storytelling, interview). To produce listening behaviors, the Rapport Agent first collects and analyzes the features from the speaker's voice and upperbody movements via microphone and a Videre Design Small Vision System stereo camera, which was placed in front of the participants to capture their movements.…”

“…This scale contains ten items from the rapport construct by Tickle-Degnen [41], which were already in use in an experiment on the effects of nonverbal signal delay in telepsychiatry (see [42]). 19 ad hoc items were added, which proved to measure rapport in several studies [16][17][18]. The resulting 29 items were measured on an 8-point Likert scale.…”

“…Recent studies about the impact of anthropomorphic virtual humans indicate that increasing the number of social cues leads to even stronger social reactions on the part of the user [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Learning Data-Driven Models of Non-Verbal Behaviors for Building Rapport Using an Intelligent Virtual Agent

“…Also, in the rapport-enabled condition, they reported 98 instances of positive facial expressions (total of 458 seconds) and 6 instances of negative facial expressions (11 seconds in total), which shows that the rapport model was able to convey the positivity feature of the rapport to the users, therefore, users had more positive facial expressions during the interaction with rapport-enabled character. Also, research [GM04,GWO07] shows that, positive facial expressions are indicative of rapport, while negative facial expressions are indicative of lack of rapport.…”

“…Authors [GWO07] suggest that, such rapport-enabled and empathic agents can improve the computer-mediated systems used in the learning and health interventions to have socially desirable outcomes. They believe that rapport and motor empathy can lead to effective communications, better learning outcomes, and improved acceptance of medical advice in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).…”