Empathy and Its Modulation in a Virtual Human

Abstract

Abstract. Endowing artificial agents with the ability to empathize is believed to enhance their social behavior and to make them more likable, trustworthy, and caring. Neuropsychological findings substantiate that empathy occurs to different degrees depending on several factors including, among others, a person's mood, personality, and social relationships with others. Although there is increasing interest in endowing artificial agents with affect, personality, and the ability to build social relationships, little attention has been devoted to the role of such factors in influencing their empathic behavior. In this paper, we present a computational model of empathy which allows a virtual human to exhibit different degrees of empathy. The presented model is based on psychological models of empathy and is applied and evaluated in the context of a conversational agent scenario.

Intelligent virtual agents as language trainers facilitate multilingualism

“…Besides automatic speech recognition, new software enables an agent to detect changes in the pitch and tone of the voice that denote emotion (Ramakrishnan and Emary, 2013 ; Rao et al, 2013 ; Lech and He, 2014 ). Furthermore, empathy models that recognize negative emotional states in the user (Boukricha et al, 2013 ) will be implemented. This will enable the machine to generate adequate verbal support, so that the agent can interact with the user in a sensitive and personalized way.…”

A BDI Empathic Agent Model Based on a Multidimensional Cross-Cultural Emotion Representation

“…In fact, systems that are capable of simulating some level of empathic abilities have been used in different contexts and have proved to be more reliable and more credible, thus reducing the stress and frustration of human users and improving human-machine interaction [165]. However, this type of models are generally presented as ad-hoc proposals for a predetermined scenario and with a limited capacity to simulate emotional, social, or empathic behavior [32,138,189]. Therefore, much work remains to be done in the areas of affective computing, simulation of human behavior, and human-machine interaction until a reliable simulation of empathic interactions and human behavior will be achieved.…”

Improving user affect through empathic conversational agents

“…Boukricha et al present a computational model for empathy that comprises an empathic mechanism that detects emotions from the target's response and plots them in a three-dimensional Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) space [17], [43], [44]. For the empathic mechanism of the model, the study implemented 44 Action Units (AUs) for their virtual human EMMA's face based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).…”

“…The overall system comprises a computational architecture of empathy that extends the hierarchical computational model of empathy developed by Yalcin and DiPaola [18], [45], [46] by implementing a high-level mechanism for empathy developed using a combination of Boukricha's computational formulae for empathic modulation [17], [43], [44], with an empathic response generation architecture to facilitate empathic response in text. The model is multimodal, with facial gestures and speech as both inputs and outputs.…”