Related papers: Computational Empathy Counteracts the Negative Eff…
While novel social networks and emerging technologies help us transcend the spatial and temporal constraints inherent to in-person communication, the trade-off is a loss of natural expressivity. While empathetic interaction is already…
This paper describes an experimental evaluation aimed at detecting the users' perception of the robot's empathic abilities during a conversation. The results have been then analyzed to search for a possible relationship between the…
When members of ad-hoc virtual teams need to collectively ideate or deliberate, they often fail to engage with each others' perspectives in a constructive manner. At best, this leads to sub-optimal outcomes and, at worst, it can cause…
The social acceptance of AI agents, including intelligent virtual agents and physical robots, is becoming more important for the integration of AI into human society. Although the agents used in human society share various tasks with…
Collective decision-making in biological and human groups often emerges from simple interaction rules that amplify minor differences into consensus. The bee equation, developed initially to describe nest-site selection in honeybee swarms,…
Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global…
While the field of affective computing has contributed to greatly improving the seamlessness of human-robot interactions, the focus has primarily been on the emotional processing of the self, rather than the perception of the other. To…
We explore the representational space of emotions by combining methods from different academic fields. Cognitive science has proposed appraisal theory as a view on human emotion with previous research showing how human-rated abstract event…
When engaging in conversations, dialogue agents in a virtual simulation environment may exhibit their own emotional states that are unrelated to the immediate conversational context, a phenomenon known as self-emotion. This study explores…
This study investigates how different virtual agent (VA) behaviors influence subjects' perceptions and group decision-making. Participants carried out experimental group discussions with a VA exhibiting varying levels of engagement and…
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has enabled agents to represent virtual humans in societal simulations, facilitating diverse interactions within complex social systems. However, existing LLM-based agents exhibit severe…
Conversational agents (CAs) are revolutionizing human-computer interaction by evolving from text-based chatbots to empathetic digital humans (DHs) capable of rich emotional expressions. This paper explores the integration of neural and…
Affective Computing is a rapidly growing field spurred by advancements in artificial intelligence, but often, held back by the inability to translate psychological theories of emotion into tractable computational models. To address this, we…
Prior efforts to create an autonomous computer system capable of predicting what a human being is thinking or feeling from facial expression data have been largely based on outdated, inaccurate models of how emotions work that rely on many…
Quantitative analysis of empirical data from online social networks reveals group dynamics in which emotions are involved (\v{S}uvakov et al). Full understanding of the underlying mechanisms, however, remains a challenging task. Using…
The development of agents with emotional intelligence is becoming increasingly vital due to their significant role in human-computer interaction and the growing integration of computer systems across various sectors of society. Affective…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
Recent approaches to empathetic response generation incorporate emotion causalities to enhance comprehension of both the user's feelings and experiences. However, these approaches suffer from two critical issues. First, they only consider…
Considered the increasing use of assistive technologies in the shape of virtual agents, it is necessary to investigate those factors which characterize and affect the interaction between the user and the agent, among these emerges the way…
Argumentative dialogues across political divides can reduce polarization, yet opportunities for citizens to engage with opposing views in accessible and structured ways remain limited. AI dialogue partners offer a scalable framework for…