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The influence of a virtual companion on amusement when watching funny films

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Abstract

We investigated the role of a virtual companion and trait cheerfulness on the elicitation of amusement. Ninety participants watched funny films in four conditions: either alone, with a virtual companion laughing or verbally expressing amusement at fixed time points (pre-scripted), or additionally joining the participant’s laughter (responsive companion). Amusement was assessed facially and vocally by coding Duchenne Displays and laughter vocalizations. Participants’ cheerful mood pre and post the film watching and positive experience were assessed. Results showed that high trait cheerful individuals generally experienced and expressed more amusement than low trait cheerful individuals. The presence of a virtual companion (compared to being alone) led to more laughter for individuals low in trait cheerfulness. Unexpectedly, the responsive companion did not elicit more amusement than the pre-scripted companion. The general disliking of virtual companions and gelotophobia related negatively to amusement. Amusement expressing virtual companions may be used in interventions aiming at eliciting positive responses, especially for individuals with higher thresholds for amusement.

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Notes

  1. We use the term virtual companion to denominate a virtual agent in specific social interactions. Virtual agents (VA) are computer generated animated characters that are able to interact verbally and also nonverbally with human users, including reactions to the human behaviors and displaying autonomous “pro-active” behaviors. VAs have a graphical representation, usually humanoid. Being a metaphor of human behavior, these agents are expected to display/communicate several complex behaviors such as emotions or social skills.

  2. Emotional contagion is closely related to mimicry (Hess and Blairy 2001) and occurs spontaneous in the observer (Hatfield et al. 1993). Studies have shown that mimicry and emotional contagion occur often, that positive emotions are mimicked more frequently than negative ones, and that motor regions associated with producing facial expressions are activated when hearing emotional vocalizations of amusement (e.g., Bourgeois and Hess 2008; Scott et al. 2010).

  3. Due to technical problems with the recordings, missing data occurred for some participants (e.g., the audio recording was good, but the film was too dark and therefore could not be coded; the camera software crashed during the experiment, the audio stream was not recorded sufficiently, the participant forgot to complete the last page of the questionnaire package). For this reason, we recruited 30 participants (instead of 20) for the control condition, in order to compensate for the data loss.

  4. Items targeting the quality of the technical system (15 items, technical features scale) were omitted in the current analysis since they specifically target the architecture of the system.

  5. Examples: “Oh, that is funny.” “I liked that one.” “I enjoyed that.” “This is great!” “How amusing!” “This is hilarious!” “He is so funny.”.

  6. Raters were instructed to watch the film clips one after another and rate their funniness. For this, they had a cursor that they could move from “not funny” to “irresistibly funny”. The full length of the film clip had to be rated without breaks.

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Acknowledgments

This research received funding by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No. 270780. The authors would like to thank Roddy Cowie and the reviewers for the helpful comments on a prior version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Personality and Assessment, University of Zurich, Binzmuhlestrasse 14, Box 7, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jennifer Hofmann, Tracey Platt & Willibald Ruch

  2. Infomus Lab, DIBRIS Department, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

    Radoslaw Niewiadomski

  3. TCTS Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Mons, Mons, Belgium

    Jérôme Urbain

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  1. Jennifer Hofmann
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  2. Tracey Platt
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Correspondence to Jennifer Hofmann.

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Hofmann, J., Platt, T., Ruch, W. et al. The influence of a virtual companion on amusement when watching funny films. Motiv Emot 39, 434–447 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9461-y

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