Abstract
The ability of artificial companions (virtual agents or robots) to establish meaningful relationships with users is still limited. In humans, a key aspect of such ability is empathy, often seen as the basis of social cooperation and pro-social behaviour. In this paper, we present a study where a social robot with empathic capabilities interacts with two users playing a chess game against each other. During the game, the agent behaves in an empathic manner towards one of the players and in a neutral way towards the other. In an experiment conducted with 40 participants, results showed that users to whom the robot was empathic provided higher ratings in terms of companionship.
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Leite, I., Mascarenhas, S., Pereira, A., Martinho, C., Prada, R., Paiva, A. (2010). ”Why Can’t We Be Friends?” An Empathic Game Companion for Long-Term Interaction. In: Allbeck, J., Badler, N., Bickmore, T., Pelachaud, C., Safonova, A. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6356. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15892-6_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15892-6_32
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