{"pk":28930,"title":"Evaluating Levels of Emotional Contagion with anEmbodied Conversational Agent","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This paper presents an embodied conversational agent frame-work as a controlled environment to test components of em-pathy. We implement levels of emotional contagion which in-cludes mimicry and affective matching along with necessarycommunicational capabilities. We further demonstrate an ex-amination of these foundational behaviors in isolation, to bet-ter understand the effect of each level on the perception of em-pathy in a social conversational scenario with a human actor.We report three studies where the agent shows levels of emo-tional contagion behavior during (1) the listening act in com-parison with baseline backchanneling behavior (2) additionalverbal response matching simple emotional storyline (3) theverbal response to the human actor performing complex emo-tional behaviors. Results revealed that both mimicry and affec-tive matching behaviors were perceived as more empathic thanthe baseline listening behavior, where the difference betweenthese behaviors was only significant when the agent verballyresponded to complex emotional behaviors.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Emotional Contagion; Mirroring; AffectMatching; Affective Computing; Social Interaction; Em-bodied Conversational Agents"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2z36p1gk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ozge","middle_name":"Nilay","last_name":"Yalcın","name_suffix":"","institution":"Simon Fraser University","department":""},{"first_name":"Steve","middle_name":"","last_name":"DiPaola","name_suffix":"","institution":"Simon Fraser University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28930/galley/18801/download/"}]}