The Effect of Empathic Expression Levels in Virtual Human Interaction: A Controlled Experiment
Sung Park, Daeho Yoon, Jungmin Lee

TL;DR
This study investigates how varying levels of empathic expression in virtual humans affect user experience, revealing that visual cues significantly enhance affective empathy and emphasizing empathy as a graded rather than binary feature.
Contribution
It introduces a nuanced view of empathic expression as a graded design variable and demonstrates the impact of visual cues on affective empathy in virtual agents.
Findings
Video-based empathic agents increase affective empathy significantly.
Visual cues improve perceived naturalness and appropriateness of facial expressions.
Empathy should be designed as a graded feature, not a binary capability.
Abstract
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly embedded in everyday life, the ability of interactive agents to express empathy has become critical for effective human-AI interaction, particularly in emotionally sensitive contexts. Rather than treating empathy as a binary capability, this study examines how different levels of empathic expression in virtual human interaction influence user experience. We conducted a between-subject experiment (n = 70) in a counseling-style interaction context, comparing three virtual human conditions: a neutral dialogue-based agent, a dialogue-based empathic agent, and a video-based empathic agent that incorporates users' facial cues. Participants engaged in a 15-minute interaction and subsequently evaluated their experience using subjective measures of empathy and interaction quality. Results from analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Robot Interaction and HRI · Emotion and Mood Recognition · Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
