Importance of Considering User’s Social Skills in Human-agent Interactions - Is Performing Self-adaptors Appropriate for Virtual Agents?

Tomoko Koda, Hiroshi Higashino

2014

Abstract

Self-adaptors are bodily behaviours that often involve self-touch that is regarded as taboo in public. However, self-adaptors also occur during casual conversations between friends. We developed a virtual agent that exhibits self-adaptors during conversation with users. Our continuous evaluation of the interaction between the agents that exhibit self-adaptors and without indicated that there is a dichotomy on the impression on the agents between users with high social skills and those with low skills. People with high social skills feel more friendliness toward an agent that exhibits self-adaptors than those with low social skills. The result suggests the need to tailor non-verbal behaviour of virtual agents according to user’s social skills.

References

  1. Argyle, M., 1988. Bodily communication. Taylor & Francis.
  2. Aylett, R., Vannini, N., Andre, E., Paiva, A., Enz, S., Hall, L., 2009. But that was in another country: agents and intercultural empathy. In Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems-Volume 1. pp. 329-336. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
  3. Bickmore, T. and Cassell, J., 2001. Relational Agents: A Model and Implementation of Building User Trust, In Proc. of CHI 2001, pp. 396-403. ACM Press.
  4. Bickmore, T, Schulman, D, Yin, L., 2010. Maintaining Engagement in Long-term Interventions with Relational Agents. In International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence special issue on Intelligent Virtual Agents 24(6), pp. 648-666.
  5. Blacking,j.,(ed)., 1977. The Anthropology of the Body, Academic Press.
  6. Caso, L., Maricchiolo, F., Bonaiuto, M., Vrij, A., and Mann. S. 2006. The Impact of Deception and Suspicion on Different Hand Movements. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 30(1), pp. 1-19.
  7. Chartrand, T. L., and Bargh, J. A. 1999. The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 76, pp. 893-910.
  8. Duck, S.W. 1973. Personality similarity and friendship choice: Similarity of what, when? Journal of Personality, 41(4), pp. 543-558.
  9. Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., 1972. Hand movements. In Journal of Communication 22, pp. 353-374.
  10. Ekman P., 1980. Three classes of nonverbal behavior. In Aspects of Nonverbal Communication. Swets and Zeitlinger.
  11. Hayashi, T., 1982. The Measurement of Individual Differences in Interpersonal Cognitive Structure. In Experimental Social Psychology 22, pp. 1-9 (in Japanese).
  12. Izard, C. 1960. Personality similarity and friendship. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 61(1), pp. 47-51.
  13. Johnson, W., Marsella, S., Mote, N., Viljhalmsson, H., Narayanan, S., Choi, S., 2004. Tactical language training system: Supporting the rapid acquisition of foreign language and cultural skills. In Proc. of InSTIL/ICALLNLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems.
  14. Kikuchi, A., 2004. Notes on the researches using KiSS-18 Bulletin of the Faculty of Social Welfare. Iwate prefectural university (in Japanese).
  15. Koda, T., Ishida. T., Rehm, M., and Andre, E., 2009. Avatar culture: cross-cultural evaluations of avatar facial expressions. In Journal of AI & Society, Vol.24, No.3, pp.237-250. Springer London.
  16. Neff, M., Toothman, N., Bowmani, R., Fox Tree, J. E., Walker, M., 2011. Don't Scratch! Self-adaptors Reflect Emotional Stability. In Vilhjalmsson, H. H. et al. (Eds.): IVA 2011, LNAI 6895, pp. 398-411. Springer-Verlag.
  17. Reeves, B. and Nass, C., 1996. Media Equation : How People Treat Computers, Television and New Media like Real People and Place. Univ. of Chicago Press.
  18. Rehm, M., Andre, E., Bee, N., Endrass, B., Wissner, M., Nakano, Y., Nishida,T., Huang, H., 2007. The cube-g approach -coaching culture-specific nonverbal behavior by virtual agents. In Organizing and learning through gaming and simulation: proc. of Isaga 2007 p. 313.
  19. Rehm, M., Nakano, Y., Andre, E., Nishida, T., 2008. Culture-specific first meeting encounters between virtual agents. In Intelligent virtual agents. pp. 223- 236. Springer-Verlag.
  20. Rehm, M., Nakano, Y., Koda, T., and WinschiersTheophilus, H., 2010. Culturally Aware Agent Communications. In Marielba Zacharias, Jose Valente de Oliveira (eds): Human-Computer Interaction: The Agency Perspective. Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 396, pp. 411-436. Springer.
  21. Vardoulakis, L., Ring, L., Barry, B., Sidner, C., and Bickmore, T., 2012. Designing Relational Agents as Long Term Social Companions for Older Adults. In Proc. of Intelligent Virtual Agents conference. Springer-Verlag.
  22. Waxer, P., 1988. Nonverbal cues for anxiety: An examination of emotional leakage. In Journal of Abnormal Psychology 86(3), pp. 306-314.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Koda T. and Higashino H. (2014). Importance of Considering User’s Social Skills in Human-agent Interactions - Is Performing Self-adaptors Appropriate for Virtual Agents? . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-016-1, pages 115-122. DOI: 10.5220/0004751801150122


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart14,
author={Tomoko Koda and Hiroshi Higashino},
title={Importance of Considering User’s Social Skills in Human-agent Interactions - Is Performing Self-adaptors Appropriate for Virtual Agents?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2014},
pages={115-122},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004751801150122},
isbn={978-989-758-016-1},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - Importance of Considering User’s Social Skills in Human-agent Interactions - Is Performing Self-adaptors Appropriate for Virtual Agents?
SN - 978-989-758-016-1
AU - Koda T.
AU - Higashino H.
PY - 2014
SP - 115
EP - 122
DO - 10.5220/0004751801150122