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"Give Me the Support I Want!": The Effect of Matching an Embodied Conversational Agent's Social Support to Users' Social Support Needs in Fostering Positive User-Agent Interaction

Published: 04 December 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Do users' general social support needs influence their satisfaction with embodied conversational agents' (ECAs) social support? We examined this research question by conducting a 2 (an agent's social support: informational vs. emotional) x 2 (a user's general social support needs: informational vs. emotional) between-subjects online experiment. Participants (N = 132) first indicated their general social support needs and then interacted with a virtual health coach, Andy, who talked about the importance of stress management. Then, Andy gave participants either informational or emotional social support on their initiation to manage their stress. Our results indicate that participants rated Andy higher on trustworthiness and likability when her social support matched their support needs, and this pattern was especially stronger for those with emotional support needs. Moreover, for these participants, we found that trustworthiness and likability significantly mediated the effect of the agent's matched social support on their attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

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  • (2022)Understanding the Design Elements Affecting User Acceptance of Intelligent Agents: Past, Present and FutureInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-021-10230-924:3(699-730)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
HAI '18: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
December 2018
402 pages
ISBN:9781450359535
DOI:10.1145/3284432
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 December 2018

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Author Tags

  1. emotional social support
  2. human-agent interaction
  3. informational social support
  4. social support
  5. virtual agents

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HAI '18
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HAI '18: 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
December 15 - 18, 2018
Southampton, United Kingdom

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HAI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 92 submissions, 43%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 121 of 404 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

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  • (2022)A Mobile Application-Based Relational Agent as a Health Professional for COVID-19 Patients: Design, Approach, and ImplicationsInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph19211379419:21(13794)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2022
  • (2022)“I felt her company”International Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102771160:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Understanding the Design Elements Affecting User Acceptance of Intelligent Agents: Past, Present and FutureInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-021-10230-924:3(699-730)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2022
  • (2020)Technical Metrics Used to Evaluate Health Care Chatbots: Scoping ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/1830122:6(e18301)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Enter Your Dinner Now!Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare10.1145/3421937.3422014(122-132)Online publication date: 18-May-2020
  • (2020)Promises of Anthropomorphism in Virtual CoachesProceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare10.1145/3421937.3421945(243-246)Online publication date: 18-May-2020
  • (2019)"I think people are powerful"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33591433:CSCW(1-29)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019

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