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Motivating Health Behavior Change with Humorous Virtual Agents

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Editorial Notes

The authors have requested minor, non-substantive changes to the VoR and, in accordance with ACM policies, a Corrected VoR was published on October 23, 2020. For reference purposes the VoR may still be accessed via the Supplemental Material section on this page.

Abstract

Research on the psychology of humor indicates that humor can increase the impact of persuasive messages in certain circumstances, suggesting that virtual agents could use humor to improve the effectiveness of motivational counseling with users. To explore this idea, we developed two virtual agents that attempt to motivate users to perform healthy behaviors - either to increase exercise or fruit and vegetable consumption - and systematically vary whether they use humor or not in their counseling conversations. Human-authored jokes were selected from a large corpus based on the nature of the humor (empathetic affiliative humor that serves to build relational closeness), health topic relevance, and subjective ratings of funniness, as well as relevance to user stage of behavior change. We evaluated our agents in a two-treatment counterbalanced within-subjects experiment, where participants interacted with a humorous and non-humorous agent motivating either exercise or healthy diet. We found the interaction with the humorous agent led to a significantly greater change in motivation to engage in the target behavior than interacting with the non-humorous agent.

Supplementary Material

3423915-VoR (3423915-vor.pdf)
Version of Record for "Motivating Health Behavior Change with Humorous Virtual Agents" by Olafsson et al., Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '20).

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cover image ACM Conferences
IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
October 2020
394 pages
ISBN:9781450375863
DOI:10.1145/3383652
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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Published: 19 October 2020

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Author Tags

  1. embodied conversational agents
  2. humor
  3. motivational interviewing
  4. user study

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IVA '20
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IVA '20: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
October 20 - 22, 2020
Scotland, Virtual Event, UK

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  • (2024)Exploring the Impact of Non-Verbal Virtual Agent Behavior on User Engagement in Argumentative DialoguesProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3687272.3688315(224-232)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Caring for a companion as a form of self-care. Exploring the design space for irritating companion technologies for mental healthProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685343(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Keeping Users Engaged During Repeated Interviews by a Virtual Agent: Using Large Language Models to Reliably Diversify QuestionsProceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3652988.3673929(1-10)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
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