ABSTRACT
We developed a virtual agent that motivates church-going users to change their health behavior by telling existing cultural narratives that have high relevance with the counseling topic in an engaging way. We evaluated this agent in a between-subjects experiment where participants interacted with an agent that counseled them on nutrition either without a story, with a story but told in a neutral speech style, or with a story using dramatic delivery inspired by church sermons. We found that interaction with either one of the storytelling agents leads to a significantly greater change in confidence to engage in the target behavior of healthy eating than interacting with a non-storytelling agent, demonstrating the efficacy of stories in health counseling by virtual agents.
- Tom Baranowski, Kathleen B Watson, Christine Bachman, Janice C Baranowski, Karen W Cullen, Debbe Thompson, and Anna-Maria Siega Riz. 2010. Self efficacy for fruit, vegetable and water intakes: Expanded and abbreviated scales from item response modeling analyses. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 7, 1 (2010), 1--10.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Justine Cassell, Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson, and Timothy Bickmore. 2004. BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit. In Life-Like Characters: Tools, Affective Functions, and Applications, Helmut Prendinger and Mitsuru Ishizuka (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 163--185. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Herbert Clark. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- James Paul Gee and Francois Grosjean. 1984. Empirical evidence for narrative structure. Cognitive Science 8, 1 (1984), 59--85.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wael H Gomaa, Aly A Fahmy, et al. 2013. A survey of text similarity approaches. international journal of Computer Applications 68, 13 (2013), 13--18.Google Scholar
- Diane J Litman and Rebecca J Passonneau. 1995. Combining multiple knowledge sources for discourse segmentation. arXiv preprint cmp-lg/9505025 (1995).Google Scholar
- Jun Ma, Nancy M Betts, Tanya Horacek, Constance Georgiou, Adrienne White, and Susan Nitzke. 2002. The importance of decisional balance and self-efficacy in relation to stages of change for fruit and vegetable intakes by young adults. American Journal of Health Promotion 16, 3 (2002), 157--166.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Renata K Martins and Daniel W McNeil. 2009. Review of motivational interviewing in promoting health behaviors. Clinical psychology review 29, 4 (2009), 283--293.Google Scholar
- Raúl Montaño, Francesc Alías, and Josep Ferrer. 2013. Prosodic analysis of storytelling discourse modes and narrative situations oriented to Text-to-Speech synthesis. In Eighth ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis.Google Scholar
- Seth Noar, C Benac, and M Harris. 2007. Does tailoring matter? Meta-analytic review of tailored print health behavior change interventions. Psychological Bulletin 133 (2007), 673--93.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Miguel Oliveira. 2002. The role of pause occurrence and pause duration in the signaling of narrative structure. In International Conference for Natural Language Processing in Portugal. Springer, 43--51.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Miguel Oliveira Jr and Dóris AC Cunha. 2004. Prosody as marker of direct reported speech boundary. In Speech Prosody 2004, International Conference.Google Scholar
- Haddon W Robinson. 2014. Biblical preaching: The development and delivery of expository messages. Baker Academic.Google Scholar
- P Sunilkumar and Athira P Shaji. 2019. A survey on semantic similarity. In 2019 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication and Control (ICAC3). IEEE, 1--8.Google Scholar
- Marc Swerts and Ronald Geluykens. 1994. Prosody as a marker of information flow in spoken discourse. Language and speech 37, 1 (1994), 21--43.Google Scholar
- Mariët Theune, Koen Meijs, Dirk Heylen, and Roeland Ordelman. 2006. Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 14, 4 (2006), 1137--1144.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jiapeng Wang and Yihong Dong. 2020. Measurement of text similarity: a survey. Information 11, 9 (2020), 421.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Motivating health behavior change with a storytelling virtual agent
Recommendations
Negotiating task interruptions with virtual agents for health behavior change
AAMAS '08: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3Virtual health counseling agents on mobile devices need to be able to interrupt their users when it is time for them to engage in healthy behaviors, such as scheduled medication taking or exercise. However, these real-time reminders often represent task ...
Discovering eye gaze behavior during human-agent conversation in an interactive storytelling application
ICMI-MLMI '10: International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal InteractionIn this paper, we investigate the user's eye gaze behavior during the conversation with an interactive storytelling application. We present an interactive eye gaze model for embodied conversational agents in order to improve the experience of users ...
Conciliating coherence and high responsiveness in interactive storytelling
DIMEA '08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and ArtsInteractive storytelling is a new form of digital entertainment that brings together techniques and tools for the creation, visualization and control of interactive stories through electronic means. One of the main challenges of interactive storytelling ...
Comments