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Effects of Virtual Agents' Social Support for Social Sharing of Negative Emotions on Attachment Function and Trust

Published: 24 November 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The first purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the type of perceived social support that virtual agents bring to a human user when the user shares one’s negative emotional experience with the agent, on the extent to which the user perceives attachment functions as well as on trust on the agent. The second purpose was to investigate the influence of differences in agency on the extent to which a human user perceives attachment functions and trust on the agent. An experiment with kind of social support and agency as two between-subject factors was conducted with 69 Japanese adult males as subjects. Subjects participated in the experiment one at a time, conversing with a virtual agent in a VR environment. The subjects were asked to recall their own worrisome event and to talk with the virtual agent about the worrisome event they recalled. After subjects shared their worrisome events, the virtual agent gave the subjects statements to make them perceive social support, either instrumental or emotional. The results showed that when the subjects talk about their negative emotional experiences, given the information that the virtual agent is controlled by a computer, the virtual agent that gives the subjects statements eliciting perception of emotional support has positive effects on the the subjects’ perception of secure base, safe haven, maintaining proximity, as well as on cognitive and affective trust.

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  1. Effects of Virtual Agents' Social Support for Social Sharing of Negative Emotions on Attachment Function and Trust

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HAI '24: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
      November 2024
      502 pages
      ISBN:9798400711787
      DOI:10.1145/3687272
      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 the author(s) 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: 24 November 2024

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      Author Tags

      1. Safe Haven
      2. Secure Base
      3. Social Support
      4. Trust
      5. Virtual Agent

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      HAI '24
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      HAI '24: International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
      November 24 - 27, 2024
      Swansea, United Kingdom

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