Emotional contagion between user and product recommendation virtual agent

Abstract

The notion of Emotional contagion is a phenomenon in which a human emotion infects others. Various studies have been done to cause emotional contagion between a human and a robot or an anthropomorphic agent in HRI research fields. However, few studies have been done to compare different kinds of agents in order to find important properties in emotional contagion in human-agent interaction (HAI). In this research, we conducted an experiment to determine which properties cause this phenomenon between anthropomorphic agents and users. We prepared two kinds of agents. One is a cartoon-like agent, and the other is a concrete agent. The cartoon-like agent smiled exaggeratedly, and the concrete agent smiled modestly. As a result, we found that the concrete agent was more effective than the cartoon-like agent at emotional contagion. This result suggests a model for designing more trustworthy and familiar agents and robots.