Are Aggressive Agents as Scary as Aggressive Humans?

Most research into intelligent virtual agents focuses on agents with a positive stance towards the user. Nevertheless, the development of virtual agents that show aggressive behavior may also be interesting for a range of application domains, varying from aggression de-escalation training to anti-bullying education. However, ensuring that such aggressive agents achieve the desired effect is not easy, as they need to be believable in a number of aspects. In particular, they need to bring their human conversation partners into a serious state of anxiety. To investigate to what extent this can be achieved using state-of-theart virtual agent technology, an experiment was performed in which the impact of an aggressive virtual agent was compared with that of an aggressive human. By randomly distributing a group of 28 participants over two conditions (virtual and human) and measuring their physiological and subjective emotional state before and after an aggressive outburst of their conversat...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Romy Blankendaal, Tibor Bosse, Charlotte Gerritsen, Tessa de Jong, Jeroen de Man
• Keywords: ATAL 2015, Intelligent Agents