When building agents and synthetic characters, and in order to achieve believability, we must consider the emotional relations established between users and characters, that is, we must consider the issue of ”empathy”. Defined in broad terms as ”An observer reacting emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or about to experience an emotion”, empathy is an important element to consider in the creation of relations between humans and agents. In this paper we will focus on the role of empathy in the construction of synthetic characters, providing some requirements for such construction and illustrating the presented concepts with a specific system called FearNot!. FearNot! was developed to address the difficult and often devastating problem of bullying in schools. By using role playing and empathic synthetic characters in a 3D environment, FearNot! allows children from 8 to 12 to experience a virtual scenario where they can witness (in a third-person perspective) bullying situations. To build empathy into FearNot! we have considered the following components: agent’s architecture; the characters ’ embodiment and emotional expression; proximity with the user and emotionally charged situations. We will describe how these were implemented in FearNot! and report on the preliminary results we have with it.

Abstract. This paper considers affective interactions to achieve empathic engagement with synthetic characters in virtual learning environments, in order to support and induce the expression of empathy in children. The paper presents FearNot!, a school based virtual learning environment, populated by synthetic characters used for personal, social and health education, specifically bullying issues in schools. An empirical study of 345 children aged 8-11 years who interacted with FearNot! is outlined. The results identify that affective interactions resulting in the expression of empathy were increased when children had high levels of belief and interest in character conversations and if they believed that their interactions had an impact on the characters ’ behaviour. 1

Psychological approaches to the study of presence are limited, and those with experimental support even more limited. This work is an attempt to highlight the human factors involved which may lead to a better understanding of individual differences in relation to the experience of presence. We investigated the relationship between four cognitive factors namely absorption, creative imagination, empathy and cognitive style, and their effect upon the experienced users’ sense of presence. The results enable us to describe a presence equation, employing a deeper and more thorough approach to the psychology of presence. 1.

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Affective reasoning plays an increasingly important role in cognitive accounts of social interaction. Humans continuously assess one another's situational context, modify their own affective state accordingly, and then respond to these outcomes by expressing empathetic behaviors. Synthetic agents serving as companions should respond similarly. However, empathetic reasoning is riddled with the complexities stemming from the myriad factors bearing upon situational assessment. A key challenge posed by affective reasoning in synthetic agents is devising empirically informed models of empathy that accurately respond in social situations. This paper presents CARE, a data-driven affective architecture and methodology for learning models of empathy by observing human-human social interactions. First, in CARE training sessions, one trainer directs synthetic agents to perform a sequence of tasks while another trainer manipulates companion agents ’ affective states to produce empathetic behaviors (spoken language, gesture, and posture). CARE tracks situational data including locational, intentional, and temporal information to induce a model of empathy. At runtime, CARE uses the model of empathy to drive situationappropriate empathetic behaviors. CARE has been used in a virtual environment testbed. Two complementary studies investigating the predictive accuracy and perceived accuracy of CAREinduced models of empathy suggest that the CARE paradigm can provide the basis for effective empathetic behavior control in embodied companion agents. 1.

Humans continuously assess one another’s situational context, modify their own affective state, and then respond based on these outcomes through empathetic expression. Virtual agents should be capable of similarly empathizing with users in interactive environments. A key challenge posed by empathetic reasoning in virtual agents is determining whether to respond with parallel or reactive empathy. Parallel empathy refers to mere replication of another’s affective state, whereas reactive empathy exhibits greater cognitive awareness and may lead to incongruent emotional responses (i.e., emotions different from the recipient’s and perhaps intended to alter negative affect). Because empathy is not yet sufficiently well understood, it is unclear as to which type of empathy is most effective and under what circumstances they should be applied. Devising empirically informed models of empathy from observations of “empathy in action ” may lead to virtual agents that can accurately respond in social situations. This paper proposes a unified inductive framework for modeling parallel and reactive empathy. First, in training sessions, a trainer guides a virtual agent through a series of problem-solving tasks in a learning environment and encounters empathetic characters. The proposed inductive architecture tracks situational data including actions, visited locations, intentions, and the trainer’s physiological responses to generate models of empathy. Empathy models are used to drive runtime situation-appropriate empathetic behaviors by selecting suitable parallel or reactive empathetic expressions. An empirical evaluation of the approach in an interactive learning environment suggests that the induced empathy models can accurately assess social contexts and generate appropriate empathetic responses for virtual agent control. Categories and Subject Descriptors

The successful timing of organizational activities depends not only on effective planning and coordination, but also temporal responsiveness – the ability of organizational actors to adapt the timing of their activities to unanticipated events. In this paper, we examine the individuallevel dynamics underlying temporal responsiveness: we examine how organizational actors evaluate timing changes; e.g., changes from existing organizational schedules, routines, expectations, and plans. We review a broad body of psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological and organizational research on time to introduce a reference point model of how people perceive and evaluate time in organizations. We extend these findings to examine the psychology of how changes in timing are valued. Several propositions are presented about personal schedule changes and how individual actors evaluate them. When Plans Change 3

Abstract. According to traditional animators, the art of building believable characters resides in the ability to successfully portray a character’s behaviour as the result of its internal emotions, intentions and thoughts. Following this direction, we want our agents to be able to explicitly talk about their internal thoughts and report their personal past experiences. In order to achieve it, we look at a specific type of episodic long term memory. This paper describes the integration of Autobiographic Memory into FAtiMA, an emotional agent architecture that generates emotions from a subjective appraisal of events. 1

Identification of other people’s emotion from quickly presented stimuli, including facial expressions, is fundamental to many social processes, including rapid mimicry and empathy. This study examined extraction of valence from brief emotional expressions in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by impairments in understanding and sharing of emotions. Control participants were individuals with reading disability and typical individuals. Participants were shown images for durations in the range of microexpressions (15 ms and 30 ms), thus reducing the reliance on higher level cognitive skills. Participants detected whether (a) emotional faces were happy or angry, (b) neutral faces were male or female, and (c) neutral images were animals or objects. Individuals with ASD performed selectively worse on emotion extraction, with no group differences for gender or animal–object tasks. The emotion extraction deficit remains even when controlling for gender, verbal ability, and age and is not accounted for by speed–accuracy tradeoffs. The deficit in rapid emotional processing may contribute to ASD difficulties in mimicry, empathy, and related processes. The results highlight the role of rapid early emotion processing in adaptive social–emotional functioning.

This paper provides a high level overview of a game called ORIENT which aims at cultural and emotional learning by engaging adolescents in a role-play with virtual characters in a virtual world. The paper focuses on defining and explaining the learning objectives, and gives an overview of how we intend to achieve these objectives using narrative concepts, affective characters, and innovative technologies for interaction.