Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents an embodied conversational agent frame-work as a controlled environment to test components of em-pathy. We implement levels of emotional contagion which in-cludes mimicry and affective matching along with necessarycommunicational capabilities. We further demonstrate an ex-amination of these foundational behaviors in isolation, to bet-ter understand the effect of each level on the perception of em-pathy in a social conversational scenario with a human actor.We report three studies where the agent shows levels of emo-tional contagion behavior during (1) the listening act in com-parison with baseline backchanneling behavior (2) additionalverbal response matching simple emotional storyline (3) theverbal response to the human actor performing complex emo-tional behaviors. Results revealed that both mimicry and affec-tive matching behaviors were perceived as more empathic thanthe baseline listening behavior, where the difference betweenthese behaviors was only significant when the agent verballyresponded to complex emotional behaviors.