SARA: Social Affective Relational Agent: A Study on the Role of Empathy in Artificial Social Agents

Over the last decade extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational agents focusing in many different aspects of these agents. In this research, and aiming at building agents that maintain a social connection with users, empathy has been one of those areas, as it plays a leading role in the establishment of social relationships. In this paper we present a relationship model of empathy that takes advantage of Social Penetration Theory’s concepts for relationship building. This model has been implemented into an agent that attempts to establish a relationship with the user, expressing empathy both verbally and visually. The visual expression of empathy consists of facial expression and physical proximity representation. The user tests performed showed that while users were able to develop a simple relationship with the agents, they however developed stronger relationships with a version of the agent that is most visually expressive and takes advantage of the proximity element, confirming the significance of our model based on social penetration theory may have and, consequently, the importance of the visual representation of empathic responses.