Interactants’ Most Intimate Self-disclosure in Interactions with Virtual Humans

Recent studies have shown that virtual humans can facilitate social interactions among people who have difficulty in forming social bonds or help develop their social skills by interaction with virtual practice. Virtual human research tends to focus exclusively on appearance or behavior in assessing agent effectiveness, whereas other studies of human social interaction emphasize aspects of the social context, such as anticipated future interaction (AFI) which has been implicated as a key moderator of people’s behavior in virtual interactions. It has been reported that anonymity [2] or interactants’ AFI with their interaction partners [4,5] have a critical role in entailing greater self-disclosure. However, no studies of virtual humans have investigated the impact of the combination of interactants’ visual appearance and AFI on their social responses, specifically revealing their intimate information. In this study, we examined the impact of different visual realism of virtual humans and interactants’ AFI on interactants’ self-disclosure, when their anonymity is secured and future interaction may be anticipated.