I Feel What You Feel: Empathy and Placebo Mechanisms for Autonomous Virtual Humans

Computational modeling of emotion, physiology and personality is a major challenge in order to design believable virtual humans. These factors have an impact on both the individual behavior and the collective one. This requires to take into account the empathy phenomenon. Furthermore, in a crisis simulation context where the virtual humans can be contaminated by radiological or chemical substances, empathy may lead to placebo or nocebo effects. Stemming from works in the multiagent systems domain, our virtual human decision process is designed as an autonomous agent. It has been shown that the environment can encapsulate the responsibility of spreading part of the agent state. The agent has two parts, its mind and its body. The mind contains the decision process and is autonomous. The body is influenced by the mind, but controlled by the environment which manages the empathy process. Combined with biased reasoning, favorable personality traits and situational factors, empathy can lead some agents to believe they are contaminated although they are not. We describe these mechanisms and show the results of several experiments.

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