Recognizing, Modeling, and Responding to Users' Affective States

We describe a system that recognizes physiological data of users in real-time, interprets this information as affective states, and responds to affect by employing an animated agent. The agent assumes the role of an Empathic Companion in a virtual job interview scenario where it accompanies a human interviewee. While previously obtained results with the companion with were not significant, the analysis reported here demonstrates that empathic feedback of an agent may reduce user arousal while hearing interviewer questions. This outcome may prove useful for educational systems or applications that induce user stress.