Associations Between Interactants Personality Traits and Their Feelings of Rapport in Interactions With Virtual Humans

This study explored associations between the personality traits of human subjects and their feelings of rapport when they interacted with either a virtual agent or a real human. The animated graphical agent, the Responsive Agent, responded to real human subjects’' storytelling behavior, using appropriately timed nonverbal (contingent) feedback. Interactants’' personal-Words. The results revealed that subjects who scored higher on Conscientiousness reported higher rapport when interacting with another human, while subjects who scored higher on Agreeableness reported higher rapport while interacting with a virtual agent. The effects of these personality variables differed significantly across the two experimental groups. The conclusions provide a step toward further development of rapport theory that contributes to enhancing the interactional fidelity of virtual humans.

[1]  Anton Leuski,et al.  Virtual Patients for Clinical Therapist Skills Training , 2007, IVA.

[2]  Clifford Nass,et al.  The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places , 1996 .

[3]  L. R. Goldberg,et al.  Integration of the big five and circumplex approaches to trait structure. , 1992, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  Ning Wang,et al.  Can Virtual Humans Be More Engaging Than Real Ones? , 2007, HCI.

[5]  C. Hendrick.  The Nature of Rapport , 1990 .

[6]  Christopher Edwards,et al.  The effects of filtered video on awareness and privacy , 2000, CSCW '00.

[7]  Merrill Carlsmith.  Methods of research in social psychology , 1976 .

[8]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Consistency of personality in interactive characters: verbal cues, non-verbal cues, and user characteristics , 2000, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[9]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Can computer personalities be human personalities? , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[10]  S. Srivastava,et al.  The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. , 1999 .

[11]  Phillip R. Shaver,et al.  Attachment dimensions and the big five personality traits: Associations and comparative ability to predict relationship quality , 2006 .

[12]  David Machin,et al.  Sample Size Tables for Clinical Studies , 1997 .

[13]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[14]  Ning Wang,et al.  Creating Rapport with Virtual Agents , 2007, IVA.

[15]  Nigel G. Ward,et al.  Prosodic features which cue back-channel responses in English and Japanese , 2000 .

[16]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Can computer personalities be human personalities? , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[17]  R. Daft,et al.  Media Symbolism, Media Richness, and Media Choice in Organizations , 1987 .

[18]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Accuracy of Behavioral Predictions at Zero Acquaintance: A Social Relations Analysis , 1993 .

[19]  J A Dyce.  The big five factors of personality and their relationship to personality disorders. , 1997, Journal of clinical psychology.

[20]  R. Daft,et al.  Information Richness. A New Approach to Managerial Behavior and Organization Design , 1983 .

[21]  P. Borkenau,et al.  Trait inferences: Sources of validity at zero acquaintance. , 1992 .

[22]  L. Tickle-Degnen,et al.  The Nature of Rapport and Its Nonverbal Correlates , 1990 .

[23]  D. Berry,et al.  Positive affect, negative affect, and social interaction , 1996 .

[24]  J. Breese,et al.  Emotion and personality in a conversational agent , 2001 .

[25]  L. R. Goldberg.  The structure of phenotypic personality traits. , 1993, The American psychologist.

[26]  Ning Wang,et al.  Agreeable People Like Agreeable Virtual Humans , 2008, IVA.

[27]  Freda Kemp.  Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 2003 .

[28]  Luca Chittaro,et al.  Behavioral programming of autonomous characters based on probabilistic automata and personality , 2004, Comput. Animat. Virtual Worlds.

[29]  L. A. Pervin.  Personality: Theory and Research , 1984 .

[30]  Stacy Marsella,et al.  Virtual Rapport , 2006, IVA.

[31]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Contextual recognition of head gestures , 2005, ICMI '05.

[32]  Justine Cassell,et al.  Relational agents: a model and implementation of building user trust , 2001, CHI.

[33]  J. Cassell,et al.  Embodied conversational agents , 2000 .

[34]  Ass,et al.  Can computers be teammates? , 1996 .

[35]  Timothy W. Bickmore,et al.  The comforting presence of relational agents , 2006, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[36]  D. Berry,et al.  Personality, Nonverbal Behavior, and Interaction Quality in Female Dyads , 2000 .