Exploring perceived emotional intelligence of personality-driven virtual agents in handling user challenges

Abstract

An effective virtual agent (VA) that serves humans not only completes tasks efficaciously, but also manages its interpersonal relationships with users judiciously. Although past research has studied how agents apologize or seek help appropriately, there lacks a comprehensive study of how to design an emotionally intelligent (EI) virtual agent. In this paper, we propose to improve a VA's perceived EI by equipping it with personality-driven responsive expression of emotions. We conduct a within-subject experiment to verify this approach using a medical assistant VA. We ask participants to observe how the agent (displaying a dominant or submissive trait, or having no personality) handles user challenges when issuing reminders and rate its EI. Results show that simply being emotionally expressive is insufficient for suggesting VAs as fully emotionally intelligent. Equipping such VAs with a consistent, distinctive personality trait (especially submissive) can convey a significantly stronger sense of EI in terms of the ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions, and can better mitigate user challenges.