Effects of Virtual Humans' Gender and Spoken Accent on Users' Perceptions of Expertise in Mental Wellness Conversations

Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents Pub Date : 2021-09-14 DOI:10.1145/3472306.3478367

P. Feijóo-García, Mohan S Zalake, A. G. de Siqueira, Benjamin C. Lok, Felix G. Hamza-Lup

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引用次数: 7

Abstract

In the context of mental wellness support, trust and intimacy between a counselor and a patient are necessary to converge healing processes positively. However, convincing students to trust a virtual human for topics regarding mental wellness is a complex problem that requires understanding students' experiences. Based on research that discusses mental health as a concerning topic regarding Computer Science (CS) students, this paper investigates how undergraduate computing-related students perceive virtual humans' expertise on mental wellness support based on demographic resemblance on spoken accent and gender. Four virtual human counselors were developed to conduct the study, as 58 undergraduate computing-related students from two North American universities were recruited and assessed. Our findings suggest that students were less inclined to interact with a male virtual human than a female one. Also, that spoken accents can impact students' perceptions of expertise under students' multilingualism.

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虚拟人的性别和语音重音对用户心理健康对话中专业知识感知的影响

在心理健康支持的背景下，咨询师和患者之间的信任和亲密关系对于积极地融合治疗过程是必要的。然而，说服学生在心理健康方面信任虚拟人是一个复杂的问题，需要了解学生的经历。基于对心理健康作为计算机科学(CS)学生关注话题的研究，本文调查了计算机相关本科生如何基于人口统计学上的口音和性别相似性来感知虚拟人在心理健康支持方面的专业知识。研究人员开发了四名虚拟人类顾问来进行这项研究，并从两所北美大学招募了58名与计算机相关的本科生，对他们进行了评估。我们的研究结果表明，与女性虚拟人相比，学生们更不愿意与男性虚拟人互动。此外，口语口音会影响学生在多语言环境下对专业知识的看法。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

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