The effect of a virtual agent's emotional facial expressions on the Mind's Eye test

Abstract

In this study, we explored how interacting with a virtual agent under stressful conditions affected situational awareness as assessed by a theory of mind task. Volunteers played a negotiation game in which an embodied, digital virtual agent both displayed an angry, happy, or neutral facial expression and played either cooperatively or competitively. Results indicated that users who negotiated with the angry virtual agent performed significantly worse on the Mind in the Eye Task compared to those who interacted with the happy virtual agent. The results indicate that exposure to an angry virtual agent decreased humans' ability to take the mental perspective of another person. These results offer speculations about how negative affect associated with virtual agents can have detrimental implications for human-agent interactions that requires theory of mind type situational awareness, especially regarding virtual agent technology for rehabilitating theory of mind deficits (e.g., for individuals on the Autism spectrum).