Practical approaches to comforting users with relational agents

Interactions in which computer agents comfort users through expressed empathy have been shown to be important in alleviating user frustration and increasing user liking of the agent, and may have important healthcare applications. Given the current state of technology, designers of these systems are forced to choose between (a) allowing users to freely express their feelings, but having the agents provide imperfect empathic responses, or (b) greatly restricting how users can express themselves, but having the agents provide very accurate empathic feedback. This study investigates which of these options leads to better outcomes, in terms of comforting users and increasing user-agent social bonds. Results, on almost all measures, indicate that empathic accuracy is more important than user expressivity.