Towards caring machines

ABSTRACT

The perception of feeling cared for has beneficial consequences in education, psychotherapy, and medicine. Results from a longitudinal study of simulated caring by a computer are presented, in which 60 subjects interacted with a computer agent daily for a month, half with a "caring" agent and half with an agent that did not use behaviors to demonstrate caring. The perception of caring by subjects in the "caring" condition was significantly higher after four weeks, and was also reflected in qualitative interviews with them, and in a significantly higher reported willingness to continue working with the "caring" agent. This paper presents the techniques that contributed to the increased perception of caring, and presents some of the implications of this new technology.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ambady, N., Koo, J., Rosenthal, R., and Winograd, C. Physical Therapists' Nonverbal Communication Predicts Patients' Health Outcomes. Psychology and Aging, 17, 3 (2002) 443--452.
• 2: Berscheid, E. and Reis, H. Attraction and Close Relationships. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, Eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, McGraw-Hill, NY, 1998, 193--281.
• 3: Bickmore, T. Relational Agents: Effecting Change through Human-Computer Relationships. PhD Thesis, Media Arts & Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2003.
• 4: Timothy Bickmore , Justine Cassell, Relational agents: a model and implementation of building user trust, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.396-403, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365304]
• 5: Birch, S. H. and Ladd, G. W., Interpersonal Relationships in the School Environment and Children's Early School Adjustment. In J. Juvonen and K. Wentzel, Eds., Social Motivation: Understanding Children's School Adjustment, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1996.
• 6: Justine Cassell , Timothy Bickmore, External manifestations of trustworthiness in the interface, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.12, p.50-56, Dec. 2000 [doi>10.1145/355112.355123]
• 7: Justine Cassell , Tim Bickmore , Lee Campbell , Hannes Vilhjálmsson , Hao Yan, Human conversation as a system framework: designing embodied conversational agents, Embodied conversational agents, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001
• 8: Justine Cassell , Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson , Timothy Bickmore, BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.477-486, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383315]
• 9: Batya Friedman , Peter H. Kahn, Jr. , Jennifer Hagman, Hardware companions?: what online AIBO discussion forums reveal about the human-robotic relationship, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642660]
• 10: Goetz, J., Kiesler, S., and Powers, A., Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation., Proc. Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication: RO-MAN, 2003.
• 11: Horvath, A. and Greenberg, L. Development and Validation of the Working Alliance Inventory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 36, 2 (1989) 223--233.
• 12: Klein, J., Moon, Y., and Picard, R. This Computer Responds to User Frustration: Theory, Design, Results, and Implications. Interacting with Computers, 14 (2002) 119--140.
• 13: James C. Lester , Sharolyn A. Converse , Susan E. Kahler , S. Todd Barlow , Brian A. Stone , Ravinder S. Bhogal, The persona effect: affective impact of animated pedagogical agents, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.359-366, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258797]
• 14: Levinson, W., Gorawara-Bhat, R., and Lambs, J. A Study of Patient Clues and Physician Responses in Primary Care and Surgical Settings. JAMA, 284, 8 (2000) 1021--1027.
• 15: John Morkes , Hadyn K. Kernal , Clifford Nass, Humor in task-oriented computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction, CHI 98 conference summary on Human factors in computing systems, p.215-216, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/286498.286704]
• 16: Susanne van Mulken , Elisabeth André , Jochen Müller, An empirical study on the trustworthiness of life-like interface agents, Proceedings of the HCI International '99 (the 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction) on Human-Computer Interaction: Communication, Cooperation, and Application Design-Volume 2, p.152-156, August 22-26, 1999
• 17: Picard, R. and Klein, J. Computers that recognize and respond to user emotion: theoretical and practical implications. Interacting with Computers, 14 (2002) 141--169.
• 18: Reeves, B. and Nass, C. The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
• 19: Richmond, V. and McCroskey, J., Immediacy. In Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA, 1995, 195--217.
• 20: Squier, R. A model of empathic understanding and adherence to treatment regimens in practitioner-patient relationships. Social Science and Medicine, 30 (1990) 325--39.
• 21: Wentzel, K. Student Motivation in Middle School: The Role of Perceived Pedagogical Caring. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 3 (1997) 411--419.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Voice I/O; Theory and methods; Natural language

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
affective computing, caring, embodied conversational agent, emotion, relational agent, social interface