research-article

Are Aggressive Agents as Scary as Aggressive Humans?

Authors:

Romy Blankendaal,

Charlotte Gerritsen,

Jeroen de ManAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Pages 553 - 561

Published: 04 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Most research into intelligent virtual agents focuses on agents with a positive stance towards the user. Nevertheless, the development of virtual agents that show aggressive behavior may also be interesting for a range of application domains, varying from aggression de-escalation training to anti-bullying education. However, ensuring that such aggressive agents achieve the desired effect is not easy, as they need to be believable in a number of aspects. In particular, they need to bring their human conversation partners into a serious state of anxiety. To investigate to what extent this can be achieved using state-of-the-art virtual agent technology, an experiment was performed in which the impact of an aggressive virtual agent was compared with that of an aggressive human. By randomly distributing a group of 28 participants over two conditions (virtual and human) and measuring their physiological and subjective emotional state before and after an aggressive outburst of their conversation partner, the difference between virtual and human aggression was studied. The results point out that both types of aggression induced a substantial stress response, but that the impact of the human aggression was higher than that of the virtual aggression.

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Cited By

Dickinson PJones AChristian WWesterside AMulloy FGerling KHicks KWilson LParke AKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Experiencing Simulated Confrontations in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445401(1-10)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445401
Bosse THartmann TBlankendaal RDokter NOtte MGoedschalk LAndre EKoenig SDastani MSukthankar G(2018)Virtually BadProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3237885(1258-1266)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3237383.3237885
Bosse TGerritsen Cde Man J(2016)An intelligent system for aggression de-escalation trainingProceedings of the Twenty-second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.3233/978-1-61499-672-9-1805(1805-1811)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/978-1-61499-672-9-1805

Index Terms

Are Aggressive Agents as Scary as Aggressive Humans?
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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cover image ACM Other conferences

AAMAS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

May 2015

2072 pages

ISBN:9781450334136

General Chairs:
Gerhard Weiss
Maastricht University, The Netherlands
,
Pınar Yolum
Bogazici University, Turkey
,
Program Chairs:
Rafael H. Bordini
PUCRS, Brazil
,
Edith Elkind
University of Oxford, UK

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IFAAMAS

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SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

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International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

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Published: 04 May 2015

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Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research

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AAMAS'15

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AAMAS'15: International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

May 4 - 8, 2015

Istanbul, Turkey

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AAMAS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 108 of 670 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

Dickinson PJones AChristian WWesterside AMulloy FGerling KHicks KWilson LParke AKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Experiencing Simulated Confrontations in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445401(1-10)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445401
Bosse THartmann TBlankendaal RDokter NOtte MGoedschalk LAndre EKoenig SDastani MSukthankar G(2018)Virtually BadProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3237885(1258-1266)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3237383.3237885
Bosse TGerritsen Cde Man J(2016)An intelligent system for aggression de-escalation trainingProceedings of the Twenty-second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.3233/978-1-61499-672-9-1805(1805-1811)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/978-1-61499-672-9-1805

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