Abstract
While applications of virtual agents in training and pedagogy have largely concentrated on positive valenced environments and interactions, human-human interactions certainly also involve a fair share of negativity that is worth exploring in virtual environments. Further, in natural human interaction as well as in virtual spaces, physical actions arguably account for a great deal of variance in our representations of social concepts (e.g., emotions, attitudes). Proxemics, specifically, is a physical cue that can elicit varying perceptions of a social interaction. In the current paper, we explore the combined and individual effects of proxemic distance and gender in a specifically negative feedback educational context. We pursue this with a 2 (Proxemic Distance) \(\times \) 2 (Virtual Instructor Gender) between subject design, where participants actively engage in a learning task with a virtual instructor that provides harsh, negative feedback. While this study demonstrates some anticipated negative reactions to negative feedback from a close distance, such as external attribution of failure, we also observe some unexpected positive outcomes to this negative feedback. Specifically, negative feedback from a close distance has raises positive affect and effort, particularly among male participants interacting with a male virtual professor. Objective measures (head movement data) corroborate these same-gender effects as participants demonstrate more engagement when interacting with a virtual professor of their same gender. The results of the present study have broad implications for the design of intelligent virtual agents for pedagogy and mental health outcomes.
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Jeong, D.C., Feng, D., Krämer, N.C., Miller, L.C., Marsella, S. (2017). Negative Feedback In Your Face: Examining the Effects of Proxemics and Gender on Learning. In: Beskow, J., Peters, C., Castellano, G., O'Sullivan, C., Leite, I., Kopp, S. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_19
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