Modelling Empathy: The EU-Project VICTEC (Virtual Information And Communication Technology With Empathic Characters)
Harald Schaub ()
Carsten Zoll ()
Institut für Theoretische Psychologie, Universität Bamberg,
Markusplatz 3, D-96045 Bamberg
Ruth Aylett ()
The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford,
Manchester M5 4WT, England
Abstract
The prevention of aggressive behaviour in schools (bullying) is a key task of educators among Europe. The EU sponsored project VICTEC aims to create a software (the “Demonstrator”) that helps students aged 8 to 12 on the one hand to cope with aggressive acts against them and on the other hand to reach their goals without using violence.
The Demonstrator works with virtual environments and virtual agents. Social immersion of the child users seems to be mandatory for the goal of the software which is to change their behaviour and cognitions regarding bullying. Key feature of the Demonstrator is empathic virtual agents, because empathic characters will promote social immersion very strongly. To achieve this goal the model of the empathic agents considers results of believability research done within computer science as well as psychological theories of empathy.
In the running model real bullying situations are simulated. The empathic agents take the role of teachers and students in a virtual school building. The running model is tested by two ways. Firstly, the child users who interact with the empathic virtual agents are interviewed. Secondly, the interactions between agent and user are analyzed by experts.
Modelling empathy: The EU-project VICTEC (Virtual Information and Communication Technology with Empathic Characters)
Harald Schaub ()
Carsten Zoll ()
Institut für Theoretische Psychologie, Universität Bamberg,
Markusplatz 3, D-96045 Bamberg, Germany
Ruth Aylett ()
The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford,
Manchester M5 4WT, England
Abstract
Within the EU sponsored project VICTEC (Virtual Information and Communication Technology with Empathic Characters) a software program is created that aims to reduce aggressive behaviour of children (aged 8 to 12) in schools with the help of virtual agents and virtual environments. A key feature of the virtual agents is their ability to react empathically. This should improve the social immersion of the child users and thus lead to better learning effects.
Introduction
The prevention of aggressive behaviour in schools (bullying) is a key task of educators among Europe. Not only to prevent catastrophes like the killing spree in Erfurt/Germany 2002, where a student killed several of his colleagues, but also to reduce the damage that unspectacular, but much more often happening aggressive acts in schools cause. Those aggressive acts disturb the main task of schools which is to induce responsible, academically and socially skilled humans.
The EU sponsored project VICTEC aims to create a software (the “Demonstrator”) that helps students aged 8 to 12 on the one hand to cope with aggressive acts against them and on the other hand to reach their goals without using violence.
The Demonstrator works with virtual environments and virtual agents. Social immersion of the child users seems to be mandatory for the goal of the Software which is to change their behaviour and cognitions. Key feature of the Demonstrator is empathic virtual agents, because empathic characters will promote social immersion very strongly.
Bullying
In contemporary psychological literature aggressive behaviour in school contexts is often referred to as “bullying”.
According to Olweus (1999) bullying is a repeated action that occurs regularly over time. Two different types of bullying can be distinguished: direct and relational bullying. Direct bullying can be distinguished further between physical bullying (hitting, kicking, taking belongings) and verbal bullying (name calling, cruel teasing, taunting, threatening). Relational bullying focuses on the social network of the victim and can be achieved for example by social exclusion, rumour spreading or deliberate withdrawal of friendship.
Empathy
Empathy is a psychological concept that describes the ability of one person (the so called “observer”) to “feel in” another person (“target”).
Most contemporary empathy researchers (e.g. Davis, 1994) agree that two different aspects of empathy have to be distinguished: the cognitive and the affective aspect. Thus, one speaks of cognitive empathy, when the outcome of an empathic process is that the observer knows what the target feels. Of affective empathy is spoken, when the observer feels something because of the perception of the target. With the virtual agents of the Demonstrator the cognitive aspect of empathy is modelled.
The key to creating empathy between the child using the system and the virtual agents within it is connected to the concept of believability. This refers to the way in which a human will treat inanimate objects as if they were alive and base their interaction with them on human social norms.
Cars and ships are both known to be treated in this way by individuals. The success of the Sony robot dog Aibo has demonstrated that many humans will treat it as a living dog even though it has a robotic rather than high-fidelity dog appearance. The Tamagotchi craze of a few years back in which very crude graphical toys engaged the caring instincts of children who owned them also indicates that believability does not depend on high fidelity to human appearance or behaviour. The important factors appear to be autonomy – that the entity is felt to have a ‘life of its own’ with its own needs and goals – and consistent behaviour expressing those needs and goals. Thus emotional expressiveness is an important part of establishing believability.
Research in the US with the Kismet robot at MIT has shown that a very crude and robotic face can evoke strong feelings in a human that interacts with it given only a few features such as ears, eyebrows, eyes, and a set of behaviours using these to mirror a simulated internal emotional state.
Appearance seems to be important more as a consistency check against behaviour – in general, the more human the appearance, the greater the expectation that behaviour will also be human. Research has shown that a mismatch between these two, especially when appearance is very naturalistic, can produce a sudden drop in believability referred to as ‘the uncanny valley’, or more colloquially, as the ‘zombie factor’. Thus the virtual agents used in this project are cartoon-like in appearance, drawing thereby on known forms of emotional expressiveness used by animators.
In the VICTEC project, the aim is to engage virtual agents in interactive drama that is not pre-scripted – thus supporting the perceived autonomy of the characters – but arises from interaction. One character will carry out bullying behaviour, and the other character will respond using an action repertoire indexed by an emotional model. At the end of an episode, the child will interact with the victimised character and will be asked to act as a friend and help them to decide how they should respond in a similar situation the next time.
This advice will then influence the action-selection of the victimised character in the next scenario, allowing the child to see what a possible effect of that choice might be
Running Model – Demonstrator
The interaction of the child users with the Demonstrator enables them to simulate their behaviour in real bullying situations. Thus several different bullying situations (different locations, different persons, different bullying types) are simulated.
Since bullying is defined as aggressive behaviour in schools the virtual environment of the Demonstrator is a school environment (e.g. playground, class room).
Figure 1: Virtual environment (class room)
The empathic virtual agents that populate that environment are teachers and students. They should behave like human beings; preliminary work for this is done for example by Schaub (1993).
The child users take over a certain character in the displayed bullying situation. While interacting with the running models of empathic virtual agents the child users find out how bullying works and learn how to cope with bullying situations.
Empirical data
The evaluation of virtual agents’ empathy includes interviews and questionnaires with the child users as well as experts’ analysis of the interactions between the empathic agents and the child users.
References
Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Dubuque: Brown and Benchmark Publishers.
Olweus, D. (1999). Norway. In P. K. Smith & Y. Morita & J. Junger-Tas & D. Olweus & R. Catalano & P. Slee (Eds.), The nature of school bullying: A cross-national perspective (pp. 28-48). London: Routledge.
Schaub, H. (1993). Modellierung der Handlungsorganisation. Bern: Huber.
Modelling empathy: The EU-project VICTEC (Virtual Information and Communication Technology with Empathic Characters)
AUTHORS
Name / Harald Schaub / Carsten Zoll / Ruth AylettDepartment / Institut für Theoretische Psychologie / Institut für Theoretische Psychologie / The Centre for Virtual Environments
University / Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg / Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg / University of Salford
Phone / 0951/863-1960 / 0951/863-1965 / +44 161 295 2912
Fax / 0951 /601511 / 0951 /601511 / +44 161 295 2925
Address / Kapuzinerstr. 16
96045 Bamberg
Germany / Kapuzinerstr. 16
96045 Bamberg
Germany / Business House
University of Salford
Salford
Manchester
M5 4WT
England
Email / / /
Please send correspondence to Carsten Zoll.