A Virtual Emotional Freedom Therapy Practitioner: (Demonstration)

The role of virtual humans in a range of health scenarios, including therapy and counselling, are being explored. To help people in managing their emotional health this research project novelly investigates the value of a virtual practitioner to deliver the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT, also known as Tapping Method, is a kind of psychological acupressure technique to optimize emotional and physical health. Significantly, we compare two different types of virtual EFT therapists, one that seeks to exhibit empathetic behaviour with another that delivers the therapy in a neutral manner. An initial online semi-interactive study with 37 participants reported benefits for both therapists from baseline emotion, and these improvements increased with a subsequent session, the empathic agent delivered slight but nonsignificant improvements but did not achieve a higher level of rapport with the human.