Adapting Empathic Agents to User Experiences

In this paper we provide a theoretical contribution to the area of experience design in the field of human-agent interaction. Our research focuses on the question which (emotional) processes lead to people’s behavior of seeking or avoiding interaction with interface agents. A main startingpoint for this research is the model for Perceiving and Experiencing Fictional Characters (PEFiC). It explains the (dis)liking of fictional characters in television and in other media. We think this empirically tested model provides an opportunity to investigate user experiences in human-agent interaction in a systematic way. As the PEFiC model concerns unidirectional interaction in the media domain, we will include other factors that are relevant in bidirectional interaction in the agent domain to create the Interactive PEFiC model. In this paper we attempt to identify such factors. In addition, we describe a set of experiments we are planning to conduct. One of the strengths of our approach to the study of user experiences with interface agents, is that we focus on relevant features of the agent within its particular context, and also, more importantly, on the cognitive and affective processes of users while interacting with empathic agents.