Designing emotional support messages tailored to stressors

Although computers could offer emotional support as well as task support when aiding a user for a complex task, there is little current understanding of how they might do this. Moreover existing demonstrations of emotional support, though promising, only cover a small number of types of support and investigate a limited number of algorithms designed by hand. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation that starts from first principles, determining different categories of stressors for which emotional support might be useful, different categories of emotional support utterances and promising algorithms for deciding the content and form of textual emotional support messages according to the stressors present. At each stage, the results are validated through empirical experiments with human participants who, for instance, are required to place statements into categories, evaluate possible support messages in different imagined situations and compose their own emotional support from options offered. This development methodology allows us to avoid potentially challenging ethical issues in presenting people with stressful situations. Although our algorithms are attempting to choose emotional support based on the general, “naive” competence of human speakers, we use as a running example situations that can arise when attending a medical emergency and awaiting expert help. & 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 1 One can argue about whether mimicking human behaviour is the right approach. In many fields of Artificial Intelligence, the focus has traditionally been on emulating humans, for example when modeling emotions (Gratch and Marsella, 2001) or generating natural language (see van Deemter (2016) for a discussion on this). Given emotional support in computers is still in its infancy and humans interact with computers in a social way (Nash et al., 1994), modelling human beha