I want to be your friend: establishing relations with emotionally intelligent agents

This paper addresses the problem of how to create autonomous virtual agents that are able to intentionally establish and strengthen social relations with other agents and humans. To do so, a computational model is proposed that embraces explicit intentions in the agents that are aimed at increasing the other’s relations towards them. The model is inspired in the notion of emotional intelligence, and allows for agents to reason about the emotions of others and perform interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) in order to dynamically create the relations with others. The model was used to build the NPCs of a computer game scenario in NeverWinter Nights 2, where the player is required to work together with two agents to achieve a particular quest. An experiment was then conducted where players interacted with either a version with or without IER. By measuring friendship quality we were able to show that when one of the agents employed IER strategies it was perceived as more friendly according to four out of six dimensions of friendship.