An Embodied Conversational Agent for Social Support

Today, children and adolescents spend a lot of time on the Internet. One of the risks they run online is to become a victim of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is bullying through electronic communication devices. It is a complex problem that has a high impact on victims [4]. About 40% of the victims is emotionally affected by incidents of cyberbullying [4]. These victims may need help to deal with their negative emotions. To this end, specialized helplines exist, that allow cyberbullying victims to talk to online counselors and/or peers trained to give social support (see for example Cybermentors or Pestweb). Social support or comforting refers to communicative attempts, both verbal and nonverbal, to alleviate the emotional distress of another person [2]. To some extent, everybody is capable of comforting another person. Since one on one online counseling is very labor intensive, automating this kind of support could help to reach more victims. Early work in the field of affective computing demonstrated that virtual agents are able to reduce negative emotions in users by addressing them [3]. More recent developments show that empathic agents are increasingly capable of complex social and emotional dialogues. However, these dialogues are predominantly task-oriented, i.e. to help users perform concrete tasks, such as finding information and learning, whereas giving social support is unrelated to this type of tasks. Our research concerns the design and implementation of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that provides social support to victims of cyberbullying. The ECA ‘lives’ on the computer screen of potential victims of cyberbullying. When a child feels uncomfortable because of a cyberbullying incident, it turns to the ECA for emotional support and practical advice on how to deal with the situation, just as it would do with a human online counselor.