When people are in emotional distress, they often seek support. Virtual humans may provide
unique and complementary benefits to human support provision, given that virtual humans …

We explored the relationship between interactants' social anxiety and the interactional
fidelity of virtual humans. We specifically addressed whether the contingent nonverbal …

This study is about pain expressed by virtual humans and empathy in users immersed in
virtual reality. It focuses on whether people feel more empathy toward the pain of a virtual …

This study explores the independent and joint effects of immersion and real-world
distractions (a ringing cell phone) on cognitive (ie, recognition and recall), affective valence …

The emerging uptake of AI chatbots for social support entails systematic comparisons
between human and non-human entities as sources of support. In a between-subject …

Objective: To investigate whether virtual humans produce social facilitation effects.
Background: When people do an easy task and another person is nearby, they tend to do …

The purpose of this study was to examine social evaluations (ie, perceptions of empathy and
positivity) following peoples' interactions with digital human representations. Female …

Virtual humans are computer-generated characters designed to simulate key properties of
human face-to-face conversation---verbal and nonverbal. Their human-like physical …

Past research highlights the potential for leveraging both humans and animals as social
support figures in one's real life to enhance performance and reduce physiological and …

To test whether synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human elicit positive or negative
emotions in a human conversation partner and affect satisfaction towards the conversation …