Effects of Virtual Humans' Gender and Spoken Accent on Users' Perceptions of Expertise in Mental Wellness Conversations

Pedro Guillermo Feijóo-García, Mohan Zalake, Alexandre Gomes De Siqueira, Benjamin Lok, Felix Hamza-Lup

Research output: Contribution to book or proceedingConference articlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the context of mental wellness support, trust and intimacy between a counselor and a patient are necessary to converge healing processes positively. However, convincing students to trust a virtual human for topics regarding mental wellness is a complex problem that requires understanding students' experiences. Based on research that discusses mental health as a concerning topic regarding Computer Science (CS) students, this paper investigates how undergraduate computing-related students perceive virtual humans' expertise on mental wellness support based on demographic resemblance on spoken accent and gender. Four virtual human counselors were developed to conduct the study, as 58 undergraduate computing-related students from two North American universities were recruited and assessed. Our findings suggest that students were less inclined to interact with a male virtual human than a female one. Also, that spoken accents can impact students' perceptions of expertise under students' multilingualism.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages68-75
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450386197
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 14 2021
Event21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021 - Virtual, Online, Japan
Duration: Sep 14 2021Sep 17 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021

Conference

Conference21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityVirtual, Online
Period09/14/2109/17/21

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Keywords

  • Virtual reality
  • conversational agent
  • culturally relevant computing
  • virtual humans

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