TY - GEN
T1 - Effects of Virtual Humans' Gender and Spoken Accent on Users' Perceptions of Expertise in Mental Wellness Conversations
AU - Feijóo-García, Pedro Guillermo
AU - Zalake, Mohan
AU - De Siqueira, Alexandre Gomes
AU - Lok, Benjamin
AU - Hamza-Lup, Felix
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/9/14
Y1 - 2021/9/14
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Virtual reality
KW - conversational agent
KW - culturally relevant computing
KW - virtual humans
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115776617&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3472306.3478367
DO - 10.1145/3472306.3478367
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85115776617
T3 - Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
SP - 68
EP - 75
BT - Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2021
Y2 - 14 September 2021 through 17 September 2021
ER -