“I can feel it too!”: Emergent empathic reactions between synthetic characters

Abstract

Empathy is often seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This concept has been incorporated in virtual agents to achieve better believability, social interaction and user engagement. However, this has been mostly done to achieve empathic relations with the users. Instead, in this article we focus on empathy between synthetic characters and propose an analytical approach that consists in a generic computational model of empathy, supported by recent neuropsychological studies. The proposed model of empathy was implemented into an affective agent architecture. To evaluate the implementation a small scenario was defined and we asked a group of users to visualize it with the empathy model and another group to visualize it without the model. The results obtained confirmed that our model was capable of producing significant effects in the perception of the emergent empathic responses.