Expressions of empathy in ECAs

Recent research has shown that empathic virtual agents enable to improve human-machine interaction. Virtual agent’s expressions of empathy are generally fixed intuitively and are not evaluated. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the expressions of empathy using complex facial expressions like superposition and masking. An evaluation study have been conducted in order to identify the most appropriate way to express empathy. According to the evaluation results people find more suitable facial expressions that contain elements of emotion of empathy. In particular, complex facial expressions seem to be a good approach to express empathy.