The effect of empathy on human-agent interaction

Technology development and information communication have led to an in-crease of human-agent communication and provided an opportunity to overcome the ex-isting limitation human-human communication. Psychological counseling studies suggest conventional face-to-face counseling method can replace the role of a counselor by ap-plying agent technology. The present study has been established to identify the effects of empathy in human-agent interaction. In order to do so, we designed and conducted a pilot study of a prototype of counseling conversation based on psychological counseling theory. We have found that empathic agents resulted in lower score on counselor’s as-sessment and lower level of empathy perceived by the subjects. The simple empathy used in this study may have given the participants a sense of imitating a clumsy human be-ing and have caused a higher level of displeasure and discomfort compared to the agents without empathy response. This study is meaningful in that it provides basic data for developing and improving an artificial intelligence-based psychological counseling system by designing artificial intelligence counseling agents and varying levels of empathy.