User psychology remains a significant obstacle in dialogue agents. Previous studies have shown that users’ dialogue motivation decreases if they find it difficult to attribute subjective opinions to agents. This study proposes physical touch and a dialogue strategy called virtual sense acquisition statement (VSAS) to develop an interaction design for promoting opinion attribution and maintaining users’ dialogue motivation. VSAS is a dialogue strategy wherein an agent claims to have acquired a human-like sense before engaging in dialogue with a user. We examined the effect of the proposed interaction design on user dialogue motivation through a dialogue experiment (n = 20). The results showed that VSAS increased dialogue motivation in the ’Religion & Festivals’ topic category. These findings suggest that relatively simple interaction designs involving VSAS can significantly affect users’ motivation to engage in dialogue with agents.

This study proposes a dialogue strategy called “Critical Tongue Dialogue Strategy” (CTDS) for dialogue agents that respond to users experiencing anxiety or tension by delivering blunt, non-conformist remarks while maintaining a non-empathetic stance. This strategy employs balance theory principles to deliberately avoid acknowledging users’ negative emotions, instead utilizing interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. By creating emotional imbalance, it aims to trigger users’ own emotion regulation processes, thereby facilitating cognitive changes that enable them to reframe their anxieties and tensions in a more positive light. In this paper, we present the interaction modeling of this dialogue strategy and the results of psychological evaluations from a scenario-based and video-based study comparing CTDS agents with those employing empathetic dialogue strategies (n=108). Experimental results demonstrate that in terms of cognitive change assessment metrics, CTDS significantly outperformed the empathetic dialogue strategy.

This study develops a practical learning support system to mitigate the psychological and emotional burden on caregivers supporting the increasing population of people with dementia in home-care settings. To address the insufficient fidelity (or "sense of urgency") in conventional learning systems, we propose an interactive, role-playing learning system featuring a dementia patient agent. This system leverages "LLM Embedded in Cognitive Architecture (LEC)," a novel framework that integrates a large language model (LLM) with a cognitive architecture to accurately interpret user intent. This role-playing promotes realistic caregiving communication by generating the agent’s responses based on the user’s spoken dialogue. Testing with caregiving novices indicated a statistically significant improvement in both learning effectiveness and the quality of understanding, thereby demonstrating the system’s potential to enhance learning.

This study aimed to clarify how end-users’ mind perception towards an agent (Social Connection and Self-Aware Emotions) affects the trust transference from the agent adopter (AA) to the agent. A questionnaire survey was conducted, and the results confirmed a significant interaction between trust in the AA and mind perception towards the agent concerning affective trust. This suggests that when an agent is highly perceived to have a mind, negative information about the AA strongly affects affective distrust towards the agent. However, no interaction was observed regarding cognitive trust, suggesting that the mechanisms by which humans form cognitive and affective trust in agents might differ.

Part-time workers are seen handing out pocket tissues containing advertisements to pedestrians in the streets and around train stations in Japan. However, there are cases in which pedestrians feel stressed by workers handing out tissues. This is when the tissues are unnecessary for pedestrians. Workers actively try to hand out tissues to pedestrians because if they do not hand out tissues, their work will be evaluated negatively. Most pedestrians understand that refusing to accept a tissue is a betrayal of the worker’s expectations. Therefore, refusing to accept a tissue is emotionally taxing for the pedestrian. The authors believe that anthropomorphic agents handing out tissues can alleviate the aforementioned mental burden for pedestrians. In this paper, we conducted an experiment in which pedestrians interacted with a tissue-distributing worker by reproducing a typical Japanese cityscape in VR. The results showed that the anthropomorphic agent handing out tissues may cause less stress to pedestrians than a human worker handing out tissues. The results of this paper suggest the usefulness of anthropomorphic agents for tasks such as distributing advertisements in the city and around train stations, and for fundraising activities.

Soon, autonomous cars are expected to become widespread, but at present, it is still common for people to drive cars manually. A driving support agent (DSA) is used to support driving using the human-agent interaction approach. In previous research, it was shown that DSAs can be useful in assisting the user through voice utterances. However, previous studies focusing on DSA utterance design have not compared off-record strategies with other politeness strategies that explicitly communicate the speaker's intentions, and it was not clear whether DSA should provide explicit utterances to the user. Therefore, in this study, a video-based subjective evaluation experiment (n=240) was conducted to compare the acceptability of off-record strategies, positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies, and direct utterances without politeness strategies. The results of the experiment showed that the negative politeness strategy was evaluated significantly higher than the off-record strategy on evaluation items related to functionality. This result suggests the usefulness of providing explicit instructions with linguistic consideration (politeness) when DSA provides driving assistance to users. In addition to the above findings, there were several correlations between the user's personality characteristics and the subjective evaluation of the DSA. Specifically, there was a significant positive correlation between the level of conscientiousness of the user and the direct utterance evaluation value. For the positive politeness strategy and off-record strategy, there were no significant correlations between evaluation categories of the dislikeability and users' personality characteristics. These results suggest that individual differences in n egative impressions due to personality characteristics are small in the positive politeness and off-record strategies.

The purpose of this research is to analyze overconfidence and dependence caused by receiving the utterance from a driving support robot when a driver drives a car. Comfortable driving can be performed by receiving support from the driving support robot. However, it is expected that drivers will lead to accidents by the dependence or overconfidence bias on support robots. The dependence bias is that driver decreases the quality of driving behavior with respect to the function of the safety system, and the overconfidence bias is that driver embraces expectations more than the performance of the driving support robot. Although this problem includes the fuzziness of human characteristics, the conventional driving support system does not take into consideration such influence of the overconfidence or dependent bias. In order to verify whether driver has the bias against driving support robot in this paper, we investigated the impression of the robot when the driving support with driving animation and robot and report the results.

In interpersonal interactions, humans speak in part by considering their social distance and position with respect to other people, thereby developing relationships. In our research, we focus on positive politeness (PP), a strategy for positively reducing the distance people in human communication using language. In addition, we propose an agent that attempts to actively interact with humans. First, we design a dialog system based on the politeness theory. Next, we examine the effect of our proposed method on interactions. For our experiments, we implemented two agents:the method proposed for performing PP and a conventional method that performs negative politeness based on the unobjectionable behavior. We then compare and analyze impressions of experiment participants in response to the two agents. From our results, male participants accepted PP more frequently than female participants. Further, the proposed method lowered the perceived sense of interacting with a machine for male participants.