This demo presents CO-PARLEY, a mobile socially interactive agent designed to support individuals experiencing difficulties with emotion regulation.The system engages users through reciprocal coregulation, a dynamic and two-way process in which the agent and user mutually influence each other's emotional and physiological states.By combining verbal and nonverbal interaction with real-time physiological synchrony, CO-PARLEY fosters therapeutic alliance, trust, and emotional awareness.Built on a modular framework that integrates multimodal sensing, dialogue management, and adaptive behavior generation, the agent supports users in emotionally challenging moments.In general, this alliance can improve the effectiveness of psychoeducational and awareness exercises.

This paper introduces SIA-Lab, a versatile and broadly applicable platform to advance socially interactive agents (SIAs).Unlike existing single-use case systems, SIA-Lab is a modular and scalable framework built on Android and mobile technologies, enabling rapid explorative and comparative studies between human-human and human-agent interactions, offering valuable insights into behavioral dynamics and user engagement.Effective in health-related applications, including screening, therapeutic assistance, and posttreatment care, it is equally adaptable to education and other settings.By integrating dialog management, affective modeling, and multimodal interaction analysis, SIA-Lab represents a comprehensive toolkit for researchers and practitioners to evaluate and design next-generation supportive technologies.

Humans can develop closeness through the exchange of personal information. A structured method of self-disclosure has been developed in the Fast Friends paradigm, in which two people alternately ask 36 questions with increasing levels of interpersonal intimacy. We transferred this paradigm to interactions with Socially Interactive Agents (SIA). In our study, 72 participants alternately asked and answered 36 questions with a SIA -- indicating their level of interpersonal closeness with the SIA at three points. Participants rated specific trust in the SIA after the interaction, and their general trust and attachment styles were measured. Over time, participants' levels of closeness increased, which was moderated by specific trust but not by general trust and attachment style. Participants with high specific trust developed higher levels of closeness to the SIA than participants with low specific trust. These findings indicate that people can develop a close relationship with SIAs and that trust in the SIA is a prerequisite for developing closeness. Furthermore, this paper introduced the Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale for assessing the relationship between two interaction partners during an ongoing interaction.

In the last decade, empirical sciences have faced a tremendous change in the way of conducting research. As a broad interdisciplinary field, research in Affective Computing often employs empirical user studies. The current paper analyzes research practices in Affective Computing and deduces recommendations for improving the quality of methods and reporting. We extracted a total of k = 65 empirical studies from the two most recent International Conferences on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII) ’17 and ’19. Three raters summarized characteristics of studies (e.g., number of experimental studies) and how much methodological (e.g., participant characteristics) and statistical information (e.g., degrees of freedom) were missing. Also, we conducted a p-curve analysis to test the overall evidential value of findings. Results showed that 1. in at least half of the studies, one important information about statistical results was missing, and 2. those k = 31 studies that had reported all necessary information to be included into the p-curve showed evidential value. In general, all criteria were never met in one single study. We provide concrete recommendations on how to implement open research practices for empirical studies in Affective Computing.