The effect of emotional expression in a digital human and gender on psychological and physiological outcomes in healthy adults

• Register: ANZCTR
• Last refreshed on: 12 July 2021
• Main ID: ACTRN12621000865819
• Date of registration: 05/07/2021
• Prospective Registration: No
• Primary sponsor: The University of Auckland
• Public title: The effect of emotional expression in a digital human and gender on psychological and physiological outcomes in healthy adults
• Scientific title: The effect of emotional expression in a digital human and gender on psychological and physiological outcomes in healthy adults
• Date of first enrolment: 20/02/2019
• Target sample size: 198
• Recruitment status: Completed
• URL: https://anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12621000865819.aspx
• Study type: Interventional
• Study design: Purpose: Treatment; Allocation: Randomised controlled trial; Masking: Blinded (masking used);Assignment: Parallel;Type of endpoint: Efficacy;
• Phase: Not Applicable

Countries of recruitment

New Zealand

Contacts

• Name: Prof Elizabeth Broadbent

• Name: Prof Elizabeth Broadbent

Key inclusion & exclusion criteria

Inclusion criteria: Adults aged 18 years or older with English fluency.
Exclusion criteria: None

Age minimum: 18 Years
Age maximum: No limit
Gender: Both males and females

Health Condition(s) or Problem(s) studied

Loneliness;Stress;
Loneliness
Stress

Mental Health - Other mental health disorders

Intervention(s)

Participants were block-randomised by gender to interact with one of six versions of a digital human that varied in terms of their face type (no face/ neutral face/ emotional face) and voice type (neutral voice/ emotional voice):
1. No face, neutral voice
2. No face, emotional voice
3. Neutral face, neutral voice
4. Neutral face, emotional voice
5. Emotional face, neutral voice
6. Emotional face, emotional voice
A digital human is a type of embodied conversational agent with a humanlike embodiment and animation (based on a real human), that includes artificial intelligence for emotional intelligence (e.g., classifiers of emotional expression in a users face). The digital human in this study was a mixed race, young adult female based on a real person that used a finite state conversation engine (i.e., pre-programmed language) and responded through speech using pre-recorded voice clips from the human model.

The interaction involved completing the Relationship Closeness Induction Task (RCIT; Sedikides et al., 1999) with the digital human. The RCIT is a structured conversation task that involves reciprocal self-disclosure in response to 28 questions which gradually increase in intimacy (e.g., from "what is your name?" to "describe the last time you felt lonely"). The participant took turns at asking and answering personal questions from the RCIT with a digital human. The RCIT has been shown to reliably induce a moderate sense of closeness between human strangers in experimental psychology research, and it has been associated with improvements in wound healing (Robinson et al., 2013).

The intervention took place on a laptop computer in a private clinic room with a researcher available (PhD student) in another room to seek help from if nee

Primary Outcome(s)

Loneliness (100mm visual analogue scale)[T1: Baseline
T2: Immediately post-intervention completion (primary endpoint). ]

Secondary Outcome(s)

Caring perceptions scale (Brave, Nass, & Hutchinson, 2005)[T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Closeness (RCIT closeness scale; Sedikides et al., 1999)[T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Electrodermal activity (average; Empatica E4 device)[During interaction]

Emotional content in participant language during the interaction (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software [LIWC], Pennebaker et al., 2015)[During conversation]

Heart rate (average; Empatica E4 device)[During interaction]

Reasons for feeling or not feeling closeness towards the digital human (open-ended, written qualitative question)[T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Reasons for feeling or not feeling willing to seek emotional support from the digital human in future (open-ended, written qualitative question)[T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Skin temperature (average; Empatica E4 device)[During interaction]

Social support (100mm visual analogue scale)[T1: Baseline
T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Stress (100mm visual analogue scale)[T1: Baseline
T2: Immediately post-intervention completion.]

Secondary ID(s)

None

Source(s) of Monetary Support

Soul Machines Ltd

The University of Auckland

Secondary Sponsor(s)

Soul Machines Ltd

Ethics review

Status: Approved
Approval date: 01/11/2018
Contact:

The University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (UAHPEC)

Results

• Date Posted: 05/07/2021
• Date Completed: 24/07/2019