Virtual humans as social actors: Investigating the effects of emotion on perceived emotional intelligence, anthropomorphism, and authenticity

Jeongmin Ham*, Sitan Li, Jiemin Looi, Matthew Eastin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to conferenceConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

Virtual humans are digitally-created characters with human-like appearances and they have appeared in many virtual environments such as social media. They emulate human-like behaviors including displaying different emotions to enrich their narratives. There is limited knowledge about whether these emotional cues have an effect on media users’ perceptions and attitudes toward the virtual humans as well as how virtual humans’ emotions are interpreted. Guided by the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, this study employed both computational and experimental methods. The two studies explored the extent to which the virtual human's social media posts contain emotions and the valence of these emotions as well as examine in a mediation model whether the depictions of a virtual human’s happiness, love, sadness, and sexual desire (compared with no emotion) have an impact on media users’ attitudes toward the virtual human. The findings suggest that perceived emotional intelligence, anthropomorphism, and authenticity of the virtual human are significant serial mediators between the display of emotions to attitude towards the virtual human. In order to develop successful communication strategies with social media users, affective characteristics, such as emotional expressions that match the captions and emojis used in virtual humans’ social media posts, should be included when portraying virtual humans as favorable social beings.

Conference

Conference73rd Annual International Communication Association Conference, ICA 2023
Abbreviated titleICA 2023
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period25/05/2329/05/23
Internet address

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