An Emotional Agent for Moral Impairment Rehabilitation in TBI Patients.

Eleonora Ceccaldi,Rossana Damiano,Valentina Galetto,Cristina Battaglino,Marina Zettin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01102

Eleonora Ceccaldi, Rossana Damiano + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01102

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Abstract

The ability to identify the emotions of others is a key component of what is known as social cognition. Narratives exploit this mechanism to create an emotional bond with the characters and to maintain the engagement of the audience throughout the story. In this paper, we illustrate a case study in emotion understanding in stories that exploits a computational agent to explore emotion impairment in a group of traumatic brain injured people. The study focuses on moral emotions, aiming to investigate the differences in moral functioning that characterize traumatic brain injured patients. After comparing the understanding of the moral and emotional facets of the agent's behavior in traumatic brain injured patients and in neurologically intact controls, slight–yet meaningful–differences were observed between the two groups. We describe the test methodology and results, highlighting their implications for the design of rehabilitation applications based on virtual agents.

Highlights

Emotions play a crucial role in stories, as stated by scholars for centuries, from philosophy (Aristotle, 2013) and psychology (Bruner, 1991) to narratology (Giovannelli, 2009)
We described and discussed the results of the experiments on emotion understanding in stories that we conducted on a group TBI patients by leveraging a moral emotional agent
The results show that, notwithstanding no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups, the performance of the TBI patients differed from the control group concerning moral emotions

Summary

Introduction

Emotions play a crucial role in stories, as stated by scholars for centuries, from philosophy (Aristotle, 2013) and psychology (Bruner, 1991) to narratology (Giovannelli, 2009). The ability to read and understand the emotions of characters is crucial to grasping the meaning of a story. Such ability relies on what is known as social cognition. Traumatic brain injuries (here TBI), like other neurological conditions, lead to impairments in social cognition (Bibby and McDonald, 2005) as well as in controlling behavior and properly displaying emotions (Roberts et al, 2019)

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