Abstract
Abstract Although computers could offer emotional support as well as task support when aiding a user for a complex task, there is little current understanding of how they might do this. Moreover existing demonstrations of emotional support, though promising, only cover a small number of types of support and investigate a limited number of algorithms designed by hand. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation that starts from first principles, determining different categories of stressors for which emotional support might be useful, different categories of emotional support utterances and promising algorithms for deciding the content and form of textual emotional support messages according to the stressors present. At each stage, the results are validated through empirical experiments with human participants who, for instance, are required to place statements into categories, evaluate possible support messages in different imagined situations and compose their own emotional support from options offered. This development methodology allows us to avoid potentially challenging ethical issues in presenting people with stressful situations. Although our algorithms are attempting to choose emotional support based on the general, “naive” competence of human speakers, we use as a running example situations that can arise when attending a medical emergency and awaiting expert help.
Highlights
The APA categorizes stress into the following three categories (APA, 2013): (1) acute stress occurs over short durations of time and comes from pressures from the recent past or anticipated near future, (2) episodic stress is when an individual experiences one episode of acute stress which is followed shortly and frequently by another episode, (3) chronic stress is a long term experience which is continuous over a long duration of time, such as months and years
To identify different stressors for Community First Responders (CFRs), we started from the NASA-TLX (Hart, 2006), a multi-dimensional subjective scale for measuring task workload developed by the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration
This paper presents several studies which investigate the development of an emotional support algorithm for the generation of effective and appropriate emotional support for different individual stressors
Summary
We assume in this paper that emotional support to a person is relevant when there is one or more stressor in the environment. We only consider emotional support for acute stress. To identify different stressors for CFRs, we started from the NASA-TLX (Hart, 2006), a multi-dimensional subjective scale for measuring task workload developed by the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The NASA-TLX measures six workload facets: mental demand, temporal demand, physical demand, frustration, effort, and performance. We excluded effort and performance, as it was assumed that CFRs would always give their maximum effort and that to measure performance would be inappropriate. The current work takes this list of stressors as a starting point, and considers mental demand, temporal demand, physical demand, emotional demand, frustration, interruption and isolation (see Fig. 2 for informal glosses of these terms)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
