Meeting people vitually: experiments in shared virtual environments
The social life of avatars
Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Collaborative virtual environments
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
Computers in Human Behavior
Designing nonverbal communication for pedagogical agents: When less is more
Computers in Human Behavior
"It doesn't matter what you are!" Explaining social effects of agents and avatars
Computers in Human Behavior
Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution
Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution
In situ observations of non-verbal emotional behaviours for multimodal avatar design in e-commerce
Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia, Interaction, Design and Innovation
Second Life in the Psychology Classroom: Teaching and Research Possibilities
International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies
My avatar is pregnant! Representation of pregnancy, birth, and maternity in a virtual world
Computers in Human Behavior
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The purpose of this study was to examine social evaluations (i.e., perceptions of empathy and positivity) following peoples' interactions with digital human representations. Female research participants engaged in a 3-min interaction while immersed in a 3-D immersive virtual environment with a ''peer counselor.'' Participants were led to believe that the peer counselor was either an embodied agent (i.e., computer algorithm) or an avatar (i.e., another person). During the interaction, the peer counselor either smiled or not. As predicted, a digitally-rendered smile was found to affect participants' social evaluations. However, these effects were moderated by participants' beliefs about their interaction partner. Specifically, smiles enhanced social evaluations of embodied agents but degraded them for avatars. Although these results are consistent with other findings concerning the communicative realism of embodied agents and avatars they uniquely demonstrate that people's beliefs alone, rather than actual differences in virtual representations, can impact social evaluations.