Assessing the Supportiveness of Gift Emoticons in Care Scenarios

Kirsten Ailsa Smith

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPublished conference contribution

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

There is potential for an Intelligent Virtual Agent to provide good emotional support for carers; however, its text-based messages lack context and may be misconstrued. One possible solution is to use gift emoticons to convey support. I investigate how supportive an emotional support statement is when paired with a digital gift of flowers, varying the modality (text/graphics) and explicitness of the gift (implicit/explicit). Adding a graphical emoticon improved support, measured on four scales of appropriateness, helpfulness, effectiveness and sensitivity. Images of flowers were rated higher than text; additionally, appropriate and sensitive ratings were consistently higher than effective and helpful ratings. There was no difference between explicit and implicit gifts. Participants reported that adding flowers to the support message was sympathetic and represented an effort to cheer the carer up.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM Press
Pages151-156
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-3146-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015
EventCHI 2015 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 18 Apr 201523 May 2015

Conference

ConferenceCHI 2015
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period18/04/1523/05/15

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