Empathic embarrassment towards non-human agents in virtual environments.

ABSTRACT: Humans feel empathic embarrassment by witnessing others go through embarrassing situations. We examined whether we feel such empathic embarrassment even with robot avatars. Participants observed a human avatar and a robot avatar face a series of embarrassing and non-embarrassing scenarios. We collected data for their empathic embarrassment and the cognitive empathy on a 7-point Likert scale. Both empathic embarrassment and cognitive empathy were significantly higher in the embarrassed condition compared to the non-embarrassed condition with both avatars, and the cognitive empathy was significantly higher with the human avatar. There was a tendency of participants showing a higher level of skin conductance while watching the human avatar go through embarrassing situations compared to the ro

SUBMITTER: Hapuarachchi H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10497614 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature