The avatar will see you now: Support from a virtual human provides socio-emotional benefits

When people are in emotional distress, they often seek support. Virtual humans may provide unique and complementary benefits to human support provision, given that virtual humans are readily available and help sharers overcome socio-evaluative threats, thereby increasing willingness to disclose. Here, we examined whether talking to a virtual human elicits socio-emotional benefits, and whether this is moderated by the type of support provided. To examine the scope of the potential effect, we compared two key types of support (emotional and cognitive), across two emotions (anger and worry). Participants (N = 115) shared two personal emotional experiences with a virtual human, who provided either emotional or cognitive support via the Wizard-of-Oz method (i.e., a human-operated avatar). Results showed that participants felt better after talking to the virtual human, as evidenced by reduced intensity of the target emotion and generally improved affect. The emotional improvement was similar for emotional and cognitive support. Cognitive support was also experienced as equally effective as emotional support, and led to similar levels of experienced closeness and desire to interact with the virtual human again. These findings suggest that talking to a virtual human can be a valuable form of support at times of distress.