How an animated pedagogical agent’s emotional expression can impact trust and learning outcomes: Emotive virtual humans have the same results with a smile or scowl

Abstract

The current study examines if the emotional expression of an animated pedagogical agent has an impact on the trust formed between learners and the agent or on learning outcomes. Researchers have shown that the design decisions of pedagogical agents, or virtual humans, can impact user interaction. However, the effects of the virtual human’s emotional expression have yet to be fully understood. Results from this study show that trust is not affected by the emotional expression of the agents. However, evidence suggests that emotive virtual humans reduce attrition effects compared to agents without emotional expressions.