Role of Emotions in Perception of Humanness of Virtual Agents

We analyzed the performance of an agent based on an appraisal theory of human emotion with respect to how it modulates play in a social dilemma game. An experiment with 117 participants showed how the agent was rated on dimensions of Human-Uniqueness (HU), separating humans from animals, and Human-Nature (HN), separating humans from machines. We showed that our appraisal theoretic agent significantly improved on both HN and HU ratings, compared to the baselines. We also showed that perception of humanness positively affects cooperation and enjoyment.