Empathic Virtual Buddy: Setting Up Informed Empathic Responses

In order to address the user’s emotions and give emotional support, affective agents need to know the emotional state of its users. For complex situations, it is not clear what these emotional states might be. However, this information is needed to design informed and suitable empathic responses for an affective agent. This paper presents normative affective ratings for cyberbullying situations. These normative ratings will be used in the reasoning engine of an empathic agent that provides emotional support and practical advice to victims of cyberbullying. In the experiment conducted to gather the normative ratings, we also determined the AffectButton is an adequate interface for gathering affective feedback for these situations; the AffectButton is valid (i.e. measures what it is supposed to measure) and the usability is acceptable.