Storytelling can be used by conversational agents in a wide variety of domains to maintain user engagement, both within a single interaction and over dozens or hundreds of interactions over time. The majority of agents designed with this ability to date deliver their stories as monologues without user input. However, people rarely tell stories in conversations this way, and instead rely on list...

The present study investigates the perception of technical descriptions and of stories where the events are driven by the motivations and emotions of their characters. The study is explorative, using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and with a total of 10 participants. The participants accepted the use of stories and strongly preferred stories with emotional and dramatic elements. The...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Local television news commonly reports on health. This study aimed to characterize local TV news stroke reporting in America. METHODS Content analysis of stroke stories reported on 122 US local television stations. All stroke stories were coded for main focus and discussion of risk factors, stroke signs and symptoms, recombinant tissue plasminogen activator, treatment w...

Because many world folk stories describe wife abuse with remarkable insight, these stories are useful in addressing the sensitive issues that arise when counseling battered women. Following the views of Milton Erickson and Joan Laird about the importance of stories as a therapeutic tool, techniques were developed in a regional Coalition for Battered Women in North Carolina to use folk stories a...

Case-based teaching systems, like good human teachers, tell stories in order to help students learn. A case-based teaching system engages a student in a challenging task and monitors his actions looking for opportunities to tell stories that will assist the learning process. In order to produce stories at the appropriate moment, a casebased teaching system must have a library of stories that ar...

In this paper, we describe our findings from research designed to explore the effect of virtual human counselors' self-disclosure using intimate human back stories on real human clients' social responses in psychological counseling sessions. To investigate this subject, we designed an experiment involving two conditions of the counselors' self-disclosure: human back stories and computer back st...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate a media intervention designed to improve one newspaper's portrayal of mental illnesses, specifically, schizophrenia. The project was part of an international antistigma program, Open the Doors, organized by the World Psychiatric Association. METHODS The media intervention attempted to influence news content directly by providing reporters with more accurate background in...

Previous research has shown that information that is repeated is more likely to be rated as true than information that has not been heard before. The current experiment examines whether familiarity with false news stories would increase rates of truthfulness and plausibility for these events. Further, the experiment tested whether false stories that were familiar would result in the creation of...

Stories are pervasive in conversation between people [5]. They are used to establish identity pass on cultural heritage, and build rapport. Often stories are swapped when one conversational participant will reply to a story with a story. Stories are also told by virtual humans [1, 6, 2]. In creating or mining stories for a virtual human (VH) to tell, there are a number of considerations that co...