Does the Number of Agents with Vagueness Affect Empathy Expression?

Talking to others about one's thoughts and gaining empathy is important to controlling emotions and relieving stress. Unfortunately, suitable conversation partners are not always available. While conversational agents might serve as partners, the technology for accurately interpreting user's statements and unspoken intentions remains imperfect. When agents express explicit empathy based on inaccurate interpretations of the user's message, users are likely to feel discomfort. Existing study suggested that when a single agent provided feedback to a user's utterance with simple motions, users tended to feel empathy from the agent in limited scenes. We explore the hypothesis that using two agents, compared to using one agent, might be more effective on users perception of empathy. This study investigates the relationship between the number of agents and the degree to which users feel empathy from the agent using simple motions in scenarios. The experimental results showed that the number of agents may not affect the degree to which users feel empathy from the agent.