Positive Versus Negative Agents: The Effects of Emotions on Learning

The current study investigates the impact of affect, mood contagion, and linguistic alignment on learning during tutorial conversations between a human student and two artificial pedagogical agents. The study uses an Intelligent Tutoring System known as OperationARIES! to engage students in tutorial conversations with animated agents. In this investigation, 48 college students (N = 48) conversed with pedagogical agents as they displayed 3 different moods (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral) along with a control condition in a within-subjects design. Results indicate that the mood of the agent did not significantly impact student learning even though mood contagion did occur between the artificial agent and the human student. Learning was influenced by the student\u27s self-reported arousal level and the alignment scores that reflected a shared mental representation between the human student and the artificial agents. The results suggest that arousal and linguistic alignment during the tutorial conversations may play a role in learning