AUTHOR=Ceccaldi Eleonora , Damiano Rossana , Battaglino Cristina , Galetto Valentina , Zettin Marina 

TITLE=An Emotional Agent for Moral Impairment Rehabilitation in TBI Patients

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01102

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01102

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The ability to identify the emotions of others is a key component of what is known as social
cognition. Narratives exploit this mechanism to create an emotional bond with the characters and
to maintain the engagement of the audience throughout the story. In this paper, we describe a
case study in emotion understanding in stories that leverages a computational agent to explore
emotion impairment in a group of traumatic brain injured people. We focus on moral emotions,
in order to address the differences in moral functioning that characterize traumatic brain injured
patients. By comparing the understanding of the moral and emotional aspects of the agent’s
behavior in traumatic brain injured patients and in a control group of neurologically healthy
subjects, we observed slight, yet meaningful differences between the two groups. We describe
the test methodology and results, discussing their implications for the design of rehabilitation
applications that leverage virtual agents