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Creators/Authors contains: "Volonte, Matias"

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  1. ; ; (, IVA '22: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents)
    Martinho, C; Dias, J (Ed.)
    We developed a virtual agent that motivates church-going users to change their health behavior by telling existing cultural narratives that have high relevance with the counseling topic in an engaging way. We evaluated this agent in a between-subjects experiment where participants interacted with an agent that counseled them on nutrition either without a story, with a story but told in a neutral speech style, or with a story using dramatic delivery inspired by church sermons. We found that interaction with either one of the storytelling agents leads to a significantly greater change in confidence to engage in the target behavior of healthy eating than interacting with a non-storytelling agent, demonstrating the efficacy of stories in health counseling by virtual agents. 
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    Full Text Available 
  2. ; ; (, IVA '22: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents)
    Martinho, Carlos; Dias, Joao (Ed.)
    We developed a virtual agent that motivates church-going users to change their health behavior by telling existing cultural narratives that have high relevance with the counseling topic in an engaging way. We evaluated this agent in a between-subjects experiment where participants interacted with an agent that counseled them on nutrition either without a story, with a story but told in a neutral speech style, or with a story using dramatic delivery inspired by church sermons. We found that interaction with either one of the storytelling agents leads to a significantly greater change in confidence to engage in the target behavior of healthy eating than interacting with a non-storytelling agent, demonstrating the efficacy of stories in health counseling by virtual agents. 
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    Accepted Manuscript Full Text Available