Empathic AuRea: Exploring the Effects of an Augmented Reality Cue for Emotional Sharing Across Three Face-to-Face Tasks

The Empathy-Effective Communication hypothesis states the better a speaker can understand their listener's emotions, the better can they transmit information; and the better a listener can understand the speaker's emotions, the better can they apprehend the information. Previous emotional sharing systems have managed to create a space of emotional understanding between collaborators on remote locations using bio-sensing, but how a context of face-to-face communication can benefit from biofeedback is still to be studied. This study introduces a new Augmented Reality communication cue from an emotion recognition neural network model, trained using electrocardiogram physiological data. The proposed design is meant to facilitate emotional state understanding, increasing cognitive empathy without compromising the existing verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal communication cues. We conducted a study where pairs of participants (N=12) engaged in a series of collaborative tasks where significant effects on performance were observed. Further, our assembly task benefited from higher emotional understanding as instructors adapted their instructional style to the worker's needs; while our memorization task saw a detriment to information apprehension.