Adapting Emotional Support to Personality for Carers Experiencing Stress.

Abstract

Carers - people who provide regular support for a friend or relative who could not manage without them - frequently report high levels of stress. Good emotional support (e.g. provided by an Intelligent Virtual Agent) could help relieve this stress. This study investigates whether adaptation to personality affects the amount and type of emotional support a carer is given and possible interaction effects with the stress experienced. We investigated the personality trait of Emotional Stability (ES) as it is interlinked with low tolerance for stress. Participants were presented with stressful scenarios experienced by a fictitious carer and description of their personality and asked to rank 6 emotional support messages. We predicted that people with low ES would be given more emotional support messages overall and that ES would affect the type of emotional support messages given in each scenario. We found that participants gave more praise to the high ES carer with a trend towards other support types for the low ES carer.