@inproceedings{972,
  author = {Hye Yun and Matias Volonte and Timothy Bickmore},
  title = {Motivating health behavior change with a storytelling virtual agent},
  abstract = {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.},
  year = {2022},
  journal = {IVA '22: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents},
  chapter = {1},
  pages = {3},
  month = {09},
  url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10465405},
  doi = {10.1145/3514197.3549684},
}