| dc.description.abstract | The rapid development of virtual characters has enormous influence on human-computer interaction and the perception of people. In the past, computers just only use text-based interface to communicate with users, but today life-like virtual characters can provide face-to-face emotional interaction to assist people in completing all kinds of tasks. On the other hand, caring plays a very crucial role in education and medical professions to help people deal with emotional problems. Therefore, in this paper, we present an interactive caring virtual character who uses facial expressions, hand gestures, body movements, and social dialogue to show empathy and active listening for interacting with learners and making them feel cared in a learning system. The caring virtual character would listen to learners’ social and affective needs, provide empathic feedback to recover from their negative emotions (such as frustration), and encourage learners to overcome academic problems. The caring virtual character’’s effectiveness was evaluated against two control conditions (virtual character without caring ability and text-based caring agent). The preliminary results show that, in comparison with the two controls, the virtual character with caring ability may not only make the subjects feel more cared and increase the interaction between the subjects and the learning system, but also has positive effects to a certain degree on the subjects’’ learning, promoting their interest in course material, and making them more engaged in learning. | en_US |