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 (AuRea). The proposed de-sign is meant to facilitate emotional state understanding, increasing cognitive empathy without compromising the existing verbal, non-verbal, and paraverbal communication cues. We conducted a study where pairs of participants (N=12) engaged in three tasks where AuRea was found to positively affect performance and emotional understanding, but negatively affect memorization.