Social support has been demonstrated in many studies to have a significant positive impact on health. This is an on-going experiment to evaluate the calming effects of a relational agent on users in stressful situations. We hypothesize that in order for computer agents to provide the most effective comforting they first need to establish social bonds with users.

• Bickmore, T. and Schulman, D. (2007) Practical Approaches to Comforting Users with Relational Agents ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), San Jose, CA. PDF
• Bickmore, T. and Schulman, D. (2006) The Comforting Presence of Relational Agents. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Montreal, Canada. PDF