Empathy and Placebo for Autonomous Agents

Computational modeling of emotion, physiology and personality is a major challenge in order to design believable virtual humans. These factors have an impact on both the individual behavior and the collective one. This requires to take into account the empathy phenomenon. Furthermore, in a crisis simulation context where the virtual humans can be contaminated by radiological or chemical substances, empathy may lead to placebo or nocebo effects. Stemming from works in the multi-agent systems (MAS) domain, we consider that a virtual human has two parts, its mind and its body. The agent is influenced by the mind, but controlled by the environment which manages the empathy and nocebo process. We describe these mechanisms and show the results of several experiments.