Towards Effective Emotional Support for Community First Responders Experiencing Stress

Community First Responders are often the first on the scene in rural medical emergencies, and experience situations where stress is inherent. One way of reducing this stress is through the use of an Empathic Conversational Agent which can provide Emotional Support, and be applied to systems designed for the pre-hospital care domain. This paper outlines the groundwork for this goal by describing the development of stories which describe a particular stressor, and validated Emotional Support categories and statements. These will be used when developing an algorithm for adapting Emotional Support to different stressful situations. We identified 5 categories of Emotional Support, and a set of 52 statements which were validated as belonging to these categories. We then present a preliminary analysis of the patterns of usage of Emotional Support categories for each of the stressors.