Designing Affective Pedagogical Agents: How learners' and agents' gender and age influence emotion in an online tutoring task

Abstract

In designing pedagogical agents, it is important to understand what factors stimulate the learner's affect to enhance learning motivation. To do so, the present study investigated the influence of affective mood on gender types of the (1) learner and the (2) pedagogical agent through an online tutoring activity. Affective states were ascertained using a questionnaire constructed on the basis of Russell's (1980) two-dimensional affective model data for 16 times during the tutoring activities. The participants were 290 psychology students, who were made to perform a homework activity. The results of two experiments consistently revealed that male students were sensitive to the pleasantness bipolar and female students were sensitive to the activation bipolar.