  How does empathy influence creative problem solving? We introduce a
computational empathy intervention based on context-specific affective mimicry
and perspective taking by a virtual agent appearing in the form of a
well-dressed polar bear. In an online experiment with 1,006 participants
randomly assigned to an emotion elicitation intervention (with a control
elicitation condition and anger elicitation condition) and a computational
empathy intervention (with a control virtual agent and an empathic virtual
agent), we examine how anger and empathy influence participants' performance in
solving a word game based on Wordle. We find participants who are assigned to
the anger elicitation condition perform significantly worse on multiple
performance metrics than participants assigned to the control condition.
However, we find the empathic virtual agent counteracts the drop in performance
induced by the anger condition such that participants assigned to both the
empathic virtual agent and the anger condition perform no differently than
participants in the control elicitation condition and significantly better than
participants assigned to the control virtual agent and the anger elicitation
condition. While empathy reduces the negative effects of anger, we do not find
evidence that the empathic virtual agent influences performance of participants
who are assigned to the control elicitation condition. By introducing a
framework for computational empathy interventions and conducting a two-by-two
factorial design randomized experiment, we provide rigorous, empirical evidence
that computational empathy can counteract the negative effects of anger on
creative problem solving.
