  One way to improve the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic agents
is to have humans empathize with the agents. In this study, we focused on a
task between agents and humans. We experimentally investigated hypotheses
stating that task difficulty and task content facilitate human empathy. The
experiment was a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with four conditions:
task difficulty (high, low) and task content (competitive, cooperative). The
results showed no main effect for the task content factor and a significant
main effect for the task difficulty factor. In addition, pre-task empathy
toward the agent decreased after the task. The ANOVA showed that one category
of empathy toward the agent increased when the task difficulty was higher than
when it was lower.This indicated that this category of empathy was more likely
to be affected by the task. The task itself used can be an important factor
when manipulating each category of empathy.
