Emotional Support Companions in Virtual Reality

According to social psychological models, the presence of another person or even a virtual character in stressful situations can have stress-reducing effects. Thereby, the outcome can depend on the congruency between one's mood and the perceived mood of the other person. This dependence guides the design of VR applications for stress reduction, which use different virtual companion designs depending on the emotional state of individual users. This paper describes an ongoing design and development process towards such an emotionally supportive companion and shares initial results con-cerning the perception and stress-reducing effects of positively- and negatively-minded companions.