Cartoon Clinicians: Precursors of Virtual Therapy?

Researchers have discovered that people are sometimes more willing to share their fears when they are able to open up to a virtual interviewer, rather than to a real person.
Specifically, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) found soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were more likely to reveal their problem to a on-screen cartoon character (as opposed to a live human being) as long as they could be sure that information remained anonymous.
Continue reading the full article in Communications of the ACM.