ICT’s Sin-hwa Kang Receives New Investigator Award at CyberTherapy & CyberPsychology Conference

ICT research associate Sin-hwa Kang was given the New Investigator Award at the 16th Annual CyberTherapy & CyberPsychology Conference in Gatineau, Canada. The prize honors a researcher new to the field of cybertherapy who makes a presentation of outstanding research quality at the Cybertherapy conference. Kang’s winning presentation, People Like Virtual Counselors that Highly Disclose about Themselves, described findings from research designed to explore the effect of self-disclosure between virtual human counselors (interviewers) and human users (interviewees) on users’ social responses in counseling sessions. The results demonstrated that users reported more co-presence and social attraction to virtual humans who disclosed highly intimate information about themselves than when compared to other virtual humans who disclosed less intimate or no information about themselves. Jon Gratch, ICT’s associate director for virtual humans research co-authored the paper.
Read the paper.