Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Agent for Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in VR

Managing negative emotions through emotion regulation (ER) is key to mental well-being. While virtual reality (VR) shows promise for supporting ER, prior work has primarily focused on selfregulation. This paper introduces a virtual agent that helps users manage emotions through conversation-based ER strategies. We compared three conditions: no agent, an agent with non-supportive responses, and an agent with ER-supportive responses. Results showed that the ER-supportive agent significantly improved users' emotional states and overall experience. Building on this, we conducted a second experiment to examine how the agent's appearance (realistic vs. cartoon) and voice tone (emotional vs. neutral) affect ER. Results indicated that an emotional voice tone improved users' ability to regulate emotions. Although a realistic appearance did not directly improve ER, it increased users' trust and sense of social presence. This paper contributes to VR and human-agent interaction by demonstrating the potential of virtual agents to support ER and offering design implications for future ER-supportive agents.