Timothy Min - Inducing Empathy Among Strangers Through Biofeedback-Controlled Stimuli

As interfaces and installations controlled by biofeedback continue
to grow in popularity, the opportunities for these systems to elicit
empathy must be further explored and developed. Past research
on empathetic interfaces supports that listening to heartbeats increased the listeners’ empathy and emotional perspectives. The first
author created an empathetic artistic installation where a musical
interface functions using the heart rate of two users. We hypothesized that assigning two users the task of synchronizing heartbeats
based on musical biofeedback system will increase the users’ levels of empathy towards one another. An informal observational
pilot study assessed how the biofeedback-generated musical stimuli induced empathy among strangers, and whether these effects
correlated directly to the biofeedback or only the composition design. Observations of behavioral changes and biosignals among
participants support the effectiveness of increasing empathy among
strangers through such interactions. This installation exhibits design implications for empathetic auditory interfaces, and offers a
method to integrate the effects of biofeedback into ensuing virtual
designs and installations.