The effectiveness of a social skills training workshop was assessed by comparing the rated competence of participants in an Interpersonal Skills Training Program (a 2-session, 12-hour workshop) to the rated competence of nonparticipants. This comparison was operationalized through a study design of the pre- and posttesting of 12 experimental and 22 control subjects. The assessment instruments used were Spitzberg's Conversational Skills Rating Scale (CSRS) and Curran's Simulated Social Interaction Test (SSIT). Two rating judges were utilized. Results, although modest, are in the expected direction. Measured competence on the CSRS failed to show significant improvement in the rated competence of the experimental group as compared to the rated competence of the control group. However, the SSIT did reveal significant improvement of the rated skill and anxiety of experimental subjects while the control group showed no significant improvement. In addition to assessing the effectiveness of the workshop, this study sought to find a positive correlation of the CSRS instrument to the SSIT instrument. As expected, the CSRS showed a positive correlation to the SSIT.

Embodied conversational agents put a “human” touch on intelligent tutoring systems by using conversation to support learning. When considering instruction in interpersonal domains, such as intercultural negotiation, the development of an interpersonal relationship with one’s pedagogical agent may play a significant role in learning. However, there is conflicting evidence in the literature both regarding the ability of agents to cultivate social relationships with humans, and their effect on learning. In this dissertation, I present a model of social dialog designed to affect learners’ interpersonal relations with virtual agents, a development process for creating social dialog, and empirical studies showing that this dialog has significant effects on learners’ perceptions of the agents and negotiation performance. In early work, I explicitly prompted learners to have social goals for the interaction. I found that while students who reported social goals for interacting with the agents had significantly higher learning gains, explicit prompting was not effective at inducing these goals. I thus focused on implicit influence of learner goals, developing a model of social instructional dialog (SID) that integrates conversational strategies that are theorized to produce interpersonal effects on relationships. In two subsequent studies, an agent with the SID model engendered greater feelings of entitativity, shared perspective, and trust, suggesting that the model improved learner social relationships with the agent. Importantly, these effects transferred to other agents encountered later in the environment. The social dialog condition also made fewer errors and achieved more negotiation objectives in a subsequent negotiation than a control group, evidence that the improved social relationship lead to better negotiation performance. These findings regarding interpersonal relationships with agents contribute to the literature on learner-agent interactions, and can guide the future development of agents in social environments.