Research On Building Symbiotic Relationship Between Children And Virtual Pets With Emotional Intelligence

In our modern world, as human relations become more attenuated because of the falling birthrate, the aging population and the trend toward nuclear families the number of children who constantly feel lonely is increasing. How to reduce the children's feelings of loneliness, and enhance their social adjustment, have become a global concerned topic. Many studies have shown that the companion animals could alleviate the children's feelings of loneliness, and improve their social adjustment, but for various reasons, companion animals can not be extensively spread. Virtual pets as the extension of companion animals in virtual space, they have the potential to be widespread. So, how to use the features of virtual pets and companion animals to benefit the children is the focus of this paper.Firstly, base on the wide range of related research at home and broad, It's concluded that virtual pets with emotional intelligence can be used to reduce children's feelings of loneliness, nurture children's sense of responsibility and enhance their social adjustment.Secondly, through the research on the conditions and methods of how to develop the emotional intelligence of virtual pets. The similarity can be found between the virtual pets and children on the cognitive development. Thus, children's cognitive development theory can be used as a guide to design the emotional intelligence mode of virtual pets. In this case, the virtual pets could have the similar cognitive structure with the children, and this will facilitate the virtual pets to stand in the children's shoes to have equal communication.Then, through the comparison of the ways that virtual pets and animated character used to express their emotion, it can be concluded that the expressions that animated character used can be used by virtual pets too, this would make the virtual pets to convey more realistic and emotional appeal.Finally, stands on physical space and cognitive space, a number of ways to build the symbiotic relationship between virtual pets and children has been proposed. The symbiotic relationship between children and virtual pets could benefit their growth. That's why we research the symbiotic relationship between virtual pets and children. After that, a control experiment has been carried out to examine the effectiveness of the ways building the symbiotic relationship on physical space, qualitatively validated the feasibility and rationality of these methods.