Do We Need Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Agents? First Results of Human Perceptions of Emotional Intelligence in Humans Compared to Robots

Effects of Assistive Robot Behavior on Impressions of Patient Psychological Attributes: Vignette-Based Human-Robot Interaction Study

“…However, we found no support for our second and third hypotheses: there was no indication that people trusted or accepted the robot less when it behaved in a task-centered way. When Fan et al [43] found differences in trust based on the robots’ level of EI, their experimental manipulation was much more extreme than the one in this study: They compared a robot that was polite and understanding with a robot that was rude and abrasive.…”

“…We used a 24-item questionnaire based on a measure developed by Caruso and Salovey [45] and previously used by Fan et al [43] to measure perceptions of EI in robots. Items referred to emotion perception (eg, “Knows why people feel the way they do”), understanding (eg, “Considerate of others’ feelings”), and management (eg, “Creates positive moods in people”) capacities and participants indicated, on a 5-point Likert scale, how much each statement described the robot in the vignette from 0=not at all to 4=very much so (Cronbach alpha=.96).…”

“…In text vignettes, hypothetical situations are described to which participants are asked to respond. This is a common methodology in psychology and sociology experiments and has been used successfully in human-robot interaction research (eg, [43]) as an initial step of investigating and informing possible robot design choices.…”

“…We thus proposed that EI is needed in social robots that are to operate in the health care setting. To our knowledge, only a couple of studies have so far investigated EI in robots [43,44] and have found that people do expect and detect differences in EI in robot agents and that these differences influence how much robots are trusted [43]. It is thus important to understand people’s perceptions of robots’ EI in the context of patient care.…”

“…In the first step of the study, we investigated whether the robot behavior, patient-centered or task-centered, has an impact on (a) how the robot is perceived, in terms of EI, trustworthiness, and acceptability and (b) the impression that people form of the patient assisted by the robot. We hypothesized that (1) a robot that acts in a patient-centered way will be perceived as having higher EI, (2) inspired by the findings of [43], a robot that acts in a patient-centered way will be trusted more, and (3) accepted more, and we also hypothesized that (4) by acting in a patient-centered way and respecting the patient’s agency, the robot will cause others to think more highly of the patient.…”