Improving aspects of empathy and subjective performance for HRI through mirroring facial expressions

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of facial expressions on HRI is explored_ To determine their influence on empathy of a human towards a robot and perceived subjective performance, an experimental setup is created, in which participants engage in a dialog with the robot head EDDIE. The web-based gaming application "Akinator" serves as a backbone for the dialog structure. In this game, the robot tries to guess a thought of person chosen by the human by asking various questions about the person. In our experimental evaluation, the robot reacts in various ways to the human's facial expressions, either ignoring them, mirroring them, or displaying its own facial expression based on a psychological model for social awareness.In which way this robot behavior influences human perception of the interaction is investigated by a questionnaire. Our results support the hypothesis that the robot behavior during interaction heavily influences the extent of empathy by a human towards a robot and perceived subjective task-performance, with the adaptive modes clearly leading compared to the non adaptive mode.

Anthropomorphism and Human Likeness in the Design of Robots and Human-Robot Interaction

“…Participants evaluated the emotionally expressive robot more humanlike and anthropomorphized it more, due to the fact that it displayed two emotional states (happiness and fear) during the interaction [15]. Gonsior et al [43] could show a similar effect, measuring people's empathy toward the robot head EDDIE when (1) it was neutral, (2) displayed the subject's facial expression, and (3) when it displayed facial expressions according to its internal model, indirectly mirroring the subject's expression (labeled as the "social motivation model") [43]. People's ratings on empathy, subjective performance, trust, and likeability significantly differed between the three conditions and were most positive for the robot using the social motivation model.…”

An emotional adaption approach to increase helpfulness towards a robot

“…In previous work, the impact of emotional facial expressions on the empathy perceived by human users towards a robot was explored [22]. Results showed significantly increased empathy for emotional animation of facial expressions in an adaptive way to the user, compared with animation in a non-adaptive way.…”

“…Subsequently, the proband is asked to rate four statements concerning her situational empathy towards the robot on a scale from 1 (not true at all) to 5 (completely true) [22]: [34]. Based on 5-point semantic differential scales, her perception of the robot on four dimensions of HRI is measured: Anthropomorphism: how natural the robot appeared Animacy: the liveliness of the robot Likeability: how pleasant the robot appeared Perceived Intelligence: how the mental abilities of the robot were perceived Experimental results are presented in the following.…”

Extensive assessment and evaluation methodologies on assistive social robots for modelling human–robot interaction – A review

“…This applies especially when working with vulnerable user populations, interaction zones or proxemics that include intimate, personal, social and public (see Fig. 9) [47,167]. Developments in the last decade in the field of robotics have ushered the interactive robots to be used in socially assistive applications [ [135] Adapt to the specific requirements of evaluating social assistive robots through the five selected constructs, which are exactly the standard constructs of UTAUT Hennington and Janz [66] 2006 [58] De Ruyter et al [135] 2006 [64] Heerink et al [58,64] 2007 [66] 2010 [55] Heerink et al [57,62] Almere Model This model is very subjective and can be even more subjective than UTAUT model as they use participants' self-assessment questionnaires to obtain convergent validity for HRI behavioural measurements 2010 [57,62] (1) Almere Model is very appropriate for the elderly group's assessments; (2) Participants' self-assessment responses are used for the convergent validity of evaluation models used.…”