Reward Seeking or Loss Aversion?

Abstract

According to psychology research, emotional induction has positive implications in many domains such as therapy and education. Our aim in this paper was to manipulate the Regulatory Focus Theory to assess its impact on the induction of regulatory focus related emotions in children in a pretend play scenario with a social robot. The Regulatory Focus Theory suggests that people follow one of two paradigms while attempting to achieve a goal; by seeking gains (promotion focus -associated with feelings of happiness) or by avoiding losses (prevention focus -associated with feelings of fear). We conducted a study with 69 school children in two different conditions (promotion vs. prevention). We succeeded in inducing happiness emotions in the promotion condition and found a resulting positive effect of the induction on children's social engagement with the robot. We also discuss the important implications of these results in both educational and child robot interaction fields.

Hurry Up, We Need to Find the Key! How Regulatory Focus Design Affects Children’s Trust in a Social Robot

“…A Wilcoxon signed-rank nonparametric test revealed that children show significantly more expressions of happiness in terms of smile (W 199, p 0.013, M 9.45, SD 12.92) and joy (W 216, p 0.03, M 7.52, SD 12.04) in the promotionfocused condition than in the prevention-focused condition (Elgarf et al, 2021).…”

“…Results suggest that children were more socially engaged in the promotion-focused condition than in the prevention-focused condition. Data analysis, procedures, and methods for the analysis of happiness and social engagement are explained in detail in the study by Elgarf et al (2021).…”

“…Our research study is the first work in cHRI to investigate whether RFT can be effectively applied to the design of the whole interaction rather than only to the robot's personality (i.e., matching the robot's behavior to the child's regulatory focus type). Within an educational context, we aim at investigating the possible effects of regulatory focus designs on emotional induction and engagement (Elgarf et al, 2021), narrative creativity and learning, and child-robot relationship formation. In this context, the present contribution focuses on assessing whether RFT can be used as a design strategy that promotes trust development between a child and a robot.…”

CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller Agent Developed by Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models

“…Agents (e.g robots and virtual characters) have long been used for educational purposes. A typical application and entertaining activity of using agents for education is storytelling used for helping children learn languages, develop their social skills and stimulate their creativity [23,22,13,35,12]. Previous literature has been in favor of structuring educational activities between a robot and a human user in a collaborative manner to render the activity more engaging and maximise the user's learning performance [1,2,20].…”