The Psychosocial Fuzziness of Fear in the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Era and the Role of Robots

Marchetti, Antonio; Dio, Cinzia Di; Massaro, Davide; Manzi, Federico

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02245

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Thus, the HSRs' appearance represents an important social affordance for HRIs, as further demonstrated by the psychological research on racial and disability prejudice (Todd et al, 2011;Macdonald et al, 2017;Sarti et al, 2019;Manzi et al, 2020b). The anthropomorphic features of the HSRs can increase humans' perception of humanness, such as mind attribution and personality, and influence other psychological mechanisms and processes (Kiesler and Goetz, 2002;MacDorman et al, 2005;Powers and Kiesler, 2006;Bartneck et al, 2008;Broadbent et al, 2013;Złotowski et al, 2015;Marchetti et al, 2020).…”

Section: Anthropomorphismmentioning

confidence: 98%

A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots

et al. 2020

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Recent technological developments in robotics has driven the design and production of different humanoid robots. Several studies have highlighted that the presence of human-like physical features could lead both adults and children to anthropomorphize the robots. In the present study we aimed to compare the attribution of mental states to two humanoid robots, NAO and Robovie, which differed in the degree of anthropomorphism. Children aged 5, 7, and 9 years were required to attribute mental states to the NAO robot, which presents more human-like characteristics compared to the Robovie robot, whose physical features look more mechanical. The results on mental state attribution as a function of children’s age and robot type showed that 5-year-olds have a greater tendency to anthropomorphize robots than older children, regardless of the type of robot. Moreover, the findings revealed that, although children aged 7 and 9 years attributed a certain degree of human-like mental features to both robots, they attributed greater mental states to NAO than Robovie compared to younger children. These results generally show that children tend to anthropomorphize humanoid robots that also present some mechanical characteristics, such as Robovie. Nevertheless, age-related differences showed that they should be endowed with physical characteristics closely resembling human ones to increase older children’s perception of human likeness. These findings have important implications for the design of robots, which also needs to consider the user’s target age, as well as for the generalizability issue of research findings that are commonly associated with the use of specific types of robots.

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Section: Anthropomorphismmentioning

confidence: 98%

A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots

et al. 2020

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“…Regarding the negative attitudes toward social robots, the potential resistance and ambivalence were warned including the risk of uncanny valley phenomenon [ 118 ]. Future research is still needed to investigate the user’s experience with social robots, especially during the pandemic.…”

Section: Robots In Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Wang

2021

Journal of Manufacturing Systems

194

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Since the late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has been spread all around the world. The pandemic is a critical challenge to the health and safety of the general public, the medical staff and the medical systems worldwide. It has been globally proposed to utilise robots during the pandemic, to improve the treatment of patients and leverage the load of the medical system. However, there is still a lack of detailed and systematic review of the robotic research for the pandemic, from the technologies’ perspective. Thus a thorough literature survey is conducted in this research and more than 280 publications have been reviewed, with the focus on robotics during the pandemic. The main contribution of this literature survey is to answer two research questions, i.e. 1) what the main research contributions are to combat the pandemic from the robotic technologies’ perspective, and 2) what the promising supporting technologies are needed during and after the pandemic to help and guide future robotics research. The current achievements of robotic technologies are reviewed and discussed in different categories, followed by the identification of the representative work’s technology readiness level. The future research trends and essential technologies are then highlighted, including artificial intelligence, 5 G, big data, wireless sensor network, and human-robot collaboration.

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“…I n the last 20 years, different types of humanoid social robots (HSRs) were built to help and support people in different contexts from domestic to health care to educational. [1][2][3][4] In these contexts, the physical human likeness of the HSRs has proven to be particularly effective in the interactions with humans. 2,[5][6][7] A recent review of the literature by Marchetti et al 1 on humanoid robots showed that the quality of human-robot interactions (HRIs) improves as a function of at least two factors: the physical appearance of the robot (i.e., the design) and the behaviors performed by the robot (i.e., the interactional routines).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots Are Not All the Same: Young Adults' Expectations, Attitudes, and Mental Attribution to Two Humanoid Social Robots

Manzi

Massaro

Lernia

et al. 2021

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking

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The human physical resemblance of humanoid social robots (HRSs) has proven to be particularly effective in interactions with humans in different contexts. In particular, two main factors affect the quality of human-robot interaction, the physical appearance and the behaviors performed by the robot. In this study, we examined the psychological effect of two HRSs, NAO and Pepper. Although some studies have shown that these two robots are very similar in terms of the human likeness, other evidence has shown some differences in their design affecting different psychological elements of the human partner. The present study aims to analyze the variability of the attributions of mental states (AMS), expectations of robotic development and negative attitudes as a function of the physical appearance of two HRSs after observing a real interaction with a human (an experimenter). For this purpose, two groups of young adults were recruited, one for the NAO (N = 100, M = 20.22) and the other for the Pepper (N = 74, M = 21.76). The results showed that both the observation of interaction and the type of robot affect the AMS, with a greater AMS to Pepper robot compared to NAO. People's expectations, instead, are influenced by the interaction and are independent of the type of robot. Finally, negative attitudes are independent of both the interaction and the type of robot. The study showed that also subtle differences in the physical appearance of HSRs have significant effects on how humans perceived robots.

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The Psychosocial Fuzziness of Fear in the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Era and the Role of Robots

Cited by 11 publications

References 19 publications

A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots

A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots

A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Robots Are Not All the Same: Young Adults' Expectations, Attitudes, and Mental Attribution to Two Humanoid Social Robots

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