Future service robots mass-produced for practical applications may benefit from having personalities. To engineer robot personalities in significant quantities for practical applications, we need first to identify the personality dimensions on which personality traits can be effectively optimised by minimising the distances between engineering targets and the corresponding robots under construction, since not all personality dimensions are applicable and equally prominent. Whether optimisation is possible on a personality dimension depends on how specific users consider the personalities of a type of robot, especially whether they can provide effective feedback to guide the optimisation of certain traits on a personality dimension. The dimensions may vary from user group to user group since not all people consider a type of trait to be relevant to a type of robot, which our results corroborate. Therefore, we had proposed a test procedure as an engineering tool to identify, with the help of a user group, personality dimensions for engineering robot personalities out of a type of robot knowing its typical usage. It applies to robots that can imitate human behaviour and small user groups with at least eight people. We confirmed its effectiveness in limited-scope tests.
Engineering robot personalities is a challenge of multiple folds. Every robot that interacts with humans is an individual physical presence that may require their own personality. Thus, robot personalities engineers face a problem that is the reverse of that of personality psychologists: robot personalities engineers need to make batches of identical robots into individual personalities, as oppose to formulating comprehensive yet parsimonious descriptions of individual personalities that already exist. The robot personality research so far has been fruitful in demonstrating the positive effects of robot personality but unfruitful in insights into how robot personalities can be engineered in significant quantities. To engineer robot personalities for mass-produced robots we need a generative personality model with a structure to encode a robot’s individual characteristics as personality traits and generate behaviour with inter- and intra-individual differences that reflect those characteristics. We propose a generative personality model shaped by goals as part of a personality AI for robots towards which we have been working, and we conducted tests to investigate how many individual personalities the model can practically support when it is used for expressing personalities via non-verbal behaviour on the heads of humanoid robots.
Although many studies have suggested that nature-based activities have a healing effect on human beings, there is little research on the underlying mechanism. This study investigated the role of nature connectedness in the relationship between the perception of nature and individuals’ physical and psychological health. We recruited essential workers who participated in disease prevention and control during the COVID-19 pandemic and their family members as the subjects for this study. The stress levels experienced by this group made them an ideal sample. The results of a survey-based study showed that nature-based activities had a positive effect on alleviating state anxiety levels. The results also showed that nature-based activities affected perceived restoration via the feeling of nature connectedness. This study examined the healing effect of nature-based activities that stimulate the five senses and nature connectedness and explored the potential of nature-based treatments for people experiencing high levels of stress.
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