An emotional adaption approach to increase helpfulness towards a robot

Abstract

Abstract-This paper describes a new methodological approach and robot system to trigger more prosocial human reactions towards a robot by transferring social-psychological principles from human-human interaction to human-robot interaction (HRI). The main idea is to trigger increased helpfulness by proactively creating similarity through dynamic emotional adaption of the robot to the mood of the human. This is achieved in an explicit and implicit way: Explicitly, by a similarity-statement of the robot of being in the same mood as the user, and implicitly by controlling the affective parameters of facial and verbal expressions of a robot head in an interaction scenario such that the current values of the human mood in the dimensions of pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) are matched. In a first step, this is accomplished by an initial self-assessment by the human participant to be extended by automatic emotion recognition modules in a later stage. The effectiveness of the approach is confirmed by significant experimental results.

Affective and Behavioral Responses to Robot-Initiated Social Touch: Toward Understanding the Opportunities and Limitations of Physical Contact in Human–Robot Interaction

“…Social Presence is a "psychological state in which virtual (para-authentic or artificial) actors are experienced as actual social actors in either sensory or non-sensory ways" (Lee, 2004). A higher social presence can positively affect the perceptions of the robot (Hinds et al, 2004;Lee et al, 2006), as well as the relationship with the robot (Gonsior et al, 2012;Schneider et al, 2012). Media low in richness usually fail to provide the user with a sense of social presence (Haans and IJsselsteijn, 2006).…”

“…Robots can emulate human strategies for the formation and maintenance of relationships; on-going relationships between human and robot can thus exist (e.g., Bickmore and Picard, 2005;Gonsior et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2013;Kühnlenz et al, 2013;Leite et al, 2013). Some human interpersonal touches are only appropriate between people in a close relationship (e.g., Burgoon et al, 1992;Thompson and Hampton, 2011;Camps et al, 2012).…”

Towards transferability of theories on prosocial behavior from Social Psychology to HRI

“…As described more detailed in [12], the emotional adaption approach is evaluated, again bound in the interactive person guessing game with the robotic head EDDIE. The tested conditions are:…”

“…2. Helpfulness measure means (on a scale from 0 to 80) and standard deviations according to [12] V. CONCLUSIONS Theories from Social Psychology have been introduced in terms of helpful behavior, and relevant influence factors, namely empathy and similarity, have been designed and transferred to HRI. A methodological approach to trigger more prosocial human reactions in terms of increased helpfulness towards a robot is developed, incorporating both relevant influence factors, and is confirmed by first significant experimental results.…”

A Survey of Autonomous Human Affect Detection Methods for Social Robots Engaged in Natural HRI

“…HRI studies have also been conducted with robots using dimensional models for affect classification using facial expressions [76][77][78], body language [5,79,80], voice [81,82], physiological signals [4,22,70,[83][84][85][86][87], and multi-modal systems [88][89][90]. The most common model used in HRI is the two-dimensional circumplex (valence-arousal) model.…”