Can Robots Elicit Different Comfortability Levels?

Abstract

Social interactions entail often complex and dynamic situations that follow non-explicit, unwritten rules. Comprehending those signals and knowing how to respond becomes the key to the success of any social communication. Thus, in order to integrate a robot into a social context it should be capable of (at least) understanding others' emotional states. Nonetheless, mastering such skill is beyond reach for current robotics which is why we introduce the single internal state which we believe reveals the most regarding interactive communications. We named it Comfortability and defined it as (disapproving of or approving of ) the situation that arises as a result of a social interaction which influences one's own desire of maintaining or withdrawing from it. Consequently, in this paper we aim to show that Comfortability can be evoked by robots, investigating at the same time its connection with other emotional states. To do that, we performed two online experiments on 196 participants asking them to imagine being interviewed by a reporter on a sensitive topic. The interviewer's actions were presented in two different formats: the first experiment (the Narrative Context) presented the actions as text; whereas the second experiment (the Visual Context) presented the actions as videos performed by the humanoid robot iCub. The actions were designed to evoke different Comfortability levels. According to the experimental results, Comfortability differs from the other reported emotional and affective states and more importantly, it can be evoked by both, humans and robots in an imaginary interaction.

Can Robots Impact Human Comfortability During a Live Interview?

“…As mentioned in the Introduction, this paper builds upon the study by Redondo et al [11] where participants were requested (through an online questionnaire) to imagine being interviewed by a reporter while specific actions were presented to them. Depending on the experimental condition, the actions were shown through sentences (Narrative Context) or videos of the robot iCub (Visual Context).…”

“…The robotic actions used in the current real-life experiment were inspired by those proposed in the Visual Context condition [11]. To maximize the immersion, participants were recruited by the institutional press office IIT OpenTalk department and informed that their interview will be published on the online institutional magazine IO IIT OpenTalk magazine (https:opentalk.iit.it).…”

“…For this reason we decided to explore Comfortability, which was previously introduced in [11] as a single representation of people's feelings during an interaction. It is placed in a Extremely Uncomfortable to Extremely Comfortable uni-dimensional scale, and defined as "(disapproving of or approving of) the situation that arises as a result of an interaction which influences one's own desire of maintaining or withdrawing from it".…”

“…It is placed in a Extremely Uncomfortable to Extremely Comfortable uni-dimensional scale, and defined as "(disapproving of or approving of) the situation that arises as a result of an interaction which influences one's own desire of maintaining or withdrawing from it". Redondo, et al [11] explored already the impact of a humanoid robot on someone's Comfortability. Concretely, they exposed participants with prerecorded videos of the humanoid robot iCub [9] acting as an interviewer in a virtual and imaginary interaction.…”

Comfortability Recognition from Visual Non-verbal Cues

“…Comfortability was introduced in [45] as "(disapproving of or approving of) the situation that arises as a result of an interaction, which influences one's own desire of maintaining or withdrawing from it". The strong point about Comfortability is that it focuses on how a person feels respect to other agents' actions without deepening on the specific emotional or affective states that might arise in parallel.…”