Social Emotions for Social Robots - Studies on Affective Impressions in Human-Human and Human-Robot Interactions

In this paper, social emotions and expressive interaction are discussed in the context of human-robot interaction. The focus is on understanding natural human behaviour and how human socio-emotional stance manifests itself in various interactive settings. The paper compares two different types of agents, human partners and humanoid robot agents, and studies how the subjects’ behaviour and their impressions of the interaction differ depending on the agent type. The paper concludes that there is no statistically significant difference between the two conditions, but that the subjects are more certain and unanimous about their views when interacting with humans, but less sure and also less unanimous about their socio-emotional stance concerning a robot partner.