A robot with style, because you are worth it!

Research in social human-robot interaction gets more and more of its inspiration from psychology to make robots' behaviour more socially acceptable when among humans. In the context of rendering a robot more suitable to be a companion for children, we propose different parenting styles (namely authoritative and permissive) and evaluate them. As a first step, we use expression cues of the parenting styles; we implemented behaviours of different styles played out by two robots, Nao and Reeti, with body and facial channels respectively for communication. 88 parents watched videos of the robots and replied to a questionnaire about the authoritativeness of the robots. The results showed that the styles were perceptible through the non-verbal behaviours of the robots. The dominant condition was perceived to be more authoritative than the less dominant condition, which validates the hypothesis. We also notice an effect of the robot's modality of expressions; further work should confirm hypotheses on the modality's effects of the perception on authoritativeness of the robot.

[1]  Karl F. MacDorman,et al.  Revisiting the uncanny valley theory: Developing and validating an alternative to the Godspeed indices , 2010, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[2]  Julie Dugdale,et al.  Modelling interactions in a mixed agent world , 2012, ANSS 2012.

[3]  Fabio Tesser,et al.  Multimodal child-robot interaction: building social bonds , 2013, HRI 2013.

[4]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human–robot interaction , 2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[5]  E. Sadler‐Smith,et al.  Cognitive style and instructional preferences , 1999 .

[6]  Catherine Pelachaud,et al.  Studies on gesture expressivity for a virtual agent , 2009, Speech Commun..

[7]  Raymond H. Cuijpers,et al.  Imitating Human Emotions with Artificial Facial Expressions , 2013, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[8]  Judith A. Hall,et al.  Nonverbal behavior and the vertical dimension of social relations: a meta-analysis. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[9]  Koen V. Hindriks,et al.  Mood expression through parameterized functional behavior of robots , 2013, 2013 IEEE RO-MAN.

[10]  Koen V. Hindriks,et al.  Bodily Mood Expression: Recognize Moods from Functional Behaviors of Humanoid Robots , 2013, ICSR.

[11]  Gilbert Cockton,et al.  From quality in use to value in the world , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[12]  David Reitman,et al.  Development and Validation of the Parental Authority Questionnaire – Revised , 2002 .

[13]  Kai Oliver Arras,et al.  Robot-specific social cues in emotional body language , 2012, 2012 IEEE RO-MAN: The 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[14]  K. Scherer,et al.  Bodily expression of emotion , 2009 .