Human emotion and the uncanny valley: A GLM, MDS, and Isomap analysis of robot video ratings

The eerie feeling attributed to human-looking robots and animated characters may be a key factor in our perceptual and cognitive discrimination of the human and humanlike. This study applies regression, the generalized linear model (GLM), factor analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS), and kernel isometric mapping (Isomap) to analyze ratings of 27 emotions of 18 moving figures whose appearance varies along a human likeness continuum. The results indicate (1) Attributions of eerie and creepy better capture our visceral reaction to an uncanny robot than strange. (2) Eerie and creepy are mainly associated with fear but also shocked, disgusted, and nervous. Strange is less strongly associated with emotion. (3) Thus, strange may be more cognitive, while eerie and creepy are more perceptual/emotional. (4) Human features increase ratings of human likeness. (5) Women are slightly more sensitive to eerie and creepy than men; and older people may be more willing to attribute human likeness to a robot despite its eeriness.

[1]  J. Prinz.  Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion , 2004 .

[2]  A. Fallon,et al.  A perspective on disgust. , 1987, Psychological review.

[3]  Aude Billard,et al.  Challenges in designing the body and the mind of an interactive robot , 2005 .

[4]  Jeanette Altarriba,et al.  The distinctiveness of emotion concepts: a comparison between emotion, abstract, and concrete words. , 2004, The American journal of psychology.

[5]  Takanori Shibata,et al.  Psychological and Social Effects of One Year Robot Assisted Activity on Elderly People at a Health Service Facility for the Aged , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  M. Matarić,et al.  Benchmarks for evaluating socially assistive robotics , 2007 .

[7]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Designing sociable robots , 2002 .

[8]  Tetsuo Ono,et al.  Development and evaluation of an interactive humanoid robot "Robovie" , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[9]  J. Russell.  A circumplex model of affect. , 1980 .

[10]  D. Watson,et al.  Toward a consensual structure of mood. , 1985, Psychological bulletin.

[11]  James A. Russell,et al.  Dimensions underlying children's emotion concepts. , 1983 .

[12]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. , 2000, Science.

[13]  J. Greenberg,et al.  Role of consciousness and accessibility of death-related thoughts in mortality salience effects. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[14]  William Revelle,et al.  Interpersonal Personality Measures Show Circumplex Structure Based on New Psychometric Criteria , 2002, Journal of personality assessment.

[15]  S. Paradiso,et al.  Cerebral blood flow changes associated with attribution of emotional valence to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral visual stimuli in a PET study of normal subjects. , 1999, The American journal of psychiatry.

[16]  Aaron Powers,et al.  Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation , 2003, The 12th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2003. Proceedings. ROMAN 2003..

[17]  Heeyoul Choi,et al.  Robust kernel Isomap , 2007, Pattern Recognit..

[18]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  A quantitative technique for analysing robot-human interactions , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[19]  Tatsuya Nomura,et al.  Experimental investigation of relationships between anxiety, negative attitudes, and allowable distance of robots , 2007 .

[20]  David Lee,et al.  The art of designing robot faces: dimensions for human-robot interaction , 2006, HRI '06.

[21]  J. M. Carroll,et al.  On the bipolarity of positive and negative affect. , 1999, Psychological bulletin.

[22]  Eshkol Rafaeli,et al.  A premature consensus: are happiness and sadness truly opposite affects? , 2006 .

[23]  P. Fox,et al.  Differential limbic–cortical correlates of sadness and anxiety in healthy subjects: implications for affective disorders , 2000, Biological Psychiatry.

[24]  Dc Washington.  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Ed. , 1994 .

[25]  C. Nass,et al.  Emotion in human-computer interaction , 2002 .

[26]  R. Plutchik.  The Nature of Emotions , 2001 .

[27]  Hideki Kozima,et al.  Interactive robots for communication-care: a case-study in autism therapy , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[28]  Takashi Minato,et al.  Generating natural motion in an android by mapping human motion , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[29]  Christoph Bartneck,et al.  How Convincing is Mr. Data's Smile: Affective Expressions of Machines , 2001, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[30]  J. Greenberg,et al.  A dual-process model of defense against conscious and unconscious death-related thoughts: an extension of terror management theory. , 1999, Psychological review.

[31]  A. Ohman.  Fear and anxiety : Evolutionary, cognitive and clinical perspectives , 1993 .

[32]  Heinrich H. Bülthoff,et al.  Evaluating the perceptual realism of animated facial expressions , 2008, TAP.

[33]  D. Perrett,et al.  A specific neural substrate for perceiving facial expressions of disgust , 1997, Nature.

[34]  Clifford Nass,et al.  The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places , 1996 .

[35]  K. MacDorman,et al.  Subjective Ratings of Robot Video Clips for Human Likeness, Familiarity, and Eeriness: An Exploration of the Uncanny Valley , 2006 .

[36]  R. Igliozzi,et al.  An android for enhancing social skills and emotion recognition in people with autism , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

[37]  H. Ishiguro,et al.  The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research , 2006 .

[38]  H. Ishiguro,et al.  The uncanny advantage of using androids in social and cognitive science research , 2006 .

[39]  Takashi Minato,et al.  Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Assessing Human Likeness by Eye Contact in an Android Testbed Permalink , 2005 .

[40]  Jodi Forlizzi,et al.  All robots are not created equal: the design and perception of humanoid robot heads , 2002, DIS '02.

[41]  S. Turkle.  Authenticity in the age of digital companions , 2007 .

[42]  Karl F. MacDorman,et al.  Does Japan really have robot mania? Comparing attitudes by implicit and explicit measures , 2008, AI & SOCIETY.

[43]  Shu-Fen Tseng,et al.  From digital divide to digital inequality: the global perspective , 2006, Int. J. Internet Enterp. Manag..

[44]  Louis C. Charland.  What emotions really are : The problem of psychological categories , 2001 .

[45]  J. Vaidya,et al.  The two general activation systems of affect: Structural findings, evolutionary considerations, and psychobiological evidence , 1999 .

[46]  Shu-Fen Tseng,et al.  New Economy, Underemployment, and Inadequate Employment , 2002 .

[47]  K. MacDorman,et al.  Automatic Emotion Prediction of Song Excerpts: Index Construction, Algorithm Design, and Empirical Comparison , 2007 .

[48]  Tetsuo Ono,et al.  Android as a telecommunication medium with a human-like presence , 2007, 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[49]  R. Kötter,et al.  Functional dissociation between medial and lateral prefrontal cortical spatiotemporal activation in negative and positive emotions: a combined fMRI/MEG study. , 2000, Cerebral cortex.

[50]  J. Russell,et al.  A cross-cultural study of a circumplex model of affect. , 1989 .

[51]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Computers that care: investigating the effects of orientation of emotion exhibited by an embodied computer agent , 2005, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[52]  K. Dautenhahn,et al.  Child and Adults Perspectives on Robot Appearance , 2005 .

[53]  R. Provine.  Laughter: A Scientific Investigation , 2000 .