Contextual recognition of robot emotions

Abstract

Researchers in emotional human-robot interaction (HRI) have often focused on the abilities of sociable emotional robots to express emotions themselves, and on the ability of people to recognize these. However, it has been shown that the recognition of human emotional expressions can be influenced by the surrounding context [17]. So far, no empirical research has been done to examine whether or not the recognition of robot emotions is similarly influenced. Two experiments are reported here that examine how a robot's simulated emotions were perceived by human observers, depending on what the surrounding context was. Evidence of an effect of surrounding context on user's perception of the synthetic robot emotions was obtained. Observers were better at recognizing the robot's expressions when they matched the emotional valence of accompanying pictures or recorded News announcements, than when they did not. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.