More social and emotional behaviour may lead to poorer perceptions of a social robot

Abstract

In this paper we present a study with an autonomous robot that plays a game against a participant, while expressing some social behaviors. We tried to explore the role of emotional sharing from the robot to the user, in order to understand how it might affect the perception of the robot by its users. To study this, two different conditions were formulated: 1-Sharing Condition (the robot shared its emotional state at the end of each board game); and 2-No Sharing Condition (the robot did not shared its emotions). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the conditions and this study followed a between-subject design methodology. It was expected that in the Sharing Condition participants would feel closer to the robot and would perceive/evaluate it as more humanlike. But results contradicted this expectation and called our attention for the caution that needs to exist when building social behaviours to implement in human-robot interactions (HRI).