On the Role of Personality and Empathy in Human-Human, Human-Agent, and Human-Robot Mimicry

Abstract

Facial mimicry is crucial in social interactions as it communicates the intent to bond with another person. While human-human mimicry has been extensively studied, human-agent and human-robot mimicry have been addressed only recently, and the individual characteristics that affect them are still unknown. This paper explores whether the humanlikeness and embodiment of an agent affect human facial mimicry and which personality and empathy traits are related to facial mimicry of human and artificial agents. We exposed 46 participants to the six basic emotions displayed by a video-recorded human and three artificial agents (a physical robot, a video-recorded robot, and a virtual agent) differing in humanlikeness (humanlike, characterlike, and a morph between the two). We asked participants to recognize the facial expressions performed by each agent and measured their facial mimicry using automatic detection of facial action unit activation. Results showed that mimicry was affected by the agents’ embodiment, but not by their humanlikeness, and that it correlated both with individual traits denoting sociability and sympathy and with traits advantageous for emotion recognition.