Evaluating the Emotional Valence of Affective Sounds for Child-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Social Assistive Robots are starting to be widely used in paediatric health-care environments. In this domain, the development of effective strategies to keep the children engaged during the interaction with a social robot is still an open research area. On this subject, some approaches are investigating the combination of distraction strategies, as used in human-human interaction, and the display of emotional behaviours. In this study, we presented the results of a pilot study aimed to evaluate with children the valence of emotional behaviours enhanced with non-verbal sounds. The objective is to endow the NAO robot with emotional-like sounds, selected from a set of para-linguistic behaviours validated by valence. Results show that children aged 3–8 years perceive the robot’s behaviours and the related selected emotional semantic free sounds in terms of different degrees of arousal, valence and dominance: while valence and dominance are clearly perceived by the children, arousal is more difficult to distinguish.