Facing Emotional Reactions Towards a Robot – An Experimental Study Using FACS

As robots are starting to enter not only our professional lives but also our domestic lives, new questions arise: What about the emotional impact of getting into contact with this new ‘species’? Can robots elicit emotional reactions from humans? Assuming that humans may react in the same way towards robots as they do towards humans (Media Equation), it is important to investigate the factors influencing this emotional experience. But systematic research in this area remains scarce. An exception is the study conducted by Rosenthal-von der Pütten, Krämer, Hoffmann, Sobieraj, and Eimler in 2013 addressing the question of emotional reactions towards a robot experimentally. Taking the study by Rosenthal-von der Pütten et al. as a starting point and following their suggested multi-method approach as well as Scherer’s assumption about the five components of emotions, we added the motor expression component to further investigate the multilevel phenomenon of emotional reactions towards robots. We used the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to analyze the facial expressions of participants viewing videos of the robot dinosaur Pleo in a friendly interaction or being tortured. Participants showed Action Units associated with intrinsic unpleasantness more frequently in the torture-video-condition than during the reception of the normal video. Participants also reported more negative feelings after the torture video than the normal video. The findings indicate the importance of investigating emotional reactions towards robots for a social robot to be an ideal companion. Furthermore, this paper shows that the application of FACS to research in human-robot interaction is a fruitful and insightful enhancement to commonly used self-report measures. We conclude this paper with some recommendations for improving the design of social robots.