Teleoperated Android Robot as Emotion Regulation Media

In this paper, we experimentally examined whether changes in the facial expressions of teleoperated androids could affect and regulate operators’ emotion, based on the facial feedback theory of emotion and the phenomenon of body ownership transfer to the robot. Twenty-six Japanese participants had conversations with an experimenter based on a situation where participants feel anger and, during the conversation, the android’s facial expression changed according to a pre-programmed scheme. The results showed that the facial feedback from the android did occur. Moreover, by comparing the two groups of participants, one with operating the robot and another without operating it, we found that this facial feedback from the android robot occur only when participants operated the robot and, when an operator could effectively operate the robot, his/her emotional states were much affected by facial expression change of the robot.