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Investigating the Effect of a Humanoid Robot’s Head Position on Imitating Human Emotions

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Abstract

Humans show their emotions with facial expressions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of a humanoid robot’s head position on imitating human emotions. In an Internet survey through animation, we asked participants to adjust the head position of a robot to express six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We found that humans expect a robot to look straight down when it is angry or sad, to look straight up when it is surprised or happy, and to look down and to its right when it is afraid. We also found that when a robot is disgusted some humans expect it to look straight to its right and some expect it to look down and to its left. We found that humans expect the robot to use an averted head position for all six emotions. In contrast, other studies have shown approach-oriented (anger and joy) emotions being attributed to direct gaze and avoidance-oriented emotions (fear and sadness) being attributed to averted gaze.

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Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank Jaap Stelma, Colin Lambrechts, Maurice Houben, Krystian Trninic, and Marijn de Graaf for their contributions to this work.

Funding

This study was funded by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for Research and Technological Development (Grant Number 2010-248085).

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  1. Human Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    David O. Johnson & Raymond H. Cuijpers

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  1. David O. Johnson
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  2. Raymond H. Cuijpers
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Correspondence to David O. Johnson.

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Johnson, D.O., Cuijpers, R.H. Investigating the Effect of a Humanoid Robot’s Head Position on Imitating Human Emotions. Int J of Soc Robotics 11, 65–74 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-018-0477-4

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