Effects of (in)accurate empathy and situational valence on attitudes towards robots

Henriette Cramer, Jorrit Goddijn, Bob Wielinga, Vanessa Evers
2010 Proceeding of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction - HRI '10  
Empathy has great potential in human-robot interaction. However, the challenging nature of assessing the user's emotional state points to the importance of also understanding the effects of empathic behaviours incongruent with users' affective experience. A 3x2 between-subject video-based survey experiment (N=133) was conducted with empathic robot behaviour (empathically accurate, neutral, inaccurate) and valence of the situation (positive, negative) as dimensions. Trust decreased when empathic
more » ... responses were incongruent with the affective state of the user. However, in the negative valence condition, reported perceived empathic abilities were greater when the robot responded as if the situation were positive.
doi:10.1145/1734454.1734513 dblp:conf/hri/CramerGWE10 fatcat:sirujuhh75dnblegyrmwoij52i