It’s not all written on the robot’s face

Past work on creating robots that can make convincing emotional expressions has concentrated on the quality of those expressions, and on assessing people’s ability to recognize them in neutral contexts, without any strong emotional valence. It would be interesting to find out whether observers’ judgments of the facial cues of a robot would be affected by a surrounding emotional context. This paper takes its inspiration from the contextual effects found on our interpretation of the expressions on human faces and computer avatars, and looks at the extent to which they also apply to the interpretation of the facial expressions of a mechanical robot head. The kinds of contexts that affect the recognition of robot emotional expressions, the circumstances under which such contextual effects occur, and the relationship between emotions and the surrounding situation, are observed and analyzed. Design implications for believable emotional robots are drawn.

► An auditory context was shown to affect recognition of robot’s facial expressions.
► Better recognition of robot’s facial expressions when they matched the context.
► The recognition of robot emotional expressions is affected by surrounding contexts.