The role of emotional congruence in human-robot interaction

The communication of emotion is a crucial part of daily life interaction. Therefore, we carried out a study to research which role emotional congruence plays in human-human and human-robot interaction. In our results there is no effect of emotional incongruence between verbal content and facial expression of human as well as robotic stimuli on the cognitive performance in a story comprehension task. But more importantly, results indicate, that participants´ performance in a memorizing task is significantly better if the robot tells the story. Possible explanations will be discussed.