Can robotic emotional expressions induce a human to empathize with a robot?

Can humans empathize with robot that displays emotional expressions? If a human can do this, how is it possible to create an emotionally interactive robot that will induce empathy from a human? As interest in emotional interactions with robots is increasing, the answers to these questions are increasingly sought by researchers in HRI. As a starting point to find these answers, three hypotheses are investigated in this paper. An experiment with ten-year old children was performed to analyze the three hypotheses. The results showed that humans can empathize with a robot when the robot expresses emotions through the use of bruise colors and speech. It was also found that the bruised color expression as used here can induce a human to empathize with a robot as much as speech expression. Additionally, no gender difference was noted when a human empathized with an emotional expressing robot.