Improving aspects of empathy and subjective performance for HRI through mirroring facial expressions

In this paper, the impact of facial expressions on HRI is explored. To determine their influence on empathy of a human towards a robot and perceived subjective performance, an experimental setup is created, in which participants engage in a dialog with the robot head EDDIE. The web-based gaming application “Akinator” serves as a backbone for the dialog structure. In this game, the robot tries to guess a thought-of person chosen by the human by asking various questions about the person. In our experimental evaluation, the robot reacts in various ways to the human´s facial expressions, either ignoring them, mirroring them, or displaying its own facial expression based on a psychological model for social awareness. In which way this robot behavior influences human perception of the interaction is investigated by a questionnaire. Our results support the hypothesis that the robot behavior during interaction heavily influences the extent of empathy by a human towards a robot and perceived subjective task-performance, with the adaptive modes clearly leading compared to the non-adaptive mode.