An Android for Emotional Interaction: Spatiotemporal Validation of Its Facial Expressions
- PMID: 35185697
- PMCID: PMC8855677
- DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.800657
An Android for Emotional Interaction: Spatiotemporal Validation of Its Facial Expressions
Abstract
Android robots capable of emotional interactions with humans have considerable potential for application to research. While several studies developed androids that can exhibit human-like emotional facial expressions, few have empirically validated androids' facial expressions. To investigate this issue, we developed an android head called Nikola based on human psychology and conducted three studies to test the validity of its facial expressions. In Study 1, Nikola produced single facial actions, which were evaluated in accordance with the Facial Action Coding System. The results showed that 17 action units were appropriately produced. In Study 2, Nikola produced the prototypical facial expressions for six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), and naïve participants labeled photographs of the expressions. The recognition accuracy of all emotions was higher than chance level. In Study 3, Nikola produced dynamic facial expressions for six basic emotions at four different speeds, and naïve participants evaluated the naturalness of the speed of each expression. The effect of speed differed across emotions, as in previous studies of human expressions. These data validate the spatial and temporal patterns of Nikola's emotional facial expressions, and suggest that it may be useful for future psychological studies and real-life applications.
Keywords: Facial Action Coding System; android; dynamic facial expression; emotional facial expression; robot.
Copyright © 2022 Sato, Namba, Yang, Nishida, Ishi and Minato.
Conflict of interest statement
SNi was employed by the company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Figures
![FIGURE 1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8855677/bin/fpsyg-12-800657-g001.gif)
![FIGURE 2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8855677/bin/fpsyg-12-800657-g002.gif)
![FIGURE 3](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8855677/bin/fpsyg-12-800657-g003.gif)
![FIGURE 4](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8855677/bin/fpsyg-12-800657-g004.gif)
![FIGURE 5](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/8855677/bin/fpsyg-12-800657-g005.gif)
Similar articles
-
Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions in Japanese Laypeople.Front Psychol. 2019 Feb 12;10:259. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00259. eCollection 2019. Front Psychol. 2019. PMID: 30809180 Free PMC article.
-
Human and machine validation of 14 databases of dynamic facial expressions.Behav Res Methods. 2021 Apr;53(2):686-701. doi: 10.3758/s13428-020-01443-y. Behav Res Methods. 2021. PMID: 32804342 Free PMC article.
-
Recognition and discrimination of prototypical dynamic expressions of pain and emotions.Pain. 2008 Mar;135(1-2):55-64. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2007.05.008. Epub 2007 Jun 20. Pain. 2008. PMID: 17583430
-
Early Maladaptive Schemas and the Accuracy of Facial Emotion Recognition: A Preliminary Investigation.Psychol Rep. 2023 Aug;126(4):1585-1604. doi: 10.1177/00332941221075248. Epub 2022 Mar 2. Psychol Rep. 2023. PMID: 35084239 Review.
-
Task characteristics influence facial emotion recognition age-effects: A meta-analytic review.Psychol Aging. 2020 Mar;35(2):295-315. doi: 10.1037/pag0000441. Epub 2020 Jan 30. Psychol Aging. 2020. PMID: 31999152 Review.
Cited by
-
Differences in configural processing for human versus android dynamic facial expressions.Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 7;13(1):16952. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-44140-4. Sci Rep. 2023. PMID: 37805572 Free PMC article.
-
The inversion effect on the cubic humanness-uncanniness relation in humanlike agents.Front Psychol. 2023 Aug 29;14:1222279. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1222279. eCollection 2023. Front Psychol. 2023. PMID: 37705949 Free PMC article.
-
The spatio-temporal features of perceived-as-genuine and deliberate expressions.PLoS One. 2022 Jul 15;17(7):e0271047. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271047. eCollection 2022. PLoS One. 2022. PMID: 35839208 Free PMC article.
References
-
- Adams A., Robinson P. (2011). “An android head for social-emotional intervention for children with autism spectrum conditions,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2011, Memphis, TN, 10.1007/978-3-642-24571-8_19 - DOI
-
- Ahn H. S., Lee D. W., Choi D., Lee D. Y., Hur M., Lee H. (2012). “Appropriate emotions for facial expressions of 33-DOFs android head EveR-4 H33,” in Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE RO-MAN: The 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Paris, 10.1109/ROMAN.2012.6343898 - DOI
-
- Allison B., Nejat G., Kao E. (2009). The design of an expressive humanlike socially assistive robot. J. Mech. Robot. 1:011001. 10.1115/1.2959097 - DOI
-
- Asheber W. T., Lin C.-Y., Yen S. H. (2016). Humanoid head face mechanism with expandable facial expressions. Intern. J. Adv. Robot. Syst. 13:29. 10.5772/62181 - DOI
-
- Bartneck C. (2003). “Interacting with an embodied emotional character,” in Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces (DPPI2003), Pittsburgh, PA, 10.1145/782896.782911 - DOI
LinkOut - more resources
Full Text Sources