Shaping empathy through perspective taking

This paper describes an explorative study to evaluate a dynamic expressive mask associated to a remote robot-view used to control an assistive robot. The mask is generated by a graphical-user-interface platform displayed on a tablet used to control the robot in a smart home environment. The hypothesis of the study is that when robot's behaviour conforms to human social expectations, interactions are more likely to be found enjoyable and meaningful by people. Furthermore the expressivity of the mask is expected to result in empathic interactions with the robot and therefore to sustain rich and meaningful social exchanges. In this study we compared four scenarios of interaction between a robot and a person at home. The scenarios depicted scenes where the robot was asked to execute tasks. Each scenario was showed in two versions: with a static robot-view and with a dynamic, expressive robot-view. The results of a questionnaire administered to 60 persons showed a preference of people to interact with the dynamic expressive mask. Expressivity was a means to stimulate empathic concern and to facilitate perspective taking during the execution of the scenarios