Using artificial emotions helps in making human-robot interaction more personalised, natural, and so more likeable. In the case of humanoid robots with constrained facial expression, the literature concentrates on the expression of emotions by using other nonverbal interaction channels. When using multi-modal communication, indeed, it is important to understand the effect of the combination of such non-verbal cues, while the majority of the works addressed only the role of single channels in the human recognition performance. Here, we present an attempt (...) to analyse the effect of the combination of different animations expressing the same emotion or different ones. Results show that when an emotion is successfully expressed using a single channel, the combination of this channel with other animations, that may have lower recognition rates, appears to be less communicative. (shrink)

Do the nonverbal signals used to make social judgements differ depending on the type of judgement being made and what other nonverbal signals are visible? Experiment 1 investigated how nonverbal signals across three channels (face: angry/fearful, posture: expanded/contracted, lean: forward/backward), when viewed together, were used for judgements of emotion, threat, and status. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and explored how use of the body channels differed in making social judgements when the face channel was obscured. Both experiments found facial anger (...) linked to high anger, threat, and status ratings; facial fear was linked to low ratings. Expanded body posture increased threat and status judgements, while backward lean decreased anger and threat. With the face channel blocked (Experiment 2B), the influence of body posture increased across emotion, threat, and status judgements, while body lean was more consistent. Findings demonstrate that despite the face’s importance across types of social judgements, the body channels differentially contribute to judgements of emotion, threat and status. Further, they are differentially affected by the absence of facial information. How much face and body-related channels are used in social judgements is moderated by the type of judgement being made and the availability of other (particularly facial) channel information. (shrink)