Hi everyone.
My name is Maha Elgarf.
And today I'm going to present our work: reward seeking
or loss aversion? Impact of regulatory focus theory on emotional induction in children
and their behavior towards a social robot.
According to psychology research people tend to follow one of
two approaches in order to achieve a goal.
This is what is known as the regulatory focus theory or
RFT so the first approach is the promotion approach where
people are motivated by reward receipt and the second approach
is the prevention approach where people are motivated
by loss avoidance or failure avoidance.
So, in our work here we attempted to use
the RFT in order to induce emotions in children.
So for example, the promotion paradigm
is characterized by feelings of excitement that converge into happiness
at goal attainment and the prevention paradigm is characterized by feelings
of fear that converge
into relief at goal attainment as well.
So why are we trying to induce emotions in children it's because according
to previous research inducing emotions in children may help them develop their social skills,
specifically in relation to teaching them empathy and also
inducing positive emotions
in children, for example, happiness helps
developing their cognitive skills. For example, maximizing their learning performance in Math exercises.
Okay, so we designed the interaction as an interaction between the child
and a social robot and we used the Emys robot which is a metallic robotic
head capable of facial expressions and head movements.
We designed the interaction in two conditions: the prevention condition and
the promotion condition. We asked the child, to imagine themselves locked with
the robot in a spaceship on planet Mars and together they are trying to find the key in order to
get out of the spaceship to planet Mars.
And this is done through an interface that is displayed in
front of the child on a touch screen between the child and the robot, so the child would navigate through
different rooms, or different scenes and click on different buttons
in order to find the key. In the prevention condition, the child is asked to find the key
in order to get out of the spaceship before the spaceship explodes and in the
promotion condition the child is asked to find the key and get
out of the spaceship in order to receive a gift at the end of the interaction.
So this part we called it the priming scenario and in this part,
we were interested in measuring whether emotional induction happens or not.
We were also interested in another concept which is the emotional conservation.
So we wanted to measure if some form of....if emotions
the induced emotions of the priming scenario are going to persist for a certain time after the priming scenario.
So in order to measure this, we introduced two other parts into the activity that we called storytelling pre-test and storytelling post-test. In both parts, the robot
would ask the child to tell him a story and the child would use a software where he
would navigate between different topics and different scenes
and move characters and objects around the scene in order to tell the story to the robot.
And then we performed an experimental evaluation with 69 children
in order to evaluate our system.
We recorded data from two cameras, one frontal camera and one lateral camera
video cameras and one microphone. We were interested in specifically
two measures. So first it's the affective expressions in order to measure whether the emotional induction
the emotional conservation occurred or not.
And in order to measure this, we provided the video to the Affectiva
the recorded videos of the children to the Affectiva software in order to detect the children's faces and detect the emotions that were
expressed by the children in the different video frames.
Second, we were interested in measuring the engagement.
So whether the induced emotions in the interaction have resulted
in improving engagement between the child and the social robot. And we measured this
through the social verbal behaviors which like
some form of random questions that the child asks the robot, the child responding to the
robot's comments or questions and the child sharing some
random information with the robot. So we did this using behavioral coding analysis using the ELAN software.
Okay, so for the results,
we managed to prove that children significantly expressed more
joy and more smile expressions in the promotion condition than in the prevention condition.
We also however, we did not manage to prove that the same happened
in the prevention condition. So in the prevention condition, children did not exhibit more fear expressions
than in the promotion condition.
We found out that
children expressed or exhibited more social verbal behaviors
in the promotion condition than in the prevention condition.
There was no evidence of emotional conservation
in the post-test with respect to the pre-test. However, we found out
that children expressed more social verbal behaviors in the post-test
in comparison to the pre-test, independent
of the testing condition.
So as a summary of the main contributions of our work,
So so this is the first work to investigate RFT for emotional
induction using a social robot.
We conducted a field user study with 69 children.
We managed to prove successful induction of happiness emotions
which resulted in higher engagement of the children with the robot.
Thank you so much for listening.
And your questions are most welcome.