CrossCultural Perspectives on Emotion Expressive

Authors: Gabriele Trovato Tatsuhiro Kishi Nobutsuna Endo Massimiliano Zecca Kenji Hashimoto Atsuo Takanishi

Publish Date: 2013/09/21

Volume: 5, Issue: 4, Pages: 515-527

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Abstract

Emotion display through facial expressions is an important channel of communication However between humans there are differences in the way a meaning to facial cues is assigned depending on the background culture This leads to a gap in recognition rates of expressions this problem is present when displaying a robotic face too as a robot’s facial expression recognition is often hampered by a cultural divide and poor scores of recognition rate may lead to poor acceptance and interaction It would be desirable if robots could switch their output facial configuration flexibly adapting to different cultural backgrounds To achieve this we made a generation system that produces facial expressions and applied it to the 24 degrees of freedom head of the humanoid social robot KOBIANR and thanks to the work of illustrators and cartoonists the system can generate two versions of the same expression in order to be easily recognisable by both Japanese and Western subjects As a tool for making recognition easier the display of Japanese comic symbols on the robotic face has also been introduced and evaluated In this work we conducted a crosscultural study aimed at assessing this gap in recognition and finding solutions for it The investigation was extended to Egyptian subjects too as a sample of another different culture Results confirmed the differences in recognition rates the effectiveness of customising expressions and the usefulness of symbols display thereby suggesting that this approach might be valuable for robots that in the future will interact in a multicultural environmentThis study was conducted as part of the Research Institute for Science and Engineering Waseda University and as part of the humanoid project at the Humanoid Robotics Institute Waseda University It was supported in part by RoboSoM project from the European FP7 program Grant agreement No 248366 GCOE Program “Global Robot Academia” from the Ministry of Education Culture Sports Science and Technology of Japan SolidWorks Japan KK NiKKi Fron Co Chukoh Chemical Industries STMicroelectronics and DYDEN Corporation whom we thank for their financial and technical support

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