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On the Role of Personality and Empathy in Human-Human, Human-Agent, and Human-Robot Mimicry

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Book cover Social Robotics (ICSR 2020)

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Abstract

Facial mimicry is crucial in social interactions as it communicates the intent to bond with another person. While human-human mimicry has been extensively studied, human-agent and human-robot mimicry have been addressed only recently, and the individual characteristics that affect them are still unknown. This paper explores whether the humanlikeness and embodiment of an agent affect human facial mimicry and which personality and empathy traits are related to facial mimicry of human and artificial agents. We exposed 46 participants to the six basic emotions displayed by a video-recorded human and three artificial agents (a physical robot, a video-recorded robot, and a virtual agent) differing in humanlikeness (humanlike, characterlike, and a morph between the two). We asked participants to recognize the facial expressions performed by each agent and measured their facial mimicry using automatic detection of facial action unit activation. Results showed that mimicry was affected by the agents’ embodiment, but not by their humanlikeness, and that it correlated both with individual traits denoting sociability and sympathy and with traits advantageous for emotion recognition.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Isabelle Hupont, Mohamed Chetouani, Giovanna Varni, and Christopher Peters for the collaboration in the overall project. This work is partly supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research under the COIN project (RIT15-0133).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Giulia Perugia, Maike Paetzel & Ginevra Castellano

Authors
  1. Giulia Perugia
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  2. Maike Paetzel
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  3. Ginevra Castellano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giulia Perugia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Alan R. Wagner

  2. University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, USA

    David Feil-Seifer

  3. University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Kerstin S. Haring

  4. University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Silvia Rossi

  5. Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA

    Thomas Williams

  6. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  7. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

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Perugia, G., Paetzel, M., Castellano, G. (2020). On the Role of Personality and Empathy in Human-Human, Human-Agent, and Human-Robot Mimicry. In: Wagner, A.R., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62055-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62056-1

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