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Evaluating the Emotional Valence of Affective Sounds for Child-Robot Interaction

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11876))

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Abstract

Social Assistive Robots are starting to be widely used in paediatric health-care environments. In this domain, the development of effective strategies to keep the children engaged during the interaction with a social robot is still an open research area. On this subject, some approaches are investigating the combination of distraction strategies, as used in human-human interaction, and the display of emotional behaviours. In this study, we presented the results of a pilot study aimed to evaluate with children the valence of emotional behaviours enhanced with non-verbal sounds. The objective is to endow the NAO robot with emotional-like sounds, selected from a set of para-linguistic behaviours validated by valence. Results show that children aged 3–8 years perceive the robot’s behaviours and the related selected emotional semantic free sounds in terms of different degrees of arousal, valence and dominance: while valence and dominance are clearly perceived by the children, arousal is more difficult to distinguish.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The selected para-linguistic sounds are available for download at http://prisca.unina.it/demo/EmotionSounds.rar.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Silvia Rossi, Elena Dell’Aquila & Benedetta Bucci

  2. CRDC Tecnologie, Naples, Italy

    Elena Dell’Aquila

Authors
  1. Silvia Rossi
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  2. Elena Dell’Aquila
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  3. Benedetta Bucci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Silvia Rossi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Lab, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  2. The National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

  3. Faculty of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Noord-Brabant, The Netherlands

    Emilia Ivanova Barakova

  4. Mechanical & Industrial, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  5. Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Alan R. Wagner

  6. Robotics Lab - Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Madrid, Spain

    Álvaro Castro-González

  7. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Rossi, S., Dell’Aquila, E., Bucci, B. (2019). Evaluating the Emotional Valence of Affective Sounds for Child-Robot Interaction. In: Salichs, M., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_47

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35887-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35888-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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