Abstract
Mental health issues are receiving more and more attention in society. In this paper, we introduce a preliminary study on human–robot mental comforting conversation, to make an android robot (ERICA) present an understanding of the user’s situation by sharing similar emotional experiences to enhance the perception of empathy. Specifically, we create the emotional speech for ERICA by using CycleGAN-based emotional voice conversion model, in which the pitch and spectrogram of the speech are converted according to the user’s mental state. Then, we design dialogue scenarios for the user to talk about his/her predicament with ERICA. In the dialogue, ERICA shares other people’s similar predicaments and adopts a low-spirit voice to express empathy to the interlocutor’s situation. At the end of the dialogue, ERICA tries to encourage with a positive voice. Subsequently, questionnaire-based evaluation experiments were conducted with the recorded conversation. In the questionnaire, we use the Big Five scale to evaluate ERICA’s personality. In addition, the perception of emotion, empathy, and encouragement in the dialogue are evaluated. The results show that the proposed emotional expression strategy helps the android robot better present low-spirit emotion, empathy, the personality of extroversion, while making the user better feel the encouragement.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Ahmad RadEmotional human–robot interaction (HRI) has received a lot of attention in recent decades, with some applications in areas such as child care [1], mental therapy [2], personality presentation [3], and so on
We investigate how humans react to other’s emotions in human–human interactions (HHI) based on the IEMOCAP [21] and MELD [22] datasets; We build an emotional voice conversion model to obtain ERICA’s emotional voice; We let an android robot, ERICA, provide scenario-based comforts to users by expressing corresponding emotions in verbal behavior; We construct people-centered messages in robot utterances by sharing related experiences/situations of other people in historical human–robot interactions; We adopt the questionnaire-based evaluation with a Likert scale to examine the effectiveness of emotional experience sharing in comforting dialogues; In addition, we evaluate ERICA’s personality based on BIG FIVE personality traits [23]
Regarding emotional expression, which checked manipulation in this experiment, the results show that, after implementing the emotional voice of ERICA, the experimental condition (M = 4.75, SD = 1.12) strengthened ERICA’s ability to express low spirit (p < 0.001, t(15) = 3.59, D = 1.27) in contrast to the control condition (M = 3.19, SD = 1.33), but only incrementally on positive expression without significant difference
Summary
Emotional human–robot interaction (HRI) has received a lot of attention in recent decades, with some applications in areas such as child care [1], mental therapy [2], personality presentation [3], and so on These studies have demonstrated the importance of emotional expression in human–robot interactions to enhance engagement and improve the perception of intelligence [4,5]. The realization of the comforting dialogue requires the robot to convey semantic understanding, emotional understanding, and empathy These abilities need to be expressed in some way during the interaction, which is difficult to achieve by using some constructed models or features, such as a chatbot that has an emotional response [11] or personal information disclosure chatbot [12]
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