Quantitative Effects on Multiple Involuntary Physiologic Expressions That Convey the Fear of Robots

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce our study on the cross-modal physiological expression on a robot’s skin using goosebumps, perspiration, and shiver. Human and other living beings show their voluntary and involuntary state via physiological phenomena, and the main visible/tangible phenomena appear on the skin. We especially focused on the expressive strengths and combinations of three involuntary expressions above to affect the nuances of instinctive fear emotions. The evaluation results showed that the fear emotion of the robot, the aliveness, and other impressions of the robot can be transmitted even only by the single use of the involuntary expressions, and that might be caused by ceiling effects of each modality’s strong effectiveness. In addition, some combinations of multiple involuntary expressions, such as increased annoyance in the combination of a small amount of sweating and a large amount of goosebumps expression, showed a unique expressiveness on the factors of the fear extracted in our analyses.