In this paper we present a lab study on robot abuse by children. 61 Japanese children of ages 7-9 interacted individually with Robovie, a social robot, in a context that promoted children's free disruptive behaviors towards the robot. We compared the robot's use of an adaptation of a parental discipline strategy, the so-called love-withdrawal technique, to a similar set of robot behaviors that lacked any specific strategy (neutral condition). The main insight we gained was that perhaps we should better not focus on general robot behaviors to try to fit all children, but rather, we should adapt the robot behaviors to children's individual differences. For instance, we found that the love-withdrawal-based strategy was significantly more effective in children of age 8-9 than on children of 7.

Robot users that receive psychological or psy-chotherapeutic support from robots (e.g. robots that motivate users to perform certain tasks) are usually aware of participating in a psychological intervention. The present paper aims to ascertain whether robot users should indeed remain aware, or rather unaware, of participating in such type of interventions. We present an experiment with two conditions. In one condition (direct) the robot made participants aware of being subjected to a psychological intervention, the three good things exercise from positive psychology, whereas in the other condition (indirect) participants were not made aware of the intervention. Our results show that the robot succeeded in improving participants' positive affect in the direct condition but their affect worsened in the indirect condition.

Gestures are important non-verbal signals in human communication. Research with virtual agents and robots has started to add to the scientific knowledge about gestures but many questions with respect to the use of gestures in human-computer interaction are still open. This paper investigates the influence of robot gestures on the users' perceived workload and task performance (i.e. information recall) in a direction-giving task. We conducted a 2 x 2 (robot gestures vs. no robot gestures x easy vs. difficult task) experiment. The results indicate that robot gestures increased user performance and decreased perceived workload in the difficult task but not in the easy task. Thus, robot gestures are a promising means to improve human-robot interaction particularly in challenging tasks.

People tend to unconsciously attribute personality traits to all kinds of technology including robots. But what personality do they want robots to have? Previous research has found support for two contradicting theories: similarity attraction and complementary attraction. The similarity attraction theory implies that people prefer a robot with a similar personality to their own (e.g., an extroverted person prefers an extroverted robot). According to the complementary attraction theory, people prefer a robot's personality opposite to their own (e.g., extroverted people prefer an introverted robot). In contrast to both theories, we argue that what is considered an appropriate personality for a robot depends on the task context. In a 2×2 between-groups experiment (N=45), we found trends that indicated similarity attraction for extrovert participants when the robot was a tour guide and complementary attraction for introverted participants when the robot was a cleaner. These trends show that preferences for robot personalities may indeed depend on the context of the robot's role and the stereotype perceptions people hold for certain jobs. Robot behaviors likely need to be adapted not in complimentary or similarity to the users' personality but to the users' expectations about what kind of personality and behaviors are consistent with such a task or role.

In this paper we argue for the development of new methodological approaches to create and evaluate robots for elderly-care, which offer support for the psychological determinants of the quality of life of elderly people. Relevant determinants, such as mood, self-efficacy and happiness are discussed in this paper in relation to older people. We offer an overview of previous work on robots offering psychological support and analyse the various methodological challenges in studying the effects of motivational and psycho-therapeutic robots on elderly people's psychological well-being.