Advancements in robotic capabilities for providing physical assistance, psychological support, and daily health management are making the deployment of intelligent health-care robots in home environments increasingly feasible in the near future. However, challenges arise when the information provided by these robots contradicts users’ memory, raising concerns about user trust and decision-making. This paper presents a study that examines how varying a robot’s level of transparency and sociability influences user interpretation, decision-making and perceived trust when faced with conflicting information from a robot. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects online study, 176 participants watched videos of a Furhat robot acting as a family healthcare assistant and suggesting a fictional user to take medication at a different time from that remembered by the user. Results indicate that robot transparency influenced users’ interpretation of information discrepancies: with a low transparency robot, the most frequent assumption was that the user had not correctly remembered the time, while with the high transparency robot, participants were more likely to attribute the discrepancy to external factors, such as a partner or another household member modifying the robot’s information. Additionally, participants exhibited a tendency toward overtrust, often prioritizing the robot’s recommendations over the user’s memory, even when suspecting system malfunctions or third-party interference. These findings highlight the impact of transparency mechanisms in robotic systems, the complexity and importance associated with system access control for multi-user robots deployed in home environments, and the potential risks of users’ over-reliance on robots in sensitive domains such as healthcare.

While there is evidence that human-like characteristics in robots could benefit child-robot interaction in many ways, open questions remain about the appropriate degree of human likeness that should be implemented in robots to avoid adverse effects on acceptance and trust. This study investigates how human likeness, appearance and behavior, influence children’s social and competency trust in a robot. We first designed two versions of the Furhat robot with visual and auditory human-like and machine-like cues validated in two online studies. Secondly, we created verbal behaviors where human likeness was manipulated as responsiveness regarding the robot’s lexical matching. Then, 52 children (7–10 years old) played a storytelling game in a between-subjects experimental design. Results show that the conditions did not affect subjective trust measures. However, objective measures showed that human likeness affects trust differently. While low human-like appearance enhanced social trust, high human-like behavior improved children’s acceptance of the robot’s task-related suggestions. This work provides empirical evidence on manipulating facial features and behavior to control human likeness in a robot with a highly human-like morphology. We discuss the implications and importance of balancing human likeness in robot design and its impacts on task performance, as it directly impacts trust-building with children.

In developing a computational model of trust, this paper summarises the findings in a previous study exploring mutual gaze as a behavioural parameter of social trust and liking [1]. Drawing on the data collected in a related paper [6], which provides us with video clips of children interacting with a robot during a collaborative storytelling game, we look at the interactions between metrics assessing social trust and liking, and the development of mutual gaze as an objective measure of social trust and liking. We achieve this through several statistical analyses between the percent of mutual gaze in each interaction, scores from social trust and liking metrics, age of the participant, and duration. The findings of our study support the use of mutual gaze as an objective measure for liking, but there is still not sufficient evidence to support the use of mutual gaze as an objective measure to identify and capture social trust as a whole. Furthermore, interaction context impacts the amount of mutual gaze in an interaction, and the age of the participant has an impact on the amount of mutual gaze that occurs.

While creativity has been previously studied in Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI), the effect of regulatory focus on creativity skills has not been investigated. This paper presents an exploratory study that, for the first time, uses the Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) to assess children's creativity skills in an educational context with a social robot. We investigated whether two key emotional regulation techniques, promotion (approach) and prevention (avoidance), stimulate creativity during a story-telling activity between a child and a robot. We conducted a between-subjects field study with 69 children between the ages of 7 and 9 years old, divided between two study conditions: (1) promotion, where a social robot primes children for action by eliciting positive emotional states, and (2) prevention, where a social robot primes children for avoidance by evoking a states related to security and safety associated with blockage-oriented behaviors. To assess changes in creativity as a response to the priming interaction, children were asked to tell stories to the robot before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the priming interaction. We measured creativity levels by analyzing the verbal content of the stories. We coded verbal expressions related to creativity variables, including fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality. Our results show that children in the promotion condition generated significantly more ideas, and their ideas were on average more original in the stories they created in the post-test rather than in the pre-test. We also modeled the process of creativity that emerges during storytelling in response to the robot's verbal behavior. This paper enriches the scientific understanding of creativity emergence in child-robot collaborative interactions.

In the context of child development, practice is recognised as one of the essential activities to stimulate creativity. Here we aimed to explore whether repeated interactions with a virtual social robot could help build up children's creative performance over time. To this end, we developed an interactive storytelling game with the virtual robot Furhat. Twenty-five children between 9- and 12- years old played the online game two times with seven days of zero exposure in between. Our results revealed that repeated encounters have mixed effects on verbal creativity: while children were more creative in terms of flexibility, fluency, and elaboration in the second interaction, the level of originality remained stagnant. Moreover, the second encounter positively affected children's collaboration with and social behaviour toward the virtual robot. These results provide valuable evidence supporting the potential of multiple interactions with artificial agents to foster children's creativity over time. This paper, thus, provides readers with (1) a novel approach to stimulating verbal creativity through practice with artificial agents, (2) an assessment of the creative process in repeated interactions, and (3) evidence of how the behaviour of the robot influences children's creativity and their behaviour over time.

Studies in Child-Robot Interaction have shown that children form first impressions of a robot’s trustworthiness that might influence how they interact with social robots in long-term interactions. However, how children’s trust in robots evolves and how it relates to relationship formation is not well understood. This study investigates the effects of repeated encounters with a virtual social robot on children’s social and competency trust in social robots and their relationship formation. We developed an online storytelling game with the Furhat robot, where 25 children (9-12 years old) played with the robot over two sessions with seven days of zero exposure in between. Results show that children’s competency trust improved with time. We also found empirical evidence that children felt closer to the robot in the second encounter. This work enriches the scientific understanding of children’s trust development in social robots over extended periods of time in child-robot collaborative interactions.

Understanding the way different robot’s strategies affect children’s perceptions of social robots is crucial for a trustworthy child-robot relationship. This paper presents a preliminary study on whether motivational strategies based on Regulatory Focus Theory and goal attainment affect children’s perception of a virtual social robot when solving a task. The ongoing pandemic (COVID-19) is altering the way we perform research. Hence, we designed a fully autonomous game with a virtual social robot. In an online user study, 25 children (8 to 17 years old) played a regulatory focus goal-oriented game with a virtual child-like version of the Furhat robot. We evaluated children’s perceptions of the robot’s social trust, competency trust, and likability. Also, we assessed the children’s affective state (valence and arousal) before and after playing the game. Our preliminary results show that in the prevention condition, fulfilling the goal elicited less happiness in children. Surprisingly, we observed a trend increase in the social and competency trust elicited by the virtual robot when children were prevented from fulfilling the goal of the task. We discuss the results and the effects of online setups on conducting user studies with children.

According to psychology research, emotional induction has positive implications in many domains such as therapy and education. Our aim in this paper was to manipulate the Regulatory Focus Theory to assess its impact on the induction of regulatory focus related emotions in children in a pretend play scenario with a social robot. The Regulatory Focus Theory suggests that people follow one of two paradigms while attempting to achieve a goal; by seeking gains (promotion focus - associated with feelings of happiness) or by avoiding losses (prevention focus - associated with feelings of fear). We conducted a study with 69 school children in two different conditions (promotion vs. prevention). We succeeded in inducing happiness emotions in the promotion condition and found a resulting positive effect of the induction on children’s social engagement with the robot. We also discuss the important implications of these results in both educational and child robot interaction fields.

Facial expressions of emotions influence the perception of robots in first encounters. People can judge trustworthiness, likability, and aggressiveness in a few milliseconds by simply observing other individuals' faces. While first impressions have been extensively studied in adult-robot interaction, they have been addressed in child-robot interaction only rarely. This knowledge is crucial, as the first impression children build of robots might influence their willingness to interact with them over extended periods of time, for example in applications where robots play the role of companions or tutors. The present study focuses on investigating the effects of facial expressions of emotions on children's perceptions of trust towards robots during first encounters. We constructed a set of facial expressions of happiness and anger varying in terms of intensity. We implemented these facial expressions onto a Furhat robot that was either male-like or female-like. 129 children were exposed to the robot's expressions for a few seconds. We asked them to evaluate the robot in terms of trustworthiness, likability, and competence and investigated how emotion type, emotion intensity, and gender-likeness affected the perception of the robot. Results showed that a few seconds are enough for children to make a trait inference based on the robot's emotion. We observed that emotion type, emotion intensity, and gender-likeness did not directly affect trust, but the perception of likability and competence of the robot served as facilitator to judge trustworthiness.