Emergent leadership in teams is known as a special type of informal leadership that has unique benefits. Given that this form of leadership can be developed only organically from within the team, an informal leader may not emerge and the associated advantages can be missed. We explored the possibility of leveraging robotic social behavior to facilitate the emergence of leadership in a team. We evaluated whether a robot displaying explicit peer liking towards a specific team member would encourage that team member to take the lead. Two (stranger) participants were asked to engage in a search task together with a robotic dog who either presented peer-liking behavior toward one or both of them during the opening encounter. Our findings suggest that the robot's peer liking led the “Liked” participant to report higher sense of leadership and higher sense of responsibility over the task. Behavioral measures also indicated that the “Liked” participant managed the team's performance. We suggest that integrating a robot into human teams presents an opportunity to facilitate unique dynamics that would not develop when imposing a structure on the team from the outside.

Opening encounters are a fundamental component of every interaction. Psychology research highlights the valence of opening encounters as one of the main factors shaping the interaction that follows. We evaluated whether opening encounters would have a similarly powerful effect on human-robot interactions. Specifically, we tested how positive and negative opening encounters with a robot would impact the subsequent interaction. Participants interacted with a robot that performed gestures communicating different valences of opening encounters: Positive, Negative, or No opening encounter. To evaluate the impact on the subsequent interaction, we measured participants' willingness to comply with a help request presented by the robot and their perception of the robot. Our results indicated that most participants in the Positive opening encounter condition helped the robot and described a positive overall perception. An opposite pattern emerged in the other two conditions. Almost none of the participants helped the robot, and the perception of the robot was less positive. Our findings suggest that opening encounters with robots should be carefully considered due to their impact on the interaction that follows.

One of the main challenges parents face is recognizing and supporting the changing needs of their children. The Circle of Security (COS) psychology theory addresses this challenge by increasing parental mentalization, a parent’s ability to mentally envision her child’s mental states, and to engage in reflection on her own internal experiences. We present an exploratory design process of a tangible interface for parents of 5-7 years-old children, grounded in theoretical aspects from Attachment theory, Caregiving sensitivity theory, and COS theory. We designed three low-fidelity prototypes and evaluated them with four parents to generate initial insights about the potential of TUI as an aid for parental mentalization. Our work suggests that parents see potential in using a TUI to improve their parental mentalization abilities, however they report it is not easy and requires significant mental effort. Our work is a first step towards TUI as an aid for parental mentalization.

We evaluate whether an interaction with robots can influence a subsequent Human-Human Interaction without the robots' presence. Social psychology studies indicate that some social experiences have a carryover effect, leading to implicit influences on later interactions. We tested whether a social experience formed in a Human-Robot Interaction can have a carryover effect that impacts a subsequent Human-Human Interaction. We focused on ostracism, a phenomenon known to involve carryover effects that lead to prosocial behavior. Using the Robotic Ostracism Paradigm, we compared two HRI experiences: Exclusion and Inclusion, testing their impact on a Human-Human Interaction that did not involve robots. Robotic ostracism had a carryover effect that led to prosocial behavior in the Human-Human Interaction, whereby participants preferred intimate interpersonal space and displayed increased compliance. We conclude that HRI experiences may involve carryover effects that extend beyond the interaction with robots, impacting separate and different subsequent strictly human Interactions.