The goal of this study was to examine user\textquoteright s perception of expressions of empathy by an autonomous system. In a survey eight different components of empathy identified in literature studies and prior tests (Expressing own feelings, Expressing to know what the other feels, Helping, Showing interest, Taking the others perspective, Displaying regard, Situational understanding, and Agreement) were compared to neutral expressions. Differences in participants evaluations were found across the components of empathy as well as individual differences were revealed. Expressions of cognitive empathy (Showing interest, situational understanding) and expressions of empathy of assistance (helping) were perceived positively by participants. However, expressions of affective empathy (expressing own feelings, expressing to know what the other feels) received mainly negative ratings. Cluster analysis revealed individual differences especially for items relating to affective empathy. Whereas one group of participants identified in the cluster analysis rated expressions of affective empathy negatively, a second group of participants rated these expressions positively. Furthermore, large differences across participants also existed for taking the other's perspective, a component of cognitive empathy. Integrating expressions of empathy in human-machine interaction is a sensitive issue and designers must carefully choose what components of empathy are adequate depending on the situational circumstances and the targeted user group.

The purpose of this study was to propose a model of development of trust in social robots. Insights in interpersonal trust were adopted from social psychology and a novel model was proposed. In addition, this study aimed to investigate the relationship among trust development and self-esteem. To validate the proposed model, an experiment using a communication robot NAO was conducted and changes in categories of trust as well as self-esteem were measured. Results showed that general and category trust have been developed in the early phase. Self-esteem is also increased along the interactions with the robot.

We describe the design process of “Vyo”, a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices. Building on the concepts of ubiquitous and engaging computing in the domestic environment, we identified five design goals for the home robot: engaging, unobtrusive, device-like, respectful, and reassuring. These goals led our design process, which included simultaneous iterative development of the robot's morphology, nonverbal behavior and interaction schemas. We continued with user-centered design research using puppet prototypes of the robot to assess and refine our design choices. The resulting robot, Vyo, straddles the boundary between a monitoring device and a socially expressive agent, and presents a number of novel design outcomes: The combination of TUI “phicons” with social robotics; gesture-related screen exposure; and a non-anthropomorphic monocular expressive face. We discuss how our design goals are expressed in the elements of the robot's final design.

It is speculated that the processing of different types of information (e.g., quantitative, ordinal, or nominal data) will be affected by what type of visual display is used to present that information (e.g.. line graphs, shapes with varying levels of gray saturation, or shapes of different colors). People are expected to be able to more efficiently and accurately process and answer questions about the visual displays if the type of display (i.e., the representing dimension) provides neither too much nor too little information and matches the type of information (i.e., the represented dimension) being processed. In the present study we found that in general task performance was best when the represented and representing dimensions match. An exception to this is discussed.