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The Role of Social Robots in Fostering Human Empathy

Can social robots support children in elementary school rebuild empathy skills?

2016 - 2018
MIT Media Lab
Colombia, USA
#HCI 
︎ Completed


Motivation

Empathy is a core human skill. From early stages of our lives, being able to understand and behave with empathy is fundamental to our social experience. Research in the field of social robotics suggests that given a set of behaviors from a social robot, a child can perceive this agent as empathic. In this project, we explore a novel approach to modeling empathy in children using a social robot. Two social robots were programmed to have conversations containing interactions depicting empathic and non-empathic behaviors. Children were provided with opportunities to act on these interactions as well as to comment on the robot's behavior afterward.




A child is sitting in a room in front of two robots interacting with each other. The child is wearing sensing wristband, there is a camera in front of the child and behind the robots
Experimental setup including facial-feature detection, heart rate and EDA signals. 

What we did

We measured children's empathy prior to their interactions with the social robot and collected behavioral and physiological measurements during these interactions. I designed and deployed two studies, one in the US and one in Colombia at two schools in different socio-economic brackets. For these studies, I used the TEGA social robot platform designed at the Personal Robots Group in the MIT Media Lab. Results indicate that 1) children perceived these social robots as having or lacking empathy; 2) they followed the empathic behavioral model of the robot in both the empathic and non-empathic interactions and 3) the interaction allowed for children to reflect on their own empathic behavior. These results suggest that interacting with social robots capable of behaving empathically or non-empathically, can elicit the same behavior in children while serving as an educational tool. This work went to become my Master’s thesis. 
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Clockwisse from upper left: 1.Participant from Colombia study interacting with TEGA robots
2.Notes left by participants about TEGA’s behavior. 3.Screenshot of Emotional Robocoaster game interaction. 4.Setup for playing the Emotional Robocoaster game


Contributions

Experimental design, interaction design, interface design, field studies, quantitative data analysis, qualitative data analysis.

Collaborators

Anna Phan, Haewon Park, Cynthia Breazeal (committee), Ishaan Grover, Rosalind Picard (committee), David DeSteno (committee), Personal Robots Group.

Outputs

Reynolds-Cuéllar, P. (2018). The role of social robots in fostering human empathy: A cross-cultural exploration [Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., & Breazeal, C. (2017). Emotional Robocoaster: An Exploration on Emotions, Research Methods and Introspection. Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 561–567.


Partners

                      
Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar | 2023   ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎