Investigating Positive Psychology Principles in Affective Robotics

Positive emotions play a fundamental role in promoting well-being, social bonding, and encouraging people to flourish. We investigated an affective robot's potential to promote positive moods in human groups during a collaborative task. A between-subject experiment (N=39 teams, 78 participants) was conducted to compare the improvement in participants' mood and robot's impression after conducting a collaborative task with an affective robot showing either positive or neutral behaviors. We found that self-reported valence and arousal increased in human participants when interacting with the affective robot regardless of the robot's perceived mood. Additionally, we discovered that participants' likeability of the robot increased when interacting with a positive robot, while likeability decreased when interacting with a neutral robot. These results suggest that even if the evidence for emotional contagion between an affective robot and human group members is not conclusive, participants felt more positive after interacting with robots showing affective behaviors in human-robot team interactions.