Child’s Personality and Self-Disclosures to a Robot Persona “In-The-Wild”

Child’s Personality and Self-Disclosures to a Robot Persona “In-The-Wild”

Neerincx, Anouk (Universiteit Utrecht)
Li, Y. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
van de Sande, Kelvin (Universiteit Utrecht)
Broz, F. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Neerincx, M.A. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
de Graaf, Maartje (Universiteit Utrecht)

2023

Social robots can support children in their socio-emotional development [38]. To improve the cooperation between a child and a social robot, a good relationship is vital. Self-disclosure is an essential element for building personal relationships. Yet, knowledge about the effects of self-disclosure in child-robot interactions is still lacking. To investigate effects of robot persona, child personality, and self-disclosure category on self-disclosure in child-robot interaction, we have conducted a field study at a science festival in which children had a conversation with a robot that either behaved human-like or robot-like. The results show a significant difference in the amount of self-disclosure (in conversation duration) between the two robot personas. Additionally, significant relationships were found between conscientiousness and extraversion and amount of self-disclosure (in word count). The participant disclosed significantly more about the category `Attitudes and Opinions’ than about ‘School’. Finally, a thematic analysis shows that the content of the conversations can be categorised in five plus one themes. Between robot personas, the content of the conversations did not differ in terms of conversation themes. However, in both conditions, we found that children generally feel comfortable sharing unpleasant experiences about present themes (such as COVID) in a first encounter with a robot.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1ba883cb-6fe7-456b-bbea-89d57e327be4

https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309477

IEEE

2024-05-13

979-8-3503-3671-9

2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2023

2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2023-08-28 → 2023-08-31, Busan, Korea, Republic of

IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Communication, RO-MAN, 1944-9445

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2023 Anouk Neerincx, Y. Li, Kelvin van de Sande, F. Broz, M.A. Neerincx, Maartje de Graaf