Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems 34 (2018) 3313–3324 DOI:10.3233/JIFS-169513 IOS Press 3313 Analyzing children’s affective reactions and preferences towards social robots using paralinguistic and self-reported information Humberto P´ erez-Espinosa a,b,* , Juan Mart´ ınez-Miranda a,b,* , Himer Avila-George a,b and Ismael Espinosa-Curiel b a Mexican National Research Council (CONACyT) b CICESE-UT 3 , Andador 10 #109, Ciudad del Conocimiento, Tepic, Nayarit, M´ exico Abstract. The advances in social robotics have extended the possibilities of their use in different applications and have also increased the sectors of users to which those applications can benefit. An attractive population of users is children. Recently, there has been a trend towards research in the design of interactive systems for children, as well as in the study of modeling the interaction between children and this type of systems. In this work, we present a study carried out with the objective of analyzing the affective response of children when interacting with a robot using speech-based communication. We collected data through an experiment using a Wizard of Oz scenario where we induced different affective reactions in the participants. Two type of data were collected and analyzed: 1) a set of evaluators manually created annotations of emotions and attitudes to determine the distribution of emotions during the experiments and evaluate how difficult is the training of automatic classifiers to discriminate different affective states from the acoustic properties of the children’s voices; 2) we used the children’s responses from a self-evaluation questionnaire about their perceptions and preferences towards the robots, modeled with different personalities, to assess whether there are relevant differences according to their different age’s range. We obtained a large children’s speech database that would be a valuable resource for the study of paralinguistic and interaction aspects. Despite the imbalance of the database, we were able to obtain good results for the classification of emotions and attitudes. We also find some relevant differences in how young and older children note the differences in the behaviors of the robots according to the modeled personality. Differences based on children’s age were also found in the preferences towards the two different robots. Keywords: Children speech analysis, paralinguistic information, emotion recognition, social robots 1. Introduction One of the population groups that are benefited from the development of social robots is children [4]. The advantages and capabilities of social robots have been used to study child development [20]; child education [14]; rehabilitation [23]; the diagnosis and * Corresponding authors. Humberto P´ erez-Espinosa. E-mail: hperez@cicese.mx and Juan Mart´ ınez-Miranda. E-mail: jmiranda@cicese.mx. treatment of autism [16, 26]; and as mediators for children interviews [36], to name a few. A funda- mental aspect of long-term interactions between the robot and a child is the creation of a social bond that facilitates the acceptance of the robot in daily life activities and makes children feel more comfortable with it [35]. For developers and designers of social robots, an important source of information to build and adapt the robot’s capabilities that facilitate the creation of such social bonds is to know how the children perceive, 1064-1246/18/$35.00 © 2018 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved