“How Is His/Her Mood”: A Question That a Companion Robot May Be Able to Answer Mojgan Hashemian 1,2( ✉ ) , Hadi Moradi 1,3 , and Maryam S. Mirian 1,4 1 Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran {m.hashemian,moradih,mmirian}@ut.ac.ir 2 INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Porto Salvo, Portugal 3 Intelligent Systems Research Institute, SKKU, Suwon, South Korea 4 Center for Integrated Computer Systems Research, Faculty of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Abstract. Mood, as one of the human affects, plays a vital role in human-human interaction, especially due to its long lasting effects. In this paper, we introduce an approach in which a companion robot, capable of mood detection, is employed to detect and report the mood state of a person to his/her partner to make him/her prepared for upcoming encounters. Such a companion robot may be used at home or at work which would be able to improve the interaction experience for couples, partners, family members, etc. We have implemented the proposed approach using a vision-based method for mood detection. The approach has been tested by an experiment and a follow up study. Descriptive and statistical analysis were performed to analyze the gathered data. The results show that this type of infor‐ mation can have positive impact on interaction of partners. Keywords: Emotion · Facial expressions · HRI · Social robot · Mood 1 Introduction The ability to detect and perceive others’ affective state is considered as an aspect of “Emotional Quotient” or EQ (Mayer 2002). A successful interaction between humans involves real-time recognitions of the current state of emotion and mood status of each other (Sebe et al. 2005). For instance, a husband who returns home and encounters his wife in a bad mood needs to have great interpersonal capabilities to deal with such situation. However, in general, many people lack this capability and cannot respond properly to the unexpected mood or emotional state of their partner. Consequently, it would be greatly beneficial for a person, which we call him/her the interactor, to have an estimation of the affective state of his/her partner that would meet in near future, whom we call the intractee. This would help an interactor, who probably does not have the required competencies to respond properly to such a situation in real-time especially in case of unexpected affective states. For a person with good interpersonal capabilities, who can deal with such unexpected affective states, this feature can help him/her to interact even more efficiently. In the case of the above example, the husband would be © Springer International Publishing AG 2016 A. Agah et al. (Eds.): ICSR 2016, LNAI 9979, pp. 274–284, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_27