The Role of Emotional Congruence in Human-Robot Interaction Karoline Malchus Applied Informatics Bielefeld, Germany karoline.malchus@uni-bielefeld.de Prisca Stenneken Clinical Linguistics Bielefeld, Germany prisca.stenneken@uni-bielefeld.de Petra Jaecks Clinical Linguistics Bielefeld, Germany petra.jaecks@uni-bielefeld.de Carolin Meyer Clinical Linguistics Bielefeld, Germany and Speech and Language Therapy Hamburg, Germany carolin.meyer@hs-fresenius.de Oliver Damm Applied Informatics Bielefeld, Germany odamm@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de Britta Wrede Applied Informatics Bielefeld, Germany bwrede@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de Abstract— The communication of emotion is a crucial part of daily life interaction. Therefore, we carried out a study to research which role emotional congruence plays in human- human and human-robot interaction. In our results there is no effect of emotional incongruence between verbal content and facial expression of human as well as robotic stimuli on the cognitive performance in a story comprehension task. But more importantly, results indicate, that participants’ performance in a memorizing task is significantly better if the robot tells the story. Possible explanations will be discussed. IndexTerms— Emotional Congruence, Emotional Conflict, Human-Robot Interaction, Story Comprehension Task I. INTRODUCTION Social Communication between interlocutors is one of the most important, but also most complex aspects in daily life. It involves many processes to perceive, transmit and understand the communicated information. One of these processes deals with emotional information. These emotions can be expressed multi-modally, e.g. through face, voice or semantic meaning. To build robots, which can act in real life, we have to think about the influence of emotions in human-robot interactions. Therefore, it is important to explore the similarities and differences between emotional human-human and human- robot interactions. During an interaction, emotions can play different roles and can influence for example the perception of our interaction partners, the perception of the communicated information or our cognitive processes [3]. Ruz and Tudela [8] for example report, that emotions displayed by another person affect our decision-making in social contexts. Also for human-robot interactions, there are many studies about the necessity of emotion perception and production to diversify the interaction and make it more natural and easy [7]. But what happens, if the communicated information is emotionally incongruent? Arai et al. [1] demonstrated with their study, that already 8-10 month old infants have a neural basis for the detection of emotional conflicts or incongruence of voice tone and facial expressions. According to their results and other studies (e.g. [5]), we assume that emotions are not only a natural part of communication but also that there is an important influence of congruency. With our study, we want to investigate the interplay of emotional and cognitive aspects in human-robot compared to human-human interaction. We focus on the influence of emotionally conflicting robotic and human stimuli on cognitive aspects like memory and inference processes in a story comprehension task. Participants had to combine incoming linguistic information, their world knowledge and nonverbal communicative cues into a more and more complex discourse and situation model. A change or a development of the situation model occurs, when new information fail to overlap in one or more features for example like causality or intentionality [6]. II. METHOD A. Participants One hundred-four students from Bielefeld University (Mean Age: 28,3; SD: 9,51; 65 women) participated in this study for course credits or 15 € fee. All participants were German native speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and hearing. Participants were screened via self-report about previous or actual neurological and psychiatric diseases. B. Material Narratives Stimuli consisted of two adapted video-screened versions of the story “Herbstgespräche im Blumenhimmel [Autumn talks in flowers’ heaven]”[2]. In one condition, a professional male 978-1-4673-3101-2/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE 191 HRI 2013 Proceedings