Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Teleoperated android robot as emotion regulation media Shuichi Nishio · Koichi Taura · Hidenobu Sumioka · Hiroshi Ishiguro Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract In this paper, we experimentally examined whether changes in the facial expressions of teleoperated androids could affect and regulate operators’ emotion, based on the facial feedback theory of emotion and the phenomenon of body ownership transfer to the robot. Twenty-six Japanese participants had conversations with an experimenter based on a situation where participants feel anger and, during the conversation, the android’s facial expression changed ac- cording to a pre-programmed scheme. The results showed that the facial feedback from the android did occur. More- over, by comparing the two groups of participants, one with operating the robot and another without operating it, we found that this facial feedback from the android robot occur only when participants operated the robot and, when an operator could effectively operate the robot, his/her emotional states were much affected by facial expression change of the robot. Keywords Teleoperated android robot · Emotion reg- ulation · Facial feedback hypothesis · Body ownership transfer 1 Introduction Emotion regulation, which is the process of controlling our emotions as well as how we experience and express them, is a critical skill in our social lives [8]. The importance of this This work was supported by KAKENHI (20220002) and KAKENHI (24650114) S. Nishio, K. Taura , H. Sumioka and H. Ishiguro Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratory Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan E-mail: nishio@botransfer.org K. Taura and H. Ishiguro Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University Toyonaka, Osaka 560-0043, Japan skill is growing with the rapid development of telecommu- nications technology that increases opportunities for non- direct conversation (e.g., [2]). When we do not meet in a face-to-face setting, most of the nonverbal information that we normally obtain from directly meeting someone is lost, complicating our self-regulation from the cues of others that reflect upon our behavior. One typical and extreme example is uninhibited behaviors often seen in computer-mediated communication, such as the Internet flaming or harassment. This occurs with not only asynchronous media such as e- mails, but also with synchronous media such as internet chats or TV conference systems [5]. The definition of “emotion” has been long discussed in various fields including psychology and cognitive psychol- ogy [6, 13, 19], and recently also in the field of affective computing [4]. Most theories of emotion seem to accept emotion as flexible response sequences that run under chal- lenging, difficult or critical situations. Although emotion has positive aspects such as to prepare for rapid motor responses [6], sometimes emotional responses may mislead us and do more harm than good. When our emotions are not suitable to the situation, we try to regulate our emotional responses [8]. This act of emotion regulation is defined as a process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions [7]. Gross proposed a process model of emo- tion regulation by dividing the timeline of emotional response sequence [8]. This process model consists of five stages: 1) situation selection, 2) situation modification, 3) attentional deployment, 4) cognitive change and 5) response modula- tion. While the first four stages are performed before emo- tional response is prepared, the last stage, response mod- ulation, refers to what we do when emotional response is running. Emotion regulatory process is known to work con- sciously or unconsciously, at one or more of these stages. For the last stage, it is known that suppression of negative