Dialogue Design for a Robot-Based Face-Mirroring Game to Engage Autistic Children with Emotional Expressions

We present design strategies for Human Robot Interaction for school-aged autistic children with limited receptive language. Applying these strategies to the DE-ENIGMA project (large EU project addressing emotion recognition in autistic children) supported development of a new activity for in facial expression imitation whereby the robot imitates the child’s face to encourage the child to notice facial expressions in a play-based game. A usability case study with 15 typically-developing children aged 4–6 at an English-language school in the Netherlands was performed to observe the feasibility of the setup and make design revisions before exposing the robot to autistic children

Emotion in faces and voices : recognition and production by young and older adults

Older adults are less accurate than younger adults at emotion recognition. Given that deficits in emotion recognition have been associated with interpersonal conflict and, in turn, a reduced quality of life, understanding how older adults process emotion is vital. Thus, the research strategy of the current thesis was to investigate specific questions concerning how older adults process emotion information, e.g., how well older adults process a variety of emotional expression types and whether having multiple sources of expressive information will improve emotion recognition; how older adults extract information from emotional expressions; where problems might occur during the emotion recognition process; and whether poor emotion recognition is related to poor emotion production. My approach was different to the majority of other studies in that I tested multi-modal, dynamic spoken expressions in addition to the unimodal and static emotional expressions that are typically used for assessing emotion recognition. The first experiment assessed emotion recognition for auditory-visual (AV), visual-only (VO), and auditory-only (AO) speech stimuli (Chapter 2). The second series of experiments focused on VO expressions of emotion and investigated how older adults extract information from such expressions. The final two experiments investigated potential problems that older adults may encounter during the emotion recognition process. Taken together, the experiments in this thesis provide insight into the differences in the way older and younger adults process emotional expressions. Such insights can be used to develop reliable and ecologically valid tools to assess the emotion recognition ability of older adults