Emotional virtual agents: How do young people decode synthetic facial expressions?

Given the need of remote learning and the growing presence of virtual agents within online learning environments, the present research aims at investigating young people’ ability to decode emotional expressions conveyed by virtual agents. The study, involves 50 healthy participants aged between 22 and 35 years (mean age=27.86; SD= ±2.75; 30 females) which were required to label pictures and video clips depicting female and male virtual agents of different ages (young, middle-aged and old) displaying static and dynamic expressions of disgust, anger, sadness, fear, happiness, surprise and neutrality. Depending on the emotional category, significant effects were observed for the agents’ age, gender, and type of administered (static vs dynamic) stimuli on the young people’ decoding accuracy of the virtual agents’ emotional faces. Anger was significantly more accurately decoded in male rather than female faces while the opposite result was observed for happy, fearful, surprised, and disgusted faces. Middle aged faces were generally more accurately decoded than young and old emotional faces except for sadness and disgust. Significantly greater accuracy was observed for dynamic vs static faces of disgust, sadness, and fear, in contrast to static vs dynamic neutral and surprised faces

Humanoid and android robots in the imaginary of adolescents, young adults and seniors

This paper investigates effects of participants’ gender and age (adolescents, young adults, and seniors), robots’ gender (male and female robots) and appearance (humanoid vs android) on robots’ acceptance dimensions. The study involved 6 differently aged groups of participants (two adolescents, two young adults and two seniors’ groups, for a total of 240 participants) requested to express their willingness to interact and their perception of robots’ usefulness, pleasantness, appeal, and engagement for two different sets of females (Pepper, Erica, and Sophia) and male (Romeo, Albert, and Yuri) humanoid and android robots. Participants were also requested to express their preferred and attributed age ranges and occupations they entrusted to robots among healthcare, housework, protection and security and front office. Results show that neither the age nor participants and robots’ gender, nor robots’ human likeness univocally affected robots’ acceptance by these differently aged users. Robots’ acceptance appeared to be a nonlinear combination of all these factors

How Human Likeness, Gender and Ethnicity affect Elders'Acceptance of Assistive Robots

The present study investigates the extent to which robots' 1) degree of human likeness, 2) gender and 3) ethnicity affect elders' attitude towards using robots as healthcare assistants. To this aim 2 groups of 45 seniors, aged 65 + years, were asked to watch video clips showing three speaking female and male robots, respectively. Each set of stimuli consisted in 2 androids, one with Caucasian and one with Asian aspect, and 1 humanoid robot. After each video clip elders were asked to assess, through the Robot Acceptance Questionnaire (RAQ) their willingness to interact with them, as well as robots' Pragmatic, Hedonic and Attractive qualities. Through this investigation it was found that male seniors were more proactive than female ones in their attitude toward robots showing more willingness to interact with them and attributing more positive scores to robots' qualities. It was also observed that androids were clearly more preferred than humanoid robots no matter their gender. Finally, seniors' preferences were for female android robots with Asian traits and male android with Caucasian traits suggesting that both gender and ethnical features are intermingled in defining robot's appearance that generate seniors' acceptance

Seniors’ ability to decode differently aged facial emotional expressions

The present investigation aims at assessing elders' ability to decode facial emotional expressions conveyed by differently aged people in order to confirm (or disconfirm) the appropriateness of the 'own age bias' theory, as well as investigate effects of different ages and different emotional categories. The study, involves 44 healthy elders (23 females), aged 65+ (mean age=75.09; SD=±7.9) which were requested to label 76 pictures depicting elders, middle-aged and young women and men displaying the six facial emotional expressions of disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness and neutrality. Results show a complex pattern of influences that calls for more deep investigations on the features to be accounted by providing socially and emotionally believable interfaces of effective and efficient algorithms to detect and decode their users' emotional facial expressions

Magnetic excitations and phonons simultaneously studied by resonant inelastic x-ray scattering in optimally doped Bi1.5_{1.5}Pb0.55_{0.55}Sr1.6_{1.6}La0.4_{0.4}CuO6+δ_{6+\delta}

Magnetic excitations in the optimally doped high-$T_\mathrm{c}$ superconductor Bi$_{1.5}$Pb$_{0.55}$Sr$_{1.6}$La$_{0.4}$CuO$_{6+\delta}$ (OP-Bi2201, $T_\mathrm{c}\simeq 34$ K) are investigated by Cu $L_3$ edge resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS), below and above the pseudogap opening temperature. At both temperatures the broad spectral distribution disperses along the (1,0) direction up to $\sim$350~meV at zone boundary, similarly to other hole-doped cuprates. However, above $\sim$0.22 reciprocal lattice units, we observe a concurrent intensity decrease for magnetic excitations and quasi-elastic signals with weak temperature dependence. This anomaly seems to indicate a coupling between magnetic, lattice and charge modes in this compound. We also compare the magnetic excitation spectra near the anti-nodal zone boundary in the single layer OP-Bi2201 and in the bi-layer optimally doped Bi$_{1.5}$Pb$_{0.6}$Sr$_{1.54}$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+\delta}$ (OP-Bi2212, $T_\mathrm{c}\simeq96$ K). The strong similarities in the paramagnon dispersion and in their energy at zone boundary indicate that the strength of the super-exchange interaction and the short-range magnetic correlation cannot be directly related to $T_\mathrm{c}$, not even within the same family of cuprates

Direct observation of bulk charge modulations in optimally-doped Bi1.5_{1.5}Pb0.6_{0.6}Sr1.54_{1.54}CaCu2_{2}O8+δ_{8+\delta}

Bulk charge density modulations, recently observed in high critical-temperature ($T_\mathrm{c}$) cuprate superconductors, coexist with the so-called pseudogap and compete with superconductivity. However, its direct observation has been limited to a narrow doping region in the underdoped regime. Using energy-resolved resonant x-ray scattering we have found evidence for such bulk charge modulations, or soft collective charge modes (soft CCMs), in optimally doped Bi$_{1.5}$Pb$_{0.6}$Sr$_{1.54}$CaCu$_{2}$O$_{8+\delta}$ (Pb-Bi2212) around the summit of the superconducting dome with momentum transfer $q_{\parallel}\sim0.28$ reciprocal lattice units (r.l.u.) along the Cu-O bond direction. The signal is stronger at $T\simeq T_\mathrm{c}$ than at lower temperatures, thereby confirming a competition between soft CCMs and superconductivity. These results demonstrate that soft CCMs are not constrained to the underdoped regime, suggesting that soft CCMs appear across a large part of the phase diagram of cuprates and are intimately entangled with high-$T_\mathrm{c}$ superconductivity.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Influence of apical oxygen on the extent of in-plane exchange interaction in cuprate superconductors

In high Tc superconductors the magnetic and electronic properties are determined by the probability that valence electrons virtually jump from site to site in the CuO2 planes, a mechanism opposed by on-site Coulomb repulsion and favored by hopping integrals. The spatial extent of the latter is related to transport properties, including superconductivity, and to the dispersion relation of spin excitations (magnons). Here, for three antiferromagnetic parent compounds (single-layer Bi2Sr0.99La1.1CuO6+delta, double-layer Nd1.2Ba1.8Cu3O6 and infinite-layer CaCuO2) differing by the number of apical atoms, we compare the magnetic spectra measured by resonant inelastic x-ray scattering over a significant portion of the reciprocal space and with unprecedented accuracy. We observe that the absence of apical oxygens increases the in-plane hopping range and, in CaCuO2, it leads to a genuine 3D exchange-bond network. These results establish a corresponding relation between the exchange interactions and the crystal structure, and provide fresh insight into the materials dependence of the superconducting transition temperature.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 Table, 42 reference