A Novel Culture-Dependent Gesture Selection System for a Humanoid Robot Performing Greeting Interaction

In human-robot interaction, it is important for the robots to adapt to our ways of communication. As humans, rules of non-verbal communication, including greetings, change depending on our culture. Social robots should adapt to these specific differences in order to communicate effectively, as a correct way of approaching often results into better acceptance of the robot. In this study, a novel greeting gesture selection system is presented and an experiment is run using the robot ARMAR-IIIb. The robot performs greeting gestures appropriate to Japanese culture; after interacting with German participants, the selection should become appropriate to German culture. Results show that the mapping of gesture selection evolves successfully

Implicit Leadership Theories

While leadership is often seen as what leaders do, more recent work in this area acknowledges that leadership is a process of interaction between different actors (i.e., leaders and followers) and the environment. This notion of a process of interaction leads straight to the question of what shapes this interaction. Why do leaders behave the way they do? Why do followers react the way they do? One way of looking into this question is to turn to implicit leadership theories. Implicit leadership theories (ILTs) are everyday theories that individuals hold about leaders in general (or ideal leaders). They are mental representations of leaders and influence how an individual acts toward leaders or as leaders based on these cognitive representations. These cognitive representations are similar to stereotypes, in that they are stored in memory and will be activated when the person meets an individual whose characteristics and behavior matches their implici ..

Considering context in psychological leadership research

Despite Lewin's identification of the importance of context in behavioral research over 70 years ago, leadership psychology tended to ignore the context. Only in the past 10 years has the context been more routinely included in psychological leadership research. We provide examples of leadership research that has explored the context, introduce the special issue articles, and provide suggestions for future research on the context of leadership