Crafting for Emotion Appropriateness in Affective Robotics: Examining the Practicality of the OCC Model

Research in affective robotics has been using emotions to improve human-robot interaction. One important aspect has been to design recognizable and believable emotions in robotics. Recent work argued that externally displayed emotions on robots may or may not be appropriate for a given situation. However, the selection of emotions as appropriate/inappropriate is not trivial. We here examine the practicality of an established model to craft for emotion appropriateness based on situations of interaction. To do so, we explored the use of the Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) model, which provides a psychological framework of appraisal in which the characteristics of situations are defined and connected to emotions, to identify emotion categories and create contrasting perceptions of emotion appropriateness. We then mapped these categories to four recognizable emotions on aerial robots and designed two video clips (3min35s each) of respectively appropriate and inappropriate emotions. The clips were evaluated in an online study (N=100) where significant differences were found in attitudes toward the robot's emotions. This paper contributes initial findings to designing for emotion appropriateness.