Emotional Musical Prosody for the Enhancement of Trust in Robotic Arm Communication

TL;DR

This study explores how emotional musical prosody in robotic arm communication can enhance user trust, showing that musical prosody increases perceived trust even without affecting agreement rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of using emotional musical prosody in robotic communication and demonstrates its positive impact on user trust in human-robot interaction.

Findings

Musical prosody group reported higher trust ratings.

No significant difference in agreement rates across groups.

Emotional musical prosody enhances perceived trust without affecting decision agreement.

Abstract

As robotic arms become prevalent in industry it is crucial to improve levels of trust from human collaborators. Low levels of trust in human-robot interaction can reduce overall performance and prevent full robot utilization. We investigated the potential benefits of using emotional musical prosody to allow the robot to respond emotionally to the user's actions. We tested participants' responses to interacting with a virtual robot arm that acted as a decision agent, helping participants select the next number in a sequence. We compared results from three versions of the application in a between-group experiment, where the robot had different emotional reactions to the user's input depending on whether the user agreed with the robot and whether the user's choice was correct. In all versions, the robot reacted with emotional gestures. One version used prosody-based emotional audio phrases selected from our dataset of singer improvisations, the second version used audio consisting of a single pitch randomly assigned to each emotion, and the final version used no audio, only gestures. Our results showed no significant difference for the percentage of times users from each group agreed with the robot, and no difference between user's agreement with the robot after it made a mistake. However, participants also took a trust survey following the interaction, and we found that the reported trust ratings of the musical prosody group were significantly higher than both the single-pitch and no audio groups.