Intercultural Differences in Decoding Facial Expressions of the Android Robot Geminoid F

As android robots become increasingly sophisticated in their technical as well as artistic design, their non-verbal expressiveness is getting closer to that of real humans. Accordingly, this paper presents results of two online surveys designed to evaluate a female android’s facial display of five basic emotions. Being interested in intercultural differences we prepared both surveys in English, German, as well as Japanese language, and we not only found that in general our design of the emotional expressions “fearful” and “surprised” were often confused, but also that Japanese participants more often confused “angry” with “sad” than the German and English participants. Although facial displays of the same emotions portrayed by the model person of Geminoid F achieved higher recognition rates overall, portraying fearful has been similarly difficult for her. Finally, from the analysis of free responses that the participants were invited to give, a number of interesting further conclusions are drawn that help to clarify the question of how intercultural differences impact on the interpretation of facial displays of an android’s emotions. 1