Psychological Effects of Compliment Expressions by Communication Robots on Humans

The purpose of this research is to construct a dialogue model using proper compliments by an agent. This paper reports compliment expression by communication robot in the conversation necessary to construct dialogue model. Compliments are one of the important verbal behavior for having human communication. Humans use compliments to build and maintain relationships in daily life, taking into account social relationships and psychological states. Several research has proven that compliments used by humans in daily life is constructed several syntactic patterns. If the agent is able to use properly these compliment patterns, the agent can build an affinity relationship with human. However, few research has been done about effects of formulated compliments by agents on humans. The purpose of the experiment of this research is to investigate the effect of agents on impressions of formulated compliments and on the construction of relationships. The comparative experiment was conducted to verify the psychological subjective evaluation of dialogue interaction between the agent giving compliments and the agent not giving compliments. Experimental results showed that formulated compliments by the agent gave a positive impression to humans and was recognized as the compliment. However, there was no significant differences in the psychological impression of humans from the expression of compliments, indicating that it is necessary to construct the flexible compliment dialogue system using fuzzy control for the expression of compliments.