Affective Body Movements (for Robots) Across Cultures

Humans are very good in expressing and interpreting emotions from a variety of different sources like voice, facial expression, or body movements. In this article, we concentrate on body movements and show that those are not only a source of affective information but might also have a different interpretation in different cultures. To cope with these multiple viewpoints in generating and interpreting body movements in robots, we suggest a methodological approach that takes the cultural background of the developer and the user into account during the development process. We exemplify this approach with a study on creating an affective knocking movement for a humanoid robot and give details about a co-creation experiment for collecting a cross-cultural database on affective body movements and about the probabilistic model derived from this data.