Social robots, cross-cultural differences

Abstract

[EN]The study of emotion abilities is of interest to Artificial Intelligence because identifying and responding approp riately to the affective states of humans is thought to make users more prone to interact with robots. However, cross - cultural differences in social communication are common. The CAD (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) hypothesis proposes that these three emotions are elicited by different violations of moral codes. Our exploratory study of texts from a corpus of Spanish contextualized words shows that both the emotion receiver and its perceived cause are different for these emotions: disgust takes as its object mos tly something concrete, anger is preferentially felt towards another person, and contempt towards an abstract object. In Spain, disgust was associated with prejudice, and anger with altruistic motives while contempt remained the most elusive of the triad. In Latin America, both disgust and contempt were associated with prejudice, while the altruistic function of anger failed to reach significance. Differences concerning the moral functions of anger and contempt corroborate that the cultural context in which emotions are expressed can change their moral meaning. The procedure is an ecologically valid one that can be of help for designing more realistic social robots