Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

Affective touch is a crucial element of early hu- man development, social bonding, and emotional support. Technically and socially difficult to study, it has received little research attention. Our approach employs animal mod- els instantiated by the Haptic Creature, a touch-centric so- cial robot. In this paper, we examine how humans commu- nicate emotional state through touch to the Haptic Creature and their expectations of its reactions. A user study is pre- sented where participants selected and performed gestures they would likely use when conveying nine different emo- tions to the Haptic Creature. We report a touch dictionary compiled for our research; the gestures participants chose from it; and video analysis of their enactment. Our principal findings regard patterns of gesture use for emotional expres- sion; physical properties of the likely gestures; expectations for the Haptic Creature’s response to mirror the emotion communicated; and analysis of the human’s higher intent in communication. From the latter finding, we present five ten- tative categories of “intent” that overlap emotion states: pro- tective, comforting, restful, affectionate, and playful. These results can help inform the future design of social robots by illuminating details of one direction in affective touch inter- actions.