Appearance of a Robot Influences Causal Relationship between Touch Sensation and the Personality Impression

Personality impressions of robots have been regarded as one of the crucial factors in human-robot interaction. To design the personality impressions, we should know how the visual, auditory, and tactile impressions determine the personality impressions. In this study, we investigated the relationships between touch sensations and personality impressions with a child-type android robot in two conditions where 40 Japanese participants touched a part of the robot with different appearance of the face. Factor and path analyses were conducted on the evaluation scores of the sensations and impressions provided by the participants. As a result, two significant positive causal relationships (p < 0.001) were found between the Preference and Resilience touch sensations, and the Likability and Capability personality impressions, respectively, in both robot conditions. On the other hand, several other causal relationships were found only in one condition. This suggests that there are appearance-dependent and appearance-independent relationships between touch sensations and personality impressions.