Emotion Perception of Schizophrenia Patients for Eye Blinking Patterns of Humanoid Robots

: In this study, we conducted an experiment that compared 27 schizophrenia patients and 29 healthy subjects in perception of emotions expressed by an NAO humanoid robot. We programmed the robot to express the eight basic emotions proposed by Plutchik (1984) which were anger, anticipation, expectation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust using Teshi et al. (2015)’s method of dynamically changing the robot’s eye color. We found a significant difference between the two groups of subjects in their judgements of the robot’s emotions. The results showed that the schizophrenic patients had difficulty in recognizing the robot’s emotions. In addition, the two groups showed different patterns of emotion misperceptions. The schizophrenic group’s misperceptions mistook positive and negative emotions. The misperception of schizophrenic patients may be caused by the similarity of colors and fast blinking cycles. We consider it resulting from the decline in information processing abilities of the schizophrenic patients.