Laughter in Social Robotics – no laughing matter

In this paper we describe our work in progress on investigating an understudied aspect of social interaction, namely laughter. In social interaction between humans laughter occurs in a variety of contexts featuring diverse meanings and connotations. Thus, we started to investigate the usefulness of this auditory and behavioral signal applied to social robotics. We first report on results of two surveys conducted to assess the subjectively evaluated naturalness of different types of laughter applied to two humanoid robots. Then we describe the effects of laughter when combined with an android‘s motion and presented to uninformed participants, during playful interaction with another human. In essence, we learned that the social effect of laughter heavily depends on at least the following three factors: First, the situational context, which is not only determined by the task at hand, but also by linguistic content as well as non-verbal expressions; second, the type and quality of laughter synthesis in combination with an artificial laugher‘s outer appearance; and third, the interaction dynamics, which is partly depending on a perceiver‘s gender, personality, and cultural as well as educational background.