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Playing the Emotion Game with Feelix 75

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more easily what is essential versus unimportant, but also to detect missing
features and flaws in the model, as occurred with Feelix’s fear expression.

Beyond surface. Second, previous work with Elektra showed that expres-
sive features alone are not enough to engage humans in prolonged interaction.
Humans want to understand expressive behavior as the result of some under-
lying causality or intentionality. Believability and human acceptance can only
be properly achieved if expressive behavior responds to some clear model of
emotion activation, such as tactile stimulation patterns in our case.

Anthropomorphism. Feelix also illustrates how, as far as emotion design
is concerned, realism and anthropomorphism are not always necessary ... nor
necessarily good. Anthropomorphism is readily ascribed by the human partner
if the robot has the right features to trigger it. The designer can thus rely to
some extent on this human tendency, and build an emotional artifact that can
be easily attributed human-like characteristics. Finding out what makes this
possible is, in our opinion, an exciting research challenge. However, making
anthropomorphism an essential part of the robot’s design might easily have the
negative consequences of users’ frustrated expectations and lack of credibility.

Multidisciplinarity. Finally, it calls for the need for multidisciplinary col-
laboration and mutual feedback between researchers of human and artificial
emotions. Feelix implements two models of emotional interaction and expres-
sion inspired by psychological theories about emotions in humans. This makes
Feelix not only very suitable for entertainment purposes, but also a proof-of-
concept that these theories can be used within a synthetic approach that com-
plements the analytic perspective for which they were conceived. We do not
claim that our work provides evidence regarding the scientific validity of these
theories, as this is out of our scope. We believe, however, that expressive
robots can be very valuable tools to help human emotion researchers test and
compare their theories, carry out experiments, and in general think in different
ways about issues relevant to emotion and emotional/social interactions.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Jakob Fredslund for generously adapting his robot Elektra to build Feelix
and for helping program the robot and perform the tests, and to Henrik Lund for making this
research possible. Support was provided by the LEGO-Lab, Department of Computer Science,
University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Notes

1. FEELIX: FEEL, Interact, eXpress.