Parenting Journal · Volume 1 · Issue 2 · Licensed source edition
Smiles as a Signal of Prosocial Behaviors Toward the Robot in the Therapeutic Setting for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder
Originally published 2021-05-26 · Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Frontiers Media SA · DOI 10.3389/frobt.2021.599755 ↗
AI / system type
Teleoperated NAO social robot plus offline Bayesian helping-behavior prediction
Child-facing evidenceExamines children or child-focused systems. Transfer to everyday family life must be assessed separately.
The AI connection
Teleoperated NAO social robot plus offline Bayesian helping-behavior prediction. Examines helping toward a robot and the limits of interpreting smiles as prosocial signals.
Why this reading matters
Offers an unusually direct prosocial-behavior task while making transfer and emotion-inference limits visible.
Editorial reading guide · Kindness
Does helping a robot tell us how a child will care for people?
Examines helping toward a robot and the limits of interpreting smiles as prosocial signals.
Study context
Six autistic and six typically developing children
Age / stage: Autistic children 6–16; typically developing children 6–11
Read with three questions
- Who operated NAO during the falling scenarios?
- How were smiles and helping coded?
- Was helping humans outside the session measured?
Keep the limits in view
Tiny exploratory sample; human-operated interaction and offline analysis. Helping a robot and smiling cannot establish generalized prosocial change or reliably reveal inner feelings.
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SunKyoung Kim; Masakazu Hirokawa; Soichiro Matsuda; Atsushi Funahashi; Kenji Suzuki (2021). Smiles as a Signal of Prosocial Behaviors Toward the Robot in the Therapeutic Setting for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Frontiers in Robotics and AI. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.599755
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