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This paper proposes a systematic approach to investigate the impact of factors such as the gender and age of participants and gender, and age of faces on the decoding accuracy of emotional expressions of disgust, anger, sadness, fear, happiness, and neutrality. The emotional stimuli consisted of 76 posed and 76 naturalistic faces, differently aged (young, middle-aged, and older) selected from FACES and SFEW databases. Either a posed or naturalistic faces’ decoding task was administered. The posed faces’ decoding task involved three differently aged groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults). The naturalistic faces’ decoding task involved two groups of older adults. For the posed decoding task, older adults were found significantly less accurate than middle-aged and young participants, and middle-aged significantly less accurate than young participants. Old faces were significantly less accurately decoded than young and middle-aged faces of disgust, and anger, and young faces of fear, and neutrality. Female faces were significantly more accurately decoded than male faces of anger and sadness, significantly less accurately decoded than male faces of neutrality. For the naturalistic decoding task, older adults were significantly less accurate in decoding naturalistic rather than posed faces of disgust, fear, and neutrality, contradicting an older adults’ emended support from a prior naturalistic emotional experience. Young faces were more accurately decoded than old and middle-aged faces of disgust and anger and old faces of neutrality. Female faces were significantly more accurately decoded than male faces of fear, and significantly less accurately decoded than male faces of anger. Significant effects and significant interdependencies were observed among the age of participants, emotional categories, age, and gender of faces, and type of stimuli (naturalistic vs. posed), not allowing to distinctly isolate the effects of each involved variable. Nevertheless, the data collected in this paper weakens both the assumptions on women enhanced ability to display and decode emotions and participants enhanced ability to decode faces closer to their own age (“own age bias” theory). Considerations are made on how these data would guide the development of assessment tools and preventive interventions and the design of emotionally and socially believable virtual agents and robots to assists and coach emotionally vulnerable people in their daily routines.

Handwriting and Drawing are functional tasks involving physical and cognitive processes. Recently they have been investigated for detecting cognitive and motor disorders. In this work, handwriting/drawing features are investigated for identifying connections with personality traits. For this purpose, an experiment comprising seven handwriting/drawing tasks has been administrated to 78 young adults (mean age=24.6 ± 2.4 years) equally balanced by gender. Handwriting and Drawing activities-both on and close to the paper – had been recorded online through a digitizing tablet able to measure handwriting and drawing features such as pressure, speed, dimension, and inclination of each pen-stroke on the paper. Participants were asked to fill the Big Five Personality Questionnaire (BFQ) and according to the scores obtained for each of the 5 dimensions and 10 Big Five sub-dimensions, were partitioned into three categories: low, typical, and high. To evaluate whether the recorded handwriting/drawing features are connected with personality traits ANOVA repeated measures have been performed with gender and group category (low, typical, and high) as between and the listed handwriting/drawing features as within factors. The analyses show significant differences among low, typical and, high BFQ scores for the main Big Five dimensions and the ten Big Five sub-dimensions, indicating that personality traits can be revealed by a quantitative analysis of the proposed handwriting/drawing features.

This paper reports on experiments devoted to explore the role of specific attributes of humanoid virtual agents that may influence elderly users’ perception and attitude, determining their acceptance and adoption as assistive devices. In particular, it investigates elderly preference on agents’ gender and the role of the agents’ ability to use voice during the interaction. To this aim two different groups of seniors were involved in the experiments. The first group evaluated talking virtual agents, the second one the same virtual agents, but silenced. The data shows that elderly users, independently from their gender, prefer to interact with female agents, especially when they are able to talk to them, revealing the role played by the voice. Furthermore, it was found a significant effect of the elderly level of experience with technology: when interacting with agents with voice, elderly users with high technological experience were less interested and considered the proposed agents less attractive and appealing, while just the opposite occurred when interacting with silenced agents.

The present study was designed to identify writer's gender trough online handwriting and drawing analysis. Two groups - one of 126 males (mean age 24.65, SD=2.45) and the other of 114 females (mean age 24.51, SD=2.50) participants were recruited in the experiment. They were asked to perform seven writing and drawing tasks utilizing a digitizing tablet and a special writing device. Seventeen writing features grouped into five categories have been considered. The experiment's results show that the set of considered features enable to discriminate between male and female writers investigating their performance while copying a house drawing (task 2), writing words in capital letters (task 3) and writing a complete sentence in cursive letters (task 7), in particular focusing on Ductus (number of strokes) and Time categories of writing features.

This research reports on handwriting/drawing quantitative features and their links with personality traits. To this aim, handwriting/drawing tasks have been proposed to 78 subjects (equally balance by gender and aged between 22-35 years), which were first administered the Big Five Personality questionnaire (BFQ). Subjects were clustered as low, typical, and high according to the scores obtained to each 5 personality dimensions (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). Measures of pressure, ductus, time, space, and inclination, were computed from digital recordings of the proposed handwriting/drawing tasks through an INTUOS WACOM digitizing tablet. On these data, ANOVA repeated measures were performed with gender and group category (low, typical and high for each of the BFQ dimension) as between and associated computed measures as within factors. Results show significant differences for each of the BFQ dimension among subject group categories and handwriting/drawing measures connecting quantitatively personality traits to graphology.

The present study investigates the extent to which robots' 1) degree of human likeness, 2) gender and 3) ethnicity affect elders' attitude towards using robots as healthcare assistants. To this aim 2 groups of 45 seniors, aged 65 + years, were asked to watch video clips showing three speaking female and male robots, respectively. Each set of stimuli consisted in 2 androids, one with Caucasian and one with Asian aspect, and 1 humanoid robot. After each video clip elders were asked to assess, through the Robot Acceptance Questionnaire (RAQ) their willingness to interact with them, as well as robots' Pragmatic, Hedonic and Attractive qualities. Through this investigation it was found that male seniors were more proactive than female ones in their attitude toward robots showing more willingness to interact with them and attributing more positive scores to robots' qualities. It was also observed that androids were clearly more preferred than humanoid robots no matter their gender. Finally, seniors' preferences were for female android robots with Asian traits and male android with Caucasian traits suggesting that both gender and ethnical features are intermingled in defining robot's appearance that generate seniors' acceptance.

Elders' acceptance of robots is still a novel field and a clear research methodology to assess users' preferences has not yet been developed. The exploitation of robots, as assistive technologies, requires the properly identification of users' needs and expectations and the matching of robot's role, appearance, and behavior to these needs. Robot's degree of resemblance to humans may play a fundamental role on their acceptance into domestic spheres. The present paper investigates elders' preferences towards female robots showing different levels of human likeness (two androids and a humanoid robot are involved in the study) considering their pragmatic, hedonic and attractive dimensions, as well as occupations elders entrusted to robots. A total of 51 elders (29 females) aged 65+ years were recruited. Participants were asked to watch video clips showing three speaking female manufactured robots (Erica, Sophia, and Pepper) and after each video clip, the Robot Appearance Questionnaire (RAQ) was administered. The results highlight that the degree of robot's human likeness affects elders' preferences in favor of android robots. Elders expressed a clear preference for female android rather than humanoid robots, in contrast with the current trend observed in literature. In addition, female robots were considered more suitable in performing housework rather than protection/security, healthcare, and front office occupations

The present work reports the results of perceptual experiments aimed to investigate if some of the basic emotions are perceptually privileged and if the cultural environment and the perceptual mode play a role in this preference. To this aim, Italian subjects were requested to assess emotional stimuli extracted from Italian and American English movies in the single (either video or audio alone) and the combined audio/video mode. Results showed that anger, fear, and sadness are better perceived than surprise, happiness in both the cultural environments (irony instead strongly depend on the language), that emotional information is affected by the communication mode and that language plays a role in assessing emotional information. Implications for the implementation of emotionally colored interactive systems are discussed.

Is there any evidence that context plays a role in the perception of the emotional feeling aroused by emotional musical expressions?. This work tries to answer the above question through a series of experiments where subjects were asked to label as positive or negative a set of emotionally assessed musical expressions played in combination with congruent or incongruent visual stimuli. The influence of context was measured through the valence. The results showed that the agreement on valence was always higher when melodies were played without context suggesting that music alone is more effective in raising emotional feeling than music combined either with positive or negative visual stimuli. Visual stimuli (either congruent or incongruent) significantly affect the perception of happy and sad melodies, whereas their effects are less severe and not significant for angry and fearful musical expressions.