“A Glimpse Into My World”: Empathy Towards Emotional Robot Backstories at University

Backstory enriches the depth of a character by providing context and history. This online study explored how social robots narrating emotional backstories affect human empathy. Three backstories-happy, neutral (control), and sad- were crafted to mirror believable robot experiences. These narratives, personified as the robot's emotions, were conveyed through multi-modal video recordings of the robot that featured visual and textual elements. A within-subject experiment was conducted through a web-based survey among 60 English-speaking students from a German university. Our results highlight the significant role of backstories in shaping perceptions of robots, with the sad backstory notably increasing empathy towards social robots, diverging from prior Human-Robot Interaction paradigms. Furthermore, gender-based differences in empathetic responses highlighted the impact of sad narratives on female participants, with the robot's voice set as female. Open-ended feedback suggested the need for improved expressiveness in facial expressions and gaze strategies to mitigate the uncanny valley phenomenon.