Emotional intelligence can reveal a lot about a person's personality and now there's a new test to measure this by reading a robot's face.
Nikola the android has been created by Japanese researchers at the RIKEN Guardian Robot Project and it can successfully convey six of the basic human emotions.
From a raise or furrowing of an eyebrow to a smile or stare down, Nikola is able to express happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.
This is thanks to 29 pneumatic actuators built into Nikola's face which are able to control a network of artificial muscles, and so Nikola is able to replicate the movements of the 42 muscles within our faces, The US Sunreported.
Nikola is able to move its head and eyeballs thanks to an additional six actuators.
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“In the short term, androids like Nikola can be important research tools for social psychology or even social neuroscience,” Riken researcher Wataru Sato said.
“Compared with human confederates, androids are good at controlling behaviours and can facilitate rigorous empirical investigation of human social interactions.
“Androids that can emotionally communicate with us will be useful in a wide range of real-life situations, such as caring for older people, and can promote human wellbeing,” Sato added.
Initially, researchers wanted to find out if people could read the expressions the robot was mimicking but now they have discovered those who are able to understand what emotion Nikola is expressing are more socially intuitive.
Though, as Nikola does not have human skin but less elastic silicone instead, it can be harder for her to express certain emotions as wrinkles cannot be formed as effectively - for example disgust is a harder emotion to read on Nikola because her nose does not wrinkle that human's face does when they are disgusted.
What to know how emotionally intelligent you are? Guess the six facial expressions from Nikola in each picture:
(Answers at the end).
Can you guess what emotion Nikola is expressing with her face in each of these images?RIKEN Guardian Robot Project
Here are the answers - did you guess the right emotions?
Answers:
- Anger
- Disgust
- Fear
- Happiness
- Sadness
- Surprise