Young and Elderly Users' Emotion Recognition of Dynamically Formed Expressions Made by a Non-Human Virtual Agent

The development of non-human robots and virtual agents is focused on encouraging affective communication between humans and agents while supporting the daily life of individuals. For an agent to achieve affective communication with a wide range of users, understanding emotion recognition of an agent's expression is important. In previous studies, age has had an obvious effect on emotion recognition. However, the effect of age on emotion recognition in the context of non-human agents is not yet well understood. In this study, we investigated emotion recognition of young and elderly users when confronted with a non-human agent's expressions. A questionnaire with a seven-emotion alternative forced choice task was used to analyze emotion recognition in 62 young and 39 elderly users. Dynamically formed virtual agent expressions were used to analyze the effect of non-human expressions on emotion recognition. The elderly users had a higher variability of emotion recognition compared with the young users. Studying the individual characteristics of emotion recognition should be prioritized would allow for more affective communication between elderly users and non-human agents.