Why do you think this joke told by robot is funny? The humor style matters

Abstract

Humor usually plays a positive role in social activities. We posit that endowing a social robot with humor ability can enhance expressive human-robot interaction. People’s perception on humor is different, and therefore, making the robot expressing humor in an appropriate way is a challenge. The main aim of this paper is to explore the correlation between people’s perception on different types of jokes and their humor styles (Affiliative, Self-enhancing, Self-defeating, Aggressive). In the experiment, we used the humanoid robot Pepper to perform different types of jokes. Both subjective (jokes rating) and objective measures (RGB and thermal images) were used. The latter method was employed to extract facial features (facial action unit and facial temperature). After extracting and analyzing the data of both measurement methods, we found that the Self-defeating humor style positively affects people’s rating on all types of jokes. In addition, there is also a positive correlation between people’s humor style scores and the degree of happiness.