Identifying Opportunities for RelationshipFocused Robotic Interventions in Strained Hierarchical Relationships * When disagreements arise in hierarchical relationships, relationship members sometimes prefer conflict management strategies that avoid or quickly end the overt conflict even if the relationship is left in a state of dissatisfaction. Our lab has proposed that a peripheral robotic agent may be able to support these types of relationships during conflict. In this paper, we present the results of an IRBapproved humanrobot interaction study that examines how the members of a hierarchical relationship involved in conflict respond to the presence of an unengaged robot. This study serves as a baseline for additional studies. The unengaged robot appears to have a minimal influence on the interaction. The observed conflicts followed the patterns typically described in mediation literature. Our lab previously proposed a computational model to identify weakness and alienation in these relationships. We discuss a partial implementation of this model, and its ability to recognize problems in certain relationships within the data collected. Based on our observations, and the performance of the modelxe2x80x99s partial implementation, we suggest considerations that need to be made for an intervening robotic agent.

An experimental study of parameters influencing physical HumanRobot negotiation in comanipulative tracking task. The present paper investigates the relationship between human and virtual partnersxe2x80x99 behaviors during a comanipulative task requiring negotiation. More precisely, the study is focused on the influence of the Virtual Partnerxe2x80x99s (which was designed in a previous study) propensity to take the lead during conflicts over its human partner behavior. The experimental design includes both HumanHuman and HumanRobot trials. The HumanHuman trials serve as a baseline condition and help assessing the importance of the partnerxe2x80x99s nature (human vs robot) knowledge in the subjects behavior. The HumanRobot trials are used to observe the effect of different tuning of the Virtual Partner on the dominance relationship within HumanRobot dyads. The results of the study show that Human behavior is consistent across HumanHuman trials, and is not influenced by the knowledge of their partnerxe2x80x99s nature. Moreover, a simple tuning of the negotiation thresholds of the Virtual Partner allows to significantly modify the dominance of the human partner, although this modification has no lasting effects.