Researchers at the RIKEN Guardian Robot Project in Japan have created an android child named Nikola that successfully conveys six basic emotions. The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, tested how well people could identify six facial expressions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust – generated by moving "muscles" in Nikola's face. This is the first time that the quality of emotions expressed by Android has been tested and verified for these six emotions.

In Nikola's face there are 29 pneumatic actuators that control the movements of artificial muscles. Another 6 actuators control the movements of the head and eyeball. Pneumatic actuators are controlled by air pressure, making movements quiet and smooth. The team placed the actuators based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is widely used to study facial expressions. Previous research has identified numerous facial action units – such as 'cheek raiser' and 'lip pucker' – that encompass typical emotions such as happiness or disgust, and the researchers incorporated these action units into Nikola's design.

Research on emotions, especially how people respond to emotions, generally has a problem. It is difficult to conduct a well-controlled experiment where living people interact with each other, but at the same time, looking at photos or videos of people is less natural and the reactions are not the same.
A person certified in FACS scoring was able to identify each facial action unit, indicating that Nikola's facial movements accurately resemble those of a real human. A second test showed that ordinary people could recognize the six prototypical emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust – in Nikola's face, albeit with varying accuracy. This is because Nikola's silicone skin is less elastic than real human skin and cannot form wrinkles as well. Thus, emotions such as disgust were more difficult to identify because the action unit for nose wrinkles could not be recorded.

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