AUTHOR=Ogino Masaki , Nishikawa Akihiko , Asada Minoru TITLE=A motivation model for interaction between parent and child based on the need for relatedness JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=4 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00618 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00618 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

In parent-child communication, emotions are evoked by various types of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Those emotions encourage actions that promote more interactions. We present a motivation model of infant-caregiver interactions, in which relatedness, one of the most important basic psychological needs, is a variable that increases with experiences of emotion sharing. Besides being an important factor of pleasure, relatedness is a meta-factor that affects other factors such as stress and emotional mirroring. The proposed model is implemented in an artificial agent equipped with a system to recognize gestures and facial expressions. The baby-like agent successfully interacts with an actual human and adversely reacts when the caregiver suddenly ceases facial expressions, similar to the “still-face paradigm” demonstrated by infants in psychological experiments. In the simulation experiment, two agents, each controlled by the proposed motivation model, show relatedness-dependent emotional communication that mimics actual human communication.