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Playing the Emotion Game with Feelix 75more easily what is essential 9 versus unimportant, but also to detect missingfeatures and flaws in the model, as occurred with Feelix’s fear expression.Beyond surface. Second, previous work with Elektra showed that expressivefeatures alone are not enough to engage humans in prolonged interaction.Humans want to understand expressive behavior as the result of some underlyingcausality or intentionality. Believability and human acceptance can onlybe properly achieved if expressive behavior responds to some clear model ofemotion activation, such as tactile stimulation patterns in our case.Anthropomorphism. Feelix also illustrates how, as far as emotion designis concerned, realism and anthropomorphism are not always necessary ...nornecessarily good. Anthropomorphism is readily ascribed by the human partnerif the robot has the right features to trigger it. The designer can thus rely tosome extent on this human tendency, and build an emotional artifact that canbe easily attributed human-like characteristics. Finding out what makes thispossible is, in our opinion, an exciting research challenge. However, makinganthropomorphism an essential part of the robot’s design might easily have thenegative consequences of users’ frustrated expectations and lack of credibility.Multidisciplinarity. Finally, it calls for the need for multidisciplinary collaborationand mutual feedback between researchers of human and artificialemotions. Feelix implements two models of emotional interaction and expressioninspired by psychological theories about emotions in humans. This makesFeelix not only very suitable for entertainment purposes, but also a proof-ofconceptthat these theories can be used within a synthetic approach that complementsthe analytic perspective for which they were conceived. We do notclaim that our work provides evidence regarding the scientific validity of thesetheories, as this is out of our scope. We believe, however, that expressiverobots can be very valuable tools to help human emotion researchers test andcompare their theories, carry out experiments, and in general think in differentways about issues relevant to emotion and emotional/social interactions.AcknowledgmentsI am indebted to Jakob Fredslund for generously adapting his robot Elektra to build Feelixand for helping program the robot and perform the tests, and to Henrik Lund for making thisresearch possible. Support was provided by the LEGO-Lab, Department of Computer Science,University of Aarhus, Denmark.Notes1. FEELIX: FEEL, Interact, eXpress.