The funcanny valley: a study of positive emotional reactions to strangeness

The uncanny valley hypothesis states that an artificial character creates an unsettling impression if it resembles a real human too closely. In previous literature, uncanniness has usually been interpreted as a single feature that manifests itself in two ways: the character is perceived as strange, and it arouses emotions with negative valence in the viewer. The present study contradicts this view by demonstrating that strangeness and negative valence are not necessarily associated with each other. We showed people images of facial expressions that had already been rated for strangeness in a previous experiment. This time, we measured the viewers' emotional reactions using facial electromyography and self-assessment. Our results demonstrated that high strangeness was associated with positive emotional reactions instead of negative ones. When our participants saw strange faces, they smiled instead of frowning, and they reported experiencing amusement instead of negatively valenced emotions. We conclude that for human-like characters, strangeness is not always accompanied by emotions with negative valence, but these characters can also be uncanny in a funny way.