"And then what happens?" Promoting Children's Verbal Creativity Using a Robot

While creativity has been previously studied in Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI), the effect of regulatory focus on creativity skills has not been investigated. This paper presents an exploratory study that, for the first time, uses the Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) to assess children's creativity skills in an educational context with a social robot. We investigated whether two key emotional regulation techniques, promotion (approach) and prevention (avoidance), stimulate creativity during a storytelling activity between a child and a robot. We conducted a between-subjects field study with 69 children between the ages of 7 and 9 years old, divided between two study conditions: (1) promotion, where a social robot primes children for action by eliciting positive emotional states, and (2) prevention, where a social robot primes children for avoidance by evoking a states related to security and safety associated with blockage-oriented behaviors. To assess changes in creativity as a response to the priming interaction, children were asked to tell stories to the robot before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the priming interaction. We measured creativity levels by analyzing the verbal content of the stories. We coded verbal expressions related to creativity variables, including fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality. Our results show that children in the promotion condition generated significantly more ideas, and their ideas were on average more original in the stories they created in the post-test rather than in the pre-test. We also modeled the process of creativity that emerges during storytelling in response to the robot's verbal behavior. This paper enriches the scientific understanding of creativity emergence in child-robot collaborative interactions.