Parenting Journal · Volume 3 · Issue 1 · Licensed source edition
Hurry Up, We Need to Find the Key! How Regulatory Focus Design Affects Children’s Trust in a Social Robot
Originally published 2021-07-08 · Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Frontiers Media SA · DOI 10.3389/frobt.2021.652035 ↗
AI / system type
Social robot / teleoperated experimental behavior
Child-facing evidenceExamines children or child-focused systems. Transfer to everyday family life must be assessed separately.
The AI connection
Examines children’s trust in a social robot interface; the robot’s behavior was operator-mediated, so findings concern interaction design and perception rather than AI capability.
Why this reading matters
Provides direct child evidence that social impressions and behavioral reliance need not move together.
Editorial reading guide · Trust
Is a child’s liking for a robot the same as appropriate reliance on its suggestions?
The experiment distinguishes liking, perceived competence, stated trust and willingness to follow suggestions. These are different dimensions of children’s relationships with apparently intelligent agents.
Study context
Sixty-nine children playing a goal-oriented game with the EMYS robot
Age / stage: Children aged 7–9 years
Read with three questions
- What did promotion- and prevention-focused interaction change?
- How were liking, competence, trust and following suggestions distinguished?
- What did the experiment not test about right-versus-wrong advice?
Keep the limits in view
The robot was teleoperated by an experimenter; this was not a modern autonomous or generative-AI trial. The game did not balance correct and incorrect suggestions, and short interactions do not show lasting calibrated trust.
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Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.
Natalia Calvo-Barajas; Maha Elgarf; Giulia Perugia; Ana Paiva; Christopher Peters; Ginevra Castellano (2021). Hurry Up, We Need to Find the Key! How Regulatory Focus Design Affects Children’s Trust in a Social Robot Frontiers in Robotics and AI. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.652035
Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-04. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.