Dr Sofia Petisca

Sofia joined The University of Buckingham in 2021, she is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a Chartered Psychologist. Sofia completed her PhD at Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE) in Psychology applied to Human-Robot interaction, where she explored human dishonesty in the presence of a robot- exploring whether robots could promote more honest behaviours in people.

She now teaches modules in Cyberpsychology, Social Psychology and Psychology of Emotions in the UG Programme. She also supervises undergraduate and postgraduate (MSc and PhD) students.
Her main research interests are in exploring people’s interactions with technology, how it changes our behaviours, how it affects us, and how it can also provide support. See below some of the research interest topics:

• Artificial intelligence and creativity
• Gaming- identities and positive effects
• Morality in Human-robot interaction
• Online intra/intergroup behaviours and social identities

Publications

Google Scholar, Research Gate

Petisca, S., Leite, I., Paiva, A. & Esteves, F. (2022). Human Dishonesty in the Presence of a Robot: The Effects of Situation Awareness. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00864-3

Petisca, S., Paiva, A., & Esteves, F. (2020). Perceptions of People’s Dishonesty Towards Robots. In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), 132-143. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_12

Petisca, S., Paiva, A., & Esteves, F. (2020). The effect of a robotic agent on dishonest behavior. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423953

Petisca S., Esteves, F. and Paiva, A. (2019). Cheating with robots: how at ease do they make us feel? In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2102-2107. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967790

Correia, F., Petisca, S., Alves-Oliveira, P., Ribeiro, T., Melo, F. S., & Paiva, A. (2019). “I Choose…YOU!” Membership preferences in human–robot teams. In Autonomous Robots, Special Issue on Robotics: Science and Systems, 43(2), 359-373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-018-9767-9

Paiva, A., Mascarenhas, S., Petisca, S., Correia, F., & Alves-Oliveira, P. (2018). Towards more humane machines: creating emotional social robots. In S. G. Silva (Eds), New Interdisciplinary Landscapes in Morality and Emotion, Chapter 9 (pp. 139-153). Routledge.