Faculty of Computing, Law and Psychology | School of Psychology

Dr Sofia Petisca

Lecturer in Psychology

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 and if a robot could promote more honest behaviours from people.

She now teaches the core Social Psychology module, and the Psychology of Emotions and Cyberpsychology module at The University of Buckingham. 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. In terms of Human-Robot interaction specifically, she is interested in morality and human dishonest behaviour, and how can robots have a positive impact in society.

Publications

(Google ScholarResearch Gate)

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.

Alves-Oliveira, P., Petisca, S., Correia, F., Maia, N., & Paiva, A. (2015). Social robots for older adults: Framework of activities for aging in place with robots. In International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), 11-20. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_2

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