Does the Personality of Consumers Influence the Assessment of the Experience of Interaction with Social Robots?

In recent years, in response to the effects of Covid-19, there has been an increase in the use of social robots in service organisations, as well as in the number of interactions between consumers and robots. However, it is not clear how consumers are valuing these experiences or what the main drivers that shape them are. Furthermore, it is an open research question whether these experiences undergone by consumers can be affected by their own personality. This study attempts to shed some light on these questions and, to do so, an experiment is proposed in which a sample of 378 participants evaluate a simulated front-office service experience delivered by a social robot. The authors investigate the underlying process that explains the experience and find that cognitive-functional factors, emphasising efficiency, have practically the same relevance as emotional factors, emphasising stimulation. In addition, this research identifies the personality traits of the participants and explores their moderating role in the evaluation of the experience. The results reveal that each personality trait, estimated between high and low poles, generates different responses in the evaluation of the experience.

First-principles study of low Miller index Ni3S2 surfaces in hydrotreating conditions.

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations combined with surface thermodynamic arguments and the Gibbs-Curie-Wulff equilibrium morphology formalism have been employed to explore the effect of the reaction conditions, temperature (T), and gas-phase partial pressures (PH2 and PH2S) on the stability of nickel sulfide (Ni3S2) surfaces. Furthermore, the strength and nature of chemical bonds for selected Ni3S2 surface cuts were investigated with the quantum theory of atoms in molecules methodology. A particular analysis of the electrostatic potential within this theoretical framework is performed to study the potential activity of nickel sulfide nanoparticles as hydrodesulfurization (HDS) catalysts. The calculated thermodynamic surface stabilities and the resulting equilibrium morphology model suggest that unsupported Ni3S2 nanoparticles mainly expose (111) and (111) type surface faces in HDS conditions. Analysis of the electrostatic potential mapped onto a selected electron density isocontour (0.001 au) on those expose surface reveals a poor potential reactivity toward electron-donating reagents (i.e., low Lewis acidity). Consequently, a very low attraction between coordinatively unsaturated active sites (Lewis sites) exposed at the catalytic particles and the S atoms coming from reagent polluting molecules does inactive these kinds of particles for HDS.

Nature of the Lewis acid sites on molybdenum and ruthenium sulfides: an electrostatic potential study.

The energy of formation and the Lewis acid strength of sulfur vacancies or coordinative unsaturated sites on the MoS2 edges were studied using density functional theory for periodic systems and an electrostatic potential-based methodology. The results suggest that the more energetically favorable sites are located on the sulfur edges; however, their Lewis acid strength is considerably smaller than the site acidity at the molybdenum edges. The acid strength for the reported most hydrodesulfurization active site of RuS2 was also determined. In general, the Lewis acid for the site on RuS2 is 100% smaller than the sites on the Mo edges and around 20% larger than the most favorable site on the S edges of MoS2. Binding of the pyridine molecule in the eta1 adsorption configuration on the considered sites has corroborated the trend of Lewis acidity suggested by the electrostatic potential methodology.