Measuring the effects of human likeness and eeriness on empathetic associations with a primed categorization task.

The uncanny valley phenomenon [15] is the tendency to perceive human-looking characters with nonhuman features as eerie. One of its attributed symptoms is a loss of emotional empathy. To investigate this, participants completed an affective priming task with video primes of computer-generated characters subjected to either a harmless or harmful event followed by a word categorization. Participants concluded by rating the characters on humanness, eeriness, warmth, and pleasure to self indices. Harmful events befalling more humanlike or less eerie characters were reported as less pleasant. Although a similar result was observed in the affective priming task, the results did not reach significance.