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About

Koji Kawabe is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction psychology, specializing in how people psychologically perceive, evaluate, and relate to humanoid robots. His most significant contribution lies in developing rigorous psychological measurement tools to quantify subjective human responses toward humanoids — work that has provided the field with standardized instruments previously absent from the literature. His 2012 scale for measuring general impressions of humanoids (46 citations) remains his most influential achievement, offering researchers a validated framework for assessing how ordinary people evaluate robotic figures across demographic groups. Building on this foundation, Kawabe extended his inquiry into culturally specific emotional states, most notably through his 2015 exploration of *anshin* — a distinctly Japanese sense of psychological comfort and safety — developing a dedicated scale to measure this nuanced well-being concept in human-robot contexts (36 citations). His 2014 research quantifying the relationship between familiarity and humanness across thousands of Japanese participants further demonstrated his commitment to large-scale, empirically grounded psychology. Kawabe has also investigated personal space, nonverbal communication, and social comparison dynamics between humans and robots, collectively painting a comprehensive picture of the psychological landscape of human-humanoid coexistence.