A Stranger in the Classroom: Pre-service Teachers' Anxiety and Negative Attitudes Toward Humanoid Social Robots.

While exploring a pre-service teacher population, which is not willing to accept social robots in their future classroom, we find a low level of robot anxiety, slightly negative general attitudes toward social robots in education and a strong positive correlation between anxiety and negative attitudes in general. Our findings put in evidence also a strong positive correlation between anxiety and negative attitudes toward interactions with robot, which we interprete with Anxiety/uncertainty management theory. In human relations the communication with a stranger of another culture results in the managment of uncertainty and in some associated anxiety and can lead to communication avoidance with strangers.