Hello everyone.
I am Rachel Au, a graduate student
at New Mexico State University
Today I am going to give this talk
entitled "Robot Touch to Send Sympathy:
Divergent Perspectives of Senders and Recipients."
This work is a joint effort.
I worked on it with my co-authors:
Katrina Ling, Marlena Fraune, and Katherine Tsui.
Many people live in physical isolation now.
In the past few years, I believe we all have lived in physical isolation to different degree
because of the global pandemic.
In such situations,
we have to rely heavily on online communication.
But there is one major problem:
Touch is lacking in online communication.
We cannot touch the people we are talking to
in a video call or video chat.
And this makes the communication of emotions a lot more difficult.
There is a type of touch called affective touch,
which is the type of touch
that is used to directly communicate emotions.
For example to show love, we may hug the person.
Or when we feel angry,
we may push or shake the person to show our anger
So in this work, we want to see if
robots can help fill the gap of online communication
and how robots can improve online communication.
There are existing robots with touch function,
such as Huggibot, Hugvie, PARO, and some other robots.
In previous work studying these robots,
researchers mainly focused on touch without emotions
or emotions were only implied.
They also mainly focused on one-way touch,
which means touch from the human to the robot
or touch from the robot to the human.
But in the current work, we want to study robot-mediate touch
sent from one human to another human.
This means that a person controls a robot to send touch to another person.
In our work, we also focus on one type of emotions, which is sympathy.
Sympathy is the sorrow or concern you feel
when you see other people suffering.
This is an important emotion in social bonding
because it helps people to feel closer with one another.
Sympathy can be shown with touch
usually by rubbing, stroking, hugging,
contacting the shoulders, arms, and hands
with light intensity.
We have conducted two online studies to study how
robots can be used in online communication to
help convey emotions, mainly sympathy.
And we want to see if it can in turn promote social support
and make people feel closer with one another.
Study 1 focuses on the perspectives of sympathy senders
And study 2 focuses on sympathy recipients.
We provide open access to the study materials
and datasets of both studies
on our Open Science Framework website.
In both studies we used MyCobot
developed by Elephant Robotics.
This is a robot with a very long arm
and it can move in different angles.
We want to use it to mimic different types of
human arm movements.
We have also added a soft fuzzy sock on top of
the robot arm to make the touch look more comfortable.
In study 1, which focuses on the perspectives of touch senders,
we recruited 171 U.S. participants
and 170 Japanese participants,
with a total of 341 participants.
In this study, participants named a friend they felt comfortable
having an online chat with.
And they imagined their friends talking about a negative life event
they were experiencing.
Participants then sent different responses to
comfort their friends
The first one was a type of short text they typed to their friends.
They also selected different GIFs with a sympathy theme
to send to their friends.
And they selected different forms of robot touch
to send to their friends.
These three responses
were manipulated within participants.
These are the GIFs we provided to participants to select with.
And these are the robot touch videos
we created for participants to select
for the robot condition.
And this is what we have found.
For the short texts participants sent to their friends,
The main themes were that
They wanted to affirm the effort of their friends,
show love and care,
and show self-care concerns.
These were the most commonly chosen GIFs for participants.
And these were the two most commonly chosen
videos of robot touch.
They are patting and rubbing on the shoulders.
When asked to rate how much they liked
each response they sent,
participants showed a preference for short text
and GIFs over touch.
And both comparisons were statistically significant.
In study 2, we shifted the focus to
sympathy recipients.
We recruited 170 U.S. participants
and 170 Japanese participants,
with a total of 340 participants.
This time, participants
also reported a friend that they felt comfortable
to have an online chat with.
But this time, they
themselves reported something that
they were experiencing
that negatively affected them, or worried or annoyed them.
And then they imagined sharing this life event
with their friends using
an online chat function.
And they imagined receiving one of
three responses from their friends,
which depended on the experimental condition.
So these were manipulated between participants.
They either received a short text,
a GIF, or robot touch.
The results showed that
participants who received robot touch
actually perceived more sympathy
than participants who received short texts.
There were not differences between the
GIF and touch condition.
And interestingly,
the effect only held for participants who
perceived the touch as sent from their friends
but not from the robot.
There were similar patterns of results
in perceived social support.
Participants who received the touch
also perceived more social support
from their friends
compared to participants who received short texts.
There were again no differences between
GIF and touch conditions.
And the effect also only held
for participants who received touch
that perceived it as from their friends but not the robot.
So interestingly
the two studies altogether
showed very different views of
robot-mediated touch senders and recipients.
Touch senders have a preference for more
traditional ways of sending sympathy to their friends,
such as using GIFs and short texts.
But for touch recipients,
they actually perceived more benefits
from robot touch compared to short texts.
A speculation we have is that
it may be a unique feature of robot-mediated touch.
In human-human touch normally,
both the senders and the recipients
receive some kinds of tactile sensations.
But in terms of robot-mediated touch,
the senders are actually less involved in the process of touch.
They may be only pressing a key on a computer
to control a robot to send touch.
So this may make them harder to see
the benefits of the touch itself.
One limitation of the studies is that
we mainly asked participants to imagine
receiving or sending the touch,
but they did not actually experience any touch.
So the next goal is to
conduct a real-world in-person study
to have participants actually experiencing the touch
and reporting how they actually view the touch
after experiencing it.
Thank you very much.
This is my email.
If you are interested in this work,
I am very happy to further discuss it with you.
I would like to again thank my co-authors
and other researchers who have contributed to this work.
I would also like to thank Toyota Research Institute,
who have provided funding for this work.
Thank you very much.