A Robot that Encourages Self-disclosure by Hug

Abstract

This paper presents the effects of being hugged by a robot to encourage self-disclosure. Physical interactions, which are known to be essential for communication with others, also show the effects of eliciting self-disclosure from the people with whom one is interacting and contribute to the construction of social relationships. Previous research demonstrated that people who touched a robot experienced positive impressions of it without clarifying whether being hugged by a robot elicits self-disclosure from people. We developed a huge, teddy-bear-like robot that can give reciprocal hugs to people and experimentally investigated its effects on self-disclosure. Our experiment results with 32 participants showed that those who were hugged by the robot significantly offered more self-disclosure than those who were not hugged by it. Moreover, people who were hugged by the robot interacted with it longer than those who were not hugged by it. On the other hand, the perceived feelings about the robot were not significantly different between the conditions.