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In this paper, we propose adding the traditional Japanese nodding behavior to the repertoire of social movements to be used in the context of humanrobot interaction. Our approach is motivated by the notion that in many cultures, trust-building can be boosted by small body gestures. We discuss the integration of a robot capable of such movements within CRECA, our context-respectful counseling agent. The frequent nodding called "unazuki" in Japan, often accompanying the "un-un" sound (meaning "I agree") of Japanese onomatopoeia, underlines empathy and embodies unconditioned approval. We argue that "unazuki" creates more empathy and promotes longer conversation between the robotic counsellor and people. We set up an experiment involving 10 subjects to verify these effects. Our quantitative evaluation is based on the classic metrics of utterance, adapted to support the Japanese language. Interactions featuring "unazuki" showed higher value of this metrics. Moreover, subjects assessed the counselling robot's trustworthiness and kindness as "very high" (Likert scale: 5.5 versus 3 -4.5) showing the effect of social gestures in promoting empathetic dialogue to general people including the younger generation. Our findings support the importance of social movements when using robotized agents as a therapeutic tool aimed at improving emotional state and social interactions, with unambiguous evidence that embodiment can have a positive impact that warrants further exploration. The 3D printable design of our robot supports creating culture-specific libraries of social movements, adapting the gestural repertoire to different human cultures.

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We present VICA, a Visual Counseling Agent designed to create an engaging multimedia face-to-face interaction. VICA 1 is a human-friendly agent equipped with high-performance voice conversation designed to help psychologically stressed users, to offload 2 their emotional burden. Such users specifically include non-computer-savvy elderly persons or clients. Our agent builds replies 3 exploiting interlocutor's utterances expressing such as wishes, obstacles, emotions, etc. Statements asking for confirmation, details, 4 emotional summary, or relations among such expressions are added to the utterances. We claim that VICA is suitable for positive 5 counseling scenarios where multimedia specifically high-performance voice communication is instrumental for even the old or digital 6 divided users to continue dialogue towards their self-awareness. To prove this claim, VICA's effect is evaluated with respect to a 7 previous text-based counseling agent CRECA and ELIZA including its successors. An experiment involving 14 subjects shows VICA 8 effects as follows: i) the dialogue continuation (CPS: Conversation-turns Per Session) of VICA for the older half (age >40) substantially 9 improved 53% to CRECA and 71% to ELIZA. ii) VICA's capability to foster peace of mind and other positive feelings was assessed 10 with a very high score of 5 or 6 mostly, out of 7 stages of the Likert scale, again by the older. Compared on average, such capability of 11 VICA for the older is 5.14 while CRECA (all subjects are young students, age<25) is 4.50, ELIZA is 3.50, and the best of ELIZA's 12 successors for the older (>25) is 4.41.13

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