The influence of a socially assistive robot on mood, anxiety, and arousal in children.

Abstract

Socially assistive robots (SARs) represent a promising resource for efforts to improve children’s mental health and alleviate suffering on a large scale. However, the effects of SARs on clinically relevant domains are not yet well established. Our goal was therefore to provide a proof-of-concept demonstration of the capacity for SARs to alleviate clinically relevant symptoms in children. Such a demonstration might then serve as the foundation for efforts to establish the role of SARs in mental health care. We examined the influence of interactions with an SAR on mood, anxiety, and arousal in a sample of 87 children between the ages of 6 and 9, following exposure to a stressful task. Participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test for Children before interacting with the SAR, interacting with the SAR turned off, or waiting quietly. Participants completed baseline and posttest measures of state anxiety and mood, and salivary cortisol was collected at 5 time points. Children who interacted with the robot showed greater increases in positive mood than children in either of the two control conditions, but did not differ from control participants in terms of negative mood, anxiety, or arousal. SARs may convey benefits for children’s mental health by augmenting positive mood. Future research should examine the processes through which SARs promote positive emotions and the circumstances under which that effect is most potent. Although preliminary, these findings suggest that SARs may provide a highly efficient way to alleviate clinical symptoms in children by increasing positive mood.

Annual Research Review: Expanding mental health services through novel models of intervention delivery

“…Several studies have noted improved mood and socialization and decreases in depression and stress (as measured by salivary and urinary hormones) (see Bemelmans, Gelderblom, Jonker, & De Witte, ; Kanamori et al., ; Wada & Shibata, ; Wada, Shibata, Saito, Sakamoto, & Tanie, ). Laboratory research suggests Paro can reduce stress and increase positive mood among children (Crossman, Kazdin, & Kitt, ), but of course this is quite far from clinical applications. The benefits of SARs are not unique to Paro and now many social robots have been used with psychosocial benefits (Broadbent, ).…”

Crowd of Oz: A Crowd-Powered Social Robotics System for Stress Management

“…In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems among children [10], older adults [11], and teens [12,13]. In a recent study [10], it was reported that children who interacted with the robot showed an increase in positive mood as compared to two other conditions (where the robot was turned off, or was waiting quietly). More recent review of social robots for the well-being of older adults revealed that social robots can reduce loneliness and stress and can enhance engagement [11].…”

“…In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to leverage socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems among children [10], older adults [11], and teens [12,13]. However, building a fully autonomous social agent which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor which requires emotional intelligence, affect analysis, computational psychology, automated speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), prediction and planning, and advanced computer vision techniques to automatically recognize non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expression, and objects [14].…”

Feasibility study of technology-enabled prevention intervention for children and families

“…• Response modulation: Research across a range of domains suggests that tactile stimulation may be one of the adaptive response modulation strategies in buffering stress responses: this mechanism is assumed to underpin the emotion regulatory effects of human-animal interaction (cf. 76 for a review), play a role in effects of 'social touch' [77][78][79] , and the soothing effects of animal-like robots 80,81 . Based on this literature, we hypothesised that the interaction with the prototype could also tap into the response modulation stage by affecting the child's physiological emotional response.…”

“…The design of SAR with typically developing children has been limited to educational interventions outside of mental health domain [111][112][113] . Despite the reported promising outcomes of SAR interventions in other contexts, no studies to date explored the use of SARs as part of prevention interventions (for emotion regulation or other protective factors) with typically developing children, and only one recent study 80 has explored the effects of interacting with Paro robot on children's mood, anxiety, and arousal after exposure to a lab-based stress-inducing task: interaction with the robot resulted in greater increases in positive mood than any of the two control conditions, but did not have a significant effect on negative mood, anxiety, or arousal.…”