3 accepted papers
Hugging provides psychological benefits and is common in supportive dialogue, leading to probabilistic models for a robot's intra-hug gestures (e.g., patting, rubbing). However, the psychological effects of this human-derived model have not been adequately verified. In this study, we aimed to clarif
The potential of social touch, a behavior that uses physical embodiment, has been actively studied for adaptation to social robots because of both physical and mental benefits. Social touch from robots, including hugs, reports positive effects similar to human-human interaction. Huggable robots have
One essential role of social robots is supporting human mental health by interaction with people. In this study, we focused on making people's moods more positive through conversations about their problems as our first step to achieving a robot that cares about mental health. We employed the column