TY - JOUR

T1 - Building Long-Term Human–Robot Relationships: Examining Disclosure, Perception and Well-Being Across Time

AU - Laban, Guy

AU - Kappas, Arvid

AU - Morrison, Val

AU - Cross, Emily

PY - 2024/5

Y1 - 2024/5

N2 - While interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people’s behavioural and emotional engagement might be sustained across time, since during initial interactions with a robot, its novelty is especially salient. This challenge is particularly noteworthy when considering interactions designed to support people’s well-being, with limited evidence (or empirical exploration) of social robots’ capacity to support people’s emotional health over time. Accordingly, our aim here was to examine how long-term repeated interactions with a social robot affect people’s self-disclosure behaviour toward the robot, their perceptions of the robot, and how such sustained interactions influence factors related to well-being. We conducted a mediated long-term online experiment with participants conversing with thesocial robot Pepper 10 times over 5 weeks. We found that people self-disclose increasingly more to a social robot over time, and report the robot to be more social and competent over time. Participants’ moods also improved after talking to the robot, and across sessions, they found the robot’s responses increasingly comforting as well as reported feeling less lonely. Finally, our results emphasize that when the discussion frame was supposedly more emotional (in this case, framing questions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic), participants reported feeling lonelier and more stressed. These results set the stage forsituating social robots as conversational partners and provide crucial evidence for their potential inclusion in interventions supporting people’s emotional health through encouraging self-disclosure.

AB - While interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, one concern is the extent to which people’s behavioural and emotional engagement might be sustained across time, since during initial interactions with a robot, its novelty is especially salient. This challenge is particularly noteworthy when considering interactions designed to support people’s well-being, with limited evidence (or empirical exploration) of social robots’ capacity to support people’s emotional health over time. Accordingly, our aim here was to examine how long-term repeated interactions with a social robot affect people’s self-disclosure behaviour toward the robot, their perceptions of the robot, and how such sustained interactions influence factors related to well-being. We conducted a mediated long-term online experiment with participants conversing with thesocial robot Pepper 10 times over 5 weeks. We found that people self-disclose increasingly more to a social robot over time, and report the robot to be more social and competent over time. Participants’ moods also improved after talking to the robot, and across sessions, they found the robot’s responses increasingly comforting as well as reported feeling less lonely. Finally, our results emphasize that when the discussion frame was supposedly more emotional (in this case, framing questions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic), participants reported feeling lonelier and more stressed. These results set the stage forsituating social robots as conversational partners and provide crucial evidence for their potential inclusion in interventions supporting people’s emotional health through encouraging self-disclosure.

KW - social robots

KW - human-robot interaction

KW - longitudinal

KW - Well-being

KW - self-disclosure

KW - Social Perception

U2 - 10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z

DO - 10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z

M3 - Article

VL - 16

SP - 1

EP - 27

JO - International Journal of Social Robotics

JF - International Journal of Social Robotics

IS - 5

ER -