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A Robotic Companion for Psychological Well-being: A Long-term Investigation of Companionship and Therapeutic Alliance

Published: 13 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Social support plays a crucial role in managing and enhancing one's mental health and well-being. In order to explore the role of a robot's companion-like behavior on its therapeutic interventions, we conducted an eight-week-long deployment study with seventy participants to compare the impact of (1) acontrol robot with only assistant-like skills, (2) acoach-like robot with additional instructive positive psychology interventions, and (3) acompanion-like robot that delivered the same interventions in a peer-like and supportive manner. The companion-like robot was shown to be the most effective in building a positive therapeutic alliance with people, enhancing participants' well-being and readiness for change. Our work offers valuable insights into how companion AI agents could further enhance the efficacy of the mental health interventions by strengthening their therapeutic alliance with people for long-term mental health support.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HRI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
      March 2023
      631 pages
      ISBN:9781450399647
      DOI:10.1145/3568162
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 13 March 2023

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      1. positive psychology
      2. psychological well-being
      3. social robot

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      • (2024)Empathy Toward Artificial Intelligence Versus Human Experiences and the Role of Transparency in Mental Health and Social Support Chatbot Design: Comparative StudyJMIR Mental Health10.2196/6267911(e62679)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2024
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