People get an emotional boost from being touched and talked to by robots, scientists have found.
When it comes to providing reassurance, touch plays a major role for humans. Whether it's a squeeze of the hand or a pat on the shoulder, people intuitively use touch to provide comfort or reassurance to someone feeling sick or anxious, for example.
Studies have shown that therapies involving touch can elicit positive emotional responses, but it can be difficult for healthcare services to provide sufficient touch-based therapy to people who might need it—an elderly person living alone, for example.
The answer may lie in getting robots to comfort us instead. This might sound a bit dystopian for some, but touch interactions by robots can offer a suitable substitute for similar interactions by humans and provide positive emotional experiences, according to research.
But there's a balance. Studies have also shown that while a gentle touch from a robot might be a comforting experience for some, it can also be experienced as "violent" if there isn't enough communication from the robot and no consent from the person being touched, say a group of Japanese researchers who have set out to solve the issue.
They decided to see if making a robot talk to people while also touching them would make the experience even better.
To find out, they analyzed the data from 31 study participants who sat in front of a robotic arm that was programmed to provide a gentle pat on the upper back. The robot was also equipped with a speaker that played an audio recording of speech in a nursing situation.
The participants were hooked up to sensors that provided data on certain facial muscles known to be linked to emotional experiences. They also asked the volunteers to provide a subjective assessment of their experience.
The researchers set the robot to work and compared the participants' responses from three different settings: One in which the robot only touched them; one in which it only talked to them; and one in which it did both.
The results showed that people preferred being touched and talked to by the robot rather than just being touched, with speech and touch eliciting stronger activity in the zygomatic major facial muscle—the muscle that allows us to smile.
People also subjectively reported higher emotional states when being touched only by the robot compared with a neutral state, suggesting robot touch alone does also provide a benefit.
"Pushing the boundaries of and blurring the line between robotics and psychological studies, our study provides the first evidence that multimodal touch and speech interactions by robots can induce heightened positive emotional responses than touch alone," the study said.
The researchers say the findings could be used to address a lack of touch experienced by patients in nursing or medical fields or even just "as a daily life treatment."
Some limitations of the study are that the researchers did not control for the clothes people wore which could have altered the touch experience for them, and also only tested one touch and speech type.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports on April 27 this year, and involved researchers from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, the Guardian Robot Project, and the Kyoto University of the Arts.
Sophie Scott, psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society, told Newsweek she does not think we'll be seeing such comfort robots in action any time soon.
"There are lots of things that are an advantage about a robot, but I feel quite queasy about it because we're social primates," she said. "The robot might be great at many things but it's not going to provide you with the sort of actual intentional enjoyment that you get easily when you hang out with other people, or even pets.
"I think it's always going to be very one-way [with a robot]. You might get a lot of practical help from the robot, but you're not going to get the social contact.
"I think robots will have to be much better at interacting with people in a way that we've got nowhere near achieving yet for it to start to get close to replacing that social contact—is my feeling."
Update 6/1/22, 10:27 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include a comment from Sophie Scott.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
