Narratives and emotions in seniors affected by dementia: A comparative study using a robot and a toy

This paper describes a study conducted in a Care Home with six women affected by dementia. The study focused on storytelling and compared the effect of the seal robot PARO with Sugar, a toy looking like a baby seal, in stimulating the creation of stories either based on personal memories or invented by the person. Narrative is a primitive function of human psychology, lying at the heart of human thought. The representation of experience in narratives provides a frame which enables humans to interpret their experiences. Through storytelling we learn to communicate and make sense of the external world. As Bruner [1] points out, narrative is a fundamental aspect of meaning construction, which is a developmental activity that starts in early childhood and characterizes our entire lives. It is therefore fundamental to maintain narrative competence throughout life, even when the cognitive competencies are impaired, as in the case of dementia. The stories collected during the experimental sessions were evaluated from different points of view: length, terminology, emotional content and coherence. The results show that interacting with Paro, unlike Sugar, stimulates storytelling, encouraging interaction among participants and supporting the construction of more emotionally intense content.