Robot Touch to Send Sympathy: Divergent Perspectives of Senders and Recipients

There is increasingly heavy reliance on online social communication methods for reducing the sense of social isolation. However, this type of communication lacks one of the most critical elements of expressing emotion to comfort people: physical contact. In the current work, we examined people's perceptions of robots with an affective touch function for conveying sympathy from another person. We conducted two online studies to investigate how individuals evaluate imagined robot touch gestures sent to a friend from them (Study 1) and received by them from a friend (Study 2) in the United States and Japan. We found that sympathy senders preferred robot patting or rubbing the shoulder more than other types of touch, but would rather express sympathy through text or GIFs than by robot-mediated touch. In contrast, recipients perceived more sympathy and social support when they received robot touch gestures showing sympathy, compared to some other means to convey sympathy, short text in particular. The current findings highlight the different perspectives of senders and recipients on robot affective touch and potential cultural and individual differences in evaluations of robot affective touch.