Effect of attentive listening robot on pleasure and arousal change in psychiatric daycare

In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of an attentive-listening robot in psychiatric daycare, an outpatient treatment program for the rehabilitation of psychiatric disorders. The robot was developed based on counseling techniques, such as repeating words that the user has said. It can also generate backchannels as a listening behavior during user utterance. Conversation experiments have been conducted to evaluate whether the robot can provide effective activities in this setting. The robot attentively listened to 18 daycare attendees talking about their recent memorable events for up to 3 min. The results showed that the conversation increased self-rated arousal. The impressions of the robot showed that talking with the robot was more conversable than with strangers and more useful as a talking partner than a friend. The subjects also had a positive impression about whether they would keep the robot in their homes. A linear regression analysis indicates that the frequency of the robot's assessment responses and backchannels positively affect pleasure improvement. The findings may pave the way for utilizing this kind of robots that people can talk to easily without hesitation or excessive consideration.