Coping with Emotional Distress via Self-Disclosure to Robots: Intervention with Caregivers

People often engage in various forms of self-disclosure and social sharing with others when trying to regulate the impact of emotional distress. Here we introduce a novel long-term mediated intervention aimed at supporting informal caregivers to cope with emotional distress via self-disclosing their emotions and needs to a social robot. Research has shown that informal caregivers often struggle in managing the emotional and practical demands of the caregiving situation, and also highlights the lack of social support and paucity of social interaction some experience. Accordingly, we were interested in the extent of informal caregivers' self-disclosure behaviour towards a social robot (Pepper, SoftBank Robotics) over time, and how (social and usability-related) perceptions of the robot develop over time. Moreover, we wished to examine how this intervention made informal caregivers feel (in terms of reported mood, perceptions of the robot as comforting, feelings of loneliness, and stress), and the extent to which interacting with the robot affected these individuals' emotion regulation. Informal caregivers conversed with the social robot Pepper 10 times across 5 weeks about general everyday topics. Our results show that informal caregivers self-disclosed increasingly more to the robot across time and perceived it as increasingly social and competent over time. Furthermore, participants' moods positively changed after interacting with the robot, which they perceived more comforting over time. Participants also reported feeling increasingly less lonely and stressed. Finally, our results showed that after self-disclosing to the robot for 5 weeks, informal caregivers reported being more accepting of their caregiving situation, reappraising it more positively, and experiencing fewer feelings of blame towards others. These results set the stage for situating social robots as conversational partners in social settings, as well as highlight how communicating with social robots holds potential for providing emotional support for people coping with emotional distress.