A Robotic Positive Psychology Coach to Improve College Students' Wellbeing
Name
2009.03829.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
884.46 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6f4bfdd92702654d1ab95808cc1370f7
Author(s)
Jeong, S
Alghowinem, S
Aymerich-Franch, L
Arias, K
Lapedriza, A
Picard, Rosalind W.
Park, HW
Breazeal, C
Date Issued
2020
Journal
29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2020
Publisher
IEEE
Citation
Jeong, S, Alghowinem, S, Aymerich-Franch, L, Arias, K, Lapedriza, A et al. 2020. "A Robotic Positive Psychology Coach to Improve College Students' Wellbeing." 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2020.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 IEEE. A significant number of college students suffer from mental health issues that impact their physical, social, and occupational outcomes. Various scalable technologies have been proposed in order to mitigate the negative impact of mental health disorders. However, the evaluation for these technologies, if done at all, often reports mixed results on improving users' mental health. We need to better understand the factors that align a user's attributes and needs with technology-based interventions for positive outcomes. In psychotherapy theory, therapeutic alliance and rapport between a therapist and a client is regarded as the basis for therapeutic success. In prior works, social robots have shown the potential to build rapport and a working alliance with users in various settings. In this work, we explore the use of a social robot coach to deliver positive psychology interventions to college students living in on-campus dormitories. We recruited 35 college students to participate in our study and deployed a social robot coach in their room. The robot delivered daily positive psychology sessions among other useful skills like delivering the weather forecast, scheduling reminders, etc. We found a statistically significant improvement in participants' psychological wellbeing, mood, and readiness to change behavior for improved wellbeing after they completed the study. Furthermore, students' personality traits were found to have a significant association with intervention efficacy. Analysis of the post-study interview revealed students' appreciation of the robot's companionship and their concerns for privacy.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223588
