Coping with Emotional Distress via Self-Disclosure to Robots: An Intervention with Caregivers
摘要
People often engage in self-disclosure and social sharing when trying to cope with emotional distress. This study introduces a novel long-term intervention designed to help informal caregivers cope with emotional distress by self-disclosing towards a social robot. Research indicates that informal caregivers frequently face challenges in handling the emotional and practical demands of caregiving, often experiencing a lack of social support and limited social interaction. Accordingly, we explored the extent of informal caregivers’ self-disclosure behaviour towards a social robot (Pepper, SoftBank Robotics) over time, and how their perceptions of the robot evolved. Additionally, we examined how this intervention affected caregivers’ moods, perceptions of the robot as comforting, feelings of loneliness, stress levels, as well as its impact on their emotion regulation. We replicated a previous long-term experiment [