1 Introduction
- Persons with social anxiety would have less “anticipatory anxiety” when they anticipate meeting with a robot than when they anticipate meeting with a person
- Persons with social anxiety would have less (actual) anxiety after interacting with a robot than after interacting with a person
2 Methods
2.1 Robot used in the experiment
2.2 Measures
2.2.1 Social anxiety trait
2.2.2 State anxiety
2.2.3 Tension
2.3 Conditions
- Interaction partner
- Robot: Participants interacted with a robot, “Robovie”, as explained in Sect. 2.1.
- Human: participants interacted with a human confederate. There were two confederates, one male and one female. To control the confederates’ reactions to the participants, they were trained in advance to ensure that they would exhibit similar listening behaviors (the details of these behaviors are explained below). Each confederate was assigned to interact with a participant of the opposite gender.
- Social anxiety trait of the participants
- “lower” social anxiety: participants whose social anxiety trait (SADS) score was lower than the median for all participants were categorized as having lower social anxiety.
- “higher” social anxiety: participants whose social anxiety trait (SADS) score was higher than the median of all participants were categorized as having higher social anxiety.
2.4 Procedure
- Step 2 Measurement of anticipatory anxiety
- Step 3 Interaction with a robot/person
- Step 4 Measurement of actual anxiety
2.5 Analysis and interpretation
3 Hypothesis and predictions
Prediction 1: When participants learn that they will be interacting with a robot/human partner, those with higher social anxiety will feel less anticipatory anxiety and anticipatory tension about interacting with a robot compared with a human.
Prediction 2: After interacting with a robot/human partner, participants with higher social anxiety will feel less actual anxiety and actual tension about interacting with a robot compared with a human.
4 Results
4.1 Scale reliability
SADS | Baseline | Just after being instructed to interact with the robot | During interaction with the robot | Just after being instructed to interact with the human | During interaction with the human | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
POMS | STAI | POMS | STAI | POMS | STAI | POMS | STAI | POMS | STAI | |
.931 | .942 | .873 | .748 | .879 | .943 | .912 | .955 | .929 | .856 | .888 |
- “lower” social anxiety (N = 12): mean (SD) SADS score was 4.9 (2.7).
- “higher” social anxiety (N = 7): mean (SD) SADS score was 18.1 (5.7).
4.2 Empirical support for Prediction 1
Anticipatory anxiety | Anticipatory tension | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Low/high social anxiety | Robot/human | Interaction | Low/high social anxiety | Robot/human | Interaction | |
F | .459 | 6.514 | 8.228 | 10.221 | .371 | 6.495 |
P | .507 | .021 | .011 | .005 | .550 | .021 |
ηp2 | .026 | .277 | .326 | .375 | .021 | .276 |
4.3 Empirical support for Prediction 2
Actual anxiety | Actual tension | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Low/high social anxiety | Robot/human | Interaction | Low/high social anxiety | Robot/human | Interaction | |
F | .229 | 3.588 | .203 | 3.971 | 9.418 | .377 |
P | .638 | .075 | .658 | .063 | .007 | .547 |
ηp2 | .013 | .174 | .012 | .189 | .357 | .022 |
5 Discussion
5.1 Findings
- Compared with those without, persons with social anxiety prefer to interact with robots over humans when they anticipate interaction.
- Actual interactions with robots can decrease anxiety and tension, regardless of social anxiety.