MetaHug: Audio-Visual Stimuli Change Stress Buffer Effect of Hug*

摘要

In human science literature, a hug interaction from a close person buffers the stress of the person being hugged. In this study, we investigated whether audio-visual stimuli during a hug with a robot change such stress buffer effects. For this purpose, we developed the MetaHug system, which consists of a huggable robot and a head-mounted-display that enables a virtual agent to reciprocate hugs. In our experiment, participants did stressful serial subtraction tasks after they experienced hug interactions with either two kinds of virtual agents: female or male appearances. Experiment results with 18 participants showed that participants showed significantly low stress when they did a hug with opposite-gender appearance agent compared to same-gender appearance agent.