It is well known that, in human communication, physical contact, such as holding hands, has the effect of relieving stress and providing a sense of intimacy. In this study, we verified whether walking hand-in-hand has a positive effect on relationship building between children and robots. Specifically, an interaction experiment was performed in which a child and a robot play one-on-one for approximately 30 min with 37 children aged 5–6 years. The robot is teleoperated by a nursery teacher in this experiment. The children are divided into two groups: the experimental group, in which children walk hand-in-hand during their first encounter with the robot, and the control group, in which children do not have any physical contact with the robot. The change in the interaction is analyzed while taking into consideration the distance between the child and the robot, eye contact rate, and a questionnaire completed by the parents and children. The results reveal that the children in the experimental group interacted significantly with the robot. Moreover, the parents of the children in the experimental group tended to feel that their children appeared to experience intimacy with the robot. These results suggest that walking hand-in-hand has a positive effect on child-robot relationship building.

1. [1] K. Abe, A. Iwasaki, T. Nakamura, T. Nagai, A. Yokoyama, T. Shimotomai, H. Okada, and T. Omori, “Playmate robots that can act according to a child’s mental state,” 2012 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 4660-4667, 2012.
2. [2] J. A. Horton, P. R. Clance, C. Sterk-Elifson, and J. Emshoff, “Touch in psychotherapy: A survey of patients’ experiences,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, Vol.32, No.3, pp. 443-457, 1995.
3. [3] J. I. Kepner, “Body Process: A Gestalt Approach to Working With the Body in Psychotherapy,” CRC Press, 2014.
4. [4] J. A. Coan, H. S. Schaefer, and R. J. Davidson, “Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat,” Psychological Science, Vol.17, No.12, pp. 1032-1039, 2006.
5. [5] K. Dautenhahn, I. Werry, J. Rae, P. Dickerson, P. Stribling, and B. Ogden, “Robotic playmates,” K. Dautenhahn, A. Bond, L. Cañamero, and B. Edmonds (Eds.), “Socially Intelligent Agents: Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots,” pp. 117-124, 2002.
6. [6] R. Ros and Y. Demiris, “Creative dance: An approach for social interaction between robots and children,” Proc. of Int. Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, pp. 40-51, 2013.
7. [7] T. Belpaeme, P. Baxter, J. Greeff, J. Kennedy, R. Read, R. Looije, M. Neerincx, I. Baroni, and M. C. Zelati, “Child-robot interaction: Perspectives and challenges,” Proc. on 5th Int. Conf. on Social Robotics (ICSR 2013), pp. 452-459, 2013.
8. [8] C. Zaga, M. Lohse, V. Charisi, V. Evers, M. Neerincx, T. Kanda, and I. Leite, “2nd workshop on evaluating child robot interaction,” Proc. of 11th ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human Robot Interaction (HRI’16), pp. 587-588, 2016.
9. [9] S. Yohanan and K. E. MacLean, “The role of affective touch in human-robot interaction: Human intent and expectations in touching the haptic creature,” Int. J. of Social Robotics, Vol.4, No.2, pp. 163-180, 2012.
10. [10] K. Nakagawa, M. Shiomi, K. Shinozawa, R. Matsumura, H. Ishiguro, and N. Hagita, “Effect of robot’s active touch on people’s motivation,” Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 465-472, 2011.
11. [11] L. S. Löken and H. Olausson, “The skin as a social organ,” Experimental Brain Research, Vol.204, No.3, pp. 305-314, 2010.
12. [12] P. Orefice, M. Ammi, M. Hafez, and A. Tapus, “Pressure variation study in human-human and human-robot handshakes: Impact of the mood,” Proc. of the 27th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Nanjing, China, August 27-31, pp. 247-254, 2018.
13. [13] F. Mueller, F. Vetere, M. Gibbs, J. Kjeldskov, S. Pedell, and S. Howard, “Hug over a distance,” Proc. of the 2005 Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005) Extended Abstracts, pp. 1673-1676, 2005.
14. [14] D. Tsetserukou, A. Neviarouskaya, H. Prendinger, N. Kawakami, and S. Tachi, “Affective haptics in emotional communication,” Proc. of 2009 3rd Int. Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and Workshops, pp. 1-6, 2009.
15. [15] K. Ogawa, S. Nishio, K. Koda, G. Balistreri, T. Watanabe, and H. Ishiguro, “Exploring the natural reaction of young and aged person with telenoid in a real world,” J. Adv. Comput. Intell. Intell. Inform., Vol.15, No.5, pp. 592-597, 2011.
16. [16] H. Nakanishi, K. Tanaka, and Y. Wada, “Remote handshaking: touch enhances video-mediated social telepresence,” Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2143-2152, 2014.
17. [17] K. Kuwamura, K. Sakai, T. Minato, S. Nishio, and H. Ishiguro, “Hugvie: A medium that fosters love,” Proc. of 2013 IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 70-75, 2013.
18. [18] N. Yamamoto, K. Fukamachi, Y. Takeda, P. R. S. De Silva, and M Okada, “Mako-no-te: To explore side-to-side communication through the intersubjectectivity,” Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Human-Agent Interaction, Sapporo, Japan, pp. 7-9, 2013.
19. [19] K. Kochigami, K. Okada, and M. Inada, “Effect of walking with a robot on child-child interactions,” Proc. of the 27th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Nanjing, China, August 27-31, pp. 468-471, 2018.
20. [20] C. Hieida, K. Abe, M. Attamimi, T. Shimotomai, T. Nagai, and T. Omori, “Physical embodied communication between robots and children: An approach for relationship building by holding hands,” Proc. of 2014 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Chicago, IL, USA, September 14-18, pp. 3291-3298, 2014.
21. [21] M. R. Barrick and M. K. Mount, “The big five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis,” Personnel Psychology, Vol.44, No.1, pp. 1-26, 1991.