Improving psychological wellbeing with robots

Robot users that receive psychological or psy-chotherapeutic support from robots (e.g. robots that motivate users to perform certain tasks) are usually aware of participating in a psychological intervention. The present paper aims to ascertain whether robot users should indeed remain aware, or rather unaware, of participating in such type of interventions. We present an experiment with two conditions. In one condition (direct) the robot made participants aware of being subjected to a psychological intervention, the three good things exercise from positive psychology, whereas in the other condition (indirect) participants were not made aware of the intervention. Our results show that the robot succeeded in improving participants' positive affect in the direct condition but their affect worsened in the indirect condition.