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Touches by a robot can make people feel positive.
This is the result of a study that Laura Hoffmann, junior professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Nicole Krämer, professor of social psychology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, carried out with 48 students, as the Bochum University announced on Thursday.
The two report on their research in the current issue of the magazine "Plos One".
In the study, the two scientists sent the test subjects into a conversation with a humanoid robot.
During the conversation, which was about student advice, the robot patted some of the participants briefly on the hand, apparently spontaneously.
The test subjects touched reacted positively across the board: most of them smiled or laughed, no one pulled their hand away.
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The willingness to follow the robot's advice was greater among the test subjects whom the robot had touched than among those it had not touched.
After the conversation with the robot, all test subjects gave information about their impressions.
Those the robot touched stressed that they felt better emotionally than the others.