Using Robot Faces to Facilitate Emotional Awareness in Human-Human-Robot Self-Disclosures

Nyomi Morris and Tom Williams

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Practicing self-disclosure is a necessary and recurring activity for survivors of trauma in their processes of recovery. However, these disclosures are often difficult because they require survivors to engage with unpleasant memories. Prior work on robot-assisted self-disclosure has focused on designing interactions for humans to disclose information to robots. However, for some populations like survivors of domestic abuse, it is necessary for disclosures to happen between two humans in order to secure recovery resources like housing or mental health support. In our prior co-design work with survivors of domestic abuse, we learned that robots would be most helpful in aiding with the practice emotional regulation as survivors are disclosing. Since then, we have also learned that certain users may especially benefit from using robot facial expressions to reflect on their emotional experience. In this paper, we propose a design paradigm for human-human-robot interaction where robots are designed to facilitate emotional awareness in human users in order to improve disclosure outcomes. Specifically, we describe a 5-stage interaction process that uses robotic facial expressions to engage users in self-reflection on their emotional arousal during disclosures and comment on future directions for design.