Physical contact like touching and hugging plays an essential role in social bonding between people by encouraging interactions and self-disclosure. However, in a human–robot interaction context, it remains unknown whether physical activity with robots provides such similar effects, even though several positive effects of touch interactions have been unveiled. Therefore, we used a hugging robot that we previously developed and experimentally investigated its physical interactions related to encouraging interactions and self-disclosure with 48 participants. Our results showed that reciprocated hugs increased the interaction times and encouraged more self-disclosure from the hugged participants than those who did not get reciprocated hugs.

身体接触（如触摸和拥抱）通过鼓励互动和自我披露，在人与人之间的社交联系中起着至关重要的作用。但是，在人机交互的背景下，尽管已经揭示了触摸交互的几种积极效果，但机器人的体育锻炼是否能提供类似的效果仍是未知的。因此，我们使用了先前开发的拥抱机器人，并通过实验研究了与鼓励与48位参与者进行互动和自我公开有关的物理互动。我们的研究结果表明，与没有往复拥抱的人相比，往复拥抱增加了互动时间，并鼓励被拥抱的参与者更多地自我展示。