Draw My Life: Using Socially Assistive Robots to Foster Children Self-disclosure

Bullying is a form of violence that is carried out repeatedly, with the intention of causing harm and with an imbalance of power between those involved [1]. Bullying has serious negative effects on the mental health of adolescents and thus represents a significant health risk in childhood and adolescence [1]. In Germany, around 14% of the children surveyed in the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study of 2022 reported direct experience of bullying at school [1]. Similarly, in the US in 2021-2022, 19.2% of the surveyed children reported being bullied at school [2].

While bullying is a well-identified problem, a factor limiting the possibility of intervention is the fact that many bullied children remain silent about it. In the US in 2021-2022 for example, only 44.2% of the children who reported being bullied during school notified an adult about the bullying [2]. On the other hand, socially assistive robotics (SAR) is an emerging field aiming at using social robots to assist humans in a variety of applications, including education, hospitality, service or healthcare [3]. In particular, socially assistive robots have already been used and shown to be effective in eliciting information disclosure from children about their mental health [4].

Indeed, social robots, by being non-human and non-judgemental, can be seen as a credible and impartial outsider with respect to mankind, thus bringing a novel perspective potentially explaining their success in making children more candid to talk about sensible topics. To this extent, we explore in this research topic the possibility of using social robots as a self-disclosure tool to detect cases of bullying in schools and thus allowing to take appropriate measures to help silent bullied children. More specifically, two main research lines are explored. The first one aims at exploring how a robot should be and behave with a child to facilitate self-disclosure. The second one aims at using the multi-modal sensing capabilities of the robot to endow it with the capacity of autonomously detecting potential cases of bullying.