Enhancing Effect of Mediated Social Touch between Same Gender by Changing Gender Impression
Keita Suzuki, Masanori Yokoyama, Yuki Kinoshita, Takayoshi Mochizuki, Tomohiro Yamada, Sho Sakurai · 2016
This study realizes a method to enhance the effect of touch in remote same-gender communication by changing the gender impression with a voice changer during telecommunication. We focused on touch in communication. Although psychological studies have revealed that touch has various positive effects such as triggering altruistic behavior, these effects are restrained in some cases, especially in same-gender communication, because the touch between persons of the same gender tends to cause unpleasant feelings. We aimed to address this problem to utilize the effects for telecommunication purposes, such as remote medical care and remote education, by hypothesizing that the use of telepresence could change people's gender impression, reduce this unpleasantness, and enhance the effect of touch. We tested the effectiveness of this method in a situation in which a male operator asked male participants to perform a monotonous task, and the results showed that a touch by the male operator whose voice was changed to female-like could reduce the boredom of the task and improve the friendliness toward the operator.