Potential clinical impact of positive affect in robot interactions for autism intervention

While interactive technologies frequently are designed to be enjoyable, there are particular reasons to prioritize this for technologies intended to support autism interventions. Most broadly, enjoyment of activities or materials used in interventions has been associated with heightened improvements in the behaviors targeted by the interventions. In the largest group study to date of school-aged children with high-functioning autism (N=24), we present evidence of more positive affect elicited with a robot than with an adult, during matched triadic interactions designed to facilitate social and conversational interaction with a clinician. Robot-mediated increases in positive affect were found to be associated with production of spoken language directed to the clinician during robot interaction. We further found that robot-mediated increases in positive affect were associated with greater autism severity, particularly in the social affect domain, and with lower nonverbal IQ. Our findings suggest that robots may have a unique advantage in interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders by eliciting more positive affect, and that we should explore robot support for interventions with lower-functioning, affected individuals.