Gender-Impression Modification Enhances the Effect of Mediated Social Touch Between Persons of the Same Gender

The main contribution of this study is realization of a method that enhances the effect of touch in remote communication between persons of the same gender by changing the gender impression with a voice changer during telecommunication. Although psychological studies have revealed that touch has various positive effects such as triggering altruistic behavior and persuading others, these effects are restrained in some cases, especially in same-gender communication, because a touch between persons of the same gender tends to cause unpleasant feelings. However, “Transcendent Telepresence,” which enhances positive psychological effects and suppresses negative effects by modifying the information transmitted via telecommunication, enables us to overcome this problem. We hypothesized that telepresence that modifies people’s gender impression reduces this unpleasantness and enhances 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. The results showed that a touch by a male operator whose voice was changed to female-like could reduce the boredom of the task and improve the friendliness toward the operator. We believe this method realizes effective communication in various fields including telemedicine, crowdsourcing, and remote education.