Datenpaket: Effects of a Robotic Storytelling Intervention Integrating Music and Sound Effects on Prejudice toward Mental Illness - Supplemental Material

Mental illnesses affect millions worldwide and have become increasingly visible in recent decades. Despite greater public awareness and discussion, significant stigma remains, undermining the self-confidence and well-being of those affected. Anti-stigmatization interventions can help reduce prejudice by promoting education and meaningful contact between people with and without mental illness. Technology-based interventions were shown to be able to mimic this contact. Social robots as physically embodied agents with a decent social presence capable of multimodal communication offer additional advantages for such interventions. Especially the integration of music and sound effects may benefit the outcomes. To this end, we evaluated a robotic storyteller as an intervention method focusing on the influence of additional sound integration.
In multimodal robotic storytelling, modalities such as voice modulation and bodily expressions have been extensively studied, while non-speech sounds – namely sound effects and background music – remain largely overlooked, despite their importance in related media such as audio books and films. To address this gap, we compared a robotic storyteller narrating a story about a person experiencing a panic attack and intrusive thoughts using only voice and bodily expression with versions integrating sound effects, background music, or both.
The effects of music and/or sound effect integration to a robotic storytelling intervention on recipients' prejudice were mixed, recommending either the combination of both sound types or complete omission. Furthermore, transportation was indicated as an important key lever for increasing empathy and decreasing prejudice in a robotic storytelling intervention that warrants further investigation. Thus, future work is needed to gain deeper insights into robotic storytelling as an intervention tool for reducing prejudice and stigmata, including work on increasing transportation as a modifiable factor as well as the integration of pre-post-measurements.

In this repository, the supplemental material to the studies, namely the story's original German text and its English translation are provided.