Human psychophysiology is influenced by physical touch with a “breathing” robot.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People often physically cling to others when afraid and doing so can downregulate negative emotional experiences (e.g., Coan et al., 2006). However, in some situations, physical touch may fail to downregulate emotional experiences-such as when an individual being touched is physiologically aroused themselves. To test this hypothesis, we built plush robots with motorized plastic ribcages that were manipulated to contract and expand to simulate human breathing patterns. Participants held these robots while we measured their heart rate before, during, and after watching a fear-eliciting stimulus. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who interacted with robots that exhibited accelerated-breathing patterns experienced a pronounced increase in their own heart rate, compared to participants who held stable-breathing and nonbreathing robots. These results indicate that holding or clinging to others engaged in accelerated breathing may be ineffective or detrimental for downregulating one's own physiological arousal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".