A preliminary investigation of using humanoid social robots as nonpharmacological techniques with children This paper presents an observational preliminary study to examine the potentialities of the humanoid social robots as nonpharmacological techniques for children. The aim of the robots is to entertain the patients, interact through voice, gestures and funny animations, in order to decrease their negative feelings, and, at the same time, to promote positive emotions. This study exploited two different humanoid social robots, Pepper and Sanbot Elf, and involved twentyeight hospitalized patients, age 3xe2x80x9319, assigned randomly to one of them. We analysed the feelings of the patients in terms of several different positive and negative moods, focusing on their variation in three different times: before, during and after the procedure. We found a significant decrease of the negative feelings by a factor between 31.25% and 53.65%, and an increase of positive emotions up to 73.33%. Generally both the robots were appreciated by the most of the children: the 78.57% of the participants evaluated the experience positive and 85.71% declared that would like to play again with the robots, if they had to repeat the procedure.

What Do Children Want from a Social Robot? Toward Gratifications Measures for ChildRobot Interaction* Social robots have, in the case of children, rarely been studied from a usesandgratifications perspective. As social robots differ from more traditional media, the first aim of this study was to explore the gratifications that children seek and obtain from social robots. This was investigated in a study among 87 children. The second aim was to develop and initially validate measures for those gratifications. We studied this among a sample of 24 children. The measures for hedonic and social gratificationsobtained worked reasonably well. The measures for hedonic and informative gratificationssought seemed problematic, whereas the others were acceptable. Our measures present a first step toward enabling future research on childrenxe2x80x99s gratifications of social robots.