From comfort objects to haptic co-regulation adjunct : theory-driven design and evaluation of an affective haptic system for emotion regulation

Mental health challenges affect over one billion people worldwide, with high rates of anxiety and depression. These challenges are not limited to diagnosed conditions; everyday experiences of uncertainty, stress, and grief can negatively impact individuals across the lifespan. Timely, accessible interventions can meaningfully support well-being, yet many people lack reliable support when they need it the most. This gap creates a critical opportunity for technology to facilitate one important aspect of mental wellness: emotion regulation, a process to volitionally influence the intensity and duration of experienced emotions. Touch is a sensory channel capable of shaping emotional processes through autonomic and cognitive pathways, making it a powerful medium for supporting emotion regulation. Yet its potential as a deliberate technological intervention is underexplored. The first contribution of this thesis, a scoping review, shows that most prior affective haptic systems are designed to sense and communicate emotional states or support visceral calming, with limited theoretical grounding, systematic evaluation, or guidance for supporting cognitive emotion regulation. This dissertation advances affective haptics beyond expressive and soothing applications toward a systematic, theory-driven foundation for emotion regulation support, particularly reappraisal. This dissertation’s subsequent work followed two complementary research trajectories. The primary research trajectory first established the CHORA (Comforting Haptic cO-Regulating Adjunct) framework, positioning haptic technologies as co-regulating partners that can support emotion regulation through sensory grounding, attentional anchoring, affiliative presence, and cognitive reframing. Building on this framework, two sequential laboratory studies with a zoomorphic haptic robot progressively evaluated its effects: the first focuses on general emotion regulation facilitation in baseline emotional states, and the second specifically examined cognitive reappraisal facilitation under experimentally induced stress. The design translation trajectory examined lived touch practices and individual differences, analyzing survey and in-lab study data, and identified user profiles and varied responsiveness patterns. We translated these insights into user-centered design guidelines and proposed a Haptic Emotion Regulation Function Design Framework for building individual-tailored haptic interventions. Together, this thesis established a theoretical, empirical, and design foundation for haptically- facilitated emotion regulation, offering frameworks, datasets, and guidance to advance affective haptic system design and research.