Imparting Otsukaresama: Designing Technology to Support Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

Humans have a basic need to share feelings in response to emotional events and to receive feedback from others, a behaviour known as social sharing. Expressing our feelings through social sharing helps us clarify and resolve the emotions we experienced on those events: a process of interpersonal emotion regulation that allows others to provide empathy, validation, and support. In contrast, research suggests that our cultural behaviour in using technology, that was promised to improve our relationship, is undermining empathy, and making us more socially isolated. However, the solution is not to avoid technology. In Japanese culture, Otsukaresama is a unique expression to show thoughts on empathy and appreciating someone's effort. It is a powerful phrase that communicates appreciation and cultivates the empathy. The aim of this study is to design a system to support interpersonal emotion regulation through interactive technology, which will enable users to experience the same feeling of being appreciated, supported, and socially accepted after being greeted by a gesture of Otsukaresama. This paper describes the motivation and user observation study, to fulfil the desire of understanding how interactive technologies can support interpersonal emotional regulation. A user observation study method inspired by Cultural Probe were designed by implementing the autoethnographic study approach in mobile technology, where participants can interact with artefacts that are being used in traditional cultural probes methods, such as postcards, maps, camera, and diary, through mobile technology. Design implications and ideas reflected from the study results are also presented.