The Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR) suggests that addiction recovery is a journey through time where membership in various groups facilitates success. With the help of computational approaches, we now have access to new resources to study whether a wide variety of different online communities can be part of the addiction recovery journey. In this work, we study the effects of two main social factors on recovery success: first, multiple group membership defined in terms of richness of online community engagement; second, active participation operationalized as the evenness in engagement with these groups. We then model recovery from addiction by applying the extended Cox regression model which accounts for the effect of these two factors on time to relapse. We applied our analysis to a dataset of 457 recovering opioid addicts that self-announced the date of their recovery, indicating that at least 219 (48%) addicts relapsed during the recovery period. We find that multiple group membership - in terms of the number of other forums that a subject had posted in - as well as active participation - in terms of how evenly their posts were spread amongst the different forums - reduced the risk of relapse. We discuss our findings with regards to the opportunity, but also risk, that online group membership poses for recovering opioid addicts, as well as the possible contribution that computational social science methods can make to the study of addiction and recovery.

In this paper we show empirically that highly humanlike robots make thoughts of death more accessible, leading to perceptions of uncanniness and eeriness of such robots. Rather than reducing the humanlikeness of robots, our research suggests the addition of emotion displays to decrease a sense of uncanniness. We show that a highly humanlike robot displaying emotions in a social context reduces death-thought accessibility (DTA), which in turn reduces uncanniness. In a pre-test with N = 95 participants, we established that not all humanoid robots elicit thoughts of death and that the extent to which a robot appears humanlike may be linked to DTA. In our Main Study, N = 44 participants briefly interacted with a highly humanlike robotic head that either showed appropriate basic emotions or reacted by blinking. The display of emotions significantly reduced perceptions of uncanniness, which was mediated by a corresponding reduction in DTA. Implications for the design of humanoid robots are proposed.

In this paper, we report a breaching study to explore the use of a tele-operated humanoid avatar from both the perspective of the robot operator and the perspective of interlocutors. Humanoid robot avatars provide capabilities that video conferencing and mobile remote presence devices lack, particularly in multi-party conversations. Specifically, we were interested whether new users encountering a tele-operated humanoid avatar in a public setting would spontaneously use head movements and arm gestures to allow better conversational flow and group interaction. Video data shows that both operators and interlocutors initially explore the system's capabilities. Most operators used social gestures such as waving and pointing, as well as gaze which in turn led to related social responses from interlocutors. Interview data additionally show that robot operators and interlocutors rated the experience very positively. This paper discusses the implications of our findings for the design of `in the wild' experiments and the usability of tele-operated humanoid avatars.