On 4 December 2024, Charlotte Labossière, a clinical psychologist and member of several PLEM associations, notably secretary of the IERHR, publicly defended her thesis, written under the supervision of Chantal Lheureux-Davidse, at Université Paris Cité, as part of the doctoral school Recherches en psychanalyse et psychopathologie (CRPMS – EA 3522).
This is the second thesis in psychopathology defended by IERHR members on the value of robot-based mediation in the field of autism. The first, in 2021, was by Olivier Duris, and dealt with a group approach to robotic mediation, and with the specific effects of introducing a robot into the dynamics of a Storytelling workshop run at the Hôpital de Jour pour Enfants André Boulloche (Association CEREP-PHYMENTIN – Paris 10).
Charlotte Labossière’s hypothesis is that robotic mediation could be a particularly suitable medium for work on developing social and relational skills, and access to socialisation, in children aged 6 to 12 with severe autism. To do this, she used a humanoid robot of the Nao type, which stands 50 CM tall and can be programmed to perform gestures and speak sentences. Her observations led her to conclude that this mediation could support the development of expression and communication abilities, as well as the emergence of playful interactions between the child and the therapist, forming the beginnings of future shared experiences.
The jury appreciated her effort to clarify the terms used to describe the kind of relationship a human has with a robot, in therapeutic situations and in everyday life: transitional object, malleable object, intermediate object, mediation object or even partner. Several members also praised her attention to the respective places of body language and spoken language in the relationship autistic children establish with robots.
The quality of the candidate’s interactions with the children she followed was also highlighted. An approach that Charlotte Labossière herself defines in her thesis (page 220): “It is easier for the autistic child to enter into interaction through a mediator acting as a third party in the relationship, all the more so if this medium is chosen by the child and the therapist takes an interest in it with enthusiasm and wonder”. Although she speaks very little about empathy in her thesis, since the word appears only five times and then only as an adjective, this work was praised as a formidable plea for developing an original approach of “shared empathy object therapy”.
Finally, the jury encouraged the candidate, strengthened by this first piece of work, to test her innovative hypotheses on the relationships autistic children have with other types of robots, notably “ virtual robots ” on a screen. She could compare there the effects of the different forms of empathy at play : those developed between the therapist and the robot, between the child and the robot, and between the therapist and the child.
Charlotte Labossière has thus joined the group of our speakers who hold the title of “ doctor of psychology ”. The PLEM members congratulate her on this achievement and encourage her to continue her research!
