Our researchers
Petr Slovak (Kings College, London), A. Jess Williams (Kings College, London), Ellen Townsend, (University of Nottingham), Marina Jirotka (Oxford University)
Research project 7 considers the impact of a socially assistive robot, Purrble, as a means of supporting emotion regulation, mental health, and self-harm among LGBTQ+ young people. This is particularly important as emotion dysregulation is associated with the development and maintenance of poor mental health outcomes, namely anxiety, depression, and self-harm.
Purrble
Purrble has been designed to help people calm down in the moment, just by interacting with it. In other words, Purrble is aimed to support users’ emotion regulation in a non-verbal way, during the daily situations when things get tough. As such, it aims to serve both as a mechanism to de-escalate immediate distress, as well as a mechanism to ideally help develop more effective emotion regulation practices over time.
Although Purrble is very new (developed in 2019), it has been shown to have positive effects on to these young people’s emotional regulation abilities and mood – a recent study with Oxford Uni students can be seen here. It also seems to help lots of different people who buy it themselves from Amazon (read the reviews), as well as has already ended up on the cover of TIME Magazine as one of their Best Inventions of 2021 issue.
Key findings
- Purrble is considered a feasible and acceptable intervention among LGBTQ+ young people with experiences of self-harm. This means that Purrble is likely to be an intervention which LGBTQ+ young people are happy to engage with.
- Purrble is significantly associated with reduced difficulties with emotion regulation, anxiety, and depression when compared to waitlist control. Therefore, Purrble could be a potential solution to support LGBTQ+ young people dealing with several mental health difficulties and enhance emotion regulation skills. By supporting these skills, young people should be better equipped to manage their mental health.
- Qualitative findings indicate young LGBTQ+ people use Purrble to prevent and manage self-harmful thoughts and behaviours, despite no statistical evidence of this. This is particularly important as to our knowledge, no interventions currently prevent self harmful thoughts. So further investigation is needed to understand the utility of Purrble to prevent self-harm.
In two pilot studies, we explored whether at-risk youth engage with Purrble, and if so, how and when do they use this intervention, and what additional support we could provide to amplify Purrble’s impact. Through ecological momentary assessments, participants received brief, daily questionnaires (asking about Purrble use and context), as well as weekly questionnaires (focusing on mood, emotional regulation, self-harm). We found that Purrble was a feasible and acceptable intervention for at-risk youth, with LGBTQ+ young people being particularly receptive to it. Purrble was used to support emotion regulation practices, such as grounding, to support the de-escalation of negative emotions, self-harmful thoughts, and prevent self-harm behaviour.
Following this, we conducted a randomised control trial with young LGBTQ+ people with young people who experience self-harmful thoughts (and potentially self-harm behaviours) to understand if these seen effects of Purrble influence emotion regulation, and reduce the impact of self-harm, depression and anxiety. By splitting participants into either an active intervention condition where they received Purrble during the trial or a wait-list condition (they got Purrble at the end of the trial!), we were able to analyse whether Purrble had an effect on emotion regulation and our mental health outcomes. Purrble was shown to significantly reduce difficulties with emotion regulation and depressive symptoms! , although, we were underpowered to test this with our self-harm outcomes. However, interview data indicates that Purrble was helpful to prevent self-harmful thoughts and behaviour, so there’s more work to do to unpack these experiences.
The final stage of the work package is co-designing a digital resource to sit around Purrble to better support LGBTQ+ youth with their distress; this is being done in iterative workshops with LGBTQ+ youth who took part in our previous study, and adult stakeholders.
Working with young people
We’re really lucky to have fantastic Sprouting Minds team members supporting this project along the way; these young people have identities or experiences which are relevant to the project and help to ensure that our research is impactful and meaningful.
To date; our Sprouting Minds team members have supported us to design studies, consider recruitment options for young people, think about the measures and questions we are using, reviewed ethical applications, supported interpretation of data analysis, facilitated workshops, engaged with co-dissemination and so much more! They continue to engage with the project despite incredibly busy lives and we’re very grateful to have them alongside us.
Insight from Sprouting Minds
“We met where we were, mentally and practically”
—Lucy, Sprouting Minds
Lucy joined our team in 2023 and has been supporting us with the randomised controlled trial and the co-design project which followed. One example is that Lucy offered insightful and critical consideration of the RCT study design and analysis. In an analysis walkthrough with our statistician, Lucy queried how measures were operationalised and translated to meaningful experiences, creating new opportunities for our research team to think about what our findings mean in the real world. She has also supported facilitation of co-design workshops with LGBTQ+ stakeholders, bringing together the perceptions and experiences of clinic researchers and charity workers in relation to a co-design cognitive wrapper for Purrble. Lucy presented the findings of this project with Dr Amy J Williams (Jess) at the Digital Youth conference in November 2025.
Next Steps
- We will be continuing our work with LGBTQ+ young people and stakeholders to co-design a digital resource to support emotion regulation and Purrble engagement. This is shaping up to look like an app which will feature; i) psychoeducation materials on emotion regulation; ii) an action plan of how to incorporate Purrble meaningfully into daily life; iii) a writing exercise to support another specific emotion regulation – reappraisal. A key element of this work with Jess, our research assistant, moving institutions is to find a meaningful stopping point for participants.
- Given the promising findings of Purrble as an emotion regulation intervention among young LGBTQ+ people, Jess aims to conduct a chunk of PPI work with clinicians and young people to explore the feasibility and acceptability of Purrble as a waiting list intervention, alongside a pilot study. This will form the foundation of a grant for follow-on Purrble investigations.
Project partners
