Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots

A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health/wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction and workshops pp. 8 - 14
Main Authors Ghandeharioun, Asma, McDuff, Daniel, Czerwinski, Mary, Rowan, Kael
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.09.2019
Subjects
affective computing
agent
emotional intelligence
experience sampling
Games
mental health
Mobile applications
Mood
Sociology
Statistics
Stress
System analysis and design
Visualization
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Summary:A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health/wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot that conducts experience sampling in an empathetic manner. We evaluate it through a human-subject experiment with N=39 participants over the course of a week. Our results show that extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot significantly more than introverts. Also, participants reported a higher percentage of positive mood reports when interacting with the empathetic bot. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of emotion-aware chatbots for potential use in mHealth contexts.
ISSN:2156-8111
DOI:10.1109/ACII.2019.8925433