Christine Wu, Ila Krishna Kumar, and Rosalind Picard. 2025. Navigating Emotions Through Art: Recommendations for Designing Art-Therapy Based Chatbots for Trauma-Impacted Youth: Recommendations for Designing Art-Therapy Based Chatbots for Trauma-Impacted Youth. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '25).

Abstract

In this study, we design and deploy a novel system to examine the safety and efficacy of using a chatbot to conduct aspects of art therapy with youth who have experienced developmental trauma, focusing on supporting emotion identification, processing, and expression. This publication describes phase one, gathering feedback on the system from practicing art therapists (n = 17) and making recommendations for how to evolve such work in beneficial ways to meet the needs of trauma-impacted youth. Our findings highlight the potential value of chatbots for trauma-impacted youth as well as important reflection questions these chatbots should ask. Additionally, the study discusses the risk of harm associated with chatbot interventions, particularly if the conversation brings up negative emotions that the chatbot fails to help process. Finally, we end by presenting a set of practitioner-driven recommendations for chatbot designers who are interested in helping trauma-impacted youth understand and cope with their emotions, leveraging art therapy techniques.