A. Ghandeharioun, D. McDuff, M. Czerwinski and K. Rowan, "Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots," 2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2019, pp. 8-14.

Abstract

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.