English

Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots

Human-Computer Interaction 2019-07-26 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.10664,
  title  = {Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots},
  author = {Asma Ghandeharioun and Daniel McDuff and Mary Czerwinski and Kael Rowan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.10664},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted for presentation at 2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1812.11423

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:29:52.884Z