Related papers: Facilitating Self-Guided Mental Health Interventio…
Many epidemiological questions concern potential interventions to alter the pathways presumed to mediate an association. For example, we consider a study that investigates the benefit of interventions in young adulthood for ameliorating the…
Recent work on language model self-improvement shows that models can refine their own reasoning through reflection, verification, debate, or self-generated rewards. However, most existing approaches rely on external critics, learned reward…
In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying cognitive distortions and emotional appraisals from both computational and psychological perspectives. Despite considerable similarities between emotional reappraisal and…
It takes several years for the developing brain of a baby to fully master word repetition-the task of hearing a word and repeating it aloud. Repeating a new word, such as from a new language, can be a challenging task also for adults.…
This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving the health information search engine CISMeF, by including a conversational agent that interacts with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes…
Both humans and large language models are able to learn language without explicit structural supervision. What inductive biases make this learning possible? We address this fundamental cognitive question by leveraging transformer language…
Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions,…
Conceptual reasoning, the ability to reason in abstract and high-level perspectives, is key to generalization in human cognition. However, limited study has been done on large language models' capability to perform conceptual reasoning. In…
We introduce MentalChat16K, an English benchmark dataset combining a synthetic mental health counseling dataset and a dataset of anonymized transcripts from interventions between Behavioral Health Coaches and Caregivers of patients in…
Cognitive distortions, distorted patterns of thinking, have been increasingly studied in computational mental health research. Although they are related to many, if not all, mental health disorders, most existing studies focus primarily on…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are being quickly adapted to many domains, including healthcare, their strengths and pitfalls remain under-explored. In our study, we examine the effects of prompt engineering to guide Large Language…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) aims to identify and restructure automatic negative thoughts pertaining to involuntary interpretations of events, yet existing counseling agents struggle to identify and address them in dialogue settings.…
Student mental health is a sensitive issue that necessitates special attention. A primary concern is the student-to-counselor ratio, which surpasses the recommended standard of 250:1 in most universities. This imbalance results in extended…
As deep learning models grow in complexity, achieving model-agnostic interpretability becomes increasingly vital. In this work, we employ post-hoc conceptual contrastive edits to expose noteworthy patterns and biases imprinted in…
Peer-run organizations (PROs) provide critical, recovery-based behavioral health support rooted in lived experience. As large language models (LLMs) enter this domain, their scale, conversationality, and opacity introduce new challenges for…
Individualized cognitive simulation (ICS) aims to build computational models that approximate the thought processes of specific individuals. While large language models (LLMs) convincingly mimic surface-level human behavior such as…
In the domain of Visual Question Answering (VQA), studies have shown improvement in users' mental model of the VQA system when they are exposed to examples of how these systems answer certain Image-Question (IQ) pairs. In this work, we show…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
As AI systems become increasingly integrated into daily life, their potential to exacerbate or trigger severe psychological harms remains poorly understood and inadequately tested. This paper presents a proactive methodology for…
Understanding the neural basis of language comprehension in the brain has been a long-standing goal of various scientific research programs. Recent advances in language modelling and in neuroimaging methodology promise potential…