Related papers: Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simu…

High-quality, multi-turn instructional dialogues between novices and experts are essential for developing AI systems that support teaching, learning, and decision-making. These dialogues often involve scaffolding -- the process by which an…

Social skills training targets behaviors necessary for success in social interactions. However, traditional classroom training for such skills is often insufficient to teach effective communication -- one-to-one interaction in real-world…

Realistic practice and tailored feedback are key processes for training peer counselors with clinical skills. However, existing mechanisms of providing feedback largely rely on human supervision. Peer counselors often lack mechanisms to…

In this work, we present a new dataset and a computational strategy for a digital coach that aims to guide users in practicing the protocols of self-attachment therapy. Our framework augments a rule-based conversational agent with a…

With the growing prevalence of psychological interventions, it is vital to have measures which rate the effectiveness of psychological care to assist in training, supervision, and quality assurance of services. Traditionally, quality…

Counseling is usually conducted through spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level of therapist is a key indicator of outcomes. Presuming that therapist's empathy expression is shaped by their past behavior and…

Current AI counseling systems struggle with maintaining effective long-term client engagement. Through formative research with counselors and a systematic literature review, we identified five key design considerations for AI counseling…

As the recent Large Language Models(LLM's) become increasingly competent in zero-shot and few-shot reasoning across various domains, educators are showing a growing interest in leveraging these LLM's in conversation-based tutoring systems.…

Understanding clients' thoughts and beliefs is fundamental in counseling, yet current evaluations of LLM therapists often fail to assess this ability. Existing evaluation methods rely on client simulators that clearly disclose internal…

Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational…

Traditional in-person psychological counseling remains primarily niche, often chosen by individuals with psychological issues, while online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of…

Large language models (LLMs) offer emerging opportunities for psychological and behavioral research, but methodological guidance is lacking. This article provides a framework for using LLMs as psychological simulators across two primary…

The increasing demand for mental health services has highlighted the need for innovative solutions, particularly in the realm of psychological conversational AI, where the availability of sensitive data is scarce. In this work, we explored…

Large language models (LLMs) are being used as ad-hoc therapists. Research suggests that LLMs outperform human counselors when generating a single, isolated empathetic response; however, their session-level behavior remains understudied. In…

Counseling is an activity of conversational speaking between a therapist and a client. Therapist empathy is an essential indicator of counseling quality and assessed subjectively by considering the entire conversation. This paper proposes…

Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global…

Assistive agents should not only take actions on behalf of a human, but also step out of the way and cede control when there are important decisions to be made. However, current methods for building assistive agents, whether via mimicking…

Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors…

Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This…

Recently, the demand for psychological counseling has significantly increased as more individuals express concerns about their mental health. This surge has accelerated efforts to improve the accessibility of counseling by using large…