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Relationships are essential to our happiness and wellbeing, yet their dissolution-the final stage of a relationship's lifecycle-is among the most stressful events individuals can experience, often leading to profound and lasting impacts.…
Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have rapidly become a significant part of everyday life, with over a quarter of American adults using them multiple times per week. While these tools offer potential benefits and risks, a…
Cognitive reappraisal is a well-studied emotion regulation strategy that helps individuals reinterpret stressful situations to reduce their impact. Many digital mental health tools struggle to support this process because rigid scripts fail…
As AI chatbots see increased adoption and integration into everyday life, questions have been raised about the potential impact of human-like or anthropomorphic AI on users. In this work, we investigate the extent to which interactions with…
Objective: Domestic abuse cases have risen significantly over the last four years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges for victims and survivors in accessing support. In this study, we investigate the role that chatbots…
As people increasingly seek emotional support and companionship from AI chatbots, understanding how such interactions impact mental well-being becomes critical. We conducted a four-week randomized controlled experiment (n=981, >300k…
AI-driven chatbots have become an emerging solution to address psychological distress. Due to the lack of psychotherapeutic data, researchers use dialogues scraped from online peer support forums to train them. But since the responses in…
Loneliness and stress are prevalent among young adults and are linked to significant psychological and health-related consequences. Social robots may offer a promising avenue for emotional support, especially when considering the ongoing…
Many Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots are designed and used for companionship, and people have reported forming friendships, mentorships, and romantic partnerships with them. Concerns that companion chatbots may harm or replace real…
Providing effective, personalized support is critical for helping students overcome conceptual difficulties in physics. However, established scaffolding methods, such as structured tiered support, are often too resource-intensive for…
Development in digital technologies has continuously reshaped how individuals seek and receive social and emotional support. While online platforms and communities have long served this need, the increased integration of general-purpose…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
AI-powered companion chatbots (AICCs) such as Replika are increasingly popular, offering empathetic interactions, yet their psychosocial impacts remain unclear. We examined how engaging with AICCs shaped wellbeing and how users perceived…
Emotion regulation is a crucial skill for managing emotions in everyday life, yet finding a constructive and accessible method to support these processes remains challenging due to their cognitive demands. In this study, we explore how…
Designing Conversational AI systems to support older adults requires more than usability and reliability, it also necessitates robustness in handling conversational breakdowns. In this study, we investigate how older adults navigate and…
AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits-yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn. What conversational design features increase consumer…
Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness. Behavioral research provides little insight into whether…
Background: Conversational AI chatbots are emerging as scalable mental health tools, but little is known about real world engagement or its relationship to clinical outcomes. Objective: To characterize engagement phenotypes among users of…
Companion chatbots offer a potential solution to the growing epidemic of loneliness, but their impact on users' psychosocial well-being remains poorly understood, raising critical ethical questions about their deployment and design. This…
Millions of users form emotional attachments to AI companions like Character AI, Replika, and ChatGPT. When these relationships end through model updates, safety interventions, or platform shutdowns, users receive no closure, reporting…