Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence For Behavior Change Chatbots
Asma Ghandeharioun, Daniel McDuff, Mary Czerwinski, Kael Rowan . 2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) 2019 – 50 citations
[Paper]
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.