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arXiv · 1907.10664

Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots

Asma Ghandeharioun·Daniel McDuff·Mary Czerwinski·Kael Rowan
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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.

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Asma Ghandeharioun, Daniel McDuff, Mary Czerwinski, Kael Rowan. 2019-07-23. Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots. https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10664

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