Abstract
The digitization of mental health care holds promises of affordable and ubiquitously available treatment, e.g., with conversational agents (chatbots). While technology can guide people to care for themselves, we examined how people can care for another being as a way to care for themselves.We created a self-compassion chatbot (Vincent) and compared between caregiving and care-receiving conditions. Care-giving Vincent asked participants to partake in self-compassion exercises. Care-receiving Vincent shared its foibles, e.g., embarrassingly arriving late at an IP address, and sought out advice. While self-compassion increased for both conditions, only those with care-receiving Vincent significantly improved. In tandem, we offer qualitative data on how participants interacted with Vincent. Our exploratory research shows that when a person cares for a chatbot, the person’s selfcompassion can be enhanced. We further reflect on design implications for strengthening mental health with chatbots.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems |
| Publisher | ACM/IEEE |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-4503-5970-2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 May 2019 |
| Event | 37th ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019 - Glasgow, United Kingdom Duration: 4 May 2019 → 9 May 2019 Conference number: 37 https://chi2019.acm.org |
Conference
| Conference | 37th ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019 |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | CHI 2019 |
| Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
| City | Glasgow |
| Period | 4/05/19 → 9/05/19 |
| Internet address |
Keywords
- chatbot
- well-being
- compassion
- self-compassion
- Conversational agents
- digital healthcare
- e-Health
- human-chatbot interaction
