Conference proceeding
Racial mirroring effects on human-agent interaction in psychotherapeutic conversations
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on intelligent user interfaces, pp 430-442
17 Mar 2020
Abstract
Conversational agents are increasingly utilized to deliver mental health interventions. However, these systems are characterized by relatively poor adoption and adherence. Our study explores the "racial mirroring" effects on how people perceive and engage with agents in the context of psychotherapy. We developed a conversational system with racially heterogeneous personas using strong visual cues. We conducted an experiment by randomly assigning participants (N=212) to racial mirroring, non-mirroring and control groups. Our results suggest that racial mirroring did influence human-agent interaction in terms of perceived interpersonal closeness, user satisfaction, disclosure comfort, desire to continue interacting, and projected future relationship with agents. In this paper, we present the conversational system, experimental procedure, and results. We conclude with design recommendations for employing conversational agents in mental health intervention.
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Details
- Title
- Racial mirroring effects on human-agent interaction in psychotherapeutic conversations
- Creators
- Yuting Liao - University of Maryland, College ParkJiangen He - Drexel UniversityJialuo He - Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on intelligent user interfaces, pp 430-442
- Conference
- 25th International Conference on intelligent user interfaces, 25th
- Series
- IUI '20
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Number of pages
- 1
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science; Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001062821300049
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85082464026
- Other Identifier
- 991019173756904721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science, Cybernetics
- Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
- Computer Science, Theory & Methods