https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1603-2010
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Abstract
Self-disclosure lowers one’s stress and anxiety and benefits their mental health. However, revealing one’s personal and unprotected information can be risky, and such a risk causes major practical difficulties in counseling services. People are reluctant to expose themselves because they are concerned about being negatively evaluated and judged by others, even professional counselors. Accordingly, this study designs and implements a fully automated text-based counseling chatbot that alleviates people’s self-disclosure burden. This chatbot is based on rapport-facilitating dialogue, which creates a mutually stable and favorable relationship between two interlocutors and eventually encourages people to self-disclose. Using 303 nonclinical samples, this study examines how rapport is activated between a user and the counseling chatbot and confirms whether it lowers psychological barriers to being judged and encourages self-disclosure. The findings offer practical implications for artificial intelligence (AI) psychotherapy service developers to design a counseling program to encourage people to reveal their mental issues without hesitation.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the NRF (No. 2020S1A5A8045556, 2020R1F1A1048202), and by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2020R1I1A1A01064107).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jieon Lee
Jieon Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Interaction Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are to investigate how to adopt new technology and make the most use of its benefits in mental health as a bridge between AI agents and human users.
Daeho Lee
Daeho Lee is an associate professor at the Department of Interaction Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. His research interests include the adoption of new ICT products & services, government policies in the area of ICT, and consumer behavior in online.
Jae-gil Lee
Jae-gil Lee is an assistant professor in the Media School at Hallym University, South Korea. His research focuses on suggesting user-friendly interfaces for latest AI services.