Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change

University of Michigan

Status: Completed

Conditions: Mental Stress

Treatments: Other: Expressive Interviewing

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05949840

HUM00182586

Details and patient eligibility

About

Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients handle stressful life events. While these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated approach can encourage behavior changes in patients. This study presents an automated writing system and evaluates its impact on individual behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigators developed a rule-based dialogue system for "Expressive Interviewing" to elicit writing from participants on the subject of how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. In May-June 2021, the investigators randomly assigned online participants (N=151) to the Expressive Interviewing task and a control condition. The investigators examined their behavior with a survey before the intervention, immediately after, and two weeks after. In aggregate, task participants experienced a significant decrease in stress in the short-term (~23% decrease, p < 0.001) and no significant changes in longer-term outcomes compared to the control group. Within the task, participants showed different outcomes based on their writing. Participants who wrote with more anxiety-related words showed a greater short-term decrease in stress (R=-0.264, p<0.001), and those who wrote with more positive emotion words reported a more meaningful experience (R=0.243, p=0.001). For longer-term effects, participants who wrote with more lexical diversity underwent an increase in social activity (R=0.266, p<0.001). Expressive Interviewing can generally help with mental health in the short term but not longer-term, and participants' writing choices may make a difference in outcomes. While there were no significant long-term effects observed, the positive short term effect points to potential future directions with a series of Expressive Interviewing interventions for longer-term effects.

Enrollment: 151 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Using Prolific platform as crowd worker
• Living in United States

Exclusion criteria

• Participating in another condition of the same study

Trial design

Primary purpose: Supportive Care

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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151 participants in 2 patient groups

Expressive Interviewing + Survey

Experimental group

Description:

Intervention with Expressive Interviewing computer system. Participants spent roughly 10-15 minutes each in conversation with an automated computer chat system. Participants answered a survey about mental health and social outcomes immediately before the intervention and two weeks after the intervention.

Treatment:

Other: Expressive Interviewing

Survey Only

No Intervention group

Description:

No intervention. Participants answered a survey about mental health and social outcomes at time of recruitment and two weeks afterward.