research-article

Coerced Change-talk with Conversational Agents Promotes Confidence in Behavior Change

Authors:

Stefan Olafsson,

Teresa O'Leary, and

Timothy BickmoreAuthors Info & Claims

PervasiveHealth'19: Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

May 2019

Pages 31 - 40

https://doi.org/10.1145/3329189.3329202

Published: 20 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Motivational interviewing is a counseling technique that works, in part, by helping people talk about changing their behavior. We describe two conversational agent-based interventions to increase motivation and confidence to promote physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption that incorporate principles from motivational interviewing. We also explore the efficacy of constraining input, so users are only allowed to express change talk in their conversation with the agent. In a within-subjects experiment we demonstrate that both interventions are effective at increasing motivation, confidence, and self-efficacy for behavior change during a single counseling session. We also demonstrate that coercing user change talk leads to significantly greater increases in confidence compared to equivalent counseling agents that allow users to express statements about not changing their behavior.

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Cited By

Rashik MJasim MKucher KSarvghad AMahyar N(2024)Beyond Text and Speech in Conversational Agents: Mapping the Design Space of AvatarsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661563(1875-1894)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661563
Meyer SElsweiler D(2024)"You tell me": A Dataset of GPT-4-Based Behaviour Change Support ConversationsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638330(411-416)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638330
Mercado JEspinosa-Curiel IMartínez-Miranda J(2023)Embodied Conversational Agents Providing Motivational Interviewing to Improve Health-Related Behaviors: Scoping ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5209725(e52097)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.2196/52097
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Index Terms

Coerced Change-talk with Conversational Agents Promotes Confidence in Behavior Change
1. Applied computing
  1. Life and medical sciences
    1. Consumer health
    2. Health care information systems
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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cover image ACM Other conferences

PervasiveHealth'19: Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

May 2019

475 pages

ISBN:9781450361262

DOI:10.1145/3329189

General Chairs:
Oscar Mayora
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
,
Stefano Forti
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Jochen Meyer,
Lena Mamykina

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 May 2019

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PervasiveHealth'19

PervasiveHealth'19: The 13th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

May 20 - 23, 2019

Trento, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 116 submissions, 47%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661563
Meyer SElsweiler D(2024)"You tell me": A Dataset of GPT-4-Based Behaviour Change Support ConversationsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638330(411-416)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638330
Mercado JEspinosa-Curiel IMartínez-Miranda J(2023)Embodied Conversational Agents Providing Motivational Interviewing to Improve Health-Related Behaviors: Scoping ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5209725(e52097)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.2196/52097
Maier EDoerk MReimer UBaldauf M(2023)Digital natives aren’t concerned much about privacy, or are they?i-com10.1515/icom-2022-004122:1(83-98)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1515/icom-2022-0041
Jeromela JConlan O(2023)Onboarding Stages and Scrutable Interaction: How Experts Envisioned Explainability in Proactive Time Management AssistantsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3623809.3623851(306-315)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
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Rapp ABoldi A(2023)Exploring the Lived Experience of Behavior Change Technologies: Towards an Existential Model of Behavior Change for HCIACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/360349730:6(1-50)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603497
Chauvin RClavel CSabouret NRavenet BLugrin BLatoschik Mvon Mammen SKopp SPécune FPelachaud C(2023)A virtual coach with more or less empathyProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3570945.3607338(1-9)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
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Maier EReimer U(2023)Analysing the Use of Voice Assistants in Domestic Settings Through the Lens of Activity TheoryHuman-Computer Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-35602-5_26(366-379)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
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Smriti DKao TRathod RShin JPeng WWilliams JMujib MColosimo MHuh-Yoo J(2022)Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for Their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User TestingJMIR Human Factors10.2196/389089:4(e38908)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2022
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