# Towards Understanding Emotional Intelligence for Behavior Change Chatbots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [An Integrative Survey on Mental Health Conversational Agents to Bridge Computer Science and Medical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17017/) (2023)
- [An Empathetic AI Coach for Self-Attachment Therapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08316/) (2022)
- [Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16235/) (2025)
- [Vibe Check: Understanding the Effects of LLM-Based Conversational Agents' Personality and Alignment on User Perceptions in Goal-Oriented Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09870/) (2025)
- [Computational Empathy Counteracts the Negative Effects of Anger on Creative Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07178/) (2022)
- [AI Alignment Dialogues: An Interactive Approach to AI Alignment in Support Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06421/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Prompt Engineering Strategies for Sentiment Control in AI-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06692/) (2026)
- [EmoMed: An Emotionally-Aware Agent for Multimodal Medical Support with Real-Time Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07194/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A natural conversational interface that allows longitudinal symptom tracking would be extremely valuable in health/wellness applications. However, the task of designing emotionally-aware agents for behavior change is still poorly understood. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of an emotion-aware chatbot that conducts experience sampling in an empathetic manner. We evaluate it through a human-subject experiment with N=39 participants over the course of a week. Our results show that extraverts preferred the emotion-aware chatbot significantly more than introverts. Also, participants reported a higher percentage of positive mood reports when interacting with the empathetic bot. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of emotion-aware chatbots for potential use in mHealth contexts.