# Chatbots for Mental Health Support: Exploring the Impact of Emohaa on Reducing Mental Distress in China

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10183 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10183/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09672/) (2019)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [On the State of Social Media Data for Mental Health Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05233/) (2020)
- [EVA2.0: Investigating Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue Systems with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09313/) (2022)
- [Transferable Persona-Grounded Dialogues via Grounded Minimal Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07713/) (2021)
- [Emily: Developing An Emotion-affective Open-Domain Chatbot with Knowledge Graph-based Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08875/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12071/) (2024)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [LLM-empowered Chatbots for Psychiatrist and Patient Simulation: Application and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13614/) (2023)
- [Task-Adaptive Tokenization: Enhancing Long-Form Text Generation Efficacy in Mental Health and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05317/) (2023)
- [LLM-based Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Screening and Psychotherapeutic Intervention via Everyday Smart Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10779/) (2024)
- [Human Decision-making is Susceptible to AI-driven Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07663/) (2025)
- [AI Chatbots for Mental Health: Values and Harms from Lived Experiences of Depression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18932/) (2025)
- [Interpersonal Memory Matters: A New Task for Proactive Dialogue Utilizing Conversational History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05150/) (2025)
- [DiaCBT: A Long-Periodic Dialogue Corpus Guided by Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram for CBT-based Psychological Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02999/) (2025)
- [PatientHub: A Unified Framework for Patient Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11684/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Strategy Chain: Dynamic Zero-Shot CoT for Long Mental Health Support Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10444/) (2023)
- [Psy-Copilot: Visual Chain of Thought for Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03645/) (2025)
- [A Generic Review of Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19422/) (2024)
- [Think out Loud: Emotion Deducing Explanation in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04758/) (2024)
- [PatientAct: Theory-Grounded Mental Health Client Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12750/) (2026)
- [CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14145/) (2024)
- [Disrupted Companionship: A Risk Assessment Framework and Cross-Platform Quantitative Analysis of Psychosocial Responses to AI Companion Disruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing demand for mental health support has highlighted the importance of conversational agents as human supporters worldwide and in China. These agents could increase availability and reduce the relative costs of mental health support. The provided support can be divided into two main types: cognitive and emotional support. Existing work on this topic mainly focuses on constructing agents that adopt Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles. Such agents operate based on pre-defined templates and exercises to provide cognitive support. However, research on emotional support using such agents is limited. In addition, most of the constructed agents operate in English, highlighting the importance of conducting such studies in China. In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of Emohaa in reducing symptoms of mental distress. Emohaa is a conversational agent that provides cognitive support through CBT-based exercises and guided conversations. It also emotionally supports users by enabling them to vent their desired emotional problems. The study included 134 participants, split into three groups: Emohaa (CBT-based), Emohaa (Full), and control. Experimental results demonstrated that compared to the control group, participants who used Emohaa experienced considerably more significant improvements in symptoms of mental distress. We also found that adding the emotional support agent had a complementary effect on such improvements, mainly depression and insomnia. Based on the obtained results and participants' satisfaction with the platform, we concluded that Emohaa is a practical and effective tool for reducing mental distress.