Can a Chatbot Comfort Humans? Studying the Impact of a Supportive Chatbot on Users’ Self-Perceived Stress

This article is part of a project that explores the potential of chatbots for providing online emotional support to humans tailored to stressors. Based on a number of empirical studies, we have developed a socially interactive agent able to have simple dialogues with stressed humans seeking for emotional support. In the current article, we address the question to what extent this chatbot is effective in helping users cope with stressful situations. To this end, we present a study in which participants were asked to interact with our proposed chatbot for three days. Participants are distributed over the following three conditions—namely: 1) receiving support from the chatbot, knowing the support is computer-generated; 2) receiving support from the chatbot, while believing the support is human-generated; 3) not receiving any support. During the three days, participants’ self-reported stress levels are measured on a daily basis before and after each interaction. Results indicate that the best results are obtained in the ‘human’ condition, while the worst results are obtained in the “computer” condition. These findings lead us to conclude that the presumed sender of a stress support message (i.e., a human or a computer) might be more important than the content of the message.