Relationship between Mood Improvement and Questioning to Evaluate Automatic Thoughts in Cognitive Restructuring with a Virtual Agent

Cognitive restructuring is a therapeutic technique of cognitive behavior therapy that helps convert negative automatic thoughts to balanced thoughts. Automatic thoughts can be converted by the patient/participant's own objective evaluation from a different perspective. Human therapists ask questions intending to guide the evaluation of automatic thoughts more effectively. Virtual agents, as therapists, have a great potential to support cognitive restructuring. We investigated how a virtual agent could affect the participant's mood when asked questions to evaluate automatic thoughts in cognitive restructuring. We implemented a virtual agent that performs scenario-based dialogue with two types of dialogue scenarios: with and without questions to evaluate automatic thoughts. We conducted a dialogue experiment with 20 healthy graduate students and divided them into two groups of ten, finding that the participant's negative mood significantly improved when the virtual agent asked questions to evaluate the automatic thoughts. Furthermore, the number of helpful questions was significantly correlated with the degree of mood change (ρ=0.81). The results suggest that it is important to provide appropriate questions for cognitive restructuring and that the number of helpful questions reflects the dialogue's effectiveness.