Empathy-Based communication Framework for Chatbots: A Mental Health Chatbot Application and Evaluation

Abstract

The World Health Organization has reported a significant increase in mental health problems globally in 2022. In response, there has been a boom in the development of applications for physical and mental health regulation. However, many of these applications lack transparency in their dialogue process logic. To address this issue, this research proposes a communication flow based on the theory of psychological empathy and implemented it using positive psychology content and NLP techniques. Through a two-week pretest-posttest experiment with 25 participants, we found that this chatbot design not only improves the user's well-being but also makes the user feel understood.