An Initial Assessment of a Chatbot for Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RFCBT) in College Students

Abstract

Context: According to the WHO, suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 28, which often may have been the result of a depressive or anxiety disorder. Objective: To construct and evaluated a Chatbot that dialogues with college young people, with the purpose of disseminating mental health and ameliorate both depressive and anxious symptoms. Method: Our Chatbot is based on Rumination-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RFCBT), which focuses on observing the interaction between thought feelings and actions. For evaluation, an experiment that reached 105 young people was carried out. The bot’s dialogues were constructed from psychological literature on RFCBT and tests were performed based on the PHQ-4 protocol and rumination tests. It is worth mentioning that the whole experiment was analyzed and authorized by the Ethics Committee. Results: The experiment results statistical significance was confirmed and obtained through T-test, for the rumination tests, and Wilcoxon Test, for the PHQ-4, obtaining p-values lower than 0.05. Conclusion: It has been shown that there was a change in symptoms after the use of Chatbot, as a result of mitigating the symptoms of evaluated mental disorders.