Using a conversational agent for thought recording as a cognitive therapy task: Feasibility, content, and feedback

E-mental health for depression is increasingly used in clinical practice, but patient adherence suffers as therapist involvement decreases. One reason may be the low responsiveness of existing programs: especially autonomous systems are lacking in their input interpretation and feedback-giving capabilities. Here, we explore (a) to what extent a...

Natural language processing for cognitive therapy: Extracting schemas from thought records

The cognitive approach to psychotherapy aims to change patients' maladaptive schemas, that is, overly negative views on themselves, the world, or the future. To obtain awareness of these views, they record their thought processes in situations that caused pathogenic emotional responses. The schemas underlying such thought records have, thus far,...

Technological State of the Art of Electronic Mental Health Interventions for Major Depressive Disorder: Systematic Literature Review

BACKGROUND: Electronic mental (e-mental) health care for depression aims to overcome barriers to and limitations of face-to-face treatment. Owing to the high and growing demand for mental health care, a large number of such information and communication technology systems have been developed in recent years. Consequently, a diverse system...

Context in Human Emotion Perception for Automatic Affect Detection: A Survey of Audiovisual Databases

An important aspect of human emotion perception is the use of contextual information to understand others' feelings even in situations where their behavior is not very expressive or has an emotionally ambiguous meaning. For technology to successfully detect affect, it must mimic this human ability when analyzing audiovisual input. Databases upon...

Ehealth4MDD: A database of e-health systems for the prevention and treatment of depressive disorders

To date, meta-analyses of e-mental health systems for major depressive disorder (MDD) have largely overlooked the technological side of interventions. This warranted the creation of an open access database, EHealth4MDD, for the systematic study of the technological implementation in relation to intervention content, study design, and study...

Virtual reality negotiation training system with virtual cognitions

A number of negotiation training systems have been developed to improve people’s performance in negotiation. They mainly focus on the skills development, and less on negotiation understanding and improving self-efficacy. We propose a virtual reality negotiation training system that exposes users to virtual cognitions during negotiation with...

Fostering relatedness between children and virtual agents through reciprocal self-disclosure

A key challenge in developing companion agents for children is keeping them interested after novelty effects wear off. Self Determination Theory posits that motivation is sustained if the human feels related to another human. According to Social Penetration Theory, relatedness can be established through the reciprocal disclosure of information...

A Disclosure Intimacy Rating Scale for Child-Agent Interaction

Reciprocal self-disclosure is an integral part of social bonding between humans that has received little attention in the field of human-agent interaction. To study how children react to self-disclosures of a virtual agent, we developed a disclosure intimacy rating scale that can be used to assess both the intimacy level of agent disclosures and...