Improving Well-being With a Mobile Artificial Intelligence-Powered Acceptance Commitment Therapy Tool: Pragmatic Retrospective Study.

BACKGROUND: Research and dissemination of smartphone apps to deliver coaching and psychological driven intervention had seen a great surge in recent years. Notably, Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) protocols were shown to be uniquely effective in treating symptoms for both depression and anxiety when delivered through smartphone apps. The aim of this study is to expand on that work and test the suitability of artificial intelligence-driven interventions delivered directly through popular texting apps. OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated our hypothesis that using Kai.ai will result in improved well-being. METHODS: We performed a pragmatic retrospective analysis of 2909 users who used Kai.ai on one of the top messaging apps (iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, etc). Users' well-being levels were tracked using the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index throughout the engagement with service. A 1-tailed paired samples t test was used to assess well-being levels before and after usage, and hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the change in symptoms over time. RESULTS: The median well-being score at the last measurement was higher (median 52) than that at the start of the intervention (median 40), indicating a significant improvement (W=2682927; P<.001). Furthermore, HLM results showed that the improvement in well-being was linearly related to the number of daily messages a user sent (ß=.029; t81.36=4; P<.001), as well as the interaction between the number of messages and unique number of days (ß=-.0003; t81.36=-2.2; P=.03). CONCLUSIONS: Mobile-based ACT interventions are effective means to improve individuals' well-being. Our findings further demonstrate Kai.ai's great promise in helping individuals improve and maintain high levels of well-being and thus improve their daily lives.

Adolescents' Well-being While Using a Mobile Artificial Intelligence-Powered Acceptance Commitment Therapy Tool: Evidence From a Longitudinal Study.

BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a critical developmental period to prevent and treat the emergence of mental health problems. Smartphone-based conversational agents can deliver psychologically driven intervention and support, thus increasing psychological well-being over time. OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to test the potential of an automated conversational agent named Kai.ai to deliver a self-help program based on Acceptance Commitment Therapy tools for adolescents, aimed to increase their well-being. METHODS: Participants were 10,387 adolescents, aged 14-18 years, who used Kai.ai on one of the top messaging apps (eg, iMessage and WhatsApp). Users' well-being levels were assessed between 2 and 5 times using the 5-item World Health Organization Well-being Index questionnaire over their engagement with the service. RESULTS: Users engaged with the conversational agent an average of 45.39 (SD 46.77) days. The average well-being score at time point 1 was 39.28 (SD 18.17), indicating that, on average, users experienced reduced well-being. Latent growth curve modeling indicated that participants' well-being significantly increased over time (ß=2.49; P<.001) and reached a clinically acceptable well-being average score (above 50). CONCLUSIONS: Mobile-based conversational agents have the potential to deliver engaging and effective Acceptance Commitment Therapy interventions.

The neural networks underlying reappraisal of empathy for pain.

Emotion regulation plays a central role in empathy. Only by successfully regulating our own emotions can we reliably use them in order to interpret the content and valence of others' emotions correctly. In an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based experiment, we show that regulating one's emotion via reappraisal modulated biased emotional intensity ratings following an empathy for pain manipulation. Task-based analysis revealed increased activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) when painful emotions were regulated using reappraisal, whereas empathic feelings that were not regulated resulted in increased activity bilaterally in the precuneus, supramarginal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus (MFG), as well as the right parahippocampal gyrus. Functional connectivity analysis indicated that the right IFG plays a role in the regulation of empathy for pain, through its connections with regions in the empathy for pain network. Furthermore, these connections were further modulated as a function of the type of regulation used: in sum, our results suggest that accurate empathic judgment (i.e. empathy that is unbiased) relies on a complex interaction between neural regions involved in emotion regulation and regions associated with empathy for pain. Thus, demonstrating the importance of emotion regulation in the formulation of complex social systems and sheds light on the intricate network implicated in this complex process.

The impact of empathy and reappraisal on emotional intensity recognition.

Empathy represents a fundamental ability that allows for the creation and cultivation of social bonds. As part of the empathic process, individuals use their own emotional state to interpret the content and intensity of other people's emotions. Therefore, the current study was designed to test two hypotheses: (1) empathy for the pain of another will result in biased emotional intensity judgment; and (2) changing one's emotion via emotion regulation will modulate these biased judgments. To test these hypotheses, in experiment one we used a modified version of a well-known task that triggers an empathic reaction We found that empathy resulted in biased emotional intensity judgment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a bias in the recognition of emotional facial expressions as a function of empathy for pain. In experiment two, we replicated these findings in an independent sample, and further found that this biased emotional intensity judgment can be moderated via reappraisal. Taken together, our findings suggest that the novel task used here can be employed to further explore the relation between emotion regulation and empathy.

The modern search for the Holy Grail: is neuroscience a solution?

Neuroscience has become prevalent in recent years; nevertheless, its value in the examination of psychological and philosophical phenomena is still a matter of debate. The examples reviewed here suggest that neuroscientific tools can be significant in the investigation of such complex phenomena. In this article, we argue that it is important to study concepts that do not have a clear characterization and emphasize the role of neuroscience in this quest for knowledge. The data reviewed here suggest that neuroscience may (1) enrich our knowledge; (2) outline the nature of an explanation; and (3) lead to substantial empirical and theoretical discoveries. To that end, we review work on hedonia and eudaimonia in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. These studies demonstrate the importance of neuroscientific tools in the investigation of phenomena that are difficult to define using other methods.