Our goal for this project was to establish a baseline for understanding how human-AI conversations influence happiness.

When millions of people are interacting with these AI chatbots daily, even a small effect on well-being can have significant societal ramifications.

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What about the dynamics within a conversation? We provide evidence for a bidirectional relationship between participants and the AI, such that participants adopt the AI chatbot's language more for negative topics:

6/7

Across all topics, the AI chatbot mirrored participants' sentiment and the emotional tone of both AI chatbot and participants predicted post-conversation happiness:

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We quantified people's unconstrained responses using LLM-assisted sentiment analysis and developed a novel computational model using sentiment PEs to explain happiness ratings.

In short, the AI chatbot caused users to express more positive sentiment than expected:

4/7

We found that, across the board, conversations with AI increased momentary happiness compared to journaling, with the largest effect sizes on discussing topics that typically would make people unhappy:

3/7

We started this research with a single question in mind: How do conversations with AI influence subjective well-being?

Participants either engaged in conversations with an AI chatbot or wrote journal entries on the same randomly assigned emotional topics:

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