“I wrote as if I were telling a story to someone I knew.”: Designing Chatbot Interactions for Expressive Writing in Mental Health

Writing about experiences of trauma and other challenges in life is known to provide measurable health benefits. Though writing for an audience may ensure better benefits, confiding one’s most troubled memories in others risks a social stigma. Conversational agents can provide a virtual audience that ensures privacy and allows social disclosure. To understand the writing experience with an agent, we created Diarybot, a chatbot assistant for expressive writing. We designed two versions, Basic and Responsive, to explore the writing experience with and without bot follow-up interactions compared to a Google doc baseline. Findings from a 4-day user study with 30 participants reveal that social disclosure with Diarybot can encourage narrative writing, with relative ease and emotional expression in Basic chat. Responsive chat can mediate social acceptance of the bot and provide guidance for self-reflection in the process. We discuss design reflections on social disclosure with agents in pursuit of wellbeing.