Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change: Randomized Controlled Study of COVID-19 Behaviors

Background Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients cope with stressful life events. Although these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated artificial intelligence approach can benefit patients. Providing an automated method would help expose a wider range of people to the possible benefits of motivational interviewing, with lower cost and more adaptability to sudden events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective This study presents an automated writing system and evaluates possible outcomes among participants with respect to behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We developed a rule-based dialogue system for “Expressive Interviewing” to elicit writing from participants on the subject of how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. The system prompts participants to describe their life experiences and emotions and provides topic-specific prompts in response to participants’ use of topical keywords. In May 2021 and June 2021, we recruited participants (N=151) via Prolific to complete either the Expressive Interviewing task or a control task. We surveyed participants immediately before the intervention, immediately after the intervention, and again 2 weeks after the intervention. We measured participants’ self-reported stress, general mental health, COVID-19–related health behavior, and social behavior. Results Participants generally wrote long responses during the task (53.3 words per response). In aggregate, task participants experienced a significant decrease in stress in the short term (~23% decrease, P<.001) and a slight difference in social activity compared with the control group (P=.03). No significant differences in short-term or long-term outcomes were detected between participant subgroups (eg, male versus female participants) except for some within-condition differences by ethnicity (eg, higher social activity among African American people participating in Expressive Interviewing vs participants of other ethnicities). For short-term effects, participants showed different outcomes based on their writing. Using more anxiety-related words was correlated with a greater short-term decrease in stress (r=–0.264, P<.001), and using more positive emotion words was correlated with a more meaningful experience (r=0.243, P=.001). As for long-term effects, writing with more lexical diversity was correlated with an increase in social activity (r=0.266, P<.001). Conclusions Expressive Interviewing participants exhibited short-term, but not long-term, positive changes in mental health, and some linguistic metrics of writing style were correlated with positive change in behavior. Although there were no significant long-term effects observed, the positive short-term effects suggest that the Expressive Interviewing intervention could be used in cases in which a patient lacks access to traditional therapy and needs a short-term solution. Trial Registration Clincaltrials.gov NCT05949840; https://www.clinicaltrials. gov/study/NCT05949840