Clinical trial NCT05949840: Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change
Official title: Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change: Randomized Controlled Study of COVID-19 Behaviors
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Mental Stress
Lead sponsor: University of Michigan
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: University of Texas at Austin
First posted: 2023-07-18
Enrollment: 151
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Brief summary: Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients handle stressful life events. While these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated approach can encourage behavior changes in patients. This study presents an automated writing system and evaluates its impact on individual behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigators 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. In May-June 2021, the investigators randomly assigned online participants (N=151) to the Expressive Interviewing task and a control condition. The investigators examined their behavior with a survey before the intervention, immediately after, and two weeks after. In aggregate, task participants experienced a significant decrease in stress in the short-term (\~23% decrease, p \< 0.001) and no significant changes in longer-term outcomes compared to the control group. Within the task, participants showed different outcomes based on their writing. Participants who wrote with more anxiety-related words showed a greater short-term decrease in stress (R=-0.264, p\<0.001), and those who wrote with more positive emotion words reported a more meaningful experience (R=0.243, p=0.001). For longer-term effects, participants who wrote with more lexical diversity underwent an increase in social activity (R=0.266, p\<0.001). Expressive Interviewing can generally help with mental health in the short term but not longer-term, and participants' writing choices may make a difference in outcomes. While there were no significant long-term effects observed, the positive short term effect points to potential future directions with a series of Expressive Interviewing interventions for longer-term effects.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Using Prolific platform as crowd worker
* Living in United States

Exclusion Criteria:

* Participating in another condition of the same study

Primary outcomes:
measure: Stress (short-term)
timeFrame: 20 minutes
measure: Mental health (long-term)
timeFrame: 2 weeks
measure: Social behavior (long-term)
timeFrame: 2 weeks
measure: Awareness of COVID-19
timeFrame: 2 weeks
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Ann Arbor
country: United States
facility: University of Michigan
state: Michigan
Study officials:
References:
citation: Stewart I, Welch C, An L, Resnicow K, Pennebaker J, Mihalcea R. Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change: Randomized Controlled Study of COVID-19 Behaviors. JMIR Form Res. 2023 Aug 1;7:e40277. doi: 10.2196/40277.