Jeong, SooyeonAymerich Franch, LauraArias, KikaAlghowinem, SharifaLapedriza, AgataPicard, RosalindPark, Hae WonBreazeal, Cynthia2022-07-252022-07-252023Jeong S, Aymerich-Franch L, Kika Arias K, Alghowinem S, Lapedriza A, Picard R, Park HW, Breazeal C. Deploying a robotic positive psychology coach to improve college students’ psychological well-being. User Model User-adapt Interact. 2023;33:571-615. DOI: 10.1007/s11257-022-09337-80924-1868http://hdl.handle.net/10230/53800Despite the increase in awareness and support for mental health, college students’ mental health is reported to decline every year in many countries. Several interactive technologies for mental health have been proposed and are aiming to make therapeutic service more accessible, but most of them only provide one-way passive contents for their users, such as psycho-education, health monitoring, and clinical assessment. We present a robotic coach that not only delivers interactive positive psychology interventions but also provides other useful skills to build rapport with college students. Results from our on-campus housing deployment feasibility study showed that the robotic intervention showed significant association with increases in students’ psychological well-being, mood, and motivation to change. We further found that students’ personality traits were associated with the intervention outcomes as well as their working alliance with the robot and their satisfaction with the interventions. Also, students’ working alliance with the robot was shown to be associated with their pre-to-post change in motivation for better well-being. Analyses on students’ behavioral cues showed that several verbal and nonverbal behaviors were associated with the change in self-reported intervention outcomes. The qualitative analyses on the post-study interview suggest that the robotic coach’s companionship made a positive impression on students, but also revealed areas for improvement in the design of the robotic coach. Results from our feasibility study give insight into how learning users’ traits and recognizing behavioral cues can help an AI agent provide personalized intervention experiences for better mental health outcomesapplication/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2022 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-022-09337-8Socially assistive robotPositive psychologyWell-beinginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess