"Thank God I'm Fly!': A Gyaru Persona Chatbot for Adopting a Positive Mindset to Prevent and Mitigate Negative Emotions

要旨

Conversational agents have been explored to support emotion regulation and reduce users’ distress, and their personas are often designed to be empathetic and approachable. However, much prior work focuses on coping after stress has occurred, and overly empathic personas can suggest harmful thinking for users. To address these limitations, we explore a new mindset, “Gyaru-mind”: a Japanese cultural mindset that emphasizes positivity, self-respect, and frankness. We therefore built a text-based chatbot, “GYARU-CHAT”, to help users adopt Gyaru-mind. In this system, an AI agent “GYARU-AI” acts as a role model of Gyaru-mind and selects a response mode from the user’s input to balance empathetic and frank stances. In addition, GYARU-AI estimates a prototype Gyaru-mind index, “GYARU-MIDX”, to make the user’s Gyaru-mind level visible. Our study revealed that chatting with a Gyaru-minded persona increases users’ positive emotions.

主題