Investigating Students’ Use of a Mental Health Chatbot to Alleviate Academic Stress

The amount of academic workload in schools can cause students to experience stress and become more susceptible to mental health problems. However, because of fear of societal stigma, students may find it more difficult to approach others about the stress they experience. A chatbot can provide an alternative avenue for students to freely share the stressful situations they are experiencing. In this study, we investigated the use of Woebot as a mechanism to help senior high school students alleviate stress from academic workload. 25 participants who engaged in daily conversations with Woebot for a two-week period rated the chatbot’s likeness to a human with a mean score of 5.56 out of 8, while its ability to understand the feelings of the participants and empathize with them had a mean score of 5.61. An analysis of the chat logs showed that the participants valued Woebot’s lessons and stories while they faced challenges in cases when the chatbot generated inappropriate responses. We discuss our findings and provide design suggestions that could make conversational agents like Woebot be more useful in helping the general student population cope with stress.