An Analysis of Questions to Evaluate an Automatic Thought in Cognitive Behavior Therapy with a Virtual Agent

Abstract

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapy that has been well-established as a method of mental health care for the general public in addition to the treatment of psychiatric disorders such as depressive disorders. In CBT, a human therapist asks a patient questions to evaluate an automatic thought and guides the patient to improve their moods. Virtual agents have been anticipated to be able to automatically provide CBT. In this study, we investigate the effect of questions of virtual agents on the mood of participants. We implement two scenarios with different numbers of questions and conducted a two-group comparison experiment. As a result, it was found that the amount of improvement in mood was significantly larger in the scenario with many questions than in the scenario with few questions. This result implies that the virtual agent's questions contribute to the improvement of the user's mood.