Although social support is important for health and well-being, many young people are hesitant to reach out for support. The emerging uptake of chatbots for social and emotional purposes entails opportunities and concerns regarding non-human agents as sources of social support. To explore this, we...

There has been a recent surge of interest in social chatbots, and human–chatbot relationships (HCRs) are becoming more prevalent, but little knowledge exists on how HCRs develop and may impact the broader social context of the users. Guided by Social Penetration Theory, we interviewed...

Chatbots represent new opportunities for low-threshold preventive mental health support to youths. To provide needed knowledge regarding how to design chatbots for this purpose, we present an exploratory design study where we designed and evaluated a prototype chatbot to complement the work of...