Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT05949840. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Official title
Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change: Randomized Controlled Study of COVID-19 Behaviors
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients handle stressful life events. While these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated approach can encourage behavior changes in patients. This study presents an automated writing system and evaluates its impact on individual behavior related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigators developed a rule-based dialogue system for "Expressive Interviewing" to elicit writing from participants on the subject of how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. In May-June 2021, the investigators randomly assigned online participants (N=151) to the Expressive Interviewing task and a control condition. The investigators examined their behavior with a survey before the intervention, immediately after, and two weeks after. In aggregate, task participants experienced a significant decrease in stress in the short-term (\~23% decrease, p \< 0.001) and no significant changes in longer-term outcomes compared to the control group. Within the task, participants showed different outcomes based on their writing. Participants who wrote with more anxiety-related words showed a greater short-term decrease in stress (R=-0.264, p\<0.001), and those who wrote with more positive emotion words reported a more meaningful experience (R=0.243, p=0.001). For longer-term effects, participants who wrote with more lexical diversity underwent an increase in social activity (R=0.266, p\<0.001). Expressive Interviewing can generally help with mental health in the short term but not longer-term, and participants' writing choices may make a difference in outcomes. While there were no significant long-term effects observed, the positive short term effect points to potential future directions with a series of Expressive Interviewing interventions for longer-term effects.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT05949840
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 151 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- Not listed
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepts healthy volunteers
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- May 23, 2021
- Primary completion
- Jun 6, 2021
- Completion
- Jun 6, 2021
- Last update posted
- Jul 17, 2023
2021
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Michigan | Ann Arbor | Michigan | 48109 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT05949840, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Jul 17, 2023 · Synced Sep 4, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT05949840 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.