Designing Computational Tools for Exploring Causal Relationships in Qualitative Data

Exploring causal relationships for qualitative data analysis in HCI and social science research enables the understanding of user needs and theory building. However, current computational tools primarily characterize and categorize qualitative data; the few systems that analyze causal relationships either inadequately consider context, lack credibility, or produce overly complex outputs. We first conducted a formative study with 15 participants interested in using computational tools for exploring causal relationships in qualitative data to understand their needs and derive design guidelines. Based on these findings, we designed and implemented QualCausal, a system that extracts and illustrates causal relationships through interactive causal network construction and multi-view visualization. A feedback study (n = 15) revealed that participants valued our system for reducing the analytical burden and providing cognitive scaffolding, yet navigated how such systems fit within their established research paradigms, practices, and habits. We discuss broader implications for designing computational tools that support qualitative data analysis.

Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and Relational Theory

AI-powered companion chatbots (AICCs) such as Replika are increasingly popular, offering empathetic interactions, yet their psychosocial impacts remain unclear. We examined how engaging with AICCs shaped wellbeing and how users perceived these experiences. First, we conducted a large-scale quasi-experimental study of longitudinal Reddit data, applying stratified propensity score matching and Difference-in-Differences regression. Findings revealed mixed effects -- greater affective and grief expression, readability, and interpersonal focus, alongside increases in language about loneliness and suicidal ideation. Second, we complemented these results with 15 semi-structured interviews, which we thematically analyzed and contextualized using Knapp's relationship development model. We identified trajectories of initiation, escalation, and bonding, wherein AICCs provided emotional validation and social rehearsal but also carried risks of over-reliance and withdrawal. Triangulating across methods, we offer design implications for AI companions that scaffold healthy boundaries, support mindful engagement, support disclosure without dependency, and surface relationship stages -- maximizing psychosocial benefits while mitigating risks.

Exploring the Effects of Chatbot Anthropomorphism and Human Empathy on Human Prosocial Behavior Toward Chatbots

Chatbots are increasingly integrated into people's lives and are widely used to help people. Recently, there has also been growing interest in the reverse direction-humans help chatbots-due to a wide range of benefits including better chatbot performance, human well-being, and collaborative outcomes. However, little research has explored the factors that motivate people to help chatbots. To address this gap, we draw on the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) framework to examine how chatbot anthropomorphism-including human-like identity, emotional expression, and non-verbal expression-influences human empathy toward chatbots and their subsequent prosocial behaviors and intentions. We also explore people's own interpretations of their prosocial behaviors toward chatbots. We conducted an online experiment (N = 244) in which chatbots made mistakes in a collaborative image labeling task and explained the reasons to participants. We then measured participants' prosocial behaviors and intentions toward the chatbots. Our findings revealed that human identity and emotional expression of chatbots increased participants' prosocial behavior and intention toward chatbots, with empathy mediating these effects. Qualitative analysis further identified two motivations for participants' prosocial behaviors: empathy for the chatbot and perceiving the chatbot as human-like. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding and promoting human prosocial behaviors toward chatbots.

What is Stigma Attributed to? A Theory-Grounded, Expert-Annotated Interview Corpus for Demystifying Mental-Health Stigma

Mental-health stigma remains a pervasive social problem that hampers treatment-seeking and recovery. Existing resources for training neural models to finely classify such stigma are limited, relying primarily on social-media or synthetic data without theoretical underpinnings. To remedy this gap, we present an expert-annotated, theory-informed corpus of human-chatbot interviews, comprising 4,141 snippets from 684 participants with documented socio-cultural backgrounds. Our experiments benchmark state-of-the-art neural models and empirically unpack the challenges of stigma detection. This dataset can facilitate research on computationally detecting, neutralizing, and counteracting mental-health stigma.

Relational Norms for Human-AI Cooperation

How we should design and interact with social artificial intelligence depends on the socio-relational role the AI is meant to emulate or occupy. In human society, relationships such as teacher-student, parent-child, neighbors, siblings, or employer-employee are governed by specific norms that prescribe or proscribe cooperative functions including hierarchy, care, transaction, and mating. These norms shape our judgments of what is appropriate for each partner. For example, workplace norms may allow a boss to give orders to an employee, but not vice versa, reflecting hierarchical and transactional expectations. As AI agents and chatbots powered by large language models are increasingly designed to serve roles analogous to human positions - such as assistant, mental health provider, tutor, or romantic partner - it is imperative to examine whether and how human relational norms should extend to human-AI interactions. Our analysis explores how differences between AI systems and humans, such as the absence of conscious experience and immunity to fatigue, may affect an AI's capacity to fulfill relationship-specific functions and adhere to corresponding norms. This analysis, which is a collaborative effort by philosophers, psychologists, relationship scientists, ethicists, legal experts, and AI researchers, carries important implications for AI systems design, user behavior, and regulation. While we accept that AI systems can offer significant benefits such as increased availability and consistency in certain socio-relational roles, they also risk fostering unhealthy dependencies or unrealistic expectations that could spill over into human-human relationships. We propose that understanding and thoughtfully shaping (or implementing) suitable human-AI relational norms will be crucial for ensuring that human-AI interactions are ethical, trustworthy, and favorable to human well-being.

Deconstructing Depression Stigma: Integrating AI-driven Data Collection and Analysis with Causal Knowledge Graphs

Mental-illness stigma is a persistent social problem, hampering both treatment-seeking and recovery. Accordingly, there is a pressing need to understand it more clearly, but analyzing the relevant data is highly labor-intensive. Therefore, we designed a chatbot to engage participants in conversations; coded those conversations qualitatively with AI assistance; and, based on those coding results, built causal knowledge graphs to decode stigma. The results we obtained from 1,002 participants demonstrate that conversation with our chatbot can elicit rich information about people's attitudes toward depression, while our AI-assisted coding was strongly consistent with human-expert coding. Our novel approach combining large language models (LLMs) and causal knowledge graphs uncovered patterns in individual responses and illustrated the interrelationships of psychological constructs in the dataset as a whole. The paper also discusses these findings' implications for HCI researchers in developing digital interventions, decomposing human psychological constructs, and fostering inclusive attitudes.

Understanding Public Perceptions of AI Conversational Agents: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

Conversational Agents (CAs) have increasingly been integrated into everyday life, sparking significant discussions on social media. While previous research has examined public perceptions of AI in general, there is a notable lack in research focused on CAs, with fewer investigations into cultural variations in CA perceptions. To address this gap, this study used computational methods to analyze about one million social media discussions surrounding CAs and compared people's discourses and perceptions of CAs in the US and China. We find Chinese participants tended to view CAs hedonically, perceived voice-based and physically embodied CAs as warmer and more competent, and generally expressed positive emotions. In contrast, US participants saw CAs more functionally, with an ambivalent attitude. Warm perception was a key driver of positive emotions toward CAs in both countries. We discussed practical implications for designing contextually sensitive and user-centric CAs to resonate with various users' preferences and needs.