Our goal for this project was to establish a baseline for understanding how human-AI conversations influence happiness.

When millions of people are interacting with these AI chatbots daily, even a small effect on well-being can have significant societal ramifications.

end 🧵

What about the dynamics within a conversation? We provide evidence for a bidirectional relationship between participants and the AI, such that participants adopt the AI chatbot's language more for negative topics:

6/7

Across all topics, the AI chatbot mirrored participants' sentiment and the emotional tone of both AI chatbot and participants predicted post-conversation happiness:

5/7

We quantified people's unconstrained responses using LLM-assisted sentiment analysis and developed a novel computational model using sentiment PEs to explain happiness ratings.

In short, the AI chatbot caused users to express more positive sentiment than expected:

4/7

We found that, across the board, conversations with AI increased momentary happiness compared to journaling, with the largest effect sizes on discussing topics that typically would make people unhappy:

3/7

We started this research with a single question in mind: How do conversations with AI influence subjective well-being?

Participants either engaged in conversations with an AI chatbot or wrote journal entries on the same randomly assigned emotional topics:

2/7

I am SO excited to share my latest #preprint with
@robbrutledge.bsky.social, Chongyu Qin, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Martin Chadwick, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, and others from DeepMind:
"Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence"
arxiv.org/abs/2504.02091

A short 🧵
1/7

I'm finally making the switch from the old one to the new one.

Looking forward to connecting and sharing research on emotions, language, decision-making, mental health, and artificial intelligence!