Mixed Chain-of-Psychotherapies for Emotional Support Chatbot
This addresses the need for more empathetic and personalized emotional support in chatbots for mental health applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of mental health support chatbots lacking tailored empathy by proposing PsyMix, which integrates analyses from multiple psychotherapy approaches before generating responses, and shows it outperforms ChatGPT baselines and achieves empathy comparable to human counselors.
In the realm of mental health support chatbots, it is vital to show empathy and encourage self-exploration to provide tailored solutions. However, current approaches tend to provide general insights or solutions without fully understanding the help-seeker's situation. Therefore, we propose PsyMix, a chatbot that integrates the analyses of the seeker's state from the perspective of a psychotherapy approach (Chain-of-Psychotherapies, CoP) before generating the response, and learns to incorporate the strength of various psychotherapies by fine-tuning on a mixture of CoPs. Through comprehensive evaluation, we found that PsyMix can outperform the ChatGPT baseline, and demonstrate a comparable level of empathy in its responses to that of human counselors.