Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT

Jason Phang; Michael Lampe; Lama Ahmad; Sandhini Agarwal; Cathy Mengying Fang; Auren R. Liu; Valdemar Danry; Eunhae Lee; Samantha W. T. Chan; Pat Pataranutaporn; Pattie Maes

arXiv · 2504.03888

Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT

Jason Phang·Michael Lampe·Lama Ahmad·Sandhini Agarwal·Cathy Mengying Fang·Auren R. Liu·Valdemar Danry·Eunhae Lee·Samantha W. T. Chan·Pat Pataranutaporn·Pattie Maes

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Abstract

As AI chatbots see increased adoption and integration into everyday life, questions have been raised about the potential impact of human-like or anthropomorphic AI on users. In this work, we investigate the extent to which interactions with ChatGPT (with a focus on Advanced Voice Mode) may impact users' emotional well-being, behaviors and experiences through two parallel studies. To study the affective use of AI chatbots, we perform large-scale automated analysis of ChatGPT platform usage in a privacy-preserving manner, analyzing over 3 million conversations for affective cues and surveying over 4,000 users on their perceptions of ChatGPT. To investigate whether there is a relationship between model usage and emotional well-being, we conduct an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved randomized controlled trial (RCT) on close to 1,000 participants over 28 days, examining changes in their emotional well-being as they interact with ChatGPT under different experimental settings. In both on-platform data analysis and the RCT, we observe that very high usage correlates with increased self-reported indicators of dependence. From our RCT, we find that the impact of voice-based interactions on emotional well-being to be highly nuanced, and influenced by factors such as the user's initial emotional state and total usage duration. Overall, our analysis reveals that a small number of users are responsible for a disproportionate share of the most affective cues.

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Jason Phang, Michael Lampe, Lama Ahmad, Sandhini Agarwal, Cathy Mengying Fang, Auren R. Liu, Valdemar Danry, Eunhae Lee, Samantha W. T. Chan, Pat Pataranutaporn, Pattie Maes. 2025-04-04. Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03888

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