The growing demand for mental health services and artificial intelligence chatbots to replace human agents have led to increased attention to chatbot anthropomorphizing. This study explored the effect of anthropomorphism on counseling satisfaction and reuse intention for chatbot-led mental health counseling and the mediating role of social rapport in the relationship. This study also examined the interaction effect of anthropomorphism and social anxiety on counseling satisfaction and reuse intention. A total of 374 U.S. adults were recruited from an online crowdsourcing company to simulate user-chatbot interactions in the context of mental health counseling. Two chatbots either with a high anthropomorphic design (i.e., human face) or low anthropomorphic design (i.e., robot face) were developed through Dialogflow-a natural language processing engine-to examine the hypotheses. The results revealed that the high anthropomorphic design produced higher counseling satisfaction and reuse intention than the low anthropomorphic design, while this relationship is mediated by the perceived social rapport between chatbot counselors and users. The results further revealed a significant interaction effect of anthropomorphism and social anxiety on counseling satisfaction and reuse intention. The findings of this study are expected to (a) enhance the understanding of the effect of anthropomorphic chatbots on counseling satisfaction and reuse intention, (b) clarify moderating effects of social rapport and social anxiety, and (c) help mental health practitioners and chatbot designers by providing a psychological mechanism of how anthropomorphism functions in the context of human-chatbot interaction.

中文翻译：

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拟人化的聊天机器人会增加咨询满意度和重用意愿吗？社会融洽和社会焦虑的适度调解。

对心理健康服务和人工智能聊天机器人取代人类代理的需求不断增长，导致人们越来越关注聊天机器人拟人化。本研究探讨了拟人化对聊天机器人主导的心理健康咨询的咨询满意度和重用意愿的影响，以及社会融洽关系在这种关系中的中介作用。本研究还考察了拟人化和社交焦虑对咨询满意度和重用意愿的交互作用。从一家在线众包公司招募了总共 374 名美国成年人，以模拟心理健康咨询背景下的用户与聊天机器人的互动。两个具有高度拟人化设计（即人脸）或低拟人化设计（即，robot face）是通过 Dialogflow（一种自然语言处理引擎）开发的，用于检验假设。结果表明，高拟人化设计比低拟人化设计产生更高的咨询满意度和重用意愿，而这种关系是由聊天机器人顾问和用户之间感知到的社会融洽关系调节的。结果进一步揭示了拟人化和社交焦虑对咨询满意度和重用意愿的显着交互作用。这项研究的结果有望 (a) 加强对拟人化聊天机器人对咨询满意度和重用意愿影响的理解，(b) 阐明社交融洽和社交焦虑的调节作用，