The interaction between emotion dynamics and opinion changes in the era of generative AI

Abstract

Online emotion regulation interventions have experienced huge developments during the last decade due to the expansion of information communication technologies applications. Most existing emotion regulation interventions aim to provide long-term or on-site assistance to help users manage their sentiments to a desired psychological state. Recent advancements have significantly bolstered online emotion regulation interventions, such as AI-driven mindfulness apps that adapt to user feedback. Online-based emotion regulation applications are considered influential on users’ contextual and emotional decision-making processes. However, existing research offers limited observations on (i) how emotion regulation interventions affect people’s opinion changes and (ii) how generative AI could contribute to the development of automatic emotion regulation interventions. Hence, we experimented with 150 participants to close this research gap. We proposed two novel emotion regulation approaches to determine whether users’ opinions and emotional changes differ between ordinary-AI-based and generative-AI-based interventions on emotion regulation tasks. The result revealed that people’s feelings and decisions are highly correlated to their information consumption and perspectives. Furthermore, we found that intervention methods and users’ perceptions of the technology behind that intervention also played a vital role in their user experiences and decision-making processes. This research (i) shows that there exist interactions between emotions and opinion changes, (ii) opens new avenues for leveraging generative AI in emotion regulation applications, and (iii) underscores how divergent attitudes towards AI technology can lead to varied levels of success in the user experience.