Self-disclosure lowers one’s stress and anxiety and benefits their mental health. However, revealing one’s personal and unprotected information can be risky, and such a risk causes major practical difficulties in counseling services. People are reluctant to expose themselves because they are concerned about being negatively evaluated and judged by others, even professional counselors. Accordingly, this study designs and implements a fully automated text-based counseling chatbot that alleviates people’s self-disclosure burden. This chatbot is based on rapport-facilitating dialogue, which creates a mutually stable and favorable relationship between two interlocutors and eventually encourages people to self-disclose. Using 303 nonclinical samples, this study examines how rapport is activated between a user and the counseling chatbot and confirms whether it lowers psychological barriers to being judged and encourages self-disclosure. The findings offer practical implications for artificial intelligence (AI) psychotherapy service developers to design a counseling program to encourage people to reveal their mental issues without hesitation.

In the platform-based sharing economy service, the consumer using the service and the service provider providing the service form a two-sided market around the platform. In the two-sided market, service users and service providers interact across the platform, and the value of the platform increases with the size of the network. This study aims to study the virtuous circulation of consumption and production for sustainability of sharing economy. For this purpose, several hypotheses were established based on the literature and are tested with survey data of both consumer and service provider of Airbnb. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze whether the consumer acceptance intention model and the supplier acceptance intention model can be linked through the concept of network effect, which is a major characteristic of the sharing economy service platform. The research results are expected to contribute to development of a sustainable sharing economy model.

This paper examines how gamification affects user intention to use mobile healthcare applications (mHealth) and how the effect of gamification works differently according to health status, age, and gender. We use data from a mobile survey conducted by a Korean representative survey agency. We estimate the effect of gamification on user intention to use mobile healthcare applications based on a structural equation model and examine the moderating effects of self-reported health status, age, and gender. We find that gamification is effective in increasing user intention to use mHealth, especially in the healthy and younger groups. These findings suggest that mHealth, with the gamification factor, would encourage healthy (but lack exercise) people as well as unhealthy people to maintain their health status, and thus the mHealth developers need to consider the gamification factor when they develop mHealth services for healthy people.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet #Preprint #PeerReviewMe: Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint. Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn. Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period. Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author). Background: Coincident with the global trend of urbanization, a possible association between decreased exposure to nature and increased occurrence of mental disorders has increasingly been reported. Beyond spatial and temporal limitations, new 360° VR technology using one’s own smartphone and portable VR glasses allows modern people to deal with mental fatigue in everyday life. Objective: Based on Attention Restoration Theory (ART), the current study investigates whether the amplitude of the MMN/P3a complex can act as a potential ERP biomarker of involuntary attention restoration during exposure to 360° virtual nature in healthy young adults with different levels of restorative VR experience. Methods: A total of 40 healthy adults completed pre-questionnaires on demographics and simulator sickness and post-questionnaires on simulator sickness and perceived restorativeness before and after exposure to virtual nature, respectively. During the VR exposure, their brain activity was measured with EEG (Electroencephalography) by asking participants to conduct a two-tone auditory passive oddball task. Results: Both amplitude and latency of the MMN/P3a complex between the two between-subject groups were compared. While viewing a nature virtual environment (VE), the high restorative group (N = 19) exhibited significantly reduced P3a amplitudes than the low restorative group (N = 20) did, t (38) = 2.57, P = .02, d = .59. Particularly, a moderate, but significantly negative correlation was found between the self-reported perceived restorative scores and the P3a amplitudes at the fronto-central region (FCz; r = - .38, P = .02). The outcome of 360° virtual nature experience seems to be consistent with that of previous ERP studies on the during-effect of meditation practice. However, the latency of the MMN/P3a complex did not significantly differ between the two restorative groups: (1) aMMN: t (38) = - 1.47, P = .15; (2) P3a: t (38) = - .31, P = .76. Conclusions: These findings of this study will extend those of previous ART and ERP studies on meditation, restoration, and the management of mental fatigue in the real world into the virtual world via . Considering individuals’ restorative experience, the amplitude of the fronto-central MMN/P3a complex can be potentially employed as a distinct ERP component of interest in involuntary attention restoration during virtual nature experience in healthy young adults.