A Test Platform for Managing School Stress Using a Virtual Reality Group Chatbot Counseling System

Abstract

Student life causes many sources of stress due to the requirements of managing schoolwork, family, friends, health and wellbeing, and future career planning. Some students are overwhelmed and lack resilience to overcome stress, especially if they are inexperienced in managing setbacks, fail to achieve expectations, or lack skills to independently manage social skills, recreation, and study time. The long-term accumulation of stress has a negative impact on students’ physical and mental health, and may lead to a range of symptoms such as depression, anxiety, headache, insomnia, and eating disorders. Although most universities provide psychological counseling services, there is often a shortage of professional psychologists, which leads to students suffering from stress for longer than necessary without immediate assistance. The build-up of stress can lead to tragic consequences including abnormal reasoning, anti-social behavior, and suicide. There should never be a need for a student to wait more than a month to make an appointment for counseling services and every request for help should be immediately addressed and assessed. In this research, we designed a unique test platform for an immersive virtual reality group chatbot counseling system so students can receive psychological help and stress management counseling anytime and anywhere. First, the research used questionnaires to measure the stress levels and identifies how stress affects their lives. An immersive virtual reality chatbot was developed using professional psychological counseling knowledge that can provide answers during individual or group counseling sessions. Students can log in to the platform as avatars and ask the chatbot questions or interact with other students on the platform. This research provides college students with a new technology-based counseling environment designed to help relieve stress and learn new ways to improve student life quality from others. The platform provides a test base for future clinical trials to evaluate and improve the automated virtual reality chatbot counseling system.

Development of an Empathy-Centric Counseling Chatbot System Capable of Sentimental Dialogue Analysis

“…The participants' stress levels decreased in the experiment, reflecting that the empathic conversations effectively created a supportive environment. Another interesting outcome is that their psychological sensitivity dropped slightly (but not significantly), which indicates a possible need for more counseling sessions involving a real counselor in-person or online (such as our study in VR group counseling [3]) when subjects are not totally at ease in an imitating session with a virtual counselor (chatbot). Further, there may be more elements in the counseling language, such as the variables and effectiveness of certain emotional and empathic vocabulary usages, to be considered in further study.…”

“…In short, this research aims to alleviate students' distresses and psychological symptoms by providing empathy-centric counseling using the chatbot system and making students feel relieved through the virtual interactive conversations. In this research, we adopted a VR group-counseling chatbot (VRGCC) framework, preliminarily presented in our recent publication [3]. We further improved the original VRGCC system by incorporating the empathy-centric counseling knowledge for the chatbot development.…”

Building a virtual psychological counselor by integrating EEG emotion detection with large-scale NLP models

“…The aim is to provide psychological assistance and stress management counseling to students facing difficulties in various aspects of school, including academics, family, and social issues, at any time and from any location. At the same time, the robot can intelligently identify life-threatening reactions and inform clinical psychologists to intervene immediately to ensure professional help for students [24]. The Amy team developed a chat robot VRECC system that can perform emotional dialogue analysis centered on empathy.…”

A Chatbot Intent Classifier for Supporting High School Students

“…Similarly, Abbas et al [19] established a chat platform for encouraging the online engagement between students during the academic year 2021/2022 at the University of Leeds, and the results show a positive impact in students' reactions, as freshman students are more comfortable asking questions due to needing more guidance during the first year. In addition, some colleges adopted a chatbot for relieving stress and improving the student life by using a chatbot counselling system, which can provide different psychological services through Q&A system [20]. Yet, most researchers focused on chatbots for assisting freshman students at colleges, even though many students need to decide their majors in grade 11 and 12 and they should be aware of standardised exams as well as universities earlier.…”