Exploring the Impact of Meaningful Film Fragments on Reflective Thoughts about Death in Conversations with Chatbots
Iris Hendrickx
Centre for Language Studies, Centre for Language and Speech Technology, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Wieke Harmsen
Centre for Language Studies, Centre for Language and Speech Technology, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Enny Das
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Certain topics are difficult for people to discuss; and might even be difficult to think about. Even though death is an inevitable part of life, people tend to avoid reflecting on death and they suppress their thoughts. Fear of death can be regarded as a fundamental fear (terror management theory) that might hamper people to develop a healthy and open attitude towards death. Previous work has shown that certain types of media entertainment can provide an environment to (safely) contemplate such deeper meaningful topics (Oliver & Raney, 2011; Das, E., & te Hennepe, 2022). We are interested in studying whether meaningful (eudaimonic) entertainment can facilitate a conversation about death.
One path that can offer people an anonymous, patient and nonjudgmental platform for an active discussion about death are chatbots. We investigated the following research question: To what extent do eudaimonic film fragments facilitate reflective thoughts in a conversation with a chatbot about death?
We performed user experiments with a chatbot (van Waterschoot et al, 2020), with eudaimonic and neutral film fragments, and measured how people reflected on death. In addition, we used two different chatbots, one which communicates using written language, and one which communicates using spoken language. We discuss our findings and outline possible lines for future research.
Project: Beyond a Fear of Death: Exploring the Terror Management Potential of Eudaimonic Entertainment:
https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/40618sw039
Project: Behaviour-based Language-Interactive Speaking Systems (BLISS) https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/628011029
Das, E., & te Hennepe, L. (2022). Touched by tragedy: Mortality salience of loved ones increases narrative processing of tragic movies with meaningful endings. Journal of Media Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000329
Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as Pleasurable and Meaningful: Identifying Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Entertainment Consumption. Journal of Communication, 61(5), 984–1004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460- 2466.2011.01585.x
Van Waterschoot, J., Hendrickx, I., Khan, A., Klabbbers, E., de Korte, M., Strik, H., Cucchiarini, C., and Theune, M. (2020). BLISS: An agent for collecting spoken dialogue data about health and well-being. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 449–458, Marseille, France. ELRA
