By Cami Rosso

How will artificial intelligence (AI) impact the future of the mental health industry? One pioneering group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is applying emotion AI to improve mental health and overall quality of life. Recently the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab published a new study that provides empirical evidence that empathetic artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning can counterbalance the adverse effects of anger on human creative problem solving.

The MIT study involved over a thousand participants to play a word guessing game, Wordle, to see how anger and empathy impacts performance. Those assigned to the anger elicitation condition performed poorly compared to the control group. The research shows that an empathic AI agent can reduce the negative impact of anger on creative problem solving.