References: Artificial intelligence

The key studies and reviews behind these pathways – organised by page, so you can see exactly what each claim on the site is based on.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966). “ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine.” Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36–45. Weizenbaum’s own paper describing ELIZA and the effect this page traces the whole field back to.
Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H. & Way, B.M. (2007). “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli.” Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. The evidence behind this page’s claim that articulating a feeling engages parts of the brain involved in regulating it, regardless of who or what receives it.
Skjuve, M., Følstad, A., Fostervold, K.I. & Brandtzaeg, P.B. (2021). “My Chatbot Companion – a Study of Human-Chatbot Emotional Attachment.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, 102601. Research behind this page’s account of the genuine emotional benefit many people report from AI companion apps, alongside the substitution concerns researchers have raised.

Fitzpatrick, K.K., Darcy, A. & Vierhile, M. (2017). “Delivering Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Young Adults With Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Fully Automated Conversational Agent (Woebot): A Randomized Controlled Trial.” JMIR Mental Health, 4(2), e19. The Stanford trial this page describes directly, the first of its kind to test whether an AI tool could deliver CBT technique and produce a measurable clinical effect.
Abd-Alrazaq, A.A., Rababeh, A., Alajlani, M., Bewick, B.M. & Househ, M. (2020). “Effectiveness and Safety of Using Chatbots to Improve Mental Health: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(7), e16021. A broader systematic review supporting this page’s claim that early trials of AI-delivered CBT and mindfulness tools show genuinely promising results for mild to moderate anxiety.

Pennebaker, J.W. & Chung, C.K. (2011). “Expressive writing: Connections to physical and mental health.” In Oxford Handbook of Health Psychology. Oxford University Press. The underlying research behind this page’s claim that articulating a worry engages a different kind of processing than turning it over silently – the well-established psychological principle this genuinely new behaviour extends, even though the AI-specific version remains almost entirely unstudied.