A necessary transition in emotional metaphor of social chatbot technology

Abstract Social chatbots offer companionship to users, particularly those who experience long-term loneliness, through natural language and emotional interaction. However, prolonged usage of these chatbots may result in changes in users’ emotional concepts. This article examines the impact and risks of social chatbots on human emotional concepts from a conceptual metaphor perspective. We analyze that social chatbot technology interprets and comprehends emotions within the metaphorical framework of ‘emotion as a fingerprint’, which emphasizes the recognition of emotions through expression but overlooks the disparity between expressing and experiencing human emotions. Consequently, this phenomenon leads users to experience a disembodied context in their emotional relationship with chatbots, thereby exacerbating the risk of addiction. To mitigate the potential alienation of emotional concepts, this article suggests adopting the metaphor of ‘emotion as a story’, focusing on users’ active construction of emotions by enabling them to comprehend and reflect upon their emotions through narratives, thereby reducing self-deceptive emotional dependence.