Jieon Lee’s research while affiliated with Sungkyunkwan University and other places

Self-disclosure lowers one’s stress and anxiety and benefits their mental health. However, revealing one’s personal and unprotected information can be risky, and such a risk causes major practical difficulties in counseling services. People are reluctant to expose themselves because they are concerned about being negatively evaluated and judged by others, even professional counselors. Accordingly, this study designs and implements a fully automated text-based counseling chatbot that alleviates people’s self-disclosure burden. This chatbot is based on rapport-facilitating dialogue, which creates a mutually stable and favorable relationship between two interlocutors and eventually encourages people to self-disclose. Using 303 nonclinical samples, this study examines how rapport is activated between a user and the counseling chatbot and confirms whether it lowers psychological barriers to being judged and encourages self-disclosure. The findings offer practical implications for artificial intelligence (AI) psychotherapy service developers to design a counseling program to encourage people to reveal their mental issues without hesitation.

It is difficult for Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to establish themselves in the market because of their relatively low brand awareness compared with well-known major corporates. Accordingly, Korean government operates a government-run television home shopping channel that only sells products of SMEs, serving as a shopping platform that guarantees brands from SMEs and connects them with consumers. This study introduces a public home shopping platform in South Korea and investigates the shopping experience of its consumers to provide implications to practitioners and researchers who prepare for a similar business model. To collect data on user experience, a subjective survey was conducted based on the critical incident technique. The survey response was analyzed with the Dirichlet-multinomial regression topic modeling to see how the shopping experience of public home shopping customers varies depending on customer loyalty.

Information and communications technology (ICT) startups, which are relatively smaller than large companies, need to choose efficiency-oriented networking strategies to efficiently utilize resources. However, the effects of networking strategies on ICT startups' efficiency have been relatively neglected. This study explores which networking strategies are effective for ICT startups. We compare the efficiencies of ICT startups with different interfirm networking strategies: formal networking, informal networking, and noncooperative networking. Technical efficiencies of each strategic group were measured using stochastic frontier analysis, and efficiencies among groups were compared using meta-frontier analysis. Our results reveal that the noncooperative group has the highest technology gap ratio, followed by the informal and formal cooperative networking groups. This study presents the optimal networking strategy for ICT startups and highlights that interfirm networking is not essential for enhancing the overall competitiveness to ICT startups.

People tend to alleviate their negative emotions by shopping. Considering the change of shopping behavior during COVID-19 outbreak, negative emotions are the key contributors to this change. In this light, this study aims to investigate how negative emotions caused by COVID-19 affect shopping behaviors. This study classified consumer groups based on their perceived negative emotions (i.e., anxiety, fear, depression, anger, and boredom). By clustering analysis, four groups (i.e., group of anxiety, depression, anger, and indifference) were derived. Then, this study examined how each of the emotional groups differently affect the shopping-related motivations (i.e., mood alleviation, shopping enjoyment, socialization seeking, and self-control seeking) and shopping behaviors (i.e., shopping for high-priced goods and buying of bulk goods). Results revealed all emotional groups affect socialization seeking and influence high-priced shopping intentions. However, depression and indifference are positively associated with socialization seeking and influence bulk shopping intentions. In addition, other emotions except for anxiety affect mood alleviation and influence high-priced shopping intentions. Finally, anger is associated with self-control seeking and affects bulk shopping intentions. This study enables practitioners and researchers to better understand how people control negative emotions by shopping in pandemic situations such as the current COVID-19 crisis.

Is it true that parents always prioritize educational effectiveness when selecting childcare services? The current study identified the potential requirements of dual-income parents toward social robots’ diverse childcare functions (e.g., socialization, education, entertainment, and consultation). The results revealed that parental attitudes toward robots were made more positive by all the childcare functions of robots except for their educational features. Furthermore, parents’ expectations of childcare functions varied based on their parenting characteristics. Spectral clustering analysis identified distinctive parenting styles (e.g., family-oriented, work-oriented, noninterventional, and dominant), and multigroup structural equation modeling suggested that the impact of robots’ socialization function was significant in all parent groups, while other childcare functions exerted limited influence according to specific parenting styles. In addition, children’s characteristics were found to alter parents’ preferences for each childcare function. These results offer practical implications for the early adoption of childcare robots through predetermining parents’ acceptability based on their specific parenting characteristics.

Social robots employed for childcare must conform to the norms of human society if they are to help children acquire valuable interpersonal interaction skills through the inculcation of behavioral attributes such as politeness. A survey of working parents identified certain behavioral principles necessary for social robots used with children at varying stages of their social development. A set of politeness principles was derived from scholarly discussions on human courtesy to design appropriately polite social robots. In communicating courteously with children, social robots must be able to express intimacy (i.e., friendliness), respect opinions (i.e., agreeableness), and remember previous interactions (i.e., attentiveness). These principles should improve children’s evaluation of the robots and enhance their perception of the machines’ sociality, likability, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness. The results obtained from this study confirm that the priorities of etiquette must be modified according to the developmental stages of children. These outcomes offer practical implications for the design of social robots.

The current study purposes to verify the motivations for the consumption of audio-visual content through binge-viewing or short watching. It is grounded in the uses and gratification perspective to examine five distinct types of stimuli for binge-viewing and short watching: enjoyment, efficiency, information seeking, social interaction, and relaxation. Results of the analyses demonstrate that enjoyment and efficiency are positively associated with the tendency toward binge-viewing. However, the inclination toward short watching is correlated to enjoyment, efficiency, social interaction, and information seeking, and relaxation was not predictive of either inclination. The study also contemplated loneliness and addiction as moderating variables for binge-viewing and short watching behaviour. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to validate the moderating effects of these two psychological states. The SEM results of the two-group analysis revealed that loneliness and addiction affected motivation and influenced attitudes toward binge-viewing and short watching. The present study is one of the first attempts to verify and compare the media viewing behaviours of binge-watching and short watching. Thus, it can contribute substantially to a more comprehensive scholarly understanding of over-the-top consumption of audio-visual content.