Health Inquiry with AI: How Empathetic Expression and Conversational Contexts Shape Users' Communicative Acts

Abstract

As online health information-seeking shifts to conversational AI, high-quality information retrieval increasingly relies on users' ``communicative acts''(proactively sharing and seeking information)---similar to how effective diagnosis and personalized guidance are elicited in patient-clinician communication. Drawing on health communication research, this study examines how a chatbot's modality of empathetic expression (Verbal, Visual, Multimodal) and the conversational context (General, Sensitive, Mental Health) influence these acts through a 2 x 2 x 3 within-subjects experiment (N = 48). The results revealed that while verbal and multimodal empathy significantly increased reply length, communicative acts were largely shaped by conversational context, with Sensitive context triggering more question-asking and Mental Health context leading to heightened concerns, assertive responses, and unprompted information disclosure. Combined with qualitative findings, we discuss design implications for building context-sensitive AI health inquiry systems that can encourage active user participation.

5 pages, 2 figures. To appear in UbiComp Companion 2026 (October 11-15, 2026, Shanghai, China)