AI Companionship and Mental Health:
A Socio-Ecological Perspective
Lecture overview:
AI chatbots are increasingly becoming social and emotional companions, offering users empathy, support, and a sense of connection. While these systems hold promise for enhancing well-being, they also raise important questions about dependency, privacy, and broader social consequences.
In this talk, Dr Zhang will present a programme of research examining how AI companionship shapes users’ mental and social well-being. Drawing on qualitative interviews, computational analyses of human-AI conversations, and controlled experiments, her work investigates how AI design features and platform-level updates can influence emotional outcomes.
Building on these findings, Dr Zhang propose a socio-ecological framework for understanding AI companionship as embedded within users’ social ecologies, offering a new lens for studying its long-term implications and for designing safer, more responsible relational AI systems.
Event details:
Date: 29 September 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 15:00 to 16:30
Venue: Tung Wah College, King's Park Campus, 2/F Lecture Theatre (LT1) and Zoom
*This workshop will be conducted in english.
About the speaker:
Dr Renwen Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She directs the Social Well-being, Empathy, and Emerging Technologies (SWEET) Lab. Her research examines how digital technologies, such as AI and social media, influence social relationships and mental health.
Dr Zhang has received several prestigious international awards, including the Google Research Scholar Award and Google Academic Research Award, ACM CHI Best Paper Award, and International Communication Association (ICA) Top Paper Award. Her research has also been featured in major media outlets, such as the BBC and The New York Times. She was recognized among the World’s Top 2% of Scientists (Stanford & Elsevier ranking).
Register your seats today: