Designing Interactive Agents to Support Emotion Regulation in the Workplace through Guided Art-Making

Workplaces are high-pressure environments where employees often deal with inflexible deadlines, instability in work relationships due to conflict, and the expectations of deliverables -- factors that exacerbate occupational stress and anxiety. While studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of therapeutic art-making interventions for supporting emotion regulation and alleviating occupational stress, there are few deliberate opportunities for employees to regulate their emotional state within the workplace. In this work, we present the design of a voice agent that can guide a user through a therapeutic art-making intervention to promote emotion regulation within the workplace. We share preliminary insights regarding the design of our voice agent, including the importance of embodiment and personalization. We also share insights about the feasibility of our proposed user study, which is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of our voice agent at promoting emotion regulation in employees through therapeutic art-making.